| ||
| ||
|
December 5, 2005
December 2, 2005
-
Arianna Huffington
Arianna Huffington 2005
Richard C. Soria
Arianna Calling!
By SUZANNA ANDREWS
Whether she's running for governor of California or launching a new Web site, Arianna Huffington is impossible to ignore—and even harder to figure out
It is another busy day at the end of another busy week for Arianna Huffington. She has been up since five a.m. on this Friday in late August, returning phone calls to the East Coast, reading the papers, and knocking off the first of several columns she writes each day for her new online venture, the Huffington Post. At eight, a car from CNN arrived at her mansion, in Brentwood, as it does most Fridays, to shuttle Huffington to the taping of its weekly show Reliable Sources; after that, she was driven to Santa Monica for her weekly appearance on the public-radio political talk show Left, Right & Center. Back home shortly after noon, she has no time for lunch. There are calls to return, the phone rings nonstop, and her staff is lining up with questions. Settled on the couch in her book-lined study, Huffington calls out to her housekeeper in that soft, Zsa Zsa Gabor purr so well known to the millionswho have seen her on TV over the years: "Daaahling, more tea!"
The tea arrives—"Thank you, sweetheaaarrrt"—and Huffington turns back to the matters at hand. An assistant wants to know which columns to include in the "blast"—a weekly digest of Huffington's writings that is e-mailed to 80,000 subscribers. Another staffer wants to know whether a posting on today's HuffPost that includes the phrase "fucked up" can be sent to Yahoo, which has just begun to run portions of the blog. The Hollywood mogul David Geffen has called, three times. The son of the former presidential candidate Gary Hart has called to say he wants to write a piece for the HuffPost about his father's blogs on the HuffPost. Someone from the anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan's entourage has called from Crawford, Texas. The 10 phone lines keep ringing, and the intercom goes off again and again: "Arianna, for you" … "Arianna, pick up" … "Ariaaanna."
And so life has beenfor Arianna Huffington ever since May, when she and her business partner, Kenneth Lerer, a former AOL Time Warner executive, launched the Huffington Post. Part daily online newspaper—billed as the liberal answer to the Drudge Report—and part Internet salon, featuring cultural and political commentary, the HuffPost was also, on the day it launched, the biggest burst of star power ever to hit the blogosphere. Until recently, the prototypical blogger was an outsider, a lone voice at the computer, one of millions in a vast and ever more powerful conversation that has challenged the conventional wisdom as expressed by the mainstream media and, increasingly, affected national politics. With the HuffPost, however, Arianna Huffington was creating a site that would showcase the opinions of dozens of bloggers, all of them ultimate insiders.
A woman who has become famous for her gold-plated Rolodex,Huffington put out the calls to her friends last spring, asking them to contribute to her site. And because they "adore Arianna," or owe her a favor, or "could not resist her," about 300 of them said yes, including Pulitzer Prize winners Norman Mailer and David Mamet, political comedians Al Franken and Bill Maher, and the writer Nora Ephron. Walter Cronkite also signed on, as did Deepak Chopra and Huffington's Hollywood friends—Warren Beatty, Rob Reiner, John Cusack, Mike Nichols, Norman Lear, and Gwyneth Paltrow. From Huffington's political circle came Gary Hart, New Jersey politician Jon Corzine, former California governor Jerry Brown, and the activist Tom Hayden, among others. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said yes, as did the Democratic power broker Vernon Jordan and a host of political columnists, mainly liberals but a few from the right, including Tony Blankley, the Washington Times columnist who used to be Newt Gingrich's press secretary. (Note: Huffington also approached theeditor of this magazine about contributing to the site.)
And there many of them were on May 9, the day of the Huffington Post's debut. Like nearly everything Arianna Huffington has ever done, the event attracted much press attention—but the initial reaction was harsh. Although there was praise for the HuffPost's sleek layout and for its news section, which is overseen by Lerer, the verdicts on the blog side ran the gamut from "a sick hoax" to "a floundering vanity blog." For Huffington, the writer who called it "nothing new" probably delivered the biggest put-down, unless one counts the review from LA Weekly: "Her blog is such a bomb that it's the movie equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar, and Heaven's Gate rolled into one." And that was from the professional media. In the blogosphere, new Web sites sprang up with such names as huffingtonisfullofcrap.com and huffingtonstoast.com. There were, to be sure, aspects of the new HuffPost thatinvited ridicule: incoherent blogs from celebrities including Seinfeld star Julia Louis-Dreyfus; Deepak Chopra's cryptic admonition that death was not to be feared, because "you are dead already"; and Huffington's own post on the female orgasm, which she declared to be "so complex and strange it could only have come from God." Wouldn't it be "delicious," she wrote, "if the female orgasm were the thing that tips the scales in favor of the Intelligent Design crowd?"
But as silly as some of the blogs were, the attacks on the HuffPost seemed to be based less on objections to the site's content than on a general distaste for Huffington herself. She was, the Boston Herald sniped in the middle of a review of the site, "a woman who changes her politics like Jennifer Lopez switches husbands"; who, "unlike most bloggers," said the Baltimore Sun, "hasn't spent more than two days of her adult life out of the media spotlight." The mockery wasnot surprising, perhaps, for during her 25 years in the U.S. the Greek-born Huffington has stirred up more than her share of controversy. A Cambridge-educated scholar and socialite, the author of 10 books (on subjects ranging from Picasso and Maria Callas to corporate greed and Greek mythology, to politics and spirituality), a television commentator, syndicated columnist, political wife, activist, and, most recently, in 2003, candidate for governor of California, Huffington has had many lives, all of them conducted very much in the public eye. And all of them involving a considerable amount of drama—from the allegations of plagiarism that followed the publication of two of her books to the gossip about the prominent men in her life, and the stories about her membership in a controversial cult headed by a former high-school teacher who woke up from a coma believing that he was an emissary of God.
Along the way, there was her marriage in 1986 to Michael Huffington, aconservative Republican multi-millionaire who served in Congress. There was also, in 1994, before his divorce from Arianna and his announcement that he was gay, Michael Huffington's run for the U.S. Senate, in a campaign that Arianna was perceived to have masterminded. Denounced as a "right-wing Lady Macbeth" and excoriated for her "viciousness," Arianna was savaged even by her husband's campaign manager, who described her in his memoirs as "beautiful" but "evil." The phrase would become a national joke, picked up in the 1990s by her friends Bill Maher and Al Franken, who would introduce her on their shows as "the beautiful but evil Arianna Huffington."
That was when Arianna was a conservative Republican, one of Newt Gingrich's devoted acolytes, and a noted right-wing columnist and television pundit—before she made what is probably the most baffling move of her life. In the late 90s, shere-invented herself as a liberal—and not a lukewarm liberal but, as the famously left-wing Al Franken puts it, "some strange, liberal, green kind of thing to my left." Shutting the door on the Washington chapter of her life, Huffington moved to Los Angeles, where suddenly she was seen in the company of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. She began hosting fund-raisers in her mansion for environmental and anti-poverty causes and denouncing Republicans and conservative policies in her books, columns, and television appearances. In Los Angeles, as she has always done, Huffington befriended everyone who was anyone, and began marshaling her wealthy and influential new friends behind her causes: her provocative and much-publicized 2003 ad campaign against gas-guzzling S.U.V.'s, and her unsuccessful run for governor as an independent in the California recall race.
For many observers, the defining image of that campaign, and of Arianna, was the one of herknocking over a bank of press microphones as she elbowed her way through the crowd to stand next to Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, as they posed for the cameras in front of the Los Angeles County registrar's office. That photograph, displayed in the pages of newspapers across the country, seemed to confirm what had been whispered about Arianna Huffington for years: that she would do, and say, just about anything to get attention. Privately, people called her everything from "an intellectual lap dancer" to a woman who, as one writer puts it, "doesn't have any commitment to any core values, only to prominence," and "doesn't give a shit what people say about her, as long as they say it." And as the Huffington Post debuted, this was the criticism that was heard all over again—that the site, as this man says, was just another "media play" in a life in which "every waking moment" has been about "getting visibility."
Even some of the HuffPost's contributors feared the worst early on: one was certain "the whole thing would implode"; another thought it was "too grandiose." But then things began to change. David Mamet's posting on the firing of New York magazine theater critic John Simon was picked up by the mainstream media, as was Nora Ephron's witty post on how, during the years she was married to Carl Bernstein, she always suspected that Mark Felt was "Deep Throat." In July, the HuffPost scored its first major newsbreak with an item by the journalist Laurence O'Donnell reporting that Karl Rove had been the source who leaked the identity of the C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame to Matt Cooper of Time.
Meanwhile, Huffington's own blogs were becoming Topic A at dinner parties in New York and Washington. Her "Russert Watch" offered tough critiques of Tim Russert's weekly performance as host of NBC's Meet the Press, andher "Judy File" raised uncomfortable questions about the New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who was jailed for contempt in the Valerie Plame leak case. Huffington called attention to Miller's controversial pre-war reporting from Iraq, and she published the summer's widespread rumor that Miller had been one of the administration's sources on Valerie Plame—meaning that she had gone to jail to protect her career, not her sources. "She came out and wrote what a lot of people were talking about, but not writing," says Victor Navasky, publisher of The Nation.
Huffington also made waves with her wall-to-wall coverage of Cindy Sheehan (who blogged on the HuffPost), her lacerating denunciation of the Bush administration's handling of the catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, and her continuing criticism of The New York Times and Judy Miller following the reporter's release from prison in September—most notably Arianna'sevisceration of the Times's October 16 mea culpa. As advertisers signed up for space on the HuffPost, and its content was featured by AOL and Yahoo, its audience began to grow—to some 1.5 million site visits in September and climbing. The numbers fell short of the Drudge Report's three million, but they were enough to give Huffington's critics—those who regard her as the intellectual equivalent of Paris Hilton—a reason to think again.
"It's very brave to take on The New York Times," says Maher, host of the HBO political comedy show Real Time with Bill Maher. "And Arianna is very brave. There's nothing she feels she can't say. She's not beholden to anybody and she doesn't worry about where the chips fall. There aren't that many people in this country who say things and aren't afraid to get booed." According to Gary Hart, Huffington's "detractors" have always tried to dismiss her as a "non-serious person," but, he says, "sheis very serious, and when she gets focused on something, there's usually something very interesting there. She digs around, she works on instinct, until it's clear." Arianna, says one prominent media critic and friend, "has always been searching for something. Like Madonna, there's been all this re-invention. She has worked so hard and she's tried everything—television, marrying a rich man, right and left—and now, with the HuffPost, finally, it may all be coming together for her."
Which would be something, considering that all the aspects of Arianna Huffington have never quite come together in the past.
Huffington is 55, but she looks at least 10 years younger—and not at all evil. She's definitely beautiful, though. There are the high cheekbones and strong jaw, which play so well to the TV cameras, and her perfect posture, which has given some people the impression that she's more than six feet tall, when in fact she is just fivefeet eight. Even in bell-bottom jeans, flats, and a simple white sleeveless blouse, she has a slightly regal mien. When she was a Republican, Huffington teased and sprayed her hair into a formidable red helmet, but these days she just blow-dries it and lets it hang loose to her shoulders. She seems, indeed, altogether relaxed as she sits at the table in her dining room, picking at the grilled salmon and vegetables that her housekeeper has prepared for our lunch.
The dining room is impressive—vast, and sun-filled, with polished white limestone floors that extend into a two-story rotunda at the center of the house and, toward the back, past a sunken, wood-paneled living room, to a wall of French doors that look out on the swimming pool. It is a cozy home, despite the miles of stone floors, gilt wrought-iron chandeliers, and Florentine furniture. The grand piano and side tables are crowded with framed photographs of family and friends, and the walls arehung with paintings by friends, including Picasso's lover Françoise Gilot, and art by Huffington's two daughters, Christina, 16, and Isabella, 14. Huffington bought the $7 million house seven years ago, after her divorce. "It is the longest I've lived anywhere," she says.
Huffington's smile is warm and easy, except for the eyes, which stare straight into yours and don't let go—as if she is commanding not just your attention but your whole being. This intensity of focus has led friends to describe her as "spellbinding," "incredibly seductive," and "like a radiant heat wave." And it's not just the "Arianna gaze" that draws people in but her total concentration on the person she's with. No matter how many important people are in the room, says Huffington's friend the art consultant Barbara Guggenheim, "when Arianna's talking to you there's not that sense of social panic. When she's with you, she is with you."
Huffington'sconversation overflows with flattery and solicitous inquiries, and there is an almost hypnotic quality to her silken voice and her sultry accent—"which," she has said, "makes everything I say sound vaguely naughty." But it is when she starts to talk, really talk, that people are swept under. This is a woman who actually has read her Kierkegaard, her Schopenhauer, her John Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx, and she can quote from them. At Cambridge she studied economics and was president of the university's storied debating society, the Cambridge Union—which has made her a master sophist, capable of cutting an issue 16 ways and winning the argument without revealing what she really believes. On television, that has made her extraordinarily persuasive, a talk-show guest who "really knows her shit," says Bill Maher, "and never stumbles." In society, among the wealthy and influential, the sheer force of her mind has won her countless friends and admirers. "It's why she pulls everyone in,"says her friend the socialite and author Sugar Rautbord. "Arianna is probably one of the most intellectually seductive human beings on the face of the planet. She has such a powerful brain, and she exudes an intellectuality that is almost sexual."
Which is not to say that Arianna Huffington is insincere. On the contrary, she brings great passion to everything she does, especially her politics. Laurie David, an environmental activist and the wife of Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David, remembers how distressed she was two years ago when she showed up at Huffington's for a hike and saw Arianna's Lincoln Navigator in the driveway. David, who had spent months talking to Huffington about the environmental toll of gas-guzzling S.U.V.'s and about the foreign-policy implications of U.S. oil consumption, told Huffington, "If you aren't connecting the dots, who will?" In a matter of weeks, David says, Huffington had sold her Navigator and boughta little hybrid Prius. And soon after that, she organized the Detroit Project, the group of environmentalists and Hollywood producers that designed and financed the anti-S.U.V. ad campaign. One spot showed S.U.V. owners saying, "I like to sit up high" and "I sent our soldiers off to war." "You talk to her about an idea and within an hour and two phone calls it happens," David says. "Arianna is definitely someone you want on your side. And she is a true believer."
What Huffington believes right now is that we must "change the way we are doing things in America," she says, "because I believe that the status quo is very destructive for many people at this moment in this country. The war [in Iraq], poverty, inequality, the war on drugs—which is decimating minorities, filling our jails with nonviolent drug offenders—the spinelessness of politicians in both political parties, but the spinelessness of Democrats, especially, in responding to the assaults ofthe Republicans … " She keeps going, her indignation rising: "I mean look at them. There are almost 60 percent of Americans against the war and there is no Democratic leader articulating that position. It is astounding. And the way the system is rigged, with lobbyists and money, towards perpetuating inequalities and unfairness, and how we have stopped being shocked by what's going on. The passage of the energy bill is shocking, shocking, in the middle of a war and rising gas prices. But people are not shocked. That is why I am so passionate about the blogosphere.… Covering something relentlessly, day in and day out, is the only thing you can hope will penetrate and help to change things."
It is the desire to "change things," friends insist, that makes Huffington work as hard as she does, so hard that one Hollywood friend says she is sometimes afraid "that Arianna is going to have a breakdown. Except for her children, there is nothing in her life other thanher work." No one who knows Arianna well doubts her passion. It's just that, in the words of one political journalist who has known her for more than a decade, "there's always a small degree of amnesia required with Arianna."
It's hard to imagine that a woman whom Los Angeles magazine once described as "the Sir Edmund Hillary of social climbers" could have been a reclusive child, but Huffington insists that as a young girl in Athens she had to be "pushed to be social, to have friends." The older of Elli and Constantine Stassinopoulos's two daughters, she spent most of her time alone, reading. She was encouraged in that endeavor by her mother, who encouraged almost everything she did.
Elli Stassinopoulos barely finished high school, but she taught herself five languages and read all the great philosophers. A follower of the Indian guru Krishnamurti, she showed a profound lack ofinterest in social conventions. For many years, until her death, in 2000, Elli lived with Arianna, and prominent New Yorkers and Hollywood moguls remember Elli pattering around barefoot at her daughter's dinner parties, smoking a cigar. To Elli, everyone was fascinating, and she had no compunction about inviting her plumber to dinner with the prime minister, as she did once in London, in the 70s, when Arianna was dating John Selwyn Gummer, a prominent Conservative member of Parliament. Today, Huffington remembers her mother as "the biggest influence in my life. She was absolutely fearless, and a complete original."
Her mother, Arianna says, taught her that one should never accept limits in life. "There was always that combination of making me believe I could do anything and that if I failed she wouldn't love me any less. It was absolute, unconditional love," she says, her eyes welling with tears. "You could try anything, because failure was not aproblem."
Arianna's father, too, had a disregard for limits, but his influence was less benign. A newspaper publisher, he spent two years in a German concentration camp during the Second World War, and his life "was very formed" by that experience. "He had the survivor's mentality," Huffington says. "In his case, it was 'I can do whatever. The rules don't apply to me.'" He would start newspapers and then go bankrupt, throwing the family into chaos. He had "endless affairs, and it wasn't even an issue. My favorite line," Arianna remembers with a mirthless laugh, "was when he told my mother that she should not interfere with his private life. I can still feel her pain, because, you know, that was the big love of her life. She never had another man." Arianna was nine when she confronted her mother and persuaded her, after a long argument, to leave her husband. According to her sister, Agapi Stassinopoulos, Arianna has always needed "to tell the truth, asshe sees it. When she sees things that outrage her, she needs to be heard."
It was her mother who encouraged her to go to Cambridge, after Arianna saw a picture of the university in a magazine and "dreamed" of going there. "Everyone else told me I was ridiculous," she recalls. She barely spoke English, but she began to study the language, and when Cambridge accepted her Elli paid the tuition by borrowing from her brothers and selling her jewelry and, one by one, the family carpets.
From the day Arianna heard her first debate at the Cambridge Union, she says, she was addicted. "It was this extraordinary experience of seeing people, including myself, moved by words. It was orgasmic for me." The Union, she says, "dominated my life," but her first forays into debating were unimpressive. With her thick accent and overly aggressive and dramatic manner, she was "painful to listen to," one fellow student recalls. But Ariannapracticed "prolifically," her sister says, and she got her reward when she became the third woman to be named president of the Cambridge Union. In a picture taken in 1971, she's seated in a throne-like chair above a scrum of boys in white shirts and thick-rimmed glasses. She's dressed like a Christmas tree, in an evening gown covered in glittering sequins and slit to the thigh. Her shyness had evidently been cured.
Arianna was 22 and just a year out of Cambridge when she wrote her first best-seller. The Female Woman was commissioned after Germaine Greer's publisher heard Arianna, in 1971, debate a topic she had proposed herself: that the women's movement denigrated marriage and motherhood. Today, Huffington says the book was a call to feminists "not to throw the baby out with the bath water," but in fact it was an all-out assault on early feminism—a movement, she wrote, that "would destroyWestern civilization." A huge hit in Europe, the book was translated into 11 languages, and it not only brought Arianna enormous publicity but also made her financially secure for the first time in her life.
Success at such an early age, she recalls, brought on feelings of anxiety and emptiness. "Certain there was something else," Arianna embarked on a period of spiritual searching. She read the writings of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and of Yogi Sri Aurobindo and various mystical philosophers. She did dream analysis, explored the New Age programs est and Lifespring, walked on hot coals with the life coach Tony Robbins, and got involved with a mystic who claimed to be channeling a 3,000-year-old man. "I began to see," Huffington says, "how basically for people to find themselves spiritually there had to be an element of service, a dedication to something more than ourselves." The result of this was her second book, After Reason,a densely written treatise that argued for the need to integrate spirituality into modern politics. Attacking the "bankruptcy of Western political leadership," and describing politics as "our hypnotized acquiescence in this organized sham," the book called for a "spiritual revolution" in Western democracies. Nothing less, she wrote, could save "individual freedom" in a culture where "the 'pursuit of happiness' has been reduced today to the pursuit of comfort."
Published in 1978, After Reason won some respectful reviews but sold poorly. For Arianna, that meant pursuing work that paid—articles for the British editions of Vogue and Cosmopolitan, a column in the Daily Mail, book reviews for The Spectator. She also threw herself into London's social swirl, attending every party of any distinction on the arm of equally distinctive men, most notably Bernard Levin, the lionized English intellectual-journalist who was theleading columnist at the London Times. He was, somebody once said, "half her size and twice her age," but nevertheless he was the great passion of Huffington's life. The two remained close until long after she had married Michael Huffington. Things might have gone differently on that front but for Levin, who was a zealous bachelor. "You see," says Huffington, with a small laugh, "part of it was that the man I wanted to marry didn't want to marry me."
