Nancy Rommelmann

Should I Cut My Hair? You Decide

While I am not endowed with her other attributes, I do have about the same hair (texture, color, curliness) as Sophia Loren. A few months ago, I was looking at images of her and was taken by a short cut she had, the photo of which I sent to my hair-cutter, saying, I might want this cut when I go to Panama in January, as I will not be taking the blow-dryer (what my daughter calls my "ghetto hairdryer," to which I have essentially been harnessed since age thirteen because it nicely half-pulls out the curls). She assured me, my hair will look that way with that cut, no problem. Two images below: what my hair (if not my... attributes) sort of looks like now, on the left; the proposed cut on the right. Let the voting begin!

  

Goodbye to All That [*updated, unfortunately]

The future of journalism has, as we all know, been on the wall for several years. In that time, I have seen one of my editors at the LA Weekly (Joe Donnelly) let go, followed several months ago by the paper's editor-in-chief, Laurie Ochoa. Many of the Weekly's columnists were also axed. Some of this can be chocked up to the paper and indeed all of Village Voice Media (which also owns the Village Voice) having been bought by New Times; the rivalry between the two companies is legendary, and there's always a let-go of old regime when a new regime tromps in. And I still have dear friends and editors the Weekly, where I am still a contributor, thus giving me the illusion that the place I have done my best work for is, if not thriving, then at least ambling along.

Earlier this year, I also saw the firing of both my editors from Portland Monthly. Last month, my editor at City Arts left under her own steam, though the sense was, the door was being held open for her. The day Gourmet magazine was shut down, I was emailed the termination memo from a friend at Bob Appetit, saying, "I had to read this three times to see whether I still had a job." I have seen dear friends, the best in the biz at what they do--Anne Thompson; the deeply brilliant Virginia Postrel--have their jobs eliminated or their contributor's contracts curtailed. Yesterday, my editor at Wired, a very nice guy and a really crack editor, was let go.

This is not to say, many of these people have not gone on to find jobs in new media. My pal Richard Rushfield was delighted to leave the LA Times and is now at Gawker; Anne Thompson continues to blog like a demon (and is, now and always, a top entertainment journalist to whom places like New Yorker go for quotes), and Virginia, in addition to contributing to the Atlantic and a gazillion other publications, co-runs the brilliant blog Deep Glamour.

And astoundingly, I am not out of work. Every time one editor leaves--because you really do write for your editors--another contacts me. After a year of not writing for Portland Monthly, I have just contributed a feature to the December issue. I've made new inroads with fabulous and smart folks at the Oregonian and have the opportunity to write for them solid local stories, and earlier this year I had a feature for Reason, an event I was so delighted by, I am blushing even now.

And yet: at least once a week, I thank my husband, profusely, for creating a business that can support us, because let me tell you: while I made a living for a dozen years as a freelancer, that ship has sailed. I watch as my friend InaraVerzemnieks, who I think the best narrative journalist at the Oregonian, takes the buy-out. I read that the New York Times is cutting another hundred jobs. Yesterday, a report commissioned by the Graduate School of Journalism concluded:

“The days of a kind of news media paternalism or patronage that produced journalism in the public interest, whether or not it contributed to the bottom line, are largely gone. American society must now take some collective responsibility for supporting independent news reporting in this new environment….”

I'm not crying, and certainly, I have as much access to new writing outlets as the next journalist; I currently contribute to three sites (in addition to my own, much ignored blog). I have assignments. I am working on a book. Tonight, I will drink wine with Inara and discuss an arts and lecture series I'd like to get off the ground. It's all good.

And yet, I am wistful. I love being a journalist, a long-form journalist who goes off, sometimes for weeks, months, looking for and bringing back the stories.

Virginia told me, "Luckily, books are not dependent on advertising." Books it is.

*Within three hours of posting this, Bon Appetit announced, it was laying off six

Brendan Mullen: Good-Bye to Such a Nice Guy

They say bad news travels fast. Mine came to the door at 6:55 this morning, Hector Sanchez to tell me our mutual friend Brendan Mullen had died on Monday. I wrote about Brendan just now in an essay over at LA Observed. I also want to remember, here, his sweetness: when I was looking up something today in his emails to me earlier in the year, they invariably were complimentary of my work, of my daughter, of (blush) her/my beauty. Never crossing the line stuff, just the sort of stuff that you read and think, oh! That makes my day. Thank you, my friend.

