Tuesday, July 31, 2007
This sporting life
Yesterday brought the news of the deaths of two great sports figures: former 49ers coach
Bill Walsh and Swedish director
Ingmar Bergman.
"Who'd Bergman play for?" I hear you ask, your mouth full of cracklin' pork rinds. "The Swedenborg Angels?" No, the sometimes dyspeptic director was playing a deeper game, certainly in the Seventh Seal where a medieval knight, played by Max von Sydow,
challenges Death to a game of chess. Those of you who don't think of chess as a sport clearly haven't played with
Death, who plays for keeps.
More people know this image better than they know the film, given its vintage (1957) and American tastes, which run to less existential fare. In fact most filmgoers today probably know the iconic scene more through its parodies, the most memorable being
Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey in which the time-traveling teens challenge Death to games of Battleship and Clue and beat him five out of seven. Yes, way.
As anyone living in San Francisco during
the Niners' glory days can tell you, the greatest team in football history snatched victory from the jaws of defeat a number of times themselves -- thanks in no small part to the classy, reserved Walsh. The team rose from the dead numerous times under his tutelage, most famously in the 1982 AFC championship game against Dallas, with
The Catch.
I was driving a cab the evening of that game and by the time I was out there on the streets, the city was in a state of delirium. Every fare talked of nothing but Dwight Clark's superb reception -- or was it Joe Montana's divine pass? "Do you really think he knew where he was throwing that ball?" a Cowboys fan asked me, rather belligerently. The town was full of them - they were "America's Team" -- they were used to winning and liked to visit away games and strut around in their Stetson hats and fur-lined coats, acting like Nazis in Paris.
History proved that he did: Joe kept making no-look, eyes-in-the-back-of-head passes like that for the rest of his career, and Clark caught quite a few of them. Walsh put those players in motion and had the faith in his men to let them make miracles. That day all I could do was savor the expression on that Texan's face. He looked like Death had given him a melvin.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Falling ratings
In the midst of all the coverage of the
TV news helicopter crashes in AZ in which four people died, few have taken the time to ask: what were reporters doing chasing a carjacker anyway?
The question may seem too obvious to those living in the big southwest markets, like Phoenix and LA, where such chase scenes are staples of local TV. As the BBC report drily notes, "Police pursuits are fertile material for many US TV stations and have proved popular with viewers." And decrying the give-'em-what-they-want mentality of local news may seem hopelessly naive but really: why send newsmen out to do this job? I would suggest it would be better left to sportscasters but that would be unfair, like asking them to call the action on the greyhounds chasing the mechanized rabbit. Have the scofflaws and thieves ever gotten away on chopper camera? The best you can hope for (and I'm sure many of the viewers who drop everything to watch these pursuits do) is a multiple car collision, ideally one involving at least one police car. It's kind of like
The Dukes of Hazzard except real people get killed.
Rather than decry the viewing preferences of the rubes of America (a fulltime job for some TV critics) or even heap any more scorn on the network affiliates that sent those journalists and pilots up in the air in the first place (a third chopter witnessed the crash and reported it to TV viewers in
crash of the Hindenberg terms) I'd like to share some of the blame with the cable news networks that stop their increasinlgy imbecilic daily coverage of dog shows and celebriity scandals to share these "breaking stories" with their viewers.
Here's a newsflash for CNN et al: There is no story there. Cop-chases-criminal is the man-bites-dog of daily journalism and that you would help risk the lives of reporters who could be covering -- I dunno -- the
local effects of global warming or the
plight of working Americans without health insurance by pandering to the gladiator tastes of the
Idiocracy implicates you in their deaths.
For those of you watching at home, do yourself a favor: The next time you see a live car chase on TV, turn it off.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Are we Dunne here?
Reading
Dominick Dunne is such a guilty pleasure, if pleasure be the word. The Vanity Fair columnist, social-observer and international gadfly defies parody. Better writers than I have tried and failed to capture the circular essence of his column but it is as difficult to get a hold of as the worm
Ouroboros. In the beginning is his end, and vice versa.
It could be Dunne's proximity to the world he covers that makes his prose so
Escher-like. "I met Phil at a party given by Ahmet Ertegun," is a typical pullquote in his August column covering the trial of Phil Spector, accused of murdering a Hollywood hostess named Lana Clarkson, and that is just a small sample of the name-dropping for which the author is famous. Sprinkled throughout his trial dispatch are first-hand encounters with Yoko Ono, Mick Jagger, Bruce Cutler and a host of lesser lights.