In 1980, Huffington came to New York to promote her third book, a biography of Maria Callas. A well-written, gossipy account of the opera diva's tormented life, it made the best-seller lists in the U.S., as it had in England—and its success led to what would politely be called Arianna's "remarkable" launch in American society. It happened so fast that it took a while for people to figure out how she'd done it. Just 30, brand-new in New York,and without benefit of wealth or a title, Arianna was throwing dinner parties at her East Side duplex for her new friends Marietta Tree, Barbara Walters, Henry Kissinger, Mercedes Bass, Lucky Roosevelt, Ann Getty, Dr. Jonas Salk, Lane Kirkland, and Bill Paley. There were dinners at the Reagan White House, lunches at Le Cirque, and charity balls, at which Arianna—in lavish designer gowns and Bulgari jewels—frequently earned a mention in the gossip columns. Those columns also printed the rumors (cleverly encouraged by Arianna, some said) of her relationships with well-known men such as Jerry Brown and the publisher and real-estate magnate Mortimer Zuckerman. "The Rise and Rise of Arianna Stassinopoulos" was the headline of a 1983 New York magazine article that chronicled Arianna's social climb, noting in particular her knack for establishing "instant intimacy" with prominent figures and her willingness to send invitations to people she barely knew.
While there were those who disliked Arianna, most were dazzled by her intelligence, her charm, and her flattery. And they would have been even if she "hadn't come with credentials," as one socialite put it—namely her friendship with her British publisher, Lord George Weidenfeld, whose name she used to open doors. Her "total self-confidence" made her "completely unembarrassable," says another socialite, who remembers Arianna withdrawing invitations—"Daaahling, would you mind so much not coming to dinner?"—because she'd found a Henry Kissinger or a Barbara Walters to fill the seat. Indeed, while some people felt "badly used" by Arianna, they were rarely the ones with real influence. "It is ridiculous to call her a social climber," says one prominent New Yorker. "She was in society, but she wasn't climbing. Social climbing is a very serious affair, and that wasn't her interest. She wanted power and influence. Society just happened to be there."
Huffington won't say much today about this phase of her life. "My Icarus phase," she calls it, quoting from one of the snickering articles written about her at the time. As she tells it now, New York society nearly suffocated her. Going to parties, spending on clothes, and meeting fascinating people was fun, she says, but it was something that just sort of happened to her. "You know, when you arrive with a big best-seller, you have an accent, you're Greek, a little exotic—suddenly you're the new thing in New York." Her flaw, she says, was that she was "too weak" to resist the attention. And so, in 1984, Arianna, with her mother in tow, suddenly left New York and moved to Los Angeles, to join her sister and to finish writing her fifth book, on Picasso.
It was the heiress Ann Getty who, the following year, introduced Arianna to Roy Michael Huffington Jr. At 35, Arianna was desperate to havechildren, and she remembers that Getty sat her down one day and said, "We've got to find you a husband." Then Getty took out a legal pad and made a list of eligible men. Huffington was not on the list, but several months later, on the day Getty met him, she called Arianna and said, "I've found him!" The son of the Texas oilman Roy Huffington, Michael was 38 years old, tall, very handsome, and so reclusive that only five people in the world had his home telephone number. They met at a weekend party organized by Getty, and, says Arianna, "there is no question that, for me, it was love at first sight." They were married in New York six months later, in April 1986, in a spectacular $110,000 wedding that Getty paid for. Arianna's dress alone was rumored to have cost $15,000, but that extravagance paled in comparison with the guest list of 500—the icing of New York and Los Angeles society—and the bridesmaids. "Only Arianna," says Sugar Rautbord, "could have convinced Barbara Walters,Lucky Roosevelt, and Ann Getty to walk down the aisle in little matching dresses."
Thirteen years later, in 1999, Michael Huffington outed himself in an interview with Esquire magazine. He spoke of his homosexual encounters, his years of despair about his sexual identity, and how he'd turned to prayer hoping to be healed. He also said that Arianna had known about his sexual crisis when they married, and that she had told him it only made her love him more. Today Arianna denies she knew her husband was gay—"Absolutely not," she says. At least one friend believes her; on a conscious level, he suspects, Arianna refused to acknowledge what seemed pretty obvious to others. Another friend, however, is less convinced: "Honey, when they fixed me up with him in Houston, I knew he was gay at shrimp cocktails, and Arianna's smarter than I am. But so what? What's wrong with marrying a gay millionaire? It's very practical. She got her two children and thefinancial wherewithal to be what she really wanted to be, which was this high-grade Cassandra."
Arianna made her entrance onto the American political stage in 1992, the year Michael Huffington was elected to Congress. By then she'd published two more books, her best-selling biography of Picasso—which created a small, but much-publicized, scandal when she was accused of plagiarizing parts of it—and a coffee-table book on the Greek gods. Flush with his $70 million share of the $600 million sale in 1990 of his father's oil company, Huffco, Michael decided that he wanted to be a politician. A conservative Republican, he ran for the congressional seat representing Santa Barbara, and spent $5.2 million on a bitter, slash-and-burn campaign to defeat first the popular nine-term Republican incumbent in the primary and then his Democratic challenger.
After he won, however, itwas Arianna who attracted all the attention. She handled many of his press interviews and approved all of his public statements, and it was said he couldn't make a decision without calling Arianna to ask for guidance. But if Michael Huffington was considered something of a joke in Washington, Arianna was not. Soon after her husband took office, she attracted the attention of Newt Gingrich, the rabble-rousing congressman from Georgia, with a speech she gave challenging the Republican Party to rise to what she called "the core of true conservatism," and commit itself to fighting poverty and inequality. Within weeks, she had become part of Gingrich's informal brain trust and co-founder of his Center for Effective Compassion, which was supposed to find ways to develop a conservative anti-poverty agenda.
Everyone makes mistakes—or "loses perspective," as Arianna puts it—and, without a doubt, Arianna's biggest misstep was persuading her husband to run forthe Senate in 1994 against Dianne Feinstein. He almost won—after spending a record $30 million of his fortune on vicious attack ads and expensive advisers—but Arianna's reputation was savaged in the process. "The most ruthless, unscrupulous, and ambitious person I've met in thirty years in national politics," her husband's campaign manager, the well-known Republican strategist Ed Rollins, would later write about Arianna in his memoirs. The book alleged, among other things, that, as her husband was taking a tough stand on illegal immigrants, Arianna lied to Rollins about her nanny's undocumented status. He also claimed that she had hired investigators to collect dirt on Feinstein and on Vanity Fair's Maureen Orth, when she was writing what turned out to be a corrosive profile of the Huffingtons. It's an allegation Arianna strenuously denies, although today some supporters of Tim Russert question whether Arianna's tough coverage of Russert, who is married to Orth, has beeninfluenced by Orth's 1994 article.
Arianna had just published her sixth book, The Fourth Instinct, whose thesis was that humanity's hunger for spirituality was as fundamental as its drives for sex, survival, and power, and that poverty and inequality could be overcome if people volunteered more. Her argument that the whole social-welfare net could be eliminated if people gave part of their incomes to charity had become a central theme of her husband's campaign—which was not helped when the staff at two Santa Barbara charities Arianna claimed to be sponsoring told the press they'd seen her only once or twice, when she'd shown up with television crews.
And then there was John-Roger. The press went wild with the allegation that Arianna had been, since the late 1970s, a minister in the guru's Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA). A New Age spiritualist whoseseminars and books advance a regimen of therapy, positive thinking, and rigorous self-improvement, John-Roger was also believed by his followers to embody the "Mystical Traveler Consciousness," which inhabits God's chosen one on earth. It was never clear whether Arianna believed, as many of John-Roger's adherents did, that he was the personification of God and that he could read her mind, heal her illnesses, and even endow her with the power to change the weather. Over and over, she obfuscated as the press dogged her with questions about John-Roger, whom ex-followers accused in the press of mind control, electronic eavesdropping, and sexually coercing his male acolytes. Several former adherents also said that John-Roger had almost completely controlled Arianna, financing her lavish lifestyle in New York in return for introductions to her powerful friends, guiding her through her courtship with Huffington (she allegedly called him after each date "to see what God would do next"), andinstructing her to marry Huffington for his money. When asked about John-Roger, Arianna denied these allegations and claimed that he was just a friend, and that she knew very little about his teachings. "I have not spent many years in his training," she told Vanity Fair in 1994. "Nobody's been a guru to me."
"Looking back, some of my answers were so stupid," Arianna says now. The press, she says, was out to play "gotch-you," and she was confused, she says, by her husband's campaign advisers' attempts to silence her on the subject—a move that wasn't surprising, given that she was appearing on Christian television shows promoting her husband's support of school prayer. Of John-Roger she now says that he "remains a very good friend of mine. He's had dinner here very recently, [and] I got so much value and continue to get so much value from his teachings, and that's the story. There was never any attempt to proselytize." She still won't saywhether she was or is a minister in John-Roger's MSIA, or if she believes that he is the embodiment of God. But she says she continues to be inspired by his books, tapes, and seminars, and particularly by "his emphasis on forgiveness.… He talks a lot about how forgiveness starts with self-forgiveness, and as somebody who is incredibly self-judgmental, I learned to forgive myself, to forgive my mistakes."
Her behavior on the campaign was definitely one of those mistakes. It was something she wanted too much, she says, and she was devastated by her husband's loss at the polls. But John-Roger "talks a lot about [life] as a spiral," says Arianna. "It's not a linear progression. You have things that take you down, in order to take you up. In the spiral, [the campaign] was definitely downward, personally and professionally. But I don't think we're given anything we can't learn from."
Not one to give up in the face of defeat, Arianna returned to Washington in the fall of 1994 and threw herself into promoting the Gingrich Revolution. Night after night, in the heady aftermath of the Republican takeover of Congress and Gingrich's ascension to Speaker of the House, she threw parties in her vast, $4 million home, in Wesley Heights, gathering the city's leading intellectuals, journalists, and politicians. She called her evenings "critical mass" dinners, and billed them as an attempt at finding nonpartisan solutions to the country's social problems. Arianna also reportedly taped these dinners—although she says it happened only once—and used the recordings, along with copious notes she would take at other social events, as fodder for a political column she began to write. Glib and provocative, Arianna's column, which was nationally syndicated beginning in 1995, cleverly articulated the anti-Clinton sentiments that animated the right wing in the 90s."If Hillary is indicted," she asked in 1996, "can Al Gore become First Lady?" In time, after Arianna hired a voice coach to mute her accent, she became an in-demand conservative television pundit. By 1996 she was co-hosting "Strange Bedfellows," Comedy Central's coverage of the political conventions, sitting in bed, in a nightgown, with Al Franken.
By then, says Franken, there were signs that Arianna wasn't comfortable toeing the Republican line. "It was during the 1996 Republican convention, and we're sitting in bed, and her job is to be a Republican, and she's having the hardest time trying to defend [Republican presidential candidate] Bob Dole. Her heart just wasn't in it." Arianna now says that Franken "sped up my pulling away" from the Republican Party. Franken was writing his book Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, and he would "say to me, 'Here's what Limbaugh said,' and I'd say, 'Oh,come on, he didn't say that.'" So Franken would play her the tapes of Limbaugh's remarks and of Gingrich's speeches as well—"and that," she recalls, "opened my eyes to what Gingrich and Limbaugh were really saying."
In the early days of her association with Gingrich, Arianna says, she believed that he was committed to developing a conservative program to fight poverty and inequality. But she grew more and more disturbed by the Republican focus on cutting the budget, particularly for social programs. "I was bamboozled," she says. "My focus has always been 'How do you make a more equal society and take care of those in need?' I've always been pro-choice, pro–gay rights, pro–gun control; there has been no change there. The very fundamental change has been in one area, which is the role for government."
Her spiritual search had led her to the Republican Party, she says. Guided by the "huge biblical admonition that you shall be judged by whatyou do for the least among us," Arianna says, she came to believe that "it had to be done by all of us … because if we would simply delegate to government, and pay our taxes, and go on with our narcissistic lives, it would not be the point of life." But then she saw that, while people were giving away millions to fashionable charities, they were not giving enough to social programs. "I'm a big believer to this day that you also cannot solve the problems of this country without people stepping up to the plate and contributing time and money," she says. "I mean, can you imagine what would happen if everyone tithed 10 percent of their income or their time? The effect would be amazing." But her swing to the left came when she saw that that was "unrealistic" and "that the problems were so huge that you needed the raw power of government appropriations to address them."
Today, Arianna has no friends left from her Republican days. "To them, I had to bewrong," she says. Tony Blankley, Gingrich's former press secretary, is one of the few people from that time she still sees; she debates him every week on public radio's Left, Right & Center. "I guess I've been around long enough that it doesn't surprise me when people start joining on with a rising cause," Blankley says. "I don't necessarily assume it's a lifelong commitment. So it didn't crush me when she crossed." As for the final break between Gingrich and Arianna—which, she has written, occurred in 1997, when he sent her a sharp note chiding her for criticizing Republican policy on the drug war—Blankley says he never heard Gingrich mention it. Arianna, he says, was "not a close or important adviser to Newt. If she hadn't been the wife of a congressman—a wealthy congressman—she wouldn't have had that much face time."
Even in Hollywood, some still wonder whether Arianna's leftward move was mostly prompted by her 1997 divorce from Michael Huffington and herdecision to return to Los Angeles—"where," says one friend, "she would not have gotten invited to a lot of parties if she were right-wing." Her first forays into Liberal Nation were met with suspicion. People would back away from her at parties or ask her outright, "What are you doing here?" A number of contributors to The Nation were wary when the liberal magazine accepted Arianna's offer to throw its annual—and now, with Arianna as hostess, star-studded—Los Angeles book-fair party at her home. "There are a lot of people who don't trust her and won't have anything to do with her," says one left-wing writer, but Arianna slowly won most people over. As in New York and Washington, her intelligence and charm went a long way toward smoothing her path. Asked at a party by one liberal columnist why she had crossed over to the left, Arianna leaned close and whispered in his ear, "It was the sex, of course."
To her friends, there is no question that Arianna is sincere in her latest political incarnation. Unlike many people, they say, she's had the courage to change. "People have gone from being liberal to conservative, and there's nothing wrong with that. People are entitled to learn and grow," says her close friend Sherry Lansing, the former chairman of Paramount Pictures. The hours Arianna has spent raising money and organizing for grassroots groups no one has ever heard of is proof, some say, of her commitment. During the 2000 political conventions, "spending thousands of dollars of her own money," according to her sister, Arianna organized two "shadow conventions." Held in L.A. and Philadelphia at the same time as the Democratic and Republican conventions, respectively, they featured speakers from a wide array of environmental, anti-poverty, and social-justice organizations. The shadow conventions were "grungy," panelists recall, their participants"disproportionately people who wore backpacks," but they got national press coverage because of the speakers Arianna had personally lined up—among them John McCain, Al Franken, and Jesse Jackson.
Friends say Arianna was under no illusion that the shadow conventions would make much of an impact on the national political dialogue. Nor, they say, did she believe that she would win when she ran for governor of California. Both were attempts, Arianna says, to draw attention to "the interests of millions of Americans who don't have lobbyists" and to issues that "are left out of the political calculations and decision-making" by political leaders. Looking back, however, Arianna says she'd never run for political office again, and it's easy to see why. A wacky political spectacle involving 135 candidates, ranging from movie actors to Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and a former porn star, the recall campaign was not a high point in Arianna's career. Therewas the trip over the microphones, and then there was the vicious attack by syndicated columnist and former Clinton adviser Susan Estrich, accusing Arianna of being a neglectful mother. Soon after she launched her campaign, lambasting "corporate fat cats" who get away with not paying their fair share of taxes, the Los Angeles Times revealed that Arianna had paid zero state income tax and only $771 in federal taxes during the previous two years. Arianna said that her 2002 income of $183,000 was far exceeded by her business expenses and losses of $2.67 million and insisted that all the deductions she'd taken, while aggressive, were legitimate. The defense was a flop. "Do you have a problem with hypocrisy?" one reporter shouted at her during a press conference.
With her standing in the polls at a negligible 3 percent, Arianna dropped out of the race a week before Election Day. Politically speaking, the campaign was a disaster, but it had its upsideon the publicity front. In the space of two months, Arianna had made herself a household name in California.
Still, the hardest thing for Huffington, says her sister, was "seeing how the world was being sucked in by Schwarzenegger, not because of his values but because of his Hollywood celebrity and his money." To Arianna, it must have felt like watching herself lose at her own game. For if anything unites all of Arianna Huffington's incarnations, it is her understanding of the power of money, glamour, and fame to seduce—and her ability to use that power. Those who have dismissed her as an intellectual performance artist are not entirely wrong, but they underestimate her. "She is very strategically savvy," says the liberal author and Huffington fan Eric Alterman. "Part of her effectiveness is her shamelessness. Being in bed with Al Franken—I saw that and at first I thought, What the fuck? But it was a very effective way to get your views across in thiscrazy, mixed-up country of ours."
Arianna's knack for getting attention is something Tony Blankley admires, despite their political differences. It involves, he says, "the ability to do and say things that will be ridiculed and to keep on doing them. It was that way with Newt Gingrich. Sometimes you're vindicated, sometimes not. But to be able to have people laugh at you and push on takes a lot of courage. Arianna is a performer, a promoter. She's usually promoting ideas, though, and she's very good at it."
And so, on this Friday afternoon, the phones keep ringing. "Can you arrange for a telephonic appointment?," Arianna asks the assistant who leans in to whisper a caller's name. "Daaahling, can I call him back tomorrow?" she says minutes later, when the assistant reappears to report another call. Arianna leans back on the couch sipping her tea, and in the dim lightof her study she looks tired. In addition to the countless dinner parties, TV appearances, and blog entries, she has immersed herself in the business side of the Huffington Post—pulling in advertisers, persuading the Chicago Tribune to syndicate the site's blogs, and negotiating the deals with AOL and Yahoo. While most blogs are low-cost affairs, the HuffPost, with its paid staff of seven in New York and Los Angeles, cost an estimated $2 million to set up. The largest investment came from Kenneth Lerer and his family, but other backers reportedly include Larry and Laurie David. With more advertisers, including MTV and Sony, signing on, Lerer expects the Huffington Post to break even by the end of this year, but friends believe Arianna is hoping for more: that her first entrepreneurial venture will end up turning a profit.
It is too soon to predict whether the site will be a moneymaker, but "in terms of political influence," says the former USA Todaycolumnist and HuffPost contributor Walter Shapiro, "this may be the biggest thing that Arianna's done." The public disenchantment with the mainstream media, the growing dissatisfaction with the Republican leadership, the burgeoning demand for 24-7 news, and the exploding interest in the blogosphere have all combined, media critics say, to create a potentially huge audience for the Huffington Post.
There are those who say that Arianna Huffington wants nothing more than power; others say that she's driven by an overwhelming need for attention. But Arianna has also wanted influence—"to be a superstar" but also, says an old friend, "to change the world." Never doctrinaire, even as a conservative, according to one press critic, "she was more about vision." And it has always been a quirky vision, one that has made her a better sniper than a general. "Arianna's an advocate for her point of view," saysLerer. "She doesn't like the status quo, whatever the status quo may be at the moment, and when the dust settles, it's time to make the dust fly again."
With the Huffington Post, Arianna might finally have it all—attention, influence, and the chance to showcase her ideas and those of her interesting friends in the biggest dinner party she's ever thrown. But there's something more as well. "I honestly think," says Sugar Rautbord, "that Arianna believes she was put on this earth to make a difference. If she can't be president or senator, then she'll be part of this great Greek chorus trying to change people's opinions."
After a lifetime of spiritual searching, of trying to find a way to feel meaningful, Arianna may just have found her calling. "Sometimes you make a difference by helping to convince a few people," she says. "It doesn't have to be a difference at the national level. You help people articulate, and not doubt, what they alreadybelieve. I totally believe in the tipping point, or the critical mass. For me there are three different terms for the same thing: the tipping point, the critical mass, and also grace, the spiritual concept of grace. You do your 10 percent and then grace is extended—if this is what is to happen. If it is what is right." Or, these days, even if it's left.
Suzanna Andrews is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. Her profile of model Gisele Bündchen appeared in the October 2004 issue.
Illustrations by TIM SHEAFFER -
Rolling Stones
San Francisco, 1969
Time is on the Rolling Stones' side - here's why
By Tony Hicks
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
The age jokes will continue until the Stones roll no more.
You've heard 'em: When does Mick Jagger break out the walker? Is Keith Richards still technically alive, or is he merely being maneuvered via remote control? Have high-fiber drinks replaced alcohol backstage?
In 50 years, no rock 'n' roll band so big has lasted as long as the Rolling Stones, certainly not while making new music and avoiding casino lounges. The more they defy time, the more they boggle our minds. To be hitting the stage night after night at 60-plus years old is simply crazy.
Or is it?
Not when considering the Stones' roots and influences.
Blues musicians such as Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, without whom the Stones would not exist and whom they still idolize, rarely relied on youthful image. They rarely relied on having to look a certain way for television. They rarely relied on corporate sponsorships.
They played until they couldn't play any more. It's just what they did. And it's probably what the Stones will do.
For all their business savvy, image manipulation and musical window-dressing, the Stones are still playing their rocked-up version of those same American blues tunes they fell in love with during the London blues-revival explosion of the early 1960s.
Jagger and Richards, who knew each other as schoolboys, got randomly reacquainted on a train while both were in college. After recognizing his old friend, Richards noticed Jagger was carrying "The Best of Muddy Waters" with him.
