Nancy Rommelmann

Pod Night 2.0: A Series of Talks on Freelance Journalism

Journalist David Hochman has kindly asked me to be his guest tonight on Upod Academy's interview series.

Tonight's event: Finding Stories Only You Can Tell (And Sell): Getting Personal with Nancy Rommelmann, wherein we will talk about journalism and I will be asked questions. I am eagerly cribbing for you, so listen in tonight, May 23, from 7-9pm PST. Details on the Upod site.

photo by Virginia Lee Hunter, taken while we were working on a story about Slab City

Advice to a Young Freelancer

I posted a new essay on Medium.com, Advice to a Young Freelancer. Sample Q & A:

How do you find your stories?

I sometimes find story ideas in the Metro section of the newspaper, one-inch items with headlines like, “Man Nails Girlfriend’s Fish to Floor.” The short-shrift given to these stories will spark my wondering, what is this about? Usually the story doesn’t make complete sense; I want to look more deeply. I wrote about mushroom foragers in Alaska after reading one line about them in Bon Appetit. The reference started an itch that I needed to scratch; the scratch bloomed to a topic, the topic to a pitch, the pitch to a story. Follow that itch.

I am loving Medium.com, and am grateful to Hillary Johnson for the invitation, and for her brilliant essays, and for the Dymaxicon collection she built on Medium, as captivating to me as the grand department stores of my New York City childhood, the ceilings so high, and everything gleaming, perfumes and gossamar scarves and brass elevators going up.

Uncommon Youth: The Gilded Life and Tragic Times of J. Paul Getty III

My first book review for the Wall Street Journal is online, and in the print edition tomorrow, May 22. I am so pleased about writing for the WSJ, an idea I had about six weeks ago, asking a friend on-staff for an introduction. The editor suggested three books, all of which were bull's eyes.

The lede:

J. Paul Getty III and Charles Fox met for the last time over lunch in 2001. Both men were confined to wheelchairs: Fox from multiple sclerosis, Getty from a 1981 drug-overdose-induced stroke that left him paralyzed and nearly blind at the age of 25. They sat by the swimming pool of Getty's Hollywood estate, the air hot and "jasmine-scented," as Getty's former wife, his mother and various people tended him. Though Getty communicated only in "small, indecipherable clicks," one of the entourage translated for Fox: "He says he wants you to write his story."

Read the whole thing here.

Saturday Great Book: Joan Didion's "After Henry"

Great books, in my opinion, brought to you every Saturday. First up: Joan Didion's After Henry, a collection of nonfiction essays, many of which appeared in the New York Review of Books. Didion was the first to speak earlier in the month at the Review's 50th anniversary party in NY, which I attended. She read from Sentimental Journeys, about the Central Park jogger case. She was, at the time of its publication, pilloried. Editor Robert Silvers said the paper rarely had received as much castigating mail. When the alleged rapists were released, after wrongly serving more than a decade in prison, the silence from said castigators was deafening. Writers like Didion, and I hope myself in some small way, do their best to ammonia the sentimental, the popular, the easy from the windscreen, to show where we are and where we are going. 

"Beside the Sea" and Amanda Stott-Smith

I have been working mostly in a vacuum for 3.5 years a book about Amanda Stott-Smith and what led her to drop her children from the Sellwood Bridge in May 23, 2009, and then last week I am asked twice by the media for an update on this work, the first time by Alison Hallett, in a piece about the new Alison Barker translation of Beside the Sea, just out from Tin House, and the second by a TV station, who will film on Friday. I admit to having trepidation about the latter, as I told Hillary Johnson at Dymaxicon, "I feel very weird being interviewed." To which she replied, "Now you know how the people you interview feel."

Why Run a Marathon When You Can Just Pretend To?

As someone who has run nine marathons, I can attest to the end-of-the-run feeling Mark Singer cites in his fabulous article about marathon-run hoaxer Kip Litton. Here, Singer is hanging out in the finish area with his two adult sons, who have just run the Boston Marathon:

"We hung out there for an hour or so, as runners in varying states of elation and walking-woundedness wandered past, wearing ribboned medallions. This is what Litton was missing: the bonhomie and collective uplift of one of the world's great athletic events..."

Litton, instead, started races, logged in at a few key points to avoid detection, then jumped in near the end, often finishing first or second in his age-group, and he did this over and over and over until he was busted. The fascinating part, which Singer nicely emphasizes, is what, really, was the point of the fabulism, and may it in fact have very little to do with running? A fascinating read that may, unfortunately, only be available if you are a New Yorker subscriber, but here is the link nonetheless.