But it is those lesser lights who really distinguish his reporting. Take this not atypical encounter: "One night during the trial I had dinner at a popular restaurant on Sunset Strip," he writes. "A very pretty waitress named Crystal Angel took me to my table. A few minutes later, during a lull in her duties, she came and sat down with me. She told me she had been a friend of Lana Clarkson's..."
It is that upstairs-downstairs stuff that really sets Dunne apart. Waiters, bell hops and chauffeurs are always taking him aside to tell him the dish. This one, at least, had a name -- though Crystal Angel is probably as common in West LA as Marty Kaplan is in New York, and not just among transvestites. (It is redundant to add that waitresses such as Angel are also actresses, as was Clarkson, and doubly redundant to say they changed their names.) No one doubts these encounters really happened -- though I'm sure his off-the-record, gossip-laden style gives the fact-checkers at VF fits -- which is a testament to the profile of the man himself.
What makes the pleasure of reading him so maddening is the absence of context, and sometimes even judgment. Dunne's daughter was murdered by a stalker ex-boyfriend, and in
writiing about his trial he found his metier. He later burnished his skills covering the endless OJ trial and even hosts a slightly lame
celebrity injustice show on Court TV. He calls himself a defender of victim's rights and comes by the stance naturally.
But by the end of the Spector column, the best he can muster is "I have never believed the defense's story that Lana Clarkson committed suicide on the night she went to Phil's castle." This may have had something to do with the chauffeur in the driveway who heard the gunshot and saw Spector stagger out carrying a bloody pistol to announce, "I think I killed somebody." Of course Dunne has to muster some objectivity and he has seen worse men than Spector walk away scot free. But in downplaying the story of the producer pulling a gun on John Lennon (Yoko tells Dunne, "Oh, that story has been exaggerated" and speaks of Phil with fondness) he neglects to mention the other people he famously frightened with firearms: Leonard Cohen, the Ramones, not to mention his much-abused ex-wife Ronnie Spector. Sometimes a little distance is needed to see things clearly, or at least tell which end is up.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Champagne supernova
I recently stuck my head into the big tent of the internet business world to find that the fever is back, baby. As fans of this space know, I worked for a number of net ventures in the mid-nineties in what was euphemistically called
Silicon Alley -- New York's content answer to the west coast's claim to be creating pretty much everything else in Silicon Valley. At the waning days of a recession that had seen the print business falter, sites such as iGuide and Total New York represented not just the future but the only game in town.
Of course that game didn't seem to have any rules, or at best they were being made up as we went. Riding on a rising tide of bogus valuations and overnight success stories, venture capitalists reacted angrily to anyone questioning their business model. The money would come from somewhere and people pointed to the proprietary
AOL model (once they've come to your crummy site, never let them go) for guidance. Hence all that talk about stickiness.
AOL is something of a dinosaur now, and
Google, the success story du jour, has nothing to do with being proprietary. (Their guiding principle is not so much
"Don't be evil" as it is "If you love someone, let them go.") And since they cracked the code of advertising online, giving people exactly what they were searching for because they asked for it, the company invokes both respect and fear in a way that makes the old AOL hatred seem tepid.
What's changed now is that VC types want a better idea of how you intend on making money with your site before they'll invest while the people doing the site building are still trying to find cheap ways to get their content. You know: the stuff that people look at and interact with. The stuff that makes them want to come back. The buzz phrase these days is "user generated content" with
YouTube (owned by Google) being the most obvious example. Why create video when your users can do it for you? And with blogs and such, you can let them write most of content on the site, too.
At the then ballyhooed launch of
Slate, then editor
Michael Kinsley alienated a lot of netizens by saying that when he went into a restaurant, he wanted a trained chef, not an amateur, to make his meal. It was a battle cry for writers and editors who were sick of seeing their skills undervalued. Ten years later, Slate is still around (though Kinsley is gone) while all those little dot coms that mocked him have vanished. Their big idea -- that they didn't need no stinking word people -- has been weighed and found wanting, sort of. Perhaps this new phase is just round two with UGC representing just the latest iteration (another nineties word!) of the hope that sites will somehow create themselves and wise web heads can just reap the profits.
The young people who worked for me in the nineties were all listening to Oasis, whose song
"Champagne Supernova," I was told, was as good as anything by the Beatles. Seems silly now though the most song's memorable line -- "Where were you when we were getting high?" -- still seems relevant. If you're not inside the teepee, inhaling the smoke, you won't see the same visions the rest of the tribe does. And if everyone doesn't believe, won't the vision disappear?