Thanks to Waters, a friendship - and a band - was born. The Stones even named themselves after Waters' "Rollin' Stone" blues.
Like so many young London musicians, they were already blown away by Elvis, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. They were thirsty for what inspired that initial rock 'n' roll wave. The early '60s London scene was directly or indirectly responsible for turning out the Animals, John Mayall, the Yardbirds, Cream, Fleetwood Mac, the Small Faces (and the Faces), Led Zeppelin and the Kinks, among others.
As young musicians looking for direction, the Stones fell hip-deep in the sounds of Waters, Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Little Walter and others. Before they were even officially a band, members of the Stones were jamming with London's pre-eminent blues musicians, Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies.
Despite all their wanderings over the years, from psychedelic to country to disco, the Stones have always remained, essentially, a blues/rock band. And blues musicians keep trudging onstage, essentially, until they die.
All of the Stones but 58-year-old Ron Wood are in their 60s and not much younger than Waters when he died in 1983 at age 68. Howlin' Wolf died at age 65, just a year older than Stones drummer Charlie Watts. Jimmy Reed was only 51 in 1976 when epilepsy and alcoholism ended his life. All three were still touring when they died. B.B. King, the living patriarch of American blues, still tours heavily at 80, though health problems force him to play shorter sets sitting down.
The blues masters of the early and mid-20th century who influenced the Stones came of age in a much different time, to be sure. Musicians had to play live to eat. There weren't a lot of royalties being fairly distributed. Nobody was paying millions to use a song in a car commercial.
The Stones obviously don't keep touring because they need the money. But, like those blues musicians they loved (and even the first generation of rock 'n' rollers still out there performing), playing is just what they do. They can try to be fashionable, they can dye their hair, they can haul the latest Jumbotron and laser technology to every stadium in the world. But at the root of it all, they just keep playing. They still pour themselves into their live shows, and they sometimes tour the world and back again.
The reasons why blues musicians grow into revered elder statesmen while the Stones get tagged as a bunch of overgrown kids is pretty simple. Blues musicians never contended with being pop idols. They never had their faces plastered on TVs and fan magazines all over the world. Unlike pop stars, they never had thousands of teen girls screaming for them in arenas.
But those screaming kids grow up and grow old. So do their heroes. Rock 'n' roll was always supposed to be for the young.
But the Stones, like the still-active Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, are rooted in a time before rock 'n' roll. Playing until they can't play anymore is what their heroes did. So it only makes sense that they'll keep going. They probably couldn't stop if they wanted to.
© 2005 Macon Telegraph and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.macon.com
December 1, 2005
-
Holiday Helper
November 27, 2005
The Goods
Not for Edward Scissorhands
By BRENDAN I. KOERNER
TO describe the two customary ways to cut a swath of gift wrap, Scott Pearson uses a pair of onomatopoeic names: "clip clip" and "zip zip." The clip-clip method involves slowly snipping one's way across the paper with a pair of scissors, opening and closing the blades every few inches. The zip-zip technique consists of keeping the scissors' blades ajar and sliding them forward - a swifter option, but also one prone to error.
"The zipping thing will work sometimes," said Mr. Pearson, laboratory manager for the stationery products division of 3M in St. Paul. "But sometimes it won't, and the paper will tear."
To help prevent such tribulations, Mr. Pearson created a replacement for the imprecise scissors of yore: the new Scotch paper cutter. The gadget, which resembles a toothbrush without bristles, is intended to slice through gift wrap rapidly and reliably, propelled by a fluid hand motion akin to sliding a pizza tray into an oven.
The cutter, the size of a pen, has a small blade at one end, tucked between a plastic arch and a thin plastic tongue. When an inch of gift wrap is placed in this alcove, the cutter's shape forces the paper to curl slightly. Adding a small degree of curvature to the paper makes it easier to cut, Mr. Pearson said, citing the immutable laws of physics. He added, however, that too much curvature can cause unsightly creases, so 3M's researchers were meticulous in determining the cutter's dimensions.
They also learned the hard way that it would be wise to place the blade deep inside its plastic nook. When Mr. Pearson and his associates began designing the cutter in January, they came up with several prototypes that were more hazardous, including a two-handed tool nearly a foot long and a naked blade inspired by the X-Acto knife. The testing process with these implements did not go smoothly, to say the least. "We were showing up at work with bad cuts," Mr. Pearson said. "We were showing up with bandages on our fingers."
The final prototype, which took five weeks to complete, poses few safety hazards. The blade's alcove is too narrow to accommodate a finger or toe, and the blade itself is firmly anchored in the handle, so it can't be jostled free.
Mr. Pearson said the cutter, though intended primarily for gift wrap, could also expedite tasks like clipping coupons or recipes. Some members of focus groups convened by 3M to test the cutter's user-friendliness suggested more outlandish applications. "They wanted to cut wires, and I think somebody was trying to do bubble wrap with it," Mr. Pearson said. "That's a little outside of what we want it to do."
I found that the cutter, which costs $6.49 and has been available at Target stores since October, is stymied by both speaker wire and bubble wrap. It does a decent job of cutting cereal boxes, however, and whizzes through gift wrap, drugstore circulars and even most junk mail. An extra-thick envelope containing a credit card offer was the lone resister.
The paper cutter, of course, has one last, less tangible application: to bolster the visibility of the Scotch brand during the end-of-year high season. According to 3M, the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas accounts for roughly half of all sales of transparent tape to home consumers.
But can the new paper cutter push scissors toward extinction? Cross-bladed scissors, after all, have been around since ancient Rome, and generations have been raised as either clip-clippers or zip-zippers. And what would the holidays be without a few gift-wrapping mishaps?
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
Nutcracker
Paul Kolnik/New York City Ballet
A scene from "The Nutcracker," City Ballet's seasonal offering of George Balanchine's production, at the New York State Theater.
November 28, 2005
Dance Review | New York City Ballet
Somebody Wake Up the Sugar Plum Fairy; It's That Time of Year Again
By JENNIFER DUNNING
George Balanchine's production of "The Nutcracker" is the gold standard, with high-tech stage effects imbued with homespun magic and a believable portrayal of a loving family. The purity of Balanchine's choreography adds to the production, too, from his first-act evocation of the ordered turbulence of a snowstorm to vivid character dances and the pristine classicism of the second act.
It takes a lot to dim that enduring magic. But the lead dancers in the New York City Ballet's production nearly did on Friday night in the first "Nutcracker" of the season, at the New York State Theater, leaving the heavy lifting to the cast of children and a few adults. Sofiane Sylve danced the Sugar Plum as if she were counting the minutes until the company returned to the regular repertory in January. Hers was a shockingly formulaic performance, and her behavior in the grand pas de deux, when at one moment she seemed to be tugging her partner after her, was even worse.
Charles Askegard, Ms. Sylve's hapless Cavalier, actually sighed deeply at one point and danced like a whipped puppy. Even the dependably exhilarating Ashley Bouder came up short in a technically exciting but brittle performance that was more icicle than Dewdrop.
It fell to Jennifer Tinsley - who made the often faded-looking dance of the Marzipan Shepherdesses come alive with her finely articulated upper body - to remind you of the ballet's inherent eloquence.
Daniel Ulbricht made something vibrant of the Tea divertissement; Robert La Fosse was unusually gentle as the mysterious old Herr Drosselmeier; Amar Ramasar brought an amusing touch of braggadocio to the Mouse King; and Austin Laurent's toy Soldier solo had just the right mix of crispness and ferocity.
Most of all, this year's crop of children, rehearsed by Garielle Whittle, stood out for their liveliness and lack of affectation. Isabella DeVivo's Marie was a natural little girl, bold and retiring in turn and never saccharine. Sebastien Peskind made her little brother, Fritz, as touching as he was naughty. Ghaleb Kayali was both regal and blessedly simple as the young prince.
Andrea Quinn, the evening's conductor, and the City Ballet orchestra, with Kurt Nikkanen on the violin, made the sumptuous Tchaikovsky score sing.
The New York City Ballet will perform "The Nutcracker" through Dec. 30at the New York State Theater, (212) 870-5570.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
Craigslist
From sfweekly.com
Originally published by SF Weekly 2005-11-30
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
Craig$list.com
The much-loved Web site is taking millions from Bay Area newspapers and causing layoffs that adversely affect coverage. And its founder's well-intentioned support of citizen journalism has a slim chance of fixing the problem.
Gabriela Hasbun
Newmark's home office, like his citizen journalism efforts, is still a work in progress.
More than 6 million classified ads are posted to Craigslist's 190 worldwide sites each month.
Gabriela Hasbun
The deck behind Newmark's new home overlooks a forested ravine.
Who / What:
Craigslist
Craig Newmark
citizen journalism
Craig Newmark's stubby fingers tap at the keyboard in an irregular, accelerating rhythm, akin to kernels in a microwave popcorn bag approaching peak heat.
Clack.
Click-clack.
Click-ity-click-ity-click-ca-click-clack.
Newmark peers into one of three computer monitors on his home office desk. The screen displays, in plain black-and-white text, the focus of Newmark's daily life -- much of it, anyway. It's in an e-mail program called Pine, favored by geeks of all ages, partly because it renders the mouse nearly useless. Pine users are, like Newmark, the type who derive an almost perverse pleasure from deleting a message by simply pressing the "D" key, rather than undertaking the laborious task of clicking on a trash can icon. Newmark pores over his inbox, which receives about 300 messages daily.
Clack. Clack. Clack. Click-ity-clack-ca-clack.
Every so often, he turns to the left, and his own moving image, collected by a computer video camera, stares back at him from a small laptop screen. Newmark is a young-looking 52, despite his nearly bald pate and stout physique. He wears a deep purple shirt tucked into black pants, fashionable trapezoid-framed glasses, and the perpetual awkward smirk of a middle-aged man who never quite let go of his nerdiness.
There's an e-mail from his nutritionist, who has analyzed data from the pedometer that inhabits Newmark's pocket. "Over the course of two-thirds of the year, I averaged 8,300 steps a day," Newmark says, "but in the last two weeks, I averaged 9,800." His sense of humor is so dry, it's unclear whether he is actually proud of this, and if he is aware that reciting it makes him sound like Rain Man. It's hard to believe this is the Craig Newmark, the Robin Hood of the Internet, who's now sending shock waves through the newspaper industry and becoming a major voice in a movement to reshape the media.
The offices of Craigslist, the mostly free classifieds site Newmark co-founded a decade ago, are less than a mile to the west, but he spends most of his workweek here, at the Inner Sunset house his girlfriend teasingly calls his "swank new bachelor pad." Newmark moved in in October, and his progress does much to reveal his priorities: The wall that will separate the bedroom from the bathroom has yet to be built, but two brand-new, widescreen televisions (one in the living room, one at the foot of the bed) are fully functional.
Newmark lightly rubs his index finger over the pink keyboard nub that programmers call the "nipple mouse." The arrow on the screen dashes from the left monitor to the right. A Web page shows Newmark the ads that have been "flagged" -- some users thought the posts were spam, fraud schemes, or other misbehavior. In the forums, where Craigslist community members debate and commiserate in an online free-for-all, Newmark acts as benevolent dictator -- the editor in chief, as it were, of Craigslist.org. He decides who's suspended, who's deleted, and who is relegated to the "Island of Misfit Threads" with a single click.
"This guy's a bigot," he says, pointing to a post that reads "my boss is a jew." Newmark adds: "I've seen him before.
"He's gone." Clack! "This guy is troubled, just a nasty piece of work. He's welcome as long as he behaves like an adult," Newmark says, in his best imitation of a junior high principal. "I've spoken about it with him ...." He trails off, moving to the next flag, which alerts him to a group spamming the erotic services section. Newmark blocks them from posting by clicking a button that reads "Sweep the Leg!," a jokey reference to an illegal kick by one of the bad guys in The Karate Kid. Two other Craigslist employees monitor the posts, but there's no simple way to pass on the knowledge Newmark has gained fighting spam, essentially by hand, for almost 10 years.
This is how the multimillion-dollar global corporation that is Craigslist Inc. remains operational: with the founder sitting at home for hours a day, pointing and clicking on a "Sweep the Leg!" button. Yet the consequences of this bare-bones behemoth's rise now stretch far beyond Newmark's home and the Craigslist community.
Almost by accident, Newmark built one of the Internet's most successful sites, creating a free marketplace for millions that continues to grow around the country and the world. Among the unintended consequences of Craigslist's growth, though, is that it's sucking away significant dollars in classified advertisements from already-struggling newspapers. Bay Area papers alone forfeit at least $50 million annually to Craigslist, losses that contribute to layoffs of dozens of reporters. As fearful publishers cut newsroom jobs, inferior news coverage is the likely outcome. Craigslist's devoted fans are unknowingly exchanging one public service for another -- trading away the quality of their news for a cheaper way to find an apartment. At the same time, Craigslist's executives won't disclose the amount of money they're pulling in.
Newmark now suffers from a moral dilemma: He feels guilty about helping cause job losses and poorer-quality papers, but he's excited to accelerate the decline of the big, bad mainstream media. He seems determined to remedy his sins against the media by changing it for the better, lending his name and dollars to a citizen journalism movement populated by J-school professors, idealistic techno-futurists, and so-called citizen journalists. A self-described news dilettante, Newmark believes his recent journalism-related work could be more important than Craigslist. Citizen journalism, though, may not be enough to plug the news hole created by his site's success. Newmark's well-intentioned campaign to repair the institution he inadvertently injured could very well be in vain.
On the Saturday before Halloween, Newmark walks onto the open-air back patio of Reverie, the Cole Valley cafe he visits at least once every day. He wears his standard black cap, of the style favored by hip hop moguls and elderly golfers, and the top three buttons of his green shirt are unfastened. The furniture is full of droplets from the previous night's rain, so he heads back inside and asks the guy behind the counter for a dish towel. Reverie is Newmark's own little Craigslist-like community: The staff and regulars know him here; it's where he met his girlfriend and found an architect to remodel his new house.
He sits down and clasps his hands together, ready for the morning's challenge -- discussing how his community site came to deprive the newspaper industry of tens of millions of dollars per year, and describing what, exactly, he plans to do about it.
The average person who posts an apartment for rent on Craigslist has no clue that the decision affects her local newspaper. All she knows is that, by filling out a short form, she can attract a dozen potential renters to her doorstep that weekend. No fees, no spam, no annoying pop-up ads. The same is true for personals, used car sales, and, in most cities, jobs.
The hidden cost, though, is that newspapers (including SF Weekly) make their money largely, or solely, via advertising. Media businesses are cagey about revealing how much revenue comes from classifieds, but the percentage share is usually well into the double digits, and profit margins are high. A five-line, text-only ad for a used car in the San Francisco Chronicle costs $39 for 10 days. Compare that to Craigslist, which offers as much space as you need, plus photos, for free. With millions of newspaper readers choosing Craigslist, newspaper revenue losses are adding up.
The hardest-hit publications are in the Bay Area, which accounts for about one-quarter of Craigslist's traffic. The Chronicle and its competitors lose more than $50 million per year because of job ads that have migrated to Craigslist, according to a 2004 report by Bob Cauthorn, the former vice president of digital media at Chronicle Web site SFGate.com, who is now working on his own media venture, City Tools.
In the past year, the number of Craigslist Bay Area job postings per month has almost doubled, to more than 20,000.
The San Jose Mercury News alone misses out on $12 million annually in employment ad revenue because of Craigslist, according to recent estimates by Lou Alexander, who retired as the paper's advertising operations director two years ago. (Both studies accounted for the fact that not all Craigslist posters would otherwise have bought ads in papers.) A few million is a relatively small loss for Knight Ridder, the $3 billion chain that owns the Merc, but it's a fortune inside an individual newsroom. In November, Merc Publisher George Riggs cut 52 editorial and eight business employees, laying off the entire staff of community papers Viet Mercury and Nuevo Mundo and buying out dozens more in the Merc's newsroom. This saved the Mercury about $6 million in salaries by losing 16 percent of the editorial staff but offset only half of its Craigslist-related annual losses.
The Chronicle recently bought out 91 of an expected 120 employees, many of them in editorial.
"[Publishers] wouldn't say: 'Of 52 buyouts we offered, 17 of them were from Craigslist,'" says John McManus, director of Bay Area journalism watchdog site GradeTheNews.org. "But there's no question that some of these losses in reporters are due to classified ads migrating from newspapers to the Internet." As Craigslist continues its rapid expansion beyond the Bay Area, those staffing cuts could be a harbinger of things to come at newspapers across the country.
The trouble is, outside the media industry and its watchdogs, no one seems to care. U.S. newsroom employment fell by 1 percent last year, to a total of just over 54,000, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. It was the lowest number of editorial staffers since 1997, and judging by high-profile buyouts and layoffs at the likes of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, that figure will drop again in 2005.
Fewer reporters often means lower-grade news coverage. "When a newsroom suffers cutbacks, its journalism becomes less ambitious," says McManus. "There may be as many stories, but fewer have depth and include investigation." The lack of quality articles repels readers, and circulation and revenue decrease further, in a vicious cycle.
It's tough to convince the average reader that one of the causes of inferior newspaper articles was her placement of an ad on Craigslist instead of in the paper. And yet, in aggregate, the numbers make that case. "The public gets to save a few bucks on classified advertisements," McManus says, "but given the reliance of participatory government on newspapers, it may be no bargain at all for society."
Craigslist, of course, isn't the only threat to newspapers' survival, and Newmark is quick to pin the media's problems on market forces and the publishers themselves -- and off of Craigslist.
"The media was changing anyway, because papers are too expensive and we'll soon have these flexible screens which could be rolled up into your cell phone," he says. "Meanwhile investigative journalism is suffering. It's too expensive for the profit margins that a lot of papers want to have. So those reporters are getting fired or reassigned." Newmark continues, rattling off a laundry list of problems with the news media, most of which he's learned from dozens of hours logged in conversation with media analysts and pundits.
Declining readership is chief among those troubles: Circulation during the past six months was down 2.6 percent from the year before, the largest drop in almost 15 years, according to the Newspaper Association of America. This is partly due to demographics, because the "greatest generation" reads newspapers at more than triple the rate its grandchildren do, according to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Less local coverage, the rise of the Internet, and the fast pace of wired life draw millions more away from reading their local daily. Trading sites such as eBay and companies such as Google that sell display advertising online deprive papers of millions more in revenue they'd relied upon for decades.
While the failings of the modern newspaper industry are many, if Craigslist wasn't costing them big bucks, it's unlikely that publishers would have created a host of Craigslist-copycat sites. BackPage, the mostly free classifieds site launched last year by SF Weekly's corporate parent, New Times, is only slightly more commercial than Craigslist, offering additional paid services that place an ad higher in the listings or print it in the paper. While it stopped the bleeding of classifieds from New Times papers, Senior Vice President Scott Spear admits that BackPage has little chance of overtaking Craigslist in its established cities. Nationally, BackPage has 1.8 million visitors per month, less than the number Craigslist attracts in the Bay Area alone.
Even Chronicle Publisher Frank Vega, who plays down Craigslist's damage to his own paper, concedes that as the site grows nationally, its future effects on the media are unknown. "I don't have a crystal ball," Vega says. "Craigslist, a year or two from now, [maybe] we'd look at that as the main drain of dollars from what used to be our business."
In the face of this criticism, Newmark has answers at the ready. As a high schooler, he was a debater, reportedly a very good one, and he makes good use of debating tricks to address the issue. For example, deny the truth of your opponent's statement: "It's an overstatement that we're costing [newspapers] $50 million." Next, blame the problem on something else: "I think newspapers need to return to being community services and not look for high profit margins." When in doubt, play dumb: "My understanding is that a lot of them [value high profits], and that's not the way to do it. I'm speaking ... I'm repeating what I've heard other people say. I'm out of my depth here. I am a dilettante."
Newmark uses words like "dilettante" and "amateur" often. They absolve him of responsibility for any statement he makes. Yet he's spent the past year speaking out on media matters, at lectures and panels sponsored by everyone from Google to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and he knows people are listening to what he says.
"Among my efforts is exploiting my superpower of creating noise, and hopefully my superpower to stop talking if and when the time comes," Newmark says. "These are my special abilities, and I've sworn to use my abilities only for good and never for personal gain." He stares forward, satisfied. His tone is sarcastic, but some part of him is a pre-pubescent comic book reader who always wanted to say that.
Although Newmark believes Craigslist's effect on the media is exaggerated, he now feels a duty to help save newspapers from themselves. The speeches are part of a larger campaign, rooted in a belief that, besides evading technological and market changes, today's newspapers aren't doing their jobs. Newmark especially faults reporters for being cowed by the Bush administration into banging the drum for war in Iraq.
"It stems from his frustration with these obsequious mouthpieces for whatever the administration wants to get across," Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster says. "The last thing either of us feels we need from the elite media folks to the government administration is reinforcement messages and apologist pronouncements. We both feel that that's harmful." It almost sounds like a quote from radical intellectual Noam Chomsky (Buckmaster is a big fan).
Newmark may not share his CEO's politics, but he has similar sentiments about American journalism. He is critical of daily newspapers mainly because he's a news junkie himself. The sounds of National Public Radio waft through Newmark's house from the moment he wakes up until he goes to bed. News is the background music of his life. He's a frequent reader of blogs, books, and, yes, newspapers. "Craig and I both love newspapers," says Buckmaster. "We're both avid readers of newspapers. It's not as though we're out to get the newspapers."