Sleeping with Famous Men

Last night read "Sleeping with Famous Men," Elizabeth Kaye's memoir of [see title]. Kaye is a journalist (and a fine writer; I recommend her memoir, Mid-Life: Notes from the Halfway Mark), and while reading I thought about how many bullets I've dodged when it mattered. (Lightly riddled, by chouce, from before it mattered.) This morning came upon Sexile in Guyville, in Gawker. (Note: did not bring a toothbrush? Bull.)

Want to discuss but on the run. In the meantime, your thoughts?

Remembering Cathy Seipp Redux

Our brilliant and generous and irascible friend Cathy Seipp died five years ago today. We still miss her, for the small kindnesses and the big voice, the brunches and the opinions, and for her inimitable skill at bringing together what Matt Welch called, "the unlike-minded weirdos." Thank you, Cathy.

A group of us are tweeting #MissSeipp and Facebooking and blogging today, March 21, about Cathy. Join in, will you?

Below is a remembrance of Our MissSeipp, published in 2008 at LA Observed.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the death of our friend Cathy Seipp. I say "our" because she so impacted her core group of friends, of which Matt Welch wrote on this date last year, "[Cathy] deserves all the credit in the world for creating this community of unlike-minded weirdoes around her." Indeed, Cathy had put me in touch with Matt and his wife Emmanuelle Richard three years earlier, when I had some questions about health insurance. Cathy radically disagreed with Matt and Emmanuelle's semi-positive position on socialized medicine (Emmanuelle is from France), a view I shared, and I think she threw us together with the idea that we might talk some sense into each other; that, or give her the opportunity to sit us down as a group and scold us, something we all would have thoroughly enjoyed. Cathy also was my initial liaison to Jackie Danicki; they'd met through blogging; had some face-time in London, face-time I admired and wanted to emulate, and did.

I'd actually met Cathy many years earlier, when I was still reading scripts for a living. I desperately wanted to be a journalist, and so, would type out articles at home, and fax them cold to publications around LA. No one ever answered me, but one.

"This is Catherine Seipp," the woman on the phone said. "I got your article. It's good. Now, what do you want me to do with it?"

Cathy was at Buzz at the time, and I told her, I wanted her to publish it, whereupon she gently but pointedly told me, that's not the way it worked; you sell the idea, and then write it. "This way, you get paid -- or at least get a kill fee."

I didn't know what a kill fee was, but she'd given me a strategy.

Within the year, I was a columnist at Buzz, where Cathy was both a columnist and a contributing writer. She also scared the hell out of me. She had an opinion about everything: the LA Times (which she notoriously skewered each month, under the byline Margo Magee); writing for Hustler (yay); same-sex marriage (nay); the texture of the chicken at our monthly contributers' lunches at Maple Drive. I remember mentioning at one such lunch in 1995 that the magazine was sending Hillary Johnson and me and our two small children to Las Vegas, to write about how the city was becoming kid-friendly.

"That's a sin," Cathy said from across the table. I thought she was kidding. When she repeated it, I knew she was not.

During the next five years, Cathy and I became friends, then good friends. We met for monthly breakfasts at Kokomo at the Farmers Market, a group that included Hillary, Cathy, Amy Alkon, Jill Stewart, Sandra Tsing Loh, Denise Hamilton, Monica Corcoran, Kerry Madden, Emmanuelle, other writers in town for a reading or a story. We called it the Writer Girls breakfast, though I don't think there was any edict about men coming or not coming; I do recall seeing Ross Johnson there once; also, David Rensin and Luke Ford. Though perhaps there was an edict, as I can't imagine Cathy not having one.

To say Cathy was the center of this group is to state the obvious; she was the one who sent the email invites, to which she expected an RSVP. I remember more than once someone showing up who had not, and Cathy disapprovingly raising her eyebrows, and then gently if pointedly remarking that it really is better if you RSVP, so that we know how many tables we need. Really, it's out of courtesy for the servers.

Cathy and I knew each other as colleagues, as friends; as mothers. We both had daughters born in 1989, and before I met my husband in 1997, had for the most part raised them ourselves, on what we earned as freelancers. We didn't need to beat this point, but a point it was. I don't know if it contributed to my being one of the handful of writer girls whom Amy called, in June of 2002, to say Cathy had lung cancer.

"She only wants a few people to know," Amy told me, and that the surgery would be at Cedars. I called Cathy. She told me, she'd found out really as a fluke: she had asthma, and had not been able to shake a cough, and the doctor had decided to do a chest x-ray, which he looked at and then, promptly walked her down the hall to oncology. I do recall Cathy telling me, "The doctor said, if the surgery takes 30 minutes, it means he couldn't get it. If it takes an hour, he could."