Below, Brendan explains it all

Happy Birthday, Baby Girl

My shining star

 

 

On Being Middlebrow

As someone who is coming late to reading many of the classics, I enjoyed W.A. Pannapacker's essay, "Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor," in which he quotes Virginia Woolf:

"If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me 'middlebrow,'" wrote Virginia Woolf in an unsent letter to the editor of The New Statesman, "I will take my pen and stab him, dead."

Woolf and her ilk, Pannapacker goes on to say, professed great love for the lowbrow, so long as they did not get anywhere near her sparkling little pocket of the ether. Others rolled their eyes.

As the Harper's Magazine editor Russell Lynes argued in his 1949 essay "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow," the ideal world for Woolf is a caste system in which billions of bovine proles produce the raw materials for a coterie of sensitive, highbrow ectomorphs who spring fully formed from the head of Sir Leslie Stephen. At the very least, lowbrows with upward aspirations should have the courtesy to keep themselves out of sight until they complete their passage through the awkward age of the middlebrow.

I think I probably am middlebrow, not in my mannerisms, but in the fact that, yes, I strive--and fail--and strive again for knowledge. There is, after all, no such thing as an intellectual caste system, no matter how comfortable others might be in trying to erect one.

The most comprehensive recent analysis of the cultural turn is Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008). In one chapter, Jacoby remembers the 1950s as a brief moment of intellectual aspiration among many Americans: "I look back on the middlebrow with affection, gratitude, and regret rather than condescension," she writes, "not because the Book-of-the-Month Club brought works of genius into my life, but because the monthly pronouncements of its reviewers encouraged me to seek a wider world."

The Great Books—along with all those Time-Life series—were often "purchased on the installment plan by parents who had never owned a book but were willing to sacrifice to provide their children with information about the world that had been absent from their own upbringing," Jacoby writes. They represented an old American belief—now endangered—that "anyone willing to invest time and energy in self-education might better himself."

Tomorrow Now Forever

Perpetual sunrise from webcams around the world

Gourmet Magazine, RIP

Just received an email from a friend who works at a Conde Nast publication, saying, "I had to read this three times to make sure I was still employed," referring to the memo, released this morning, saying the company is ceasing three of its publications, including Gourmet.

I will wager everyone over a certain age who cooks has a Gourmet story. Here's mine: I started subscribing to the magazine at age 12, thinking it so beautiful, so sophisticated; all these articles and beautiful photos from places like Gstaad and Vienna. It wasn't that I dreamed of going to these places, but of being the sort of person who went to these places. In the meantime, I baked from the magazine's recipes. Yes, at age 12, I was making a 12-layer Dobosh Torte.

I kept my subscription for 20 years, keeping years worth of the magazines shelved in the guest bathroom of the very first home my daughter and I lived in alone. I thought it a beautiful touch. A year later, I was contacted by Bon Appetit, to begin writing for them. They sent me on ski trips and cruises; I ate in cities all over, swam in three seas, for articles with beautiful photos. I had become that person I dreamed of, which astounded me.

Bon Appetit (whom I continue to write for) and Gourmet are both published by Conde Nast, and today, there is no more Gourmet. The wedge cut this makes in my day-to-day life will not be visible (for now), but psychically, something direct has been taken. When I metaphorically close my eyes, I see a road once traveled by a few writers and editors who were moving on by choice, or because they were not suited to the work, now increasingly crowded, moving briskly, but in which direction?

High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed

I always listen to books on tape in the car, always nonfiction, often tough stuff, death and brutality and plague. But I admit to being as shocked at what I am currently listening to, Michael Kodas's excellent High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed, as any murder tale.

Imagine, if you will: stealing climbers crampons, and stoves, and sleeping bags, and supplies, so that when they descend from their climb, exhausted and freezing and oxygen starved, they find nothing to keep them alive, and so must go begging, and as often as not are turned away. Imagine descending to find your ropes have been cut, and so you must ice-ax your way down, and when you slide, which you will, and break your ankle, you plead with fifty other people descending for help to get you down, people who step over you. Imagine lying about your climbing credentials; accepting $65,000 to lead someone up Everest, and then leaving him to die, and not mentioning his death to anyone.

Certainly, there are still moments of sacrifice here, and heroic efforts. But in Kodas's telling, the human elements on Everest have become more dangerous than the mountain itself.