Newmark and Buckmaster believe that Craigslist itself is a public good. "What we're providing has been found, and is being found, to be tremendously useful by millions of people who wouldn't have access to any means of getting the word out about what they're trying to do in their lives," Buckmaster says. "It's whether your sympathies lie with those millions of folks who need something like what we're providing, or whether you want to put your sympathies with the billion-dollar media conglomerates and whether their profit margins decline from 30 percent to 25 percent."
Unfortunately, Buckmaster neglects to mention Craigslist's effect on smaller papers and chains. Embarcadero Publishing Co., which owns Palo Alto Weekly and five other local community papers, lost enough revenues from Craigslist to lead it to establish Fogster, another Craigslist-copycat site. Fogster reversed Palo Alto Weekly's downward advertising trend but couldn't win over all of Craigslist's converts. "There's no way we'll get back all the business," says Embarcadero CEO William Johnson. "For a lot of advertisers, once they've used Craigslist ... it's difficult to pull them back into something else, even if it's equally or more effective." For the most part, Craigslist only affects smaller papers near major metropolitan areas, but every month it opens sites in places like Fresno and Bakersfield.
To Craigslist's executives, the consequences for competitors and other industries aren't important. Their choices are justified, they believe, by what the user community asks for.
"Our sympathies have to lie with our users, who tell us they really value having a service like this," Buckmaster says. "Having a free unlimited site where you can post all your needs and connect with others, hopefully that's a powerful thing to have. Someone's gonna provide it."
But it's not the users who are getting rich off of Craigslist.
In 1993, after 17 years as an IBM programmer on the East Coast and in the Southeast and Midwest, Newmark decided it was time for a change. He fled to the Bay Area and began a job working on Charles Schwab's computer architecture. Two years later, he started an e-mail list to alert friends to local events. As subscriber numbers grew, people started sending in apartment and job listings, so Newmark created Craigslist.org to display their posts. When Buckmaster joined the company in 2000, Craigslist was still based in Newmark's Cole Valley flat, but the site attracted hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors. In the meantime, to keep pace with costs, Craigslist began charging a small fee to businesses that posted job listings, and incorporated as a for-profit.
During the dot-com bubble, thousands of start-ups that originated as free sites (including Yahoo!, eBay, and Google) monetized their services on the way to multimillion-dollar public offerings. Newmark didn't. First implicitly, and later deliberately, with the help of community input, he made decisions that undoubtedly left millions of dollars on the table. He pledged to keep the site as free as possible for users and refused to accept advertising. Newmark was two decades older than most of the bubble-era wunderkinds; he knew that taking venture capital funding meant giving up control of the site, so he rejected investment offers. Newmark and Craigslist's early employees were the site's sole shareholders until last year, when an ex-employee sold a minority 25 percent stake to eBay.
The economy tanked, but that only drove more bargain hunters to the site. Small businesses that balked at paying $500 for a help wanted newspaper ad turned to Craigslist -- in San Francisco, it costs $75 to post an ad, in New York and Los Angeles $25, and everywhere else, it's free. Since then, the growth has only accelerated. Recently added cities such as Raleigh and Dallas have as many as nine times the number of monthly page views as a year ago. Craigslist.org's no-frills design may look like a personal home page circa 1995, but it's among the top 10 most-viewed sites on the entire Internet, up there with places like Google.com and Microsoft.com. Every month, 10 million people worldwide click through 3 billion pages of Craigslist.
Newmark never expected any of this: millions of people typing his name into their Web browser, millions of dollars pouring into a site he launched on a whim, his creation having a significant effect on the media. "Everything about Craigslist," he says, "is an unintended consequence."
Just how much money Newmark and Buckmaster have pocketed from this accidental success is unclear. When it comes to Halliburton, they're all for the press asking tough questions. As for Craigslist's own finances, their mouths are shut.
"We find the whole subject of money just causes a frenzy of debate. That serves as a distraction for us. I could be fielding questions or I could be doing customer service," Newmark says. "What's the point? I can't think of any positives. It does seem to be pointless. I can only see negatives."
Until recently, Craigslist displayed the number of job postings in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, as it now does for every other category in every other city. Take those numbers averaged over a few months, multiply by the cost of posting, and you could roughly estimate the company's revenue. Earlier this year, the site took those numbers down. Newmark, however, still manages to sing the praises of financial transparency. "We're as transparent as anyone," he says. "We're probably in the top percentage or two of transparency of companies."
Not counting, of course, the thousands of public companies that, unlike Craigslist, actually report their revenues and earnings publicly. When pressed, Newmark uses another debater's trick, transferring the blame from his own company to Enron and Tyco: "People think we know how much public companies make. But we've seen a lot of that apparent openness is often wrong, because things are buried, things are misleading, sometimes deliberately."
As a private for-profit, Craigslist doesn't have to publicly disclose anything. SF Weekly parent company New Times doesn't release many financial details, either. Newmark, though, views his creation as something different. "We do a better job as a nominal for-profit," he says, "but we exist in a category that doesn't really exist in the law."
That "category" allows Newmark to keep the domain Craigslist.org, a name that gives the false impression that the site is a nonprofit, by using ".org," an extension almost exclusively used by nonprofit companies and foundations. Craigslist's marketing materials call this "a symbol of our service mission and non-corporate culture." (Craigslist.com, which the company also owns, draws far less traffic.) It permits Newmark to use the word "non-commercial" twice on Craigslist's "Mission and History" page, and to bury the phrase "No charges, except for job postings" in the third line from the bottom. It means establishing a separate nonprofit, the Craigslist Foundation, which trains other nonprofits in marketing, technology, and fundraising skills, but makes no grants, has no endowment, and charges for many of its training events. This year, Craigslist will provide less than half of the foundation's $240,000 budget.
"We are a marketplace, like a flea market," Newmark says. "A flea market is more social and entertainment than commerce. In more formal terms, we are a community service. We have a company structure because that's the way life works, but that's kind of tertiary."
Even Buckmaster admits that Newmark's vision is a little utopian: "He still has trouble seeing us as a corporation, and taking seriously all the things that a corporation has got to do."
Newmark's financial secrecy conflicts with his idea of what Craigslist is, but so does the amount of money Craigslist makes. The revenue range often reported for Craigslist is $7 million to $10 million per year -- successful, but not extraordinary, for a company with about 20 employees. However, the job postings on the Bay Area Craigslist indicate a much larger number: more than 20,000 ads, or $1.5 million in revenue, this month. Add in 14,000 jobs this month in both Los Angeles and New York, and that's $2.2 million. Even assuming November is by far the busiest month, and that Craigslist doesn't charge for most ads by nonprofits, that puts the site's estimated revenue stream at $20 million per year -- minimum. To be sure, that's less than 1 percent of the revenue of sites with similar traffic levels, and Craigslist only charges for a tiny percentage of ads, but that doesn't erase its millions in hush-hush profits.
Craigslist will soon charge real estate brokers to advertise in New York (where brokers posted more than 100,000 apartment ads last week), and Buckmaster says the company may shortly require payment for job postings in a few more cities. Even at low rates, this would add tens of millions to Craigslist's revenue. Buckmaster claims that a "small" fee is necessary to discourage the posting of spam and fraud on an already-crowded site, and to pay for overhead. Yet Craigslist was profitable with about the same number of employees when it made just $5 million annually. So where do all those extra millions go?
It's hard to reconcile Newmark's utopian vision with Craigslist's real-world revenues and the site's effect on the media. To his credit, Newmark is obviously struggling with the issue. He doesn't want to cause job losses, or contribute to journalism's decline, and he hopes to use his power and money to fix the problem, but he isn't sure exactly how: "I don't know much about what to do about it, except to accelerate change. The news industry is experiencing serious dislocation. It's happening. The faster it happens, the faster we get to new technologies, the more money and more opportunities journalists and editors will have."
For nearly a year, he's been talking up the use of new technologies, especially the potential of online citizen journalism. Now, he's finally ready to put his money where his mouth is by funding a new venture. "It needs noise, buzz, and some smartass like me getting people to talk," he says, animated as a preacher, so excited he nearly jumps out of his chair. "And I have to dwell on this, and this is big, and this may be the biggest contribution I ever make."
Citizen journalism may be a young movement, but it's already branched out into dozens of disparate formats. There are hyperlocal sites, such as h2otown.info, a self-described "fun news site" written and edited by and for residents of Watertown, Mass., population 32,603. There are multimedia sites, such as Ourmedia.org, which hosts everything from a podcast of news for Milwaukee's German community to a video of a Northern Irishman's ski trip to France. There are sites that turn readers into volunteer reporters for traditional newspapers, such as the YourNews section on the Web site of Greensboro, N.C.'s News & Record. There are sites staffed mostly by citizen reporters, such as Korea's OhMyNews, and sites staffed solely by users, such as Wikinews.
In short, citizen journalism is anything that looks like journalism but isn't written by a "professional." The nature of news gathering lends itself to help from laypeople, just as someone who pays for psychotherapy might also ask a friend for free advice. Visit the most highly touted citizen journalism sites, though, and it's easy to see why professional journalists attack it as an idealistic concept. This summer, Dan Gillmor, writer of last year's citizen journalism bible We the Media and one of Newmark's "advisers," launched Bayosphere. Ostensibly written "of, by and for the Bay Area," Bayosphere is largely blog posts by Gillmor, a former San Jose Mercury News columnist, with a few citizens' articles tossed in. At Bluffton Today, Morris Communications' South Carolina citizen journalism site and tabloid, the top post a few weeks ago was headlined: "Learning about volleyball from great teachers." The same day, the top story on the citizen-written, citizen-edited Wikinews, an offshoot of the user-edited Wikipedia online encyclopedia, was: "Farmers hunt for missing bull semen."
These sites can all be forgiven for their youth. Like much of the citizen journalism movement, they're still experiments, all less than a year old. But OhMyNews -- the 5-year-old Korean sensation that Newsweek says could be "the future of journalism" -- is still suffering from growing pains, despite more than 38,000 citizen reporters. Its professional editors recently chose as the top story a puff-piece Q&A with the economic adviser of the Korean Embassy in Chile, about the "excellent progress made between the two nations" since a free trade agreement signed back in 2002.
"If you think journalism is boring when written by professional writers," GradeTheNews.org's McManus says, "wait until it's written by someone with time on their hands who happens to drop by the city council or school board. If you think journalism is biased now, wait until the 'neutral' journalist is replaced by the father of the quarterback of the high school football team, writing about how well his son did, and, oh, by the way, the team won."
Despite citizen journalism's current shortcomings, several bursts of power have signaled its potential. Last fall, Joshua Micah Marshall, Washington Monthly writer and proprietor of political blog "Talking Points Memo," asked readers to help find out which House Republicans voted to loosen ethics rules behind closed doors. "Not a journalist?" Marshall wrote. "Afraid you can't play? Fuggetaboutit...You can play too. Just pick a Republican member of Congress, call the number on their Web site and ask. Don't be rude or confrontational. Just a simple question: Did Congressperson such-and-such support the DeLay Rule in the GOP caucus meeting on Wednesday." Hundreds of readers called, and dozens of representatives answered.
Even in Marshall's successful case, though, the question remains: How many of the reader-reporters actually made those calls, and should Marshall have trusted what they told him? Aside from citizen journalists' skill limitations, the trust issue is the most important unsolved problem for the movement. New York Times readers, despite the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller scandals, expect to find something resembling the truth in the paper. With citizen journalism, there's no good way of measuring how much faith to place in a given fact or observation.
Enter Newmark, the man who strikes fear into the heart of newspaper publishers yet thinks he can lead them to the promised land of a new kind of media. "He knows how to figure out reputation and trust," says Cauthorn, the former Chronicle digital media VP. "That's what he deals with every day on spam and fraud. And he has the money."
Newmark sits on the deck outside his home office, trying to relax, a bit scatterbrained. He just returned from a week in New York, full of business meetings and conference panels. Next Friday, he'll be in Oxford, England, then heading home to New Jersey for Thanksgiving. He hasn't had a full day off in over seven years. Every week, on top of his Craigslist work, Newmark has more discussions, more speeches, more people to talk to about citizen journalism.
Considering how often he speaks publicly about citizen journalism and the future of media, Newmark is extremely guarded about his own ventures. He reveals only that he's working on three major projects -- advising two new foundations and investing in one start-up company -- all in stealth mode. The East Coast start-up was founded by Upendra Shardanand, a creator of Firefly (now Microsoft Passport), software that collects individual user information based on behavior, then recommends appropriate content. Its editor in chief, Buzzmachine.com blogger Jeff Jarvis, created Entertainment Weekly and was a journalist and executive at the New York Daily News. Next spring, they'll release technology that identifies the most important stories and most "trusted" versions -- a computerized or computer-aided "editor." As for the nonprofits, Newmark'll only say that the people running them "are a big deal ... the names involved are heavy media commentators."
Newmark has been meeting with a host of public-interest media companies and foundations (the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Investigative Reporting, Wikinews, FactCheck.org) for months but hasn't made up his mind on where else his money should go: "I'm wondering about this. I have a little cash to give away. What's the most that I can do?"
For citizen journalism to work, readers must believe the words on the screen to be true. Otherwise, the movement will do little to aid the hobbling traditional media. Facts could be checked and aggregated by professionals, in the same way Newmark hunts for spam on Craigslist, or Marshall collected congressional votes. However, just as Craigslist is at a breaking point with its monitoring resources, it would be expensive and time-consuming to check up on each citizen reporter and make sure he is trustworthy. It also leaves open the possibility of libel suits based on citizen content, which OhMyNews has already faced.
Many citizen journalism proponents believe the best method is to let users do everything -- reporting, writing, and editing the stories with minimal oversight. The shining example of the self-correcting site is Wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedia with 818,000 "wiki" Web page entries written and rewritten entirely by a volunteer user community. Users argue over facts and opinions within forums, and the site generally avoids "edit wars" over the content of pages. However, its sister project, Wikinews, reveals the limitations of a free-for-all media site. Last year, when Colin Powell resigned, for several hours, the Wikinews article read as though it was a huge disaster for the Bush administration and the entire Cabinet was jumping ship. "'Colin Powell resigned' doesn't stay a news story for more than a day," says Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. "You don't have the luxury of a long time for community debate [to get the facts right]."
If there's no time for argument over the facts before the news cycle ends, Newmark believes there's a way to post the most trusted information immediately. He hints that Shardanand's start-up may be looking at software that places different levels of "confidence" in articles, based on the author's reputation. It's an unproven idea, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. It could be a user-voting system (like eBay's ratings); a method based on the most-linked-to people (like Google News, except for individuals); or an approach that uses collaborative filtering, sending a user a "liberal" or "conservative" version of a story based on the articles she's chosen before (like TiVo and Firefly).
No matter how good software is at ferreting out the truth, though, coordinated, one-sided attacks will be a major problem. If, say, a right-wing televangelist instructs his minions to go forth as citizen journalists and lay down an extreme agenda, there's nothing to prevent them from taking over entire sites.
Wikipedia faced the issue last fall, when an edit war between George W. Bush and John Kerry supporters over their wiki pages culminated in the replacement of a Bush photo with a picture of Hitler. Both pages were locked down for several days during the 2004 campaign. Around the same time, Bush administration talking points showed up as "arguments" in a Craigslist political forum.
Newmark is focused on the challenge: "I need to figure out: How do I encourage people to work together to figure out how to prevent and fix disinformation attacks?" he asks aloud. "This is a big issue. I'm thinking I need to corral Jimmy Brooks from FactCheck, the folks I know at eBay, focus on getting to know big names at Yahoo!, Google, maybe MSN ... these are all acts in progress."
If Newmark, or one of the projects he's working with, jumps through all the technical hoops, contributors will only be able to take things so far. The shortcomings of the mainstream media that Newmark gripes about -- not investigating weapons of mass destruction claims or malfeasance by Halliburton -- aren't likely to be fixed by citizen reporters. "When you get into investigative journalism, you very quickly outstrip the ability of citizen journalists to gain access, maintain focus, and invest in a story," says Cauthorn, whose nascent company aims to enable a hybrid between citizen reporters and professional news outlets. The "social need for investigative journalists" is one of Newmark's main concerns, and he's considering making grants to the Center for Investigative Reporting. However, writing critically about powerful figures requires institutional backing, not just time and money.
Citizen journalism may become a helpful supplement to mainstream reporting, especially in smaller towns, just as bloggers help elucidate news on specific topics for millions of readers. But the more important (and more challenging) the stories are, the more likely it is that citizen journalists won't have the wherewithal to complete them. "Citizen journalism will not be the Fourth Estate," Cauthorn says. "It's not going to sit down and stare across the room at an army of lawyers for some government official who's outraged that you've written about his misdeeds."
In the best case, Newmark is joining a movement that will someday be of moderate help to the mainstream media. In the worst case, citizen journalism's optimistic supporters, in neglecting the problems of the public institution that is the mainstream press, may leave America with both a failing news media and a mediocre technology that offers little assistance on essential stories.
Even as he makes big waves in the media industry, Newmark still isn't sure this is a battle he wants to fight. "I don't want to disrupt the people who are really getting it done. I may just wind up promoting their work, I'm not sure. I could screw things up if I'm not careful," he says. "I'm speaking from the gut here, but the deal is, I'm trying. And sometimes, trying and making noise means something."
Stents vs Surgery
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Dr. John J. Ricotta works with another surgeon at Stony Brook University Hospital on Long Island. Dr. Ricotta sought training in stenting, to give patients more options.
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Dr. John J. Ricotta, right, said that in most cases he would still probably prefer surgery to stenting.
Stent vs. Scalpel
After Linda Packer, a 64-year-old social worker in Manhattan, fell twice over the Memorial Day weekend and felt vaguely unwell, a series of tests revealed a serious problem: one of the two main arteries carrying blood to her brain was more than 80 percent blocked by plaque.
Hers was a fairly advanced case of a condition, known as carotid artery disease, that becomes increasingly common with age and has been linked to 25 percent of the 700,000 strokes in this country each year. It also leads to millions of cases of mini-stroke, memory loss and other brain impairments that interfere with daily life.
Doctors told Ms. Packer her condition was severe enough to justify cutting open the artery to clear out the plaque. Some 150,000 Americans annually undergo such surgery, whose risks include strokes, heart attacks and infections. Until recently, the only alternative was a combination of blood-thinning drugs and blood-pressure medications, and watchful waiting.
But Ms. Packer sought a relatively new, less-invasive alternative called carotid stenting, which has been used on more than 10,000 patients since regulators approved it last year. The technique widens arteries from the inside by threading a catheter through the circulatory system, pressing the plaque into the wall and inserting a metal mesh stent to prop open the artery.
Despite some complications, Ms. Packer is pleased with the results of her procedure. "When it comes to carving up my neck and leaving a big scar I could avoid," she said, "then my vanity comes into play."
But the procedure's seeming ease and its growing popularity have some experts worrying that too many doctors and patients, spurred on by medical device makers, may embrace it without fully understanding that it is generally as risky as surgery - and potentially riskier in some cases.
It is also expensive. Analysts estimate that sales of carotid stents, which cost around $3,000 each, have not yet topped $100 million. But some envision a $1 billion market for the devices within a decade - not counting doctors' fees.
This country now spends about $2 billion annually on surgical treatment of carotid blockages. Both the surgery and carotid stenting procedures cost $10,000 to $15,000. Prominent skeptics include Dr. Mark J. Alberts, a professor of neurology at Northwestern University Medical School. He cites clinical data showing stroke and death rates of more than 10 percent within one year among those getting stents - not much different from the results in the same study for surgery.
Dr. Alberts and some other doctors say that both procedures are done too often and that the advent of carotid stenting seems to be making the problem of over-treatment worse. "There may be a few niche groups of patients that need a carotid stent, but we're already seeing more carotid stents being put in than is justified," said Dr. Alberts, who practices at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, a major stroke treatment center for the Chicago region.
Everyone agrees that clinical evidence about the relative risks in different types of patients is only beginning to emerge. But some clinical studies have found lower complications for both procedures than those cited by Dr. Alberts, with some results seeming to favor stenting and others leaning toward surgery.
And advocates of the technology say that more recent data show that stenting success rates are climbing, now that the systems use temporarily implanted filters to catch bits of life-threatening plaque knocked loose during the procedure. By contrast, they say, carotid surgery - called endarterectomy - has no significant room for improvement.
"We are beginning to see results that make us believers that carotid stents will replace endarterectomy, and that it's only a matter of time," Dr. L. Nelson Hopkins, a professor of neurosurgery and radiology at the State University at Buffalo School of Medicine, said last month at a symposium in Washington.
The trickiest cases involve elderly patients for whom surgery is risky but stenting might be even riskier. Patients older than 80 are more likely to have calcified blockages that are hard to push aside with a stent, and they are more likely to have twisted arteries in which it is harder to implant the stent. Even stenting proponents worry about overuse of the technology in challenging cases.