Cathy said that when she came out of the anesthesia, she'd asked the nurse, "How long did it take?"

"Forty-five minutes," the nurse told her.

"Which you can imagine, was very frustrating." This was Cathy, the day after surgery, in her hospital bed, surrounded by her family. I'd walked into the room holding a poundcake, whereupon Cathy said, "That's so kind of you, and Nancy, do you remember my mother?"

Picture this scene: a room full of shellshocked people who know the surgeon could not get the cancer; that the prognosis is bad. And Cathy, making introductions, making sure the older folks have seats, sending someone down the hall for ice. Her composure was surreal. I think of it often, especially when I am being a weakling. I think of Hillary walking in with the gift of a peignoir, so that Cathy might look beautiful as she convelesced, and Cathy -- still covered in mecurichrome or whatever that yellow stuff is they paint on you during surgery -- holding it up to her chest, commenting on how pretty it was, and how thoughtful. I think of Jill Stewart, with Cathy when she was wheeled to her room post-surgery, telling the nurse, "You need to get her some painkillers," and when the nurses dillydallied, Jill charging after them down the hall, saying, "YOU NEED TO GET HER PAINKILLERS, NOW!"

And how do I know this story? Because Cathy told it to me; she told all the cancer stories; the funny ones, the terrible ones. Cancer was now part of the narrative, and we were not going to be namby-pamby about it; we were not going to wear pink ribbons and tiptoe around. As she famously announced at a party, "I just want to let everyone know having cancer hasn't made me a better person."

I have written previously about this woman's courage.

I think of her rather as a dance mistress in this. Her friends who knew about the cancer reacted with varying degrees of emotional spasticity: to ask or not to ask about the new chemo? Is bringing over more food annoying or nice? Oh my god, Maia? How much crying is not okay? But whether in person or psychically, one sensed Cathy clapping her hands, and saying, "None of this. We are not going to freak out; we are not going to lie on the floor and throw a tantrum. We are going to do this dance this way."

And we did. We nearly always did what Cathy wanted us to do.

This became a difficult toward the end of her life. She was very sick; some of us questioned the rationality of continuing treatment -- she was on her third round of chemo, plus radiation to shrink the tumors simply so she would not be in such unbearable pain. Maybe we should look into a visiting nurse? Hospice? But Cathy did not want that, and as Sandra so wisely said, who were we to question Cathy on decisions concerning Cathy? And so Amy took her to chemo, as did Emmanuelle, who also created a Google schedule called Team Cathy, so that people could drive, bring food, pick up Maia from the train. If you die in your 40s, and if you were, as Cathy was, the centerpiece of your group, you are surrounded by robust, capable people who are going to do everything they can to save your life, though we all knew, there would be no saving. There would only be attempts at comfort. I flew in from Portland for a week last Feburary to be with Cathy, to basically drink milkshakes with her and dish the dirt and take naps. Jackie came from London the following week and did the same.

In the weeks leading to Cathy's death, it was as though we -- the weirdoes, the writer girls, Cathy's myriad other friends, and the masses teeming over at Cathy's World, a veritable clusterfuck of folks posting 200, 300, 968 comments on whatever Mistress Cathy wrote -- became a buzzing hive. Thouands of phone calls and emails and blog posts passed in the days leading up to her death. Maybe this is the way it always is, but I -- and many of Cathy's friends, most of us in our 30s and 40s -- had not experienced the protracted death of a friend; we did not know how to sit on our hands; we had to keep trying, just as Cathy was.

On March 21 2007, just after 2 pm, I was at the public library when my cell phone rang. It was Emmanuelle, the third time we'd spoken that day, this time to tell me, Cathy had died. I sank down in a nook between the wall and a bookcase; asked Emmanuelle if she were okay; she said yes, but there were still things that needed to be done. Of course.

These things included to continue talking about Cathy, a conversation that reached such a din by the next day, Technorati listed "Cathy Seipp" as its #1 search, a fact we cheered and which certainly Cathy would have loved, though I also imagine her saying, "Well, yes."

Sandra was recently in Portland, and we spent time together, including a few hours at Ristretto talking about work, kids, and of course, Cathy. Sandra was at the hospital during the days preceding Cathy's death, a time that was -- no surprise -- attended, with various degrees of decorum, by the unlike-minded weirdoes and others. There are few people in the world who can tell a story like Sandra; the grand accents; the sweeping mannerisms; the spot-on caricatures were all there, and as I sat there listening, I realized, I had cried, but I was also laughing. And you might think, what a terrible thing, laughing at the narrative of your friend's death. And maybe it is a terrible thing, but it didn't feel terrible; it felt like a continuation of Cathy, and in truth I think she would only want; would most certainly demand that we continue the narration of her life, which includes her death.

