Tuesday, December 31, 2002

My New Year's Resolution "It's just wonderful to be a pariah. I really owe my success to being a pariah. It is so good not to be invited to respectable dinner parties. People used to say to me, 'Izzy, why don't you go down and see the Secretary of State and put him straight.' Well, you know, you're not supposed to see the Secretary of State. He won't pay any attention to you anyway. He'll hold your hand, he'll commit you morally for listening. To be a pariah is to be left alone to see things your own way, as truthfully as you can. Not because you're brighter than anybody else is -- or your own truth so valuable. But because, like a painter or a writer or an artist, all you have to contribute is the purification of your own vision, and add that to the sum total of other visions. To be regarded as nonrespectable, to be a pariah, to be an outsider, this is really the way to do it. To sit in your tub and not want anything. As soon as you want something, they've got you!" --I.F. Stone 11:42:34 AM

W's New Year's Resolution & Prayer More spies, more snitches, more cops, more cameras, more background checks, more consumer spending, more jails, more wars. Grant us these things, Big Chief-eroony, in Jesus' name we pray.  11:36:22 AM

Blogdom: A Vast Wasteland... Since we launched these City Pages blogs nearly a month ago, I've spent a lot more time trolling other weblog columns. Never let it be said that journalists don't suffer for their art too. Babelogue, indeed. (And that's babel-ogue, meaning a tower of talk, not babe-logue, you smartasses.) I'm sure I haven't touched on a tenth of a tenth of what is out there--I doubt that one person could, without secreting away a large store of amphetamines and abandoning the daylight world--but I'm not convinced that matters. Someday every person in China will have a blog, and even then they will all still sound the same. Or, to put a more optimistic spin on it, you could say that the cream of the information age has yet to rise to the top. The bloggers' house contains many mansions. There are the so-called "pro" bloggers; this class consists mainly of the same old punditocracy, print media gasbags like Mickey Kaus, Andrew Sullivan, and Eric Alterman. There are others whom I guess you would have to call "pros" if only because it's hard to imagine they do anything else. There are staunch Republican blogs and indignant Democratic blogs, green blogs, libertarian blogs, socialist blogs, white power blogs, blogs that only a dog can hear. But mostly there are amateur, self-referential blogs--interactive Christmas letters that drone on all year long and serve only to satisfy the curiosity of the odd internet user (the genuinely odd, even pathetic, internet user) who wonders what guys living in basement apartments in Cleveland are listening to these days. The main pastime of this class of bloggers is linking to, back-slapping, or bitch-slapping other bloggers of like mind. It's the greatest Ponzi scheme the world has seen, only it's built upon words rather than money. If you want a glimpse of American anomie as grisly as any car crash photo, just start down the blogpath some day, leaping from one to the next guided only by the links to other blogs they all provide. After a few hours of this you will want to forswear the internet, or maybe reading itself, forever. If blogging is to come to anything as a movement in journalism--and by this I'm not talking about professional journalists; god, no--then blogdom needs a few decent clearinghouse pages to point us non-maniacs toward the good stuff. Something on the order of Drudge's news links page, except pointing to weblogs rather than news stories. If this is already happening, or if you know a really great blog you want to pass along, please email me and let me know. Finally, no blog entry on blogging would be complete without a little logrolling, so let me plug a couple of worthy blogs originating here in the great Midwest: Cursor Romenesko's Media News 11:33:34 AM

The City Pages Martian Film Festival The other night, while pacing around the house dodging the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, I slipped into a bout of delirium--it may have been seeing Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese's elegy to the brute force of American dreaming, or a bad oyster in my stew--and received a command from on high. Five movies, it said--five movies... about America! Huh? Oh, you know, the voice continued. Five movies you'd show to a visitor from Mars. Zeitgeist stuff. Recent zeitgeist, I mean--and made in the past 10 years. I shouldn't have to explain this to you. Okay then. I reckon Spike Lee really ought to be here, but his best picture, Do the Right Thing, is more than 10 years old now, and you heard what God said. Bulworth: Beltway Week in Review, or Mr. Smith Goes to Hell. The great lost American movie of our generation. Gangs of New York: "You can always hire half the poor to kill the other half." The Cable Guy: "Everybody gets lonely," Matthew Broderick assures Jim Carrey as the maniacal, TV-suckled cable installer dangles over the abyss. "Yeah," says Carrey, "but I get really lonely." Office Space: The Tao of Downsizing. 8 Mile: Black and white and off-radar, something's happening...     11:28:37 AM

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