"There is too much focus on who is a high surgical risk and not enough on who is at high risk for stenting," Dr. Sriram S. Iyer, chief of endovascular interventions at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, said at the same Washington symposium where Dr. Hopkins spoke. (Ms. Packer's procedure was conducted at Lenox Hill, one of the nation's busiest stenting centers.)
The Washington symposium was sponsored by Boston Scientific, a leader in stents used in cardiac cases, which hopes to receive Food and Drug Administration approval for a carotid stenting system by the end of the year. So far, only Guidant and Abbott Laboratories are cleared to sell carotid stents and related equipment in this country.
The F.D.A. has also tentatively approved a stent system from the Cordis division of Johnson & Johnson. Clearance is being delayed until Cordis convinces the government it has dealt with unrelated manufacturing and record-keeping problems. Medtronic, the largest company making only medical devices, could receive F.D.A. approval late next year.
Registries in which doctors track the outcomes of patients who receive carotid stents are providing a growing body of data about their performance. But doctors and insurers place far more weight on randomized clinical trials that compare the various makes and models of stents with one another or with other therapies.
By far the most important such trial under way is the Carotid Revascularization Endarterectomy Versus Stenting Trial, commonly known as Crest. A government- and industry-sponsored test comparing surgery with Guidant's stent system, the trial started in 2000 after three years of planning. But with less than a third of the enrollment goal of 2,500 patients completed, doctors will have a long wait for esults.
Meanwhile, patient demand for stents is growing. Dr. Michael R. Jaff, the director of the vascular diagnostic laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told doctors and analysts at the Washington symposium that patients were showing up with "reams of paperwork" from Web sites that have convinced them stenting is the right procedure for them.
Specialists known as interventional cardiologists are poised to grab a majority of the carotid stent business. They make up the largest medical group in stenting, with as many as 15,000 practitioners, and are usually the first to spot carotid disease, which often develops along with heart disease.
But those doctors face stiff competition from the nation's 2,800 vascular surgeons who, on average, receive about 30 percent of their revenue from endarterectomies. They say that their ability to do either procedure makes them the most unbiased source of information for carotid disease patients.
Dr. John J. Ricotta, the chairman of surgery at Stony Brook University Hospital, on Long Island, sought training in the stenting procedure last April, to be able to give patients more options. "There's going to be a lot of pressure to do these cases," he said of stenting. But Dr. Ricotta said that in most cases he would still probably prefer surgery, for which he has had a low complication rate.
Then there are the interventional radiologists, who have extensive experience with stenting in arteries not near the heart, and neurologists, who specialize in treating brain diseases. The neurologists moving into carotid stenting emphasize that they have superior training in recognizing and dealing with brain damage that carotid stenting can cause.
"All the specialties involved have the sense that they have as much or more to offer than the others," said Dr. Barry F. Uretsky, an interventional cardiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
Doctors say the single biggest brake on expansion of carotid stenting is the government's reimbursement policy. Medicare restricts coverage to patients who have a blockage of at least 70 percent of an artery, who have already had a stroke or displayed some other clear symptom of carotid disease and who have conditions that make surgery highly risky. That covers fewer than 10 percent of the patients who currently undergo carotid surgery, which is routinely covered by Medicare and commercial insurance plans.
Meanwhile, Ms. Packer - whose insurer, Guardian Health Net, agreed to pay for the procedure - says she is happy she got the stent, despite some side effects. Those included swollen lymph glands and scattering bits of plaque that led to painful swelling in her foot and a serious infection in her thigh and groin, which required a two-week course of antibiotics.
Not only does she believe her risk of stroke has been reduced, Ms. Packer is also convinced the procedure has other benefits that device companies have not yet even asked regulators to consider.
"My memory and energy levels are better now," she said.
-
Election Fraud in 2004
Lyn Davis Lear Bio
11.30.2005
Paging Frank Rich! GAO confirms - 2004 Election Was Stolen (26 comments )
I had a chance to talk to my hero, Frank Rich, a few months ago about election fraud and he claimed he didn't know much about it. Perhaps he has his plate full unraveling the administration's lies about Iraq, but with the midterm elections coming up someone has to take this issue on.
I was listening to NPR yesterday and they had some young computer hackers on bragging about how easy, embarrassingly easy, it is to switch votes on the Deibold machines. Bill Clinton once mentioned that India has flawless electronic voting while ours is mired in unaccountability. I hope Frank and other journalists and bloggers of his caliber read this article by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman about the GAO report on the 2004 election. Paul Krugman and the NYTimes editorial board have been good on this issue in the past, but it has been a while since anyone has raised the subject.
The Government Accountability Office is the only government office we have left that is ethical, non-partisan and incorruptible. They investigate and tell it like it is. Thank God for them. This report is very serious and must get more attention. It has taken years for the mainstream press and Congress to finally understand what we in the blogisphere have known since 2000. This administration will distort and cheat about anything and everything to get its way. If this report got the attention it deserves and broke through the static of our 500-channel universe, it could be the coup de grace of the Bush White House.
Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman October 26, 2005
As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling.
The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the Government Accountability Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage.
The government's lead investigative agency is known for its general incorruptibility and its thorough, in-depth analyses. Its concurrence with assertions widely dismissed as "conspiracy theories" adds crucial new weight to the case that Team Bush has no legitimate business being in the White House.
Nearly a year ago, senior Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers (D-MI) asked the GAO to investigate electronic voting machines as they were used during the November 2, 2004 presidential election. The request came amidst widespread complaints in Ohio and elsewhere that often shocking irregularities defined their performance.
According to CNN, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee received "more than 57,000 complaints" following Bush's alleged re-election. Many such concerns were memorialized under oath in a series of sworn statements and affidavits in public hearings and investigations conducted in Ohio by the Free Press and other election protection organizations.
The non-partisan GAO report has now found that, "some of [the] concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes."
The United States is the only major democracy that allows private partisan corporations to secretly count and tabulate the votes with proprietary non-transparent software. Rev. Jesse Jackson, among others, has asserted that "public elections must not be conducted on privately-owned machines." The CEO of one of the most crucial suppliers of electronic voting machines, Warren O'Dell of Diebold, pledged before the 2004 campaign to deliver Ohio and thus the presidency to George W. Bush.
Bush's official margin of victory in Ohio was just 118,775 votes out of more than 5.6 million cast. Election protection advocates argue that O'Dell's statement still stands as a clear sign of an effort, apparently successful, to steal the White House.
Among other things, the GAO confirms that:
1. Some electronic voting machines "did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected." In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush's official margin of victory.
2. "It was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate." Numerous sworn statements and affidavits assert that this did happen in Ohio 2004.
3. "Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level." 3. Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards can easily be done, according to the GAO.
4. The GAO also confirms that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a "widespread conspiracy" but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer.
5. Access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords. So even relatively amateur hackers could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies.
6. The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy, meaning, again, getting into the system was an easy matter.
7. One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail, re-emphasizing the fragility of the system on which the Presidency of the United States was decided.
8. GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel, confirming still more easy access to the system.
In essence, the GAO study makes it clear that no bank, grocery store or mom & pop chop shop would dare operate its business on a computer system as flimsy, fragile and easily manipulated as the one on which the 2004 election turned.
The GAO findings are particularly damning when set in the context of an election run in Ohio by a Secretary of State simultaneously working as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Far from what election theft skeptics have long asserted, the GAO findings confirm that the electronic network on which 800,000 Ohio votes were cast was vulnerable enough to allow a a tiny handful of operatives -- or less -- to turn the whole vote count using personal computers operating on relatively simple software.
The GAO documentation flows alongside other crucial realities surrounding the 2004 vote count. For example:
The exit polls showed Kerry winning in Ohio, until an unexplained last minute shift gave the election to Bush. Similar definitive shifts also occurred in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico, a virtual statistical impossibility.
A few weeks prior to the election, an unauthorized former ES&S voting machine company employee, was caught on the ballot-making machine in Auglaize County
Election officials in Mahoning County now concede that at least 18 machines visibly transferred votes for Kerry to Bush. Voters who pushed Kerry's name saw Bush's name light up, again and again, all day long. Officials claim the problems were quickly solved, but sworn statements and affidavits say otherwise. They confirm similar problems inFranklin County (Columbus). Kerry's margins in both counties were suspiciously low.
A voting machine in Mahoning County recorded a negative 25 million votes for Kerry. The problem was allegedly fixed.
In Gahanna Ward 1B, at a fundamentalist church, a so-called "electronic transfer glitch" gave Bush nearly 4000 extra votes when only 638 people voted at that polling place. The tally was allegedly corrected, but remains infamous as the "loaves and fishes" vote count.
In Franklin County, dozens of voters swore under oath that their vote for Kerry faded away on the DRE without a paper trail.
In Miami County, at 1:43am after Election Day, with the county's central tabulator reporting 100% of the vote - 19,000 more votes mysteriously arrived; 13,000 were for Bush at the same percentage as prior to the additional votes, a virtual statistical impossibility.
In Cleveland, large, entirely implausible vote totals turned up for obscure third party candidates in traditional Democratic African-American wards. Vote counts in neighboring wards showed virtually no votes for those candidates, with 90% going instead for Kerry.
Prior to one of Blackwell's illegitimate "show recounts," technicians from Triad voting machine company showed up unannounced at the Hocking County Board of Elections and removed the computer hard drive.
In response to official information requests, Shelby and other counties admit to having discarded key records and equipment before any recount could take place.
In a conference call with Rev. Jackson, Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney Bob Fitrakis and others, John Kerry confirmed that he lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation---only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used.
In a public letter, Rep. Conyers has stated that "by and large, when it comes to a voting machine, the average voter is getting a lemon - the Ford Pinto of voting technology. We must demand better."
But the GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House.
Given the growing body of evidence, it appears increasingly clear
that's exactly what happened.
Revised 10/27/05
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available via http://freepress.org and http://harveywasserman.com. Their What Happened in Ohio?, with Steve Rosenfeld, will be published in Spring, 2006, by New Press.
Elia Kazan
Columbia Pictures
November 27, 2005
'Elia Kazan,' by Richard Schickel
On the Kazan Front
Review by JOHN SIMON
A BIOGRAPHER'S life is not an easy one. Aside from taxing demands of I.R.S. (insight, research, style), there is the supreme test of tact: knowing what to include, what to exclude. There are not only sins, but also virtues, of omission. A good biography is like a good marriage: biographer and biographee (if they knew each other personally) must have a mutual love, but a discriminatingly nuanced rather than blind one. And both had better be interesting. All this obtains in Richard Schickel's "Elia Kazan: A Biography," the life story of the distinguished stage and screen director.
No mere page turner, this is a page devourer, generating the kind of suspense that is usually the province of the playwright or novelist. But Elia Kazan's life, as lived and written up here, is dramatic to a fault, and easily as strange as fiction.
To start with the prose, take this sentence from the discussion of the making of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons," during which, Schickel says, Kazan started "inhabiting that sublime zone directors sometimes achieve, a zone in which they sense that their every decision is the right one." Promptly, there is even better: Kazan "wanted his actors to bring their discoveries to him, like children finding pretty objects on a beach." Lest, however, this make Kazan out to be a laissez-faire director, there follows, "Impact - the more shattering the better - was everything with Kazan." And there you have him: permissive yet manipulative, enlightened but also commercial.
Kazan is a tough subject because there is so much to deal with. Equally renowned as a stage and screen director, he also became a lacerating autobiographer and prolific novelist. He helped found the enormously influential Actors Studio, cradle of the questionable "Method." He kept profuse, revelatory notes on virtually every project he undertook; there are numerous published articles by and interviews with him, including a book-length one with the French critic Michel Ciment. Further, he appears in autobiographies by major writers. Moreover, as a friendly witness naming names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he became politically controversial, necessitating knowledge of the McCarthy era and its long shadow. Lastly, this complex and contradictory figure has inspired reams of important film and drama criticism.
And even that is not quite the last. There remains Kazan the great adulterous womanizer, with his passion for blondes. From the semiautobiographical novel "The Arrangement," Schickel quotes, "Being Greek, blondness is my fetish." (Opposites, you'll recall, attract.) "All three of Kazan's wives were blondes," Schickel writes. "Almost invariably his leading ladies were, too."
Like Kazan, Schickel names names. The major extramarital affairs are there: the extended ones with the actresses Constance Dowling (causing a serious rift with the first wife, Molly Day Thatcher) and Barbara Loden (later legalized); the more playful ones, too, as with Marilyn Monroe, whose favors he shared with Miller; and even some minor ones. Their treatment is commendably succinct, short on gossipy details.
As for research, there is enough here for a lesser biographer to leave you bleary-eyed: Kazan's often fussily meticulous tomes could stop a portcullis, never mind a door. Schickel has clearly grappled with them all, but keeps matters relatively concise yet amply informative. No reader will leave either hungry or unduly replete. As for insight, Schickel makes good use of others' as well as his own. Aptly he quotes a passage like the following from Ciment's book, about a confrontation with the notorious studio head Louis B. Mayer during Kazan's shooting of "The Sea of Grass," concerning Katharine Hepburn's crying scene:
MAYER. She cries too much.
KAZAN. But that is the scene, Mr. Mayer.
MAYER. But the channel of her tears is wrong.
KAZAN. What do you mean?
MAYER. The channel of her tears goes too close to her nostril, it looks like it's coming out of her nose like snot.
KAZAN. Jesus, I can't do anything with the channel of her tears.
MAYER. Young man: you have one thing to learn. We are in the business of making beautiful pictures of beautiful people and anybody who does not acknowledge that should not be in this business.
As Schickel points out, Mayer "was, in a sense, right." He expatiates on how all this affected Kazan, and why he too was right not to yield to his temptation to quit, but instead "at least insist on doing things his way and get fired." Which did not happen.
In 1913, the 4-year-old Kazan, whose family name was Kazanjioglou, arrived in the United States from Anatolia with his mother; his father and an uncle had preceded them, starting a rug business for which Elia seemed destined. His formidable father, George, was the only man Kazan ever feared, yet he defied him in choice of career. Sensibly, Schickel wastes little space on family history, or on Kazan's studies at Williams College and the Yale Drama School, from neither of which the young man felt he had gained much.
Not so, however, from the Group Theater, into which he inveigled his way through charm and sweat, eventually reaching the top echelon. He had some respect for Harold Clurman, but scant use for Lee Strasberg, whom he resolved to supplant. Beginning as a character actor, he specialized in gangster roles; no less a critic than J. Edgar Hoover proclaimed him the most authentic hood he had seen. He befriended Clifford Odets and appeared in "Waiting for Lefty" and "Golden Boy"; in Chicago, the Mafia was so impressed as to get him better housing than he could afford. Still, Clurman had told him, "You may have talent for the theater, but it's certainly not for acting."
DIRECTING, he gradually decided, was a more "manly art" than acting. He also joined the Communist Party in 1935, but left it in disgust after 19 months. "I understood Communism better than they did," he was to declare. By directing a popular downtown Jewish comedy, "Café Crown," he gained a foothold in the commercial theater. Next he wangled the job directing Thornton Wilder's demanding "Skin of Our Teeth" with a notable cast. He was only 34 and inexperienced, but his services came cheap.
That piece was a milestone. Everyone in it was fighting with almost everyone else: Fredric March and his wife, Florence Eldridge, with Tallulah Bankhead; Florence Reed with Bankhead; and, most ferociously, Bankhead with Kazan. Tallulah did her level best to get him fired, but he survived her tantrums and maneuvers. Later he said she had "made a director of me," because "every fighter has one fight that makes or breaks him. That was my fight."
Soon Kazan was working with Helen Hayes, for whom he could do nothing, and Mary Martin, whom, in "One Touch of Venus," he was able to make "more down-to-earth, less of a soubrette." In the delightful "Jacobowsky and the Colonel," he learned from its beguiling star, Oscar Karlweis, that there was more to acting than the glorified grubbiness of the Group Theater. He also realized that his great successes were to be built around star turns, without which his shows would fail.
Pretty soon he branched out into movies, where his first success was "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" in 1945. Here he developed his technique, which often consisted of setting up creative antagonisms between actors, or, as in the case of the young Peggy Ann Garner, of tormenting her into evincing grief for her alcoholic father, played by the excellent James Dunn. The film allowed Kazan to address one of his perennially favorite topics, that of "the immigrant outsider, ever the imperfect American," which no success could quite uproot from his mind, producing a neediness that "drove almost all his actions - from his marriages to his politics."
We are taken in breathtaking, often riotous but never excessive, detail through Kazan's many achievements. We get the making of such hits as "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Death of a Salesman,"plus several more by Williams and Miller, vividly conveying how much the plays owed to him, how different their authors' careers might have been without him. Also works by lesser dramatists like Robert Anderson, William Inge and Archibald MacLeish, whose genesis is no less stimulating. Even a number of flops provide compelling evidence of how effectively, even if sometimes adversarially, Kazan worked with different playwrights and players. Especially gripping is the interaction with Marlon Brando, whom he loved, and James Dean, whom he didn't.
And then all those movies! "Boomerang" and "Panic in the Streets," with its exciting location photography; then "Streetcar" and his heroic grappling with censors and Vivien Leigh,the affair with whom Kazan was to ungallantly brag about. The fine "Viva Zapata!," with Brando again and a screenplay by John Steinbeck, was nevertheless, as Schickel shows, a problem picture. The biography goes exuberantly to town on "On the Waterfront," the collaboration with Budd Schulberg, an account so rich in funny and grim particulars that it could form a terse, mandatory volume for all film courses. It is Brando's on-screen best, later prompting Martin Scorsese's observation that Kazan "was forging a new acting style."
Indeed, Brando and Eva Marie Saint infused the film with great tenderness. As Saint was to comment about her director, "There was such empathy felt from this man." Kazan knew how to get to know his actors intimately, to tremendous artistic effect.
Another major success was "East of Eden,"again with assistance from Steinbeck. Here the technique of sharpening intramural antagonism was perfected, in this case between Dean and Raymond Massey as his father, eliciting rewardingly taut performances. For autobiographical reasons, the father-son conflict kept running through, and lending power to, Kazan's oeuvre. Schickel's pungent account of "Baby Doll" reawakens interest in that memorable but neglected comedy, Kazan's most erotic picture. As his wife, the patrician, puritanical Molly, hitherto a useful literary adviser, became ever more "calcified" to him, Kazan started an affair with Barbara Loden. Molly's opposite, she was passionately lower-class, free from abstract ideas, very attractive and, of course, blond.
With the satirical "Face in the Crowd," Kazan returned to a favorite theme, "the hidden ambiguity of idealistic enterprises." Schickel also makes a strong case for "Wild River," about problems involving the Tennessee Valley Authority; here Kazan worked with Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick to splendid effect, but meager box-office returns.
Kazan's last hit movie was "Splendor in the Grass" in 1961, with Warren Beatty (in his film debut) and Natalie Wood, from whom Kazan evoked superb performances, well beyond Inge's script and powerfully caught by Boris Kaufman's camera. Onstage, meanwhile, Kazan was stuck with Arthur Miller's political and marital auto-whitewash, "After the Fall," which, in spite of the shaky writing, provided Loden with her greatest success.
Kazan's scrappiness comes across in such statements as "It's stimulating to dislike someone, don't you think?" But the later phases of his career were less than stimulating. The marriage to Loden soured, and though his unremarkable novels kept morale and cash flow going, the Kazan star was fading. Yet there was still a happy adventure with a recent widow on a romantic trip to Europe. And Elia faithfully nursed the by-then-estranged Barbara through her two-year-long losing battle with cancer.
His final movie, "The Last Tycoon," flopped: "The resilience has gone out of me. And the fun." To a film teacher he remarked, "Tell your students they'll throw you away eventually." But he had a good third marriage with Frances Rudge, a blond Englishwoman. His last novel, "Beyond the Aegean," a sequel to his family-historical book and movie "America, America," was reviewed practically nowhere. Afflicted with deafness and arteriosclerosis, he was only half there when receiving his controversial lifetime-achievement Oscar in 1999. Four years later he died, having just turned 94.
Schickel got to know Kazan by making a television documentary about him. He also put together the film clips introducing that rather stormy Oscar presentation. He is cogent about Kazan's politics, and makes a convincing case for Kazan's naming of names to HUAC - hardly heroic, but far from indefensible. Only a self-justifying ad Kazan took out in The New York Times, urged on him and written by Molly, earns Schickel's just censure.
L ong ago, Schickel and I edited an obscure anthology together, but since those days we never communed or even communicated. I neglected, probably wrongly, his many books and TV documentaries. So I was stunned by the sharpness, levelheadedness and multifariousness of "Elia Kazan," some errors notwithstanding. There are typos ("Irwin" for Erwin Piscator, "Tavianni" for the Taviani brothers, "Brodsky" for Harold Brodkey). Also problems of accidence ("whom some thought was a journalist"), subject and verb agreement, tautology ("reverted back") and the nonword "thusly." "The Changeling" is a 17th-century, not a 15th-century, play. "A bathetically bathed Oscar broadcast" is clumsy, and how is progress of a car "not enlightened" by knots of demonstrators?
But let's forgive a book that, without any flab, manages to be, over and above a biography, a stirring bit of social history and a panorama of Broadway and Hollywood during what may have been their glory days. It could not be a more pertinent study of a spellbinding subject.