I spoke yesterday to Amy, who said, "I find myself mentioning her as often as I can. I just want her here, and for people to know about her." Me, too.

 

"Tough-Ass Reporter"

I'll take it.

Michael Totten, Libya, and "The Road to Fatima Gate"

When I moved to Portland from Los Angeles, in 2004, I knew no other writers here. I had, however, been given an introduction, by Matt Welch, to Michael Totten, a blogger writing about the Middle East. Michael and I were not covering the same terrain, but nevertheless, met for a coffee at the then-rather wonderful Gotham Building Tavern, and made what might be considered small shop-talk. It was not until we were walking to our respective cars that we really got going, about how serious each of us was about the work we do; about sharing opportunities, and about what it was like to be a very ambitious journalist in a town that preferred its news within a 20-mile radius (or from wire service). A friendship was born.

Over the years, I have watched, in awe, Michael make his career: beholden to no one, on his own terms, and on his own dime, often with money donated by his loyal, many-thousands fan-base. We have, at least a half-dozen times, spoken of the books we are working on, how we want to publish them, how we don't, and when the hell was all this going to happen?

It is happening in March 2011, for each of us. My novel, The Bad Mother, is being released March 1. Michael's book, The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel, is now available for pre-order. You can read a sample chapter here.

Or, you can read one of the very finest pieces of journalism you will encounter, "In the Land of the Brother Leader," a piece Michael orginally wrote for the LA Weekly, about his time in Libya, a piece with special resonance right now.

Congratulations, Michael x 

The Dream of the 90s is Alive in Portland

I have never before had the experience of laughing out of my mind, but only on the inside. This did it. It's a promo for the IFC series "Portlandia," passed on to me by a reader, who thought I might like it (boy, you can say that again) in light of my recent article, "Is Portland the New Neverland?" Enjoy.

 

Adventures in Freelancing

Been away a bit; sold my truck; bought a car for myself, and a truck for the business. Conducted two interviews; wrote a book review; refereed a book reading; was part of an event I shall decline to name but to say its sadness and ability to enrage knows no end; read an ancillary piece about said event that made me want to vomit; completely rebranded Ristretto Roasters; changed the business from an LLC to an S-Corps, and am relieved see my father-in-law out of the hospital after a scary three days. Din and I feel a hundred.

Which made me all the more dee-lighted to open an email from my dear friend Jackie Danicki, to the video below, made by writer Lauren Lipton. I swear on my daughter's perfect little noggin, nearly everything in it, with the exception of the exact subject matter, has happened to me. Enjoy.

 

Is Portland the New Neverland?

My article, for the Sunday Oregonian Opinion section, is online now.

The opening:

A recent episode of the AMC series "Mad Men" showed its female characters navigating a husband's departure for Vietnam and the land mines awaiting career women in 1964.

"I realized, watching it, these women were all 26," says Paige Prather, who moved to Portland in August and who is also 26 years old. Unlike her TV sisterhood, Prather, who has a bachelor's degree in anthropology, has not picked a profession. Unmarried, living rent-free in her sister's attic, she is looking for part-time work in customer service, or a full-time position in the arts. Graduate school also looms as a possibility. The crazy-making multiplicity of her situation is not lost on her.

"I sometimes think we're the scatterbrained generation," says Prather. "You have so many choices, and you know what you end up doing? Nothing. You become the DJ-fashion-designing-knitting-coffee-maker."

It was an interesting piece to report, and I am fortunate to have profiled six people about their experience of making it (or not) as 20-somethings in Portland, a city with the "tantalizing insinuation, much heralded in the media, that young people here make their passions their professions, in coffee and beer, music and bikes, progressive politics and as stewards of the land."

Let me know what you think, and/or join two of the people I profiled -- Matt Davis and Kate Williams -- and me this Monday at noon Pacific Time, for a webchat at OregonLive. 

More on David Carr and the Pillaging of the Tribune

Every day we see evidence of people promulgating information that supports their view of the world, and what information they want others to know, and how they want the money to flow. 

As someone who disseminates information, the more work I do, the more I question my information: why is this person telling me this? What outcome does he or she want? It is my job to allow readers to come to their own conclusions, while taking responsibility for the information and how I have constructed it, always in an effort to make things clear, which nearly always first requires a whole lot of mucking around in the dark.

That's the journalist's job: to work from murkiness to clarity with one's best efforts. That's immutable; what every good writer knows, which makes David Carr's story, "At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture," all more heartbreaking. Yes, my jaw dropped when I read about the bonuses. But people grabbing bits of the pie before it's gone is expected and babyish, the simplest idea in the room.