Tried to See "The September Issue"

The documentary about Vogue's Anna Wintour, with my own clothing designing daughter, who starts college at the Art Institute on Monday, but we walked into the wrong theater, and did not realize it until "Capitalism, A Love Story" started. It was too late to make the other show, so we stayed. It was a Michael Moore movie, by turns funny, spot-on, manipulated bull, full of bathos, and 30 minutes too long. Throwing in Katrina and FDR really bit, and did Wallace Shawn add anything to it? He did not. But! It was worth the price of admission alone for the inclusion of the video below

Grieving at Tiffany's

I wrote what's below this morning, to The Foodinista, adding that, I thought sad. She, worthier and wittier than I, wrote back:

Sad, but also sort of marvelous. I love this! Were Truman Capote alive today, he would approve and he would agree. How is it that you dream as beautifully as you write? Flattered to have been a part of the dream, and rubbing elbows with Martha and Michelle. We do get around, don't we?

I dreamt this morning that you and I were on a business trip to DC. It was some sort of Easter celebration; we were touring this very grand old estate, where people were serving very elegant foods; outside, there was Martha Stewart (who complimented the coat I was wearing!) with a table full of very festive and Easter-egg hued desserts, which we were sampling; you particularly liked something with lemon. Then, it was off to a receiving line in a casual living room of sorts in the White House; we said our goodbyes, including to Michelle Obama (who gave me a hug!); you'd be staying in DC, for a White House meal the next day, but I was was going to try to catch an evening flight back to Portland. We walked outside...
Where we were now (of course) on the corner of 57th and Fifth in NY, right outside Tiffany's.
"I love Tiffany's," I said.
"Me, too," you said, and we headed inside, through the heavy glass doors, my telling you that there was a particular ring Din was trying to find for me (which is true) but which had been discontinued, but maybe they had it.
Once inside, we were immediately approached by a tall, sort of oily Puerto Rican guy trying to soft-sell us. I told him what I was looking for, and he led us to a counter. But everything was wrong: Tiffany's was about a quarter of its size, the ceilings had been dropped; there was a bad white paint job and on the walls were hanging little plastic packs of earrings and geegaws; it looked like a bad airport jewelry shop.
We came to the counter where the ring was supposed to be. Behind it were two slovenly men and a skinny Puerto Rican gal chewing gum. I asked about the ring. They pulled out a box with a few things thrown in chockablock; what I wanted wasn't there; I began to explain, the ring I wanted had been discontinued...
"They don't teach us how to repair anything or nothing," said the gal; she was bitter about her job and wanted it to be known. The men sort of nodded. You'd moved down to the end of the counter, and as I passed you, I whispered, "This is a disaster."
"It is," you said.
I walked around, I looked; I thought, why did they do this? I knew it had something to do with real estate; the building had been bought and Tiffany's was forced to downsize. But it was so ugly, and there was nothing of what it had been left, and as I stood by one wall of cheap stuff, I actually started to cry. I thought, Heather and I, we grew up with this as an ideal, this sparkling if girly but so lovely dream, of being able to buy something at Tiffany's, and now that we might actually afford it, it's gone.
I looked up. There was a long zinc bar in Tiffany's, you were at the end, ordering a Cinzano. I went and sat next to you, and told the bartender, "I'll take one, too."

Cheerful Money

My review of Tad Friend's new memoir, Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor, appears in this Sunday's Oregonian. 

A snip:

Friend is very funny, as when he notes that one of his talents, as befitting a good Wasp male, is "the rarely called-for ability to carve a watermelon into the shape of a whale." But he also is sad, sometimes angry, and in an effort to understand why his family withheld and bequeathed affection, hauls us with him over the emotional shoals.

"Wasp parental love continues to feel conditional upon conduct -- namely biddable behavior that brings credit to the family and that requires no undue head-scratching to figure out what's going on with little Johnny," he writes. "[B]ut then Wasps believe in behavior, not motivations. ... And if this condemned us each to be an island of seeming cheer in an archipelago of sorrow, so be it."

On Humility

Lifted whole cloth from Jackie Danicki's site. Alice's wisdom matches my own experience; may I have the patience to live it:

             On Humility

Is there any possible argument that some of us, being ill-educated in certain areas, should simply back off and be humble? I find myself less and less inclined to keep up with the ins and outs of politics, for instance. I know comparatively nothing about several major religions, and am totally uninterested in anything but the most popular, gripping science. So I won’t be attacking any of those groups. In general, if you’re criticising any enormous group of millions of people (Americans, Jews, Blacks, Gays, Theists) your generalisations are probably going to be (a) a waste of time and (b) superficial. The wrong focus, I would say.

-Alice Bachini-Smith