John Simon is the author of "John Simon on Theater," "John Simon on Film" and "John Simon on Music." He reviews theater for Bloomberg News.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
Watchmen
Fighting Evil, Quoting Nietzsche
Did the comic book really need to grow up?
By Tom Shone
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005, at 3:30 PM ET
Alan Moore's Watchmen, originally published in 1986, was the comic-book series that supposedly revolutionized the industry, defrocked the superhero, and invented the graphic novel at a stroke. Yet reading Watchmen today is a distinctly underwhelming experience. Its fans would say that is appropriate: The world's first anti-heroic comic book is supposed to be, well, anti-heroic. The mode is pyrrhic, deflationary, its tone deadpan, spent. Either way, like a math savant at a party, the book seems to shrink from the hullabaloo surrounding its approaching 20th anniversary. A new edition, retitled Absolute Watchmen and published this month by DC, has drawn critical superlatives and comparisons with Pulp Fiction and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In truth, it's more like the White Album, a fractious, blitzed masterwork. This is not a comic book that wants you to go "Wow." It is a comic book that wants to let the air out of your tires.
Released the same year as Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns—which turned the Batman mythos on its head and emptied it into the gutter—Moore's book does the same for an entire alternate universe of superheroes. Outlawed since 1977, they now sit around in dark basements drinking beer, contemplating their middle-aged spread, and reminiscing about the good old days—just like Mr. Incredible. One, Ozymandias, has set up a lucrative franchise selling posters, diet books, and toy soldiers based on himself. Only one still paces the city: Rorschach, a psychotic vigilante attempting to wash the vermin from the streets, a la Travis Bickle. When one of his colleagues, the Comedian, is thrown from his penthouse-suite window, Rorschach decides that "someone is gunning for masks" and tries to corral his old teammates together for one last hurrah. Such is the inverted central conceit of the book, in which superheroes are far too busy defending themselves from the world to contemplate saving it.
And what a wicked world it is! Both Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four glancingly confronted the political turmoil of the times—drugs, racism, Vietnam—but Watchmen was the first comic book to allow the disenchantment to take root, albeit a decade too late. Watchmen was set in the '80s but evinces a distinct nostalgia for the anti-American sentiment of the '70s, when Moore was growing up in England: He loved the United States for its comics, hated it for its politics, and out of that was born the world of Watchmen, a world where Nixon is in his sixth term as president, nuclear apocalypse is looming, and the superheroes are trying to shake off accusations about their involvement in everything from Vietnam to Iran-Contra. "Yes we were kinky, yes we were Nazis, all those things people say," admits one, Nite Owl, in his autobiography Under the Hood, chunks of which are excerpted at length along with disquisitions on the arms race, criminal psychology, and quotations from Nietzsche and Bob Dylan. What on earth was Moore trying to get us to do? Read?
The suspicion lingers that Watchmen was more a triumph of writing than draftsmanship. The graphics were by Dave Gibbons, one of many artists who made their name on Judge Dredd, although he always felt a bit like the fill-in guy, lacking the ravaged punk impudence of Mike McMahon or the ebullient absurdity of Brian Bolland. Gibbons' style was neat, tidy, and strong-jawed, which lent his work for Watchmen a flicker of irony, although it was unclear whether the hokey costumes he came up with for Moore's superheroes were deliberately hokey or just the kind of stuff he came up with anyway. In which case, the joke was on him and the irony was all Moore's. A typical comic script is 32 pages; for Watchmen, Moore's ran to 150 pages, heavy with voice-over narration and speech balloons. Gibbons found himself cramming his graphics into a neat box-arrangement of nine frames per page, and the result was a minimalist, Philip Glass-y, metronymic tone. Watchmen also took comic-book chronology to new levels of complexity. It features an elaborate flashback structure and a fascination for slo-mo simultaneity that wouldn't have embarrassed your average Modernist—when they coined the term "graphic novel" nobody mentioned that the novel in question was Ulysses—although how well this technique melded with the more straightforward dynamism of traditional comic-book panels is open to question.
Watchmen's whodunit plot was not allowed to kick into gear until late in the day and climaxes with Ozymandias spouting Postmodern art theory in his snowbound eyrie ("phosphor-dot swirls juxtapose; meanings coalesce from semiotic chaos before reverting to incoherence"). Even that old windbag the Silver Surfer might have hung his head in shame. The book's action highlight, on the other hand, comes when Nite Owl finally shakes off his midlife crisis, dons his costume, and heads out on the town for one last night of kicking criminal butt. One gets the feeling that Moore wanted to make us feel guilty for enjoying this—to take in the episode as one would a guilty pleasure. "See apathy! Everybody escapin' into comic books and TV! Makes me sick," shouts a news vendor, peddling comics while the streets around him run red with blood.
Whether you take this self-reflexivity as evidence of a newfound sophistication on behalf of the comic book, or as self-hatred tricked out as superiority—that old adolescent standby—is up to you. Watchmen was unquestionably a landmark work, a masterpiece, even. Before Moore came along, comic books were not generally in the habit of quoting Nietzsche, or scrambling their time schemes, or berating their heroes for their crypto-fascist politics, or their readers for reading them. It was Moore's slightly self-negating triumph to have allowed it to do so. But did the comic book have to "grow up"? The last time I looked, the only ones reading Ulysses and quoting Nietzsche were teenagers. No adult has time for aesthetic "difficulty" or "self-consciousness." Life is too short. Frankly, we'd much rather be watching The Incredibles.
Tom Shone is a former critic for the (London) Sunday Times. He is author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer.
Huffington Blog
Arianna Huffington Bio
11.30.2005
Bush's New Strategy for Victory: Stop Saying 'Insurgents' (11 comments )
So “the insurgency” really is in its “last throes”.
No, not the effort to drive U.S. forces America out of Iraq -- that continues unabated. I’m talking about the Bush administration’s decision to stop using the words "insurgency” and “insurgent” to describe the rebel forces.
Yesterday, Donald Rumsfeld said that “over the weekend” he’d had “an epiphany” that “this is a group of people who don’t merit the word ‘insurgency’”.
President Bush apparently had the same epiphany because in today’s big speech on Iraq he went to great pains to rebrand the enemy as “a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists”. Indeed, he only uttered “insurgents” one time in the entire speech -- and even then it was when quoting a U.S. Lt. Colonel (who apparently has been too busy training Iraqi troops in Tikrit to have time for weekend vocabulary epiphanies).
So in the middle of a whole lot of the same tired rhetoric we’ve heard before (“September 11”, “as Iraqi security forces stand up, coalition forces can stand down”, “we will never back down, we will never give in”), here came the president’s latest “Plan for Victory in Iraq”: win the war on words.
Who says Bush’s only strategy is to “stay the course”? Not true. In previous big speeches, the administration set out to dazzle us with impressive-sounding numbers about the rapid growth of Iraqi forces. Now they’ve switched the focus to improved terminology. It’s Victory Through Vocabulary!
So “insurgents” are out and “rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists” are in. Here’s how the president broke down the new lexicon:
Rejectionists are “ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs” who “reject an Iraq in which they’re no longer the dominant group.” According to Bush, rejectionists make up “by far the largest” portion of “the enemy”.
Saddamists are former Saddam loyalists who “still harbor dreams of returning to power”. This group is “smaller” than the rejectionists “but more determined”. (Is it just me, or does “Saddamist” sound an awful lot like “Sodomite”? Hey, might as well shore up your evangelical base while charting your new victory vocabulary, right? Bush really brought this connection home when he referred to the “hard-core Saddamists… trying to foment anti-democratic sentiment amongst the larger Sunni community”. While buggering each other and pushing for gay marriage, no doubt).
And the terrorists? Well, they’re the ones who “share the same ideology as the terrorists who struck the United States on September 11”… the ones “responsible for most of the suicide bombings and the beheadings and the other atrocities we’ve seen on our television”. While calling them “the smallest” of the enemy groups, they are still clearly Bush’s favorite: he mentioned “terrorists” 42 times in his speech, compared to the five times he mentioned the “rejectionists” and the four times he brought up the “Saddamists”.
Following the president’s speech, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett appeared on MSNBC and addressed the administration’s counter-“insurgency” strategy, saying the word had been replaced because ‘insurgents’ implies that they are on the side of the people.
Fine. But, at the end of the day, we are losing the war not because of what we call our enemies in Iraq but because of how the people of Iraq see our enemies -- and the U.S. military.
And as long as American troops are seen as, what a report by an Iraqi National Assembly committee called, “occupation forces”; and as long as Shiite, Kurdish, and Sunni leaders agree, as they did at a U.S.-backed conference last week, that the insurgency is “legitimate”; and as long as Iraqi leaders like former Prime Minister Allawi and Shiite leader Abdul Aziz Hakim continue to paint a dark picture of what’s going on in George Bush’s Iraq, the president’s new victory vocabulary is just another pathetic diversion. A diversion ginned up to fight the enemy he is most concerned with: the rejectionists here at home who are finally rejecting his lies.
Today's Blogs
The Roberts Court Takes on Abortion
By Bidisha Banerjee
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005, at 7:30 PM ET
Bloggers discuss the first abortion cases that the Supreme Court has heard in five years; they also respond to a Seymour Hersh piece about withdrawal from Iraq, and an FCC proposal for a la carte pricing for cable channels.
The Roberts court takes on abortion: The Supreme Court is hearing two abortion cases today. Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood is receiving the most attention. It concerns a New Hampshire law (that hasn't yet gone into effect) that would require parental notification before a minor could have an abortion even if the minor's health is at stake. (Listen to this morning's arguments; read about the other case.)
As bloggers attempt to suss out whether the case is about health exceptions or parental notification, their views about abortion shine through. "While the major question in the Ayotte case is about health exceptions to abortion restrictions, the media has overwhelmingly been portraying it as a case about parental rights," opines Laura Donnelly on Uncommon Sense, the blog of the progressive TomPaine.com. "The decisions in these cases could have sweeping practical implications about women's abilities to actually access abortion services—potentially severely limiting reproductive choice even if Roe v. Wade remains untouched." But Blogs for Bush's Matt Margolis is convinced that the case does fundamentally concern parental rights: "Planned Parenthood is trying to make this a case about women's rights... But we're not talking about women... We're talking about minors... Children." Adamantly Mike, a college student, agrees: "[A] sixteen-year-old cannot walk into a dentist's office and have his teeth touched without parental permission. Abortion is an extremely invasive surgery. Why then, should it not be regulated under the same concern for the parents' authority?"
Reporting from this morning's hearing that there was "certainly no sign that Roe itself was in jeopardy," SCOTUSblog's Lyle Denniston suggests that "the Court appeared to be dealing with the new cases as if abortion rights at this stage had become primarily a matter calling for technical legal precision." Denniston notes that Chief Justice John Roberts "contributed to that impression." However, liberal Echidne of the Snakes demurs. Quoting a news story that described Roberts as "sympathetic to the state", she writes, "I suspect that the process of dismantling Roe will be a slow strip-tease, to keep the radical clerics at a fever pitch and their constituency voting for the Republican party."
Read more about Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood. Read Dahlia Lithwick's "Supreme Court Dispatch" on today's hearing, and find out how to pronounce "Ayotte."
Into thin air?: Seymour Hersh's latest New Yorker article claims that current U.S. plans for withdrawing from Iraq involve increasing air strikes over the country. Hersh writes, "The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what."
Some bloggers are comparing this strategy to previous American moves, both positive and negative. "The plan sounds very similar to the strategy used to great success in Afghanistan," claims Benny's World's Benny, a "media entrepreneur." But on Democratic Daily Kos, Ademption makes the Vietnam analogy, discusses Hersh's appearance to talk about the article on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, and writes, "I think Mr. Hersh raises a HUGE concern. If we can't rely on Iraqis to give us the proper intelligence on the ground, then how can we rely on the same intelligence sources to target the right people in airstrikes?"
"The reality is that protecting critical economic infrastructure from motivated attacks by native people is impossible without imposing a complete police state," writes the wonkish Outlandish Josh, who discusses Hersh's piece in context of the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, a document that the president discussed today. Dismissing it as "an extended tautology," Josh believes, "[I]t seems the war will grind on. Maybe more bombing; maybe more local paramilitaries; but basically the same war." And The Lion's Den's Aethern, is concerned: "I'm conflicted on this, because as a vet, I want my buddies to get their asses out of there as soon as possible, but if we replace boots on the ground with even more bombs and unaccountable mercenaries, then the very things that are enraging the Iraqis and fueling the insurgency will only be exacerbated, which will make things even more hellish on the troops that didn't get lucky enough to be included in the PR drawdown."
Read more about Hersh's piece. Read Fred Kaplan's analysis of President Bush's speech in Slate.
Cable a la carte: The FCC's Kevin Martin has suggested that cable and satellite channels should implement decency standards and/or a la carte pricing plans that would allow parents to select only the channels they want. (Read Martin's oral statement to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.)
Some people think Martin might be on to something. "[I]s there any way to stop the a la carte system from eventually being implemented? It just makes too much sense and has too much positive consumer sentiment behind it to not make its way into standard practice," insists Nicheplayer, a techie. "Indeed, why shouldn't TV programming work exactly like the WWW, where people seek out and subscribe to what they like, and the news about good 'shows' is spread by word of mouth from one trusted friend or acquaintance to another?"
But libertarian bloggers think that Martin's suggestions are a recipe for censorship. "[I]ndecency is in the eye of the beholder. For example, I think that the FCC is indecent. If I ask them, do you think they will commit group suicide or at least resign?" demands South Puget Sound Libertarian. And on Reason's Hit and Run blog, Nick Gillespie notes that Martin has asked, "You can always turn the television off and, of course, block the channels you don't want [....] But why should you have to?" Gillespie's answer: "Because It's a Free Country, You Idiot!" He continues, "God forbid Smellivision ever happens--because you know the FCC will be in favor of blocking adult smells too."
Read more about the FCC. Read Slate's Daniel Gross on Martin's suggestion.
Got a question, comment, or suggestion? E-mail todaysblogs@slate.com.
Bidisha Banerjee is a Slate editorial assistant
Today's Papers
Victory Strategery
By Andrew Rice
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005, at 6:29 AM ET
The New York Times leads with a preview of President Bush's speech at the U.S. Naval Academy today, where he is expected to unveil his "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," which critics argue is a little late in coming. The speech also tops the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox. The Washington Post, which leads with a local story, off-leads a very different take on America's future in Iraq, sitting in on a contentious town hall meeting held amid the falling mortar shells in Ramadi. The Los Angeles Times leads (at least online) with its second big Iraq break in two days, exposing a Pentagon-sponsored network that pays Iraqi newspapers to print dubiously favorable stories about the war. USA Today follows a scoop from yesterday's WSJ: In a reversal, the Federal Communications Commission may now allow consumers to pick and choose which cable channels they want to subscribe to, rather than forcing them to buy expensive packages.
None of the other papers even front their pre-speech stories, and reading the NYT piece, it's not hard to see why: The sneak-peek reporters got didn't contain any bombshells (no pun intended)—though Bush will be asking Congress for an additional $3.9 billion to train Iraqi troops. Some analysts, like Slate's Fred Kaplan, think today's speech will mark the beginning of the end of America's occupation of Iraq. If so, Bush is being cagy about it, saying yesterday, "I want our troops to come home, but I don't want them to come home without having achieved victory." To that end, the administration will release a 27-page booklet outlining its "strategy for victory" today. The Times says that "much of it sounded like a list of goals for Iraq's military, political and economic development rather than new prescriptions on how to accomplish the job."
The WP's Ramadi dispatch shows just how far off victory may be. At an unusual meeting held between Iraqis in the restive Anbar province and the local American military commander, Sunni leaders railed against the "illegitimate occupation" and their country's "terrorist government" and heckled an insufficiently demure female American official. The Marine general tried to sound conciliatory, telling the crowd, "We're here to work through the problems," but his message of understanding was undercut when an impatient interpreter translated his words into Arabic as, "I don't have any time to waste."
Facing such problems of miscommunication, the Army seems to have come to an innovative solution, the LAT reports: Buy good news. Secretly, through military contractors and Iraqi intermediaries posing as freelance journalists, the Pentagon has been paying local newspapers to run stories with headlines like "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism." Some of the articles are labeled as "advertorials," while others are passed off as straight news stories. The paper writes that it's only the latest example of "how far the Pentagon has moved to blur the traditional boundaries between ... the dissemination of factual information to the media" and creating propaganda.
USAT's lead doesn't add much to the cable-channel story besides a few live quotes from FCC Chairman Kevin Martin at a Senate hearing yesterday. The proposed change has less to do with lowering prices—an FCC study last year found that consumers might actually pay more under the smorgasbord approach—than with pleasing families who want Nickelodeon but not Nip/Tuck. The WSJ, which unsurprisingly has deeper coverage, stresses that cable providers and networks are vehemently opposed, saying the change will kill niche channels that survive financially only by being bundled with ESPN and MTV.
The WP has news of some slightly reassuring developments on the bird-flu front: Two manufacturers are expected to deliver several million doses of a vaccine to the government by the end of December, and researchers are experimenting to see if these could somehow be diluted to cover up to 120 million people. The bad news: Nobody really knows if the vaccine can be stretched that far, and if it can't be, the government is only sure it can protect 4 million people. In the event of a pandemic this winter, the Pentagon would be allotted a quarter of the vaccine stock, while the rest will "probably be restricted to critically needed personnel," the WP says. TP would like to see a follow-up explaining who defines "critically needed" and how one gets on the list. (May I humbly submit: The world needs freelance journalists.)
For those who are still fuzzy about why a bug that has killed fewer than 100 people in Asia is so scary, the WSJ has a useful flu FAQ.
The USAT and WSJ both front stories pegged to an abortion case that is to be argued before the Supreme Court today. The New Hampshire case concerns a parental-notification rule for minors that does not include an exemption for cases in which the health of the mother is threatened*. The WSJ has an interesting feature on Americans United for Life, a little-known group that had a "guiding hand" in crafting the legislation at issue. Modeling its fight on the NAACP's battle against segregation, the group's strategy is to "chip around the edges" of Roe v. Wade until the Supreme Court is ready to overturn it.
The LAT alone fronts news that Mexico's Supreme Court issued a ruling yesterday allowing alleged criminals who face life imprisonment—though not the death penalty—to be extradited to the United States for trial. Previously, life without parole was considered cruel and unusual punishment in Mexico.
By far the best most enjoyable read of the day is the WSJ's chronicle of fallen Russian oil billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky's life in a Siberian prison camp. Surviving on porridge while performing menial tasks in a climate that reaches temperatures of 40 below, he may be plotting a comeback once he's done his time in Siberia—following in the rich tradition, the story says, of "Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Solzhenitsyn."
Only the NYT fronts the latest round of kidnappings in Iraq. Pictures of four peace activists from Canada, Britain, and the United States turned up on the Internet yesterday, while a separate group threatened to execute a prominent German archaeologist.
Back to the Pentagon propaganda story for a moment. TP can't help wondering whether any American newspaper should cast stones at their developing-world brethren for blurring the lines of journalism for big-spending advertisers—in the LAT's case, a scandal over a glossy advertorial touting the new Staples Center comes to mind. But the piece is worth reading if only for the hilarious reactions of the duped Iraqi newspaper editors. They range from (possibly feigned) outrage to shoulder-shrugging. ("We publish anything.") Then there's the head of Iraq's "most cerebral and professional" newspaper, who ran three Pentagon advertorials and says he wishes he knew the U.S. government was behind them—so he could have "charged much, much more." Mark Willes couldn't have said it better.
Correction, Nov. 30, 2005: This article originally and incorrectly claimed that a disputed New Hampshire law that restricts a minor's access to abortion doesn't allow for exemptions even if the mother's life is at stake. In fact, the law doesn't allow for exemptions if the mother's health is an issue. Return to the corrected sentence.
Andrew Rice is writing a book about Uganda
November 30, 2005
-
Google as Dominant Force
Who's Afraid of Google? Everyone.
By Kevin Kelleher
It seems no one is safe: Google is doing Wi-Fi; Google is searching inside books; Google has a plan for ecommerce.
Of course, Google has always wanted to be more than a search engine. Even in the early days, its ultimate goal was extravagant: to organize the world's information. High-minded as that sounds, Google's ever-expanding agenda has put it on a collision course with nearly every company in the information technology industry: Amazon.com, Comcast, eBay, Yahoo!, even Microsoft.
In less than a decade, Google has gone from guerrilla startup to 800-pound gorilla. In some ways, the company is a gentle giant. Whereas Microsoft infamously smothered new and open standards, Google is famous for supporting them. And the firm is softening its image, launching a philanthropic arm, Google.org, with nearly $1 billion earmarked for social causes. But that doesn't reduce the fear factor, and Google knows it. Omid Kordestani, the company's global sales guru, said at a recent conference, "We're trying to find ways so we are not viewed as a gorilla." Given its outsize ambitions, that's one search Google might not be able to handle.
Is the sky falling? That's how it looks to panicked tech companies across the Valley as they contend with Google's ever-expanding power and ambition.
VIDEO
Today, Google Video is a motley mix: clips of monkeys performing karate and robot dogs attacking iguanas. Tomorrow? No one knows, but everyone is worried.