What I did not expect to see ravaged, and with such disdain, is the writing of stories, and how and what is offered. What really pissed me off is Tribune execs' pretending they understand how new technologies will allow us to do this in better ways, a stance that is risible considering their track record. Read the whole thing. You can also get a taste by reading the kicker, below, in which Carr perfectly captures the contempt of people deliberately or not (and I think it is deliberate) destroying what they do not understand and can never command.

The [Tribune] company recently announced the creation of a new local news format in which there would be no on-air anchors and few live reports. The newscasts will rely on narration over a stream of clips, a Web-centric approach that has the added benefit of requiring fewer bodies to produce.

“The TV revolution is upon us — and the new Tribune Company is leading the resistance,” the announcement read. And judging from the job posting for “anti-establishment producer/editors,” the company has some very strong ideas about who those revolutionaries should be: “Don’t sell us on your solid newsroom experience. We don’t care. Or your exclusive, breaking news coverage. We’ll pass.”

Joy [Part 1]

We began receiving the NYT Weekender this week, thus avoiding my driving to the two Ristretto locations and cherry-picking the sections I want before anyone snags them. Most of the paper wound up on the sofa, where I can read it at my leisure throughout the week. This morning at 6:30, over a cup of Nicaragua coffee my husband roasted yesterday, it was the Sports section, an article about John Updike's essay on the great Ted Williams. It was nice enough to read about how Updike came to be at Williams' last game, and the reverence and playfulness and seriousness with which he wrote his first and last piece on baseball, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu", which appeared in The New Yorker in 1960, but what I really took from it was a renewed sense of joy, via this quote (emphasis mine):

[T]he essay is never precious or self-consciously literary, the way a lot of subsequent Fenway prose became, penned by earnest, heavy-breathing scribes clustered in Updike’s shadow. Roger Angell, who began writing about baseball for The New Yorker two years after Updike, and whose career has had an astonishing longevity — he’s the Ripken or Gehrig to Updike’s blazing youthful phenom — has said that “Hub Fans” most of all supplied him with a tone: colloquial, attentive, unashamed of feeling or of striving for an elegant turn of phrase. It seems obvious now, but Updike was one of the first to show that you don’t have to write down about sports or empurple them, either. 

I have a library ladder in my office, just to the right of where I sit at my desk. Currently occupying its second rung is "The Thinker's Thesaurus," which Ilearned existed when I saw it on the bookshelf in which Christopher Hitchens was posed at his desk. The only thesaurus I have ever owned is a generic copy of Roget's, printed on pulp paper and bought from a street vendor in New York in the early 1980s for five dollars. At its worst, a thesaurus is a faux form of productive procrastination; at its best, it gets you out of the word-rut you plopped yourself in and helps you think. Or so I thought. The Thinker's Thesaurus turns out to be series of illustrative and author Peter Meltzer-subjective journeys, via other authors' quotes. The funniest comment I read about the book is that the quotes show consistentanti-Bill Clintonism (note: "pepperpot" is not listed as a qualifier for "portly," though there is "stomachy," which I adore). The book has provided me with much pleasure, and last week, made me remember that I love to write.

It's been a little easy to forget this. Only those still lying abed with their pillows over their heads do not acknowledge that the venues in which to run 6,000-essays about baseball grow slender and slenderer still. Fear not, I am not here to complain, only to admit that perhaps the experience of seeing five of my seven favorite editors dismissed in the past year; of writing solid pieces for one-sixth the money, felt like a punch in the eye. Feels pretty much healed today.

To come: Joy [Part 2], wherein I wonder whether anxious wives start making homemade eggrolls

Bethany Storro Burns Own Face with Acid, and It is Not a Mystery Why

Two weeks ago, Bethany Storro claimed a black woman walked up to her in a parking lot and threw acid in her face. It was front page news in Vancouver, WA (where the alleged attack took place) and Portland, and evidently sent shock-waves as far as the Oprah Winfrey show, which was scheduled to feature Storro today. Instead, Storro is again on the front pages, admitting she did it to herself.

This does not come as a surprise. A colleague at Willamette Week emailed me last week to say, local writer Marcus Griffith had been questioning Storro's account; that female fabulists seemed to be an arena I spenda good deal of time in; what did I think? I called him from New York to say, absolutely I can believe Storro did this to herself, and would be like to see the three-inch thick folder of clippings I keep, called, "Obese White Women Liars"? It is a phenom, probably a book, probably one that should be talked about on Oprah. This, though people initially prefer to jump into bed with "the victim," to have a sort of pillow party with prayers and