Who's threatened: Comcast and other cable providers, Yahoo!, TV networks that still shun the Net
Signs of panic: Comcast wants to be the Google of television. Yahoo! bristles at any mention of Google Video. Networks were stunned to find Google compiling a database of their programs.
Reality check: Google Video is up and running. The question is, How much content can it attract - or pay for - to fill the database. Watch for a strategic acquisition, even something big. TiVo?
CLASSIFIEDS
When secrecy-obsessed Google let news of "Google Base" slip, it looked like an aggressive entrée into online classifieds. The test service can search ads like used-car and personals listings, which would mesh with Google Local and might even kick-start Orkut, Google's social network.
Who's threatened: craigslist, eBay, Monster, Tribe.net
Signs of panic: Within hours of the Base bombshell, eBay's market value dropped by almost $2 billion. And even before that, the classified sites were nervous. CareerBuilder and others fretted about letting Google host their feeds.
Reality check: This may be an extension of Froogle rather than a stand-alone product. But it could expand to everything from travel to eBay-like offerings.
TELECOM
Free Wi-Fi in San Francisco, instant-messaging software, a widely anticipated VoIP foray - Google's telecom initiatives seem designed to make life radically easier for users.
Who's threatened: Comcast, SBC, Verizon, Vonage, what's left of AOL
Signs of panic: Surprisingly few so far, partially because Google says it has no plans to offer Wi-Fi beyond San Francisco. Still, Comcast coined the word Comcastic - is that its answer to Googlicious?
Reality check: Something's clearly afoot, and it could be big. With great power comes great regulation - so Google recently opened a DC lobbying shop to combat "centralized control by network operators."
OPERATING SYSTEMS
If anyone can fulfill the dream of turning the Internet into the operating system, it's Google. If the company chooses to develop an OS, the move will cement Google's other initiatives into a powerful whole.
Who's threatened: Apple, Microsoft
Signs of panic: When one of Microsoft's key operating system engineers defected to Google last year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer threw a chair across an office and vowed to kill Google.
Reality check: The migration of applications from PCs to the Net is already happening - and it's key to Google's future. But the likelihood of a Google OS depends on what Microsoft accomplishes with its new OS, Vista.
PRINT
What if a search engine trolled not just every page on the Web, but every page in every book? Amazon.com tried it first, then Google said it would "make the full text of all the world's books searchable by anyone."
Who's threatened: Amazon, Microsoft, book publishers
Signs of panic: Against the interests of a legion of obscure writers, the Authors Guild sued Google. The Association of American Publishers, with more to fear, did the same. Microsoft and Yahoo! have joined a group that's creating its own book search service.
Reality check: Making every book searchable sends a clear signal that Google has the brawn to organize the world's information. But a vicious backlash could drown out that message.
PRODUCTIVITY PROGRAMS
Google joined with Sun Microsystems in October to jointly promote and distribute apps like the Google Toolbar and Sun's free OpenOffice software. Wider distribution of the toolbar, Google's most potent Trojan horse, gives the search engine access to a world of desktops.
Who's threatened: Apple, Corel, Microsoft
Signs of panic: Microsoft launched its own toolbar and protested the decision of the Massachusetts Information Technology Department to dump Office for open source alternatives.
Reality check: It may be a fiendishly clever way to attack one of Microsoft's highest-margin products, but this tactic can't be a top priority. Google Toolbar will thrive without Sun.
ECOMMERCE
Froogle threatens no one yet. But what if, as the development of Google Wallet suggests, Google handled your every online transaction? The potential revenue from Google's cut of each purchase would make AdSense look like AdCents.
Who's threatened: Amazon, Buy.com, eBay
Signs of panic: After reports speculated that Google might take on PayPal, eBay said it would pay up to $4.1 billion for VoIP rebel Skype. Wall Street's read: With PayPal under fire, eBay needed a new growth area.
Reality check: Rather than take on PayPal directly, the company may start with something less ambitious, like handling payments for premium video content. But after that? Watch out
Children and Behavior
Chip Wass
November 27, 2005
The Nation
Kids Gone Wild
By JUDITH WARNER
CHILDREN should be seen and not heard" may be due for a comeback. After decades of indulgence, American society seems to have reached some kind of tipping point, as far as tolerance for wild and woolly kid behavior is concerned.
Last month, an Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans said they believed that people are ruder now than they were 20 or 30 years ago, and that children are among the worst offenders. (As annoyances, they tied with obnoxious cellphone users.)
The conservative child psychologist John Rosemond recently denounced in his syndicated column the increasing presence of "disruptive urchins" who "obviously have yet to have been taught the basic rudiments of public behavior," as he related the wretched experience of dining in a four-star restaurant in the company of one child roller skating around his table and another watching a movie on a portable DVD player.
In 2002, only 9 percent of adults were able to say that the children they saw in public were "respectful toward adults," according to surveys done then by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan and nonprofit public opinion research group. In 2004, more than one in three teachers told Public Agenda pollsters they had seriously considered leaving their profession or knew a colleague who had left because of "intolerable" student behavior.
Even Madonna - her "Papa Don't Preach" years long past - has joined the throng, proclaiming herself a proud "disciplinarian" in a recent issue of the British magazine Harpers & Queen and bragging that, as a mom, she takes a tough line on homework, tidiness and chores: "If you leave your clothes on the floor, they're gone when you come home."
Jo Frost, ABC's superstar "Supernanny," would be proud.
Whether children are actually any worse behaved now than they ever have been before is, of course, debatable. Children have always been considered, basically, savages. The question, from the late 17th century onwards, has been whether they come by it naturally or are shaped by the brutality of society.
But what seems to have changed recently, according to childrearing experts, is parental behavior - particularly among the most status-conscious and ambitious - along with the kinds of behavior parents expect from their kids. The pressure to do well is up. The demand to do good is down, way down, particularly if it's the kind of do-gooding that doesn't show up on a college application.
Once upon a time, parenting was largely about training children to take their proper place in their community, which, in large measure, meant learning to play by the rules and cooperate, said Alvin Rosenfeld, a child psychiatrist and co-author, with Nicole Wise, of "The OverScheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyperparenting Trap."
"There was a time when there was a certain code of conduct by which you viewed the character of a person," he said, "and you needed that code of conduct to have your place in the community."
Rude behavior, particularly toward adults, was something for which children had to be chastised, even punished. That has also now changed, said Dan Kindlon, a Harvard University child psychologist and author of "Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age."
Most parents, Dr. Kindlon said, would like their children to be polite, considerate and well behaved. But they're too tired, worn down by work and personally needy to take up the task of teaching them proper behavior at home.
"We use kids like Prozac," he said. "People don't necessarily feel great about their spouse or their job but the kids are the bright spot in their day. They don't want to muck up that one moment by getting yelled at. They don't want to hurt. They don't want to feel bad. They want to get satisfaction from their kids. They're so precious to us - maybe more than to any generation previously. What gets thrown out the window is limits. It's a lot easier to pick their towel up off the floor than to get them away from the PlayStation to do it."
Parenting today is also largely about training children to compete - in school and on the soccer field - and the kinds of attributes they need to be competitive are precisely those that help break down society's civility.
Parents who want their children to succeed more than anything, Dr. Kindlon said, teach them to value and prioritize achievement above all else - including other people.
"We're insane about achievement," he said. "Schoolwork is up 50 percent since 1981, and we're so obsessed with our kids getting into the right school, getting the right grades, we let a lot of things slide. Kids don't do chores at home anymore because there isn't time."
And other adults, even those who should have authority, are afraid to get involved. "Nobody feels entitled to discipline other people's kids anymore," Dr. Kindlon said. "They don't feel they have the right if they see a kid doing something wrong to step in."
Educators feel helpless, too: Nearly 8 in 10 teachers, according to the 2004 Public Agenda report, said their students were quick to remind them that they had rights or that their parents could sue if they were too harshly disciplined. More than half said they ended up being soft on discipline "because they can't count on parents or schools to support them."
And that, Dr. Rosenfeld said, strikes at the heart of the problem. "Parents are out of control," he said. "We always want to blame the kids, but if there's something wrong with their incivility, it's the way their parents model for them."
There's also the chance, said Wendy Mogel, a clinical psychologist whose 2001 book, "The Blessing of a Skinned Knee," has earned her a cult following, that when children are rude, obnoxious and outrageously behaved, they're trying to tell parents something - something they've got to shout in order for them to hear.
"These kids are so extremely stressed from the academic load they're carrying and how cloistered they are and how they have to live under the watchful eye of their parents," Dr. Mogel said. "They have no kid space."
Paradoxically, she said, parental over-involvement in their children's lives today often hides a very basic kind of indifference to their children's real need, simply to be kids. "There are all these blurry boundaries," she said. "They need to do fifth-grade-level math in third grade and have every pleasure and indulgence of adulthood in childhood and they act like kids and we get mad."
If stress and strain, self-centeredness and competition are the pathogens underlying the rash of rudeness perceived to be endemic among children in America today, then the cure, some experts said, has to be systemic and not topical. Stop blaming the children, they said. Stop focusing on the surface level of behavior and start curing instead the social, educational and parental ills that feed it.
This may mean less "quality" time with children and more time getting them to do things they don't want to do, like sitting for meals, making polite conversation and - Madonna was right - picking their clothes up off the floor.
Judith Warner is the author, most recently, of "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety." She is also the host of "The Judith Warner Show" on XM satellite radio.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
November 29, 2005
-
Britain's Queen Elizabeth II led the nation at the annual Remembrance Sunday tribute to the country's war dead in central London.(AFP/Odd Andersen)
Ghurkas take part in the Remembrance Sunday Service at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London, November 13, 2005. Britain's Queen Elizabeth joined Prime Minister Tony Blair and thousands of war veterans from Britain and the
Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair stands during the Remembrance Sunday Service at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London November 13, 2005. Britain's Queen Elizabeth joined Blair and thousands of war veterans from Britain and the Commonwealth on Sunday at the Cenotaph in London to remember the country's war dead. REUTERS/Stephen Hird
Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair stands during the Remembrance Sunday Service at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London November 13, 2005. Britain's Queen Elizabeth joined Blair and thousands of war veterans from Britain and the Commonwealth on Sunday at the Cenotaph in London to remember the country's war dead. REUTERS/Stephen Hird
Former servicemen and women gather before the Remembrance Sunday Service at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London, November 13, 2005. Britain's Queen Elizabeth joined Prime Minister Tony Blair and thousands of war veterans from Britain and the Commonwealth on Sunday at the Cenotaph in London to remember the country's war dead. REUTERS/Paul Hackett
Britain's Royal family and politicians stand during the two minutes silence at the Remembrance Sunday Service at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London November 13, 2005. Britain's Queen Elizabeth joined Prime Minister Tony Blair and thousands of war veterans from Britain and the Commonwealth on Sunday at the Cenotaph in London to remember the country's war dead. REUTERS/Stephen Hird
Britain's Prince William (R), and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall (L) talk before the Remembrance Sunday Service at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London November 13, 2005. Britain's Queen Elizabeth joined Prime Minister Tony Blair and thousands of war veterans from Britain and the Commonwealth on Sunday at the Cenotaph in London to remember the country's war dead. REUTERS/Stephen Hird
Britain's Queen Elizabeth stands during the Remembrance Sunday Service at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London November 13, 2005. Britain's Queen Elizabeth joined Prime Minister Tony Blair and thousands of war veterans from Britain and the Commonwealth on Sunday at the Cenotaph in London to remember the country's war dead. REUTERS/Stephen Hird
British war veterans and a Staffordshire bull terrier (R) named 'Colour Sergeant Watchman Four', the mascot of the Staffordshire Regiment, await Britain's Queen Elizabeth as she visits the Field of Remembrance at Westminster Abbey in London, November 10, 2005. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on Thursday attended the annual event ahead of Remembrance Sunday, when those who died fighting for Britain and its allies in conflict are remembered. REUTERS/Toby Melville
Queen Elizabeth II, seen here on November 10, attended the Festival of Remembrance in London to pay tribute to those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country in wartime.(AFP/File/Carl de Souza)
-
Sarah Ferguson, Dutchess of York
Sarah Ferguson (L), Duchess of York, poses with McDonald's character 'Ronald McDonald' during a media event for the 2005 World Children's Day at the Ronald McDonald house in Los Angeles November 15, 2005. World
Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, speaks at the news event for the 2005 World Children's Day at the Ronald McDonald house in Los Angeles November 15, 2005. Ferguson put a small toy pink elephant given to her by a child in Poland on the podium as she spoke. World Children's Day will be celebrated on November 20, 2005, a global program to raise funds for Ronald McDonald House Charities which provides services for children's causes. REUTERS/Fred Prouser Email Photo Print Photo
-
Outdoors Super Store Cabela's
Customers check out more than 260 reels on display at the 185,000-square-foot Cabela's in Rogers, Minn.
(Jayme Halbritter / For The Times
Outfitters fight the online trend by luring customers not only with mega aquariums, bike trails and shooting ranges, but with mountains of stuff. California is now in their sights.
(Jayme Halbritter / For The Times)
Marketing manager John Castillo holds a toilet seat embedded with bullets. (He also sells a fishing lure model.)
(Jayme Halbritter / For The Times)
Chris Klinkhammer, left, and father Jon Proell check out the display of African animals at Cabela's in Rogers, west of Minneapolis. The company operates 14 stores, with eight more planned.
(Jayme Halbritter / For The Times)
Items such as these giant fish pillows show that Cabela's isn't just a men's hook-and-bullet store. Other products include Barbie and SpongeBob fishing kits, paintball and old-fashioned games like tiddlywinks, jacks and hopscotch.
(Jayme Halbritter / For The Times)
Camouflage hats are among the countless camo items at the Cabela's in Rogers, Minn., which opened about a month ago. This display area measures about 10,000 square feet and is devoted solely to camouflage attire.
(Jayme Halbritter / For The Times)
Customers check out some of the hundreds of guns. The finest offerings of Cabela's supply are showcased in the Library, a room that smells of sweet gun oil and wood polish and where ammo is boxed and stacked in rows 6-feet high.
(Jayme Halbritter / For The Times)
A customer takes a break on one of Cabela's rustic-style benches in front of a wildlife display. Rustic furniture is also sold at the store.
(Jayme Halbritter / For The Times)
A customer weighs her options at the store's Reel Bar.
(Jayme Halbritter / For The Times)
Big-box safari
A new breed of gigantic entertainment trading posts is spreading across the country, and in these temples of gear, the modern outdoors enthusiast may never get outdoors.
By John Balzar
Times Staff Writer
November 29, 2005
"LET'S start up here."
John Castillo bounds into a doorway, up a flight of stairs, through backroom offices, to an archway over the entrance.
"This," he says with an appreciative sweep of his eyes, "is my favorite view."
A mountain three stories tall and covered with wildlife rises in the distance. Trees flame in autumn reds and yellows. Trout swim in a pond at the foot of a cascading stream. Beyond the mountain, in filtered sunlight, a yellow float plane arcs through the sky.
Directly in front of Castillo, 15 geese appear to be headed for a landing. To the right, a bull moose is frozen in a grazing posture, its mouth biting down on grass. Below and beyond, 390 game animals, elephant to hammerhead, seem to gaze back at the humans who gaze at them. In the distance, not one but two shooting galleries add a carnival feel to the scene — plus an archery range for those who want to tune up for deer season.
Oh yes, there's a store down there too. That's the point after all, and it cannot be missed.
More than three football fields of retail acreage — 185,000 square feet — sprawl across a prairie-sized main floor with a smaller balcony yonder, and a circus-sized tent outside for sale items. On the right, guns sprout forest-like from hundreds of feet of casements. To the left, more water — aquariums totaling 55,000 gallons with an array of live game fish, most notably a surfboard-sized musky with a glower on its face — and enough lures, flies, artificial worms and bait to get a rise out of everything that swims in Minnesota's 10,000 lakes.
This is Cabela's.
And this is Cabela's multimillion-dollar vision of the future of the outdoors.
Looming alongside Interstate 94 west of Minneapolis in the fashion of a stone-and-log national park lodge, only on a scale of acres rather than square feet, this store, barely a month old, is the latest in a new breed of gigantic entertainment trading posts to sprout up in the U.S. — a trend that flies in the face of the popular belief that ours is becoming a virtual world of commerce via the Web.
A 44-year-old catalog company for hunters, fishermen and campers, Cabela's — and its arch rival, Bass Pro Shops — are filling in the map of the United States with Boone and Crockett-size "destination" retail emporiums. Shop, play, hang out, gawk, go shootin' if you wish, have lunch and maybe learn a thing or two — and never get your boots muddy.
The great outdoors, we might say, is coming to an indoors location near you.
*
New possibilities
THE mountain men called them their "possibles" — the essential possessions that make outdoor pursuits possible.
If we recall that interval of history, we remember that the early 19th century mountain men and the Native Americans who befriended them ventured out of the woods periodically to gather at a rendezvous for the purpose of trading: their outdoor labors — furs, pelts, food — for outdoor gear. It was a rollicking time, and few wanted to miss it.
Today, the circle of time has closed back on the past. Once again the trade in possibles has become a spectacle to draw people from afar. The rendezvous has returned, 21st century style.
"On any given day, half our customers come from farther than 100 miles away … some from around the country and some from around the world," Castillo explains. "The average visit lasts about four hours."
Of course, what's possible these days in terms of possibles is something else again. And there's nothing like a visit to Cabela's to remind one of the industriousness, the breathtaking inventiveness, the sheer wackiness of our culture.
We could pause here, for instance, and reflect about the imperative of a toilet seat embedded with fishing lures or bullets. We might wonder what practical application we'd find for a camouflage steering-wheel cover for the pickup truck. We could ponder the nature of progress when today's possibles include underwater video cameras and portable display screens so we can watch as fish bite our bait.
But that would be getting ahead of the story.
*
Bait and beyond
LET'S begin with something simple, say worms. Castillo pauses at the plastic worms. Not the complete selection of plastic worms, mind you: That covers aisles. This is just one display.
Here, hanging from cases, we have the latest in artificial worm bait — the deluxe biodegradable variety that slowly melts in the water and gives off aromas said to be irresistible to worm-eating fish, not to mention leaving anglers in perpetual need of returning to the store for more melting worms.
Of this particular bait, 144 color and worm variations are on display, including grubs, crawlers, turtlebacks, maggots, leeches, noodles and just plain earthworms.
"Gulp."
That's a brand name, if not also a comment.
To think, Dick Cabela started it all in 1961 on his kitchen table in Chappell, Neb., selling cut-rate flies tied in Japan. First, he advertised 12 flies for $1 and got only one customer. He cut the price to five flies for free with a 25-cent charge for shipping and handling, and the orders started rolling in. According to the hardcover history of the company written by his son, David Cabela, the profit margin on each order was 2.2 cents per fly.
These days, Cabela's mail-order catalog — a coffee table and bathroom companion to practically every hunting or fishing lodge you might visit — is 616 pages, and that covers only the hunting season. It would take a fair-sized backpack to carry the fishing and other supplemental catalogs. Plus, the company operates 14 destination stores like this one with eight more in the works. Cabela's calls itself "The World's Foremost Outfitter."
In case the point is the least bit fuzzy, let's emphasize that "outfitting" in the language of Cabela's means hunting, fishing, camping — no golf shoes here, or tennis rackets, baseball bats, bicycles or any other gear of that sort.
"We are proud members, as it is known in our industry, of the hook-and-bullet crowd," says Castillo. He adds, without condescension, "This is not a place for the sock-and-jock folks."
Cabela's has not ventured out of its predominantly red-state base into California, but spokesman David Draper said, "California is definitely on the map, and we're looking at it aggressively."
Bass Pro Shops is no less a marvel of jumbo-sized ambitions to contain the outdoors indoors, and it is poised to have a leg up in bringing the phenomenon to the California market. Already, the retail giant, which calls itself "The World's Leading Supplier of Premium Outdoor Gear," operates 31 destination stores — with two more about to open and 12 in the planning. Among those upcoming for 2007 is a 4 1/2 -acre retail entertainment and "adventure" outpost in Rancho Cucamonga.
For those who might scratch their heads and wonder about the appeal of these enterprises, Bass Pro Shops' mother store in Springfield, Mo., an emporium almost seven football fields in size — 330,000 square feet — attracted 4 million visitors last year and was said to be Missouri's No. 1 tourist destination.
(And lest you think this phenomena is the exclusive domain of the hook-and-bullet crowd, REI's flagship stores in Denver and Seattle feature mammoth climbing walls, mountain bike trails and gear testing chambers at their cavernous sites.)
*
New terrain
CASTILLO'S walk through Cabela's is starting to feel more like a hike, and he hasn't left the fishing department yet. If much of this gear is at least vaguely familiar, some of it isn't.
Castillo stops in what is foreign terrain for many outside the Midwest: ice fishing. By studying the gear, we can get at least an anthropologist's understanding of the "how" of it, if not the "why."
First, ice fishing is not about exercise. There are racks of gasoline powered augers to drill a fishing hole through the ice. Second, it's only marginally about the outdoors since the well-equipped ice fishermen can choose among rows of portable shelters, which are towed onto the ice, placed over the hole and locked into place by special anchors so as to not blow away in the howling wind.
If you joke and tell an ice fishermen that his rig looks a lot like an outhouse, he'll give you the stinkeye and peg you for, what else, a creep from Southern California.
Castillo is on the move again. Boats? Got 'em, a whole warehouse-sized room of them. And why not? Summer is only seven months off. Canoes and kayaks, check. Bows, arrows, strings, quivers, points, sights, scent eliminators, but of course. Equipment for the hunting dog, naturally. Targets? Paper as well as life-like sculpture. And more: salt licks, stealth cameras to record what is licking the salt licks, hunting blinds, hunting blinds meant to be placed in trees, snowshoes, walkie-talkies, weather gauges, those clear-plastic toilet seat covers, rustic lodge furnishings, dog portraits, backpacks, tents, boots (high-tops, please), waterfowl decoys, apparel.
Now here's something serious: When the day's hunting or fishing ends, what then? Dinner, of course. "Kill It & Grill It," as one cookbook here puts it.
Encompassing an area larger than a tract home, Cabela's satisfies the modern meat hunter with assorted grinders, sausage stuffers, meat mixers, slicers, dehydrators (think venison jerky), seasonings, cast-iron cookware, sausage casings and more.
"This has a very high 'cool-guy' quotient," Castillo interrupts. He hoists from the shelf a 10-pound, 2 1/4 -horsepower, gasoline-fired blender. The manufacturer promises "enough torque to perfectly blend a pitcher of drinks (without lumps) in 15 seconds."
*
Endless equipment
TO think, a couple of hundred years ago Native Americans and trappers roamed the upper Mississippi reaches here and the mountains to the west with no more than they could carry in a canoe or on a pack mule. The wild went on forever. Today our free-roaming wild lands have been reduced to enclaves, but our gear is endless. Perhaps archeologists of the future will describe it as equilibrium of a sort.
Four hours at Cabela's seems hardly enough. After all, one must visit the laser shooting galleries. Click-click-click-click-click — five imaginary boars bite the dust in rapid succession. Hey, does that scowling ice fisherman want to see a Southern Californian in action? For $2,000, less 1 cent, this wide-screen shooting gallery can be the beginning of a home entertainment center.
Then there's the real thing.
A sales clerk along the wall of guns apologizes. "These racks were full just a couple of weeks ago," he says with a shrug. Demand is outstripping supply just now — half the muzzleloaders are gone, but the $25,500 custom Rigby .416-caliber buffalo gun is still available. And maybe a few thousand other rifles and handguns too — the finest in a circular room called the Library that smells of sweet gun oil and wood polish. Ammo is boxed and stacked in rows 6-feet high.
If the rest of this vast store is airy and spacious, the gun counters are cramped and crowded. Men and no small number of women are sighting down barrels, palming polished walnut, feeling for balance, working steel against steel, ch-chung. Kids are being fitted for their first rifle. Jot a reminder: Make no furtive movements in the presence of Midwesterners during hunting season.
Moving down the aisle, it appears that other journalists have been drawn to the rendezvous today. A team has arrived from a Minneapolis-St. Paul paper. They are from the fashion staff, but, no, they are not reporting on the latest in camo clothing — there's 10,000 square feet or so of display area devoted to it. "We've done that," says one.
This time, the local fashionistas are covering trends in gun belts.
*
Fighting controversy
CABELA'S proves one thing quite plainly — when it comes to outdoor gear, what we need and what we want are not the same thing. But this store, and the others like it spreading across the United States and Canada, have an additional purpose.
Hunting is a matter of serious controversy in the land, and the number of licensed hunters has been on the decline. Nationwide, the legions of fishermen are not booming either. The very term "outdoor sportsman" will get you an argument in many urban areas.
Rather than retrench and downsize in the face of unfavorable trends, Cabela's and Bass Pro Shops have chosen to expand, and in breathtaking fashion, seem to be betting on their power to turn things around, believing that the culture wars cannot be won without abundant supplies.
Look carefully, and you see that this is not just a men's hook-and-bullet store. Far from it. There are Barbie and SpongeBob fishing kits to entice kids, and paintball for teens. Old-fashioned games such as tiddlywinks, jacks and hopscotch are packaged as they might have been generations ago, evoking a nostalgic Americana. Rustic furniture of log, leather, fur and camouflage likewise presents a defense against the onrush of modernism. Candles with a "woodland mist" scent, woodland-themed table linens, fresh fudge and sheepskin slippers speak of a style of living very different than "lifestyle."
"What a Cabela's does to the community is bring hunting and fishing to the forefront …. Our obligation is to get people involved in the outdoors," says Castillo. "Yes, we're a business, we're not a nonprofit. But we need to make every effort to get people excited again about the outdoors."
For a good many, as we can see, the thrill begins indoors.
*
John Balzar can be reached at outdoors@latimes.com. -
Cheerleaders and Pharmaceutical Sales
Allison V. Smith for The New York Times
Penny Otwell, a former cheerleader, is a drug sales representative
November 28, 2005
Gimme an Rx! Cheerleaders Pep Up Drug Sales
By STEPHANIE SAUL
As an ambitious college student, Cassie Napier had all the right moves - flips, tumbles, an ever-flashing America's sweetheart smile - to prepare for her job after graduation. She became a drug saleswoman.
Ms. Napier, 26, was a star cheerleader on the national-champion University of Kentucky squad, which has been a springboard for many careers in pharmaceutical sales. She now plies doctors' offices selling the antacid Prevacid for TAP Pharmaceutical Products.
Ms. Napier says the skills she honed performing for thousands of fans helped land her job. "I would think, essentially, that cheerleaders make good sales people," she said.
Anyone who has seen the parade of sales representatives through a doctor's waiting room has probably noticed that they are frequently female and invariably good looking. Less recognized is the fact that a good many are recruited from the cheerleading ranks.
Known for their athleticism, postage-stamp skirts and persuasive enthusiasm, cheerleaders have many qualities the drug industry looks for in its sales force. Some keep their pompoms active, like Onya, a sculptured former college cheerleader. On Sundays she works the sidelines for the Washington Redskins. But weekdays find her urging gynecologists to prescribe a treatment for vaginal yeast infection.
Some industry critics view wholesomely sexy drug representatives as a variation on the seductive inducements like dinners, golf outings and speaking fees that pharmaceutical companies have dangled to sway doctors to their brands.
But now that federal crackdowns and the industry's self-policing have curtailed those gifts, simple one-on-one human rapport, with all its potentially uncomfortable consequences, has become more important. And in a crowded field of 90,000 drug representatives, where individual clients wield vast prescription-writing influence over patients' medication, who better than cheerleaders to sway the hearts of the nation's doctors, still mostly men.
"There's a saying that you'll never meet an ugly drug rep," said Dr. Thomas Carli of the University of Michigan. He led efforts to limit access to the representatives who once trolled hospital hallways. But Dr. Carli, who notes that even male drug representatives are athletic and handsome, predicts that the drug industry, whose image has suffered from safety problems and aggressive marketing tactics, will soon come to realize that "the days of this sexual marketing are really quite limited."
But many cheerleaders, and their proponents, say they bring attributes besides good looks to the job - so much so that their success has led to a recruiting pipeline that fuels the country's pharmaceutical sales force. T. Lynn Williamson, Ms. Napier's cheering adviser at Kentucky, says he regularly gets calls from recruiters looking for talent, mainly from pharmaceutical companies. "They watch to see who's graduating," he said.
"They don't ask what the major is," Mr. Williamson said. Proven cheerleading skills suffice. "Exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated enthusiasm - they learn those things, and they can get people to do what they want."
Approximately two dozen Kentucky cheerleaders, mostly women but a few men, have become drug reps in recent years.
While there are no statistics on how many drug representatives are former or current cheerleaders, demand for them led to the formation of an employment firm, Spirited Sales Leaders, in Memphis. It maintains a database of thousands of potential candidates.
"The cheerleaders now are the top people in universities; these are really capable and high-profile people," said Gregory C. Webb, who is also a principal in a company that runs cheerleading camps and employs former cheerleaders. He started Spirited Sales Leaders about 18 months ago because so many cheerleaders were going into drug sales. He said he knew several hundred former cheerleaders who had become drug representatives.
"There's a lot of sizzle in it," said Mr. Webb. "I've had people who are going right out, maybe they've been out of school for a year, and get a car and make up to $50,000, $60,000 with bonuses, if they do well." Compensation sometimes goes well into six figures.
The ranks include women like Cristin Duren, a former University of Alabama cheerleader. Ms. Duren, 24, recently took a leave from First Horizon Pharmaceuticals to fulfill her duties as the reigning Miss Florida U.S.A. and prepare for next year's Miss U.S.A. pageant.
Onya, the Redskins cheerer (who asked that her last name be withheld, citing team policy), has her picture on the team's Web site in her official bikinilike uniform and also reclining in an actual bikini. Onya, 27, who declined to identify the company she works for, is but one of several drug representatives who have cheered for the Redskins, according to a spokeswoman for the team, Melanie Treanor. Many doctors say they privately joke about the appearance of saleswomen who come to their offices. Currently making the e-mail rounds is an anonymous parody of an X-rated "diary" of a cheerleader-turned-drug-saleswoman.
"Saw Dr. Johnson recently," one entry reads. "After the 'episode' which occurred at our last dinner, I have purposely stayed away from him. The restraining order still remains."
Federal law bans employment discrimination based on factors like race and gender, but it omits appearance from the list.
"Generally, discriminating in favor of attractive people is not against the law in the United States," said James J. McDonald Jr., a lawyer with Fisher & Phillips. But that might be changing, he said, citing a recent ruling by the California Supreme Court, which agreed to hear an employment lawsuit brought by a former L'Oreal manager who ignored a supervisor's order to fire a cosmetics saleswoman and hire someone more attractive.
But pharmaceutical companies deny that sex appeal has any bearing on hiring. "Obviously, people hired for the work have to be extroverts, a good conversationalist, a pleasant person to talk to; but that has nothing to do with looks, it's the personality," said Lamberto Andreotti, the president of worldwide pharmaceuticals for Bristol-Myers Squibb.
But Dr. Carli, at the University of Michigan, said that seduction appeared to be a deliberate industry strategy. And with research showing that pharmaceutical sales representatives influence prescribing habits, the industry sales methods are drawing criticism.
Dr. Dan Foster, a West Virginia surgeon and lawmaker who said he was reacting to the attractive but sometimes ill-informed drug representatives who came to his office, introduced a bill to require them to have science degrees. Dr. Foster's legislation was not adopted, but it helped inspire a new state regulation to require disclosure of minimum hiring requirements.
Ms. Napier, the former Kentucky cheerleader, said she was so concerned about the cute-but-dumb stereotype when she got her job that she worked diligently to learn about her product, Prevacid.
"It's no secret that the women, and the people in general, hired in this industry are attractive people," she said. "But there so much more to it."
Still, women have an advantage with male doctors, according to Jamie Reidy, a drug representative who was fired by Eli Lilly this year after writing a book lampooning the industry, "Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman."
In an interview, Mr. Reidy remembered a sales call with the "all-time most attractive, coolest woman in the history of drug repdom." At first, he said, the doctor "gave ten reasons not to use one of our drugs." But, Mr. Reidy added: "She gave a little hair toss and a tug on his sleeve and said, 'Come on, doctor, I need the scrips.' He said, 'O.K., how do I dose that thing?' I could never reach out and touch a female physician that way."
Stories abound about doctors who mistook a sales pitch as an invitation to more. A doctor in Washington pleaded guilty to assault last year and gave up his license after forcibly kissing a saleswoman on the lips.
One informal survey, conducted by a urologist in Pittsburgh, Dr. James J. McCague, found that 12 of 13 medical saleswomen said they had been sexually harassed by physicians. Dr. McCague published his findings in the trade magazine Medical Economics under the title "Why Was That Doctor Naked in His Office?"
Penny Ramsey Otwell, who cheered for the University of Maryland and now sells for Wyeth in the Dallas area, says she has managed to avoid such encounters.
"We have a few of those doctors in our territory," said Ms. Otwell, 30, who was a contestant on the CBS television show "Survivor." "They'll get called on by representatives who can handle that kind of talk, ones that can tolerate it and don't think anything about it."
But there have been accusations that a pharmaceutical company encouraged using sex to make drug sales. In a federal lawsuit against Novartis, one saleswoman said she had been encouraged to exploit a personal relationship with a doctor to increase sales in her Montgomery, Ala., territory. In court papers responding to the lawsuit, Novartis denied the accusation. The company has also said it is committed to hiring and promoting women.
For her part, Ms. Napier, the TAP Pharmaceutical saleswoman, says it is partly her local celebrity that gives her a professional edge. On the University of Kentucky cheering squad, Ms. Napier stood out for her long dark hair and tiny physique that landed her atop human pyramids.
"If I have a customer who is a real big U.K. fan, we'll have stories to tell each other," Ms. Napier said. "If they can remember me as the cheerleader - she has Prevacid - it just allows you do to so many things."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
Sin City 100 Years old
Sin City Inc.
Las Vegas is 100 this year.
John L. Smith’s “Sharks in the Desert” and William L. Fox’s “In the Desert of Desire” look at the high-stakes city of spectacle and how it reflects American culture at large.
By Marc Cooper
November 13, 2005
Sharks in the Desert: The Founding Fathers and Current Kings of Las Vegas
John L. Smith
Barricade Books: 400 pp., $24.95
In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle
William L. Fox
University of Nevada Press: 186 pp., $24.95
Any doubt that Las Vegas has become America's mainstream cultural capital — the city that best embodies the nation's corporate ethos — evaporated this year when the town was neatly chopped (as they say at the poker tables) between two behemoth corporations: Kirk Kerkorian's MGM Mirage acquired the Mandalay Resort Group and Harrah's Entertainment bought out Caesars Entertainment, thus becoming the largest casino company in the world. The two gambling titans now own almost every major property on the fabled Strip, the main attraction in a city that draws nearly 40 million tourists a year. The notable exceptions, Steve Wynn's Wynn Las Vegas and Sheldon Adelson's Venetian, are themselves part of multibillion-dollar publicly traded corporations. Tax receipts from the newly aggregated MGM Mirage and Harrah's alone now account for almost a third of Nevada's general fund revenue.
As the desert metropolis celebrates its centennial this year, it has completed its transition from a Sin City run by gun-toting mobsters to a New Las Vegas run by risk-averse Bluetooth-equipped MBAs. "Consolidation was the way of capitalism, and the gaming industry practiced that philosophy at hyperspeed," writes John L. Smith in "Sharks in the Desert: The Founding Fathers and Current Kings of Las Vegas."
A respected columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of several books on his hometown (including an acclaimed biography of Wynn), Smith has compiled an entertaining series of meticulously researched sketches on just about everyone who has ever owned a casino there. What makes his juicy, almost surreal tales of Vegas' founding fathers (roll over, Tom Jefferson!) so engrossing is that for decades, as Smith reminds us, this neon island in the desert was the only place in America where it was legal to be illegal. Indeed, Benny Binion, the founder of Fremont Street's legendary Horseshoe casino, must be the only multiple killer in U.S. history memorialized by a bronze statue of himself on a horse. "Men considered not only notorious but deadly in other communities had evolved into colorful characters in Las Vegas," Smith writes. "Binion admitted killing three men, was suspected of ordering several other murders, and had maintained a decades-long relationship with organized crime, but on Fremont Street, he was a gregarious cowboy gambler who allowed customers to play with as much cash as they could carry into the Horseshoe."
Countless other reprobates laundered themselves in the desert sun, most famously Bugsy Siegel. There was also Moe Dalitz, who came to Las Vegas from the Cleveland mob, partnered with the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund, created the lavish Desert Inn, backed a couple of other such "carpet joints" on the Strip and then went on to build the city's first full-service hospital and become a venerated philanthropist and B'nai B'rith man of the year.
The most richly detailed portraits in "Sharks in the Desert" are of the city's two contemporary mega-players, Kerkorian and Wynn — the men most responsible for the accelerated modernization and corporatization of America's gambling mecca. Kerkorian, a reclusive but driven tennis-playing octogenarian, has on three occasions in Vegas history built the largest hotel in the world. He now controls a dozen casinos on or near the Strip and heads a $9-billion empire.
Wynn, for his part, revolutionized the casino industry in 1989, when, financed by Michael Milken's junk bonds, he opened the spectacular Mirage and proved that gambling resorts could make as much money, or more, from the shows, shops, restaurants and meeting rooms as from the slots and the card tables. Five years ago, Wynn suffered a humiliating blow when he was forced to sell his Strip holdings to Kerkorian. Now he's back, with the Wynn Las Vegas. Only in the corporate-bloated America of 2005 could his $2.7-billion property be seen as David to Kerkorian's Goliath.
Smith clearly delineates the supine posture assumed by Nevada authorities and regulators, who tolerated not only the unsavory casino operators of the Siegel-Dalitz era but also some of the slippery corporate shenanigans of the present. It's no accident that Vegas today enjoys what the pols like to call "broad bipartisan support": Local county commissioners and city council members accept paid consultancies from the casinos, while in Washington the industry is aggressively represented by Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader. The head of the casino trade association, meanwhile, is Frank Fahrenkopf Jr., an influential former chairman of the Republican National Committee.
THERE are two key contextual issues that Smith's book overlooks: Just what were the powerful economic currents that made the corporate transformation of Las Vegas inevitable? And what is the magic mass intoxicant that has made this city the nexus of so many superlatives: the fastest-growing, the hottest, the biggest, the best?
William L. Fox takes on the second question in his delightfully written "In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle." Fox is described on his book jacket as an "independent scholar, cultural geographer, essayist, poet and travel writer," so you know right away that this narrative will not exactly be linear. And it isn't. How could it be, when it concerns "the presentation of art, animals, and sex in American society as seen through that very peculiar filter, the Las Vegas Strip"?
As I tagged along on his zigzagging explorations of Steve Wynn's $300-million art collection, the local public art museum, the Guggenheim-Hermitage gallery inside Adelson's Venetian, through the Mirage's "dolphin habitat," out to the bare-bones Vegas public zoo and then into Cirque du Soleil's steamy stage production of "Zumanity," I felt the exhilarated giddiness of one of those long, winding nocturnal rambles through the Strip itself.
What Fox discovers is hardly earthshaking: The awesome, glaring, for-profit entertainments overpower the city's more sedate educational and public institutions. In other words, people come to Las Vegas not to stroll through its art museum or feed the furry critters at the zoo but to gawk at and mix it up with the city's real wildlife: the world-weary dealers, the strung-out losers, the slot addicts, the bosomy waitresses, the undulating lap dancers.
"What's being sold?" Fox asks in his preface. He provides several answers, foremost among them "spectacle" on a scale never before seen in history. "You can order up whatever spectacle you can afford, a pay-as-you-play paradise," he writes. "Las Vegas enables you not only to gaze upon spectacle but also to sleep in its bed and have sex with it."
Part of Las Vegas' heady allure is the promise of intimate association with the greatest of all aphrodisiacs — power. With grudging admiration for Wynn's chutzpah, Fox points to the casino mogul as one of its master practitioners, noting that Wynn got the Nevada Legislature to underwrite his vast private art collection, which he exhibited in one of his hotels: "So Wynn buys the art and is exempt from the tax for owning it. He leases it to the hotel, which earns more than enough in admissions to pay for the operating costs of the gallery. When he sells the art, he's exempt from most of the sales tax…." Of the Mirage's dolphin habitat, he remarks: "The unexpected juxtaposition of desert and dolphins implies the wealth and power necessary to produce such a sight, which creates the spectacle that Wynn wanted: a display of how he [had] the resources to overcome the conventions of geography, just as he [did] with tax laws."
Fox is no simple scold. Aware that the line between public and private cultural spaces is erased faster in Las Vegas than anywhere else, he argues that this city is precisely where some sort of positive synergy between the two exists. The Shark Reef at the Mandalay Bay hotel is up to or even beyond the standard of any public aquarium. And although the exhibits at the Venetian's Guggenheim-Hermitage gallery help attract new players to the casino, tens of thousands of casino patrons are also exposed to art they presumably would otherwise never seek out. Many visitors, Fox says, are apt to ask whether all those paintings are "authentic."
Authentic or not, it hardly matters in Vegas. Things move too fast for anyone to figure such things out. The 100-year-old city is sprouting a bumper crop of high-rise luxury condos. A few blocks off the old Strip, a second one is emerging, on which actor George Clooney and his partners aim to build a $3-billion resort with an upscale dress code, no less. And Kerkorian's MGM Mirage has announced the ultimate breakdown of the public-private barrier: a "Project CityCenter" that will construct a private metropolis inside the existing urban core. To be built on 66 acres, the CityCenter will offer half a million square feet of shops, an entrance on the scale of Fifth Avenue, a 4,000-room resort casino and 1,500 luxury residences for those who can afford to live in the city within the city, and who will probably never once ask themselves which one is authentic.
Marc Cooper is a contributing editor to the Nation and a columnist for L.A. Weekly. His latest book is "The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas
Archives
- September 2013 (1)
- August 2013 (21)
- June 2013 (4)
- May 2013 (17)
- April 2013 (30)
- March 2013 (14)
- February 2013 (5)
- January 2013 (13)
- December 2012 (21)
- November 2012 (38)
Recent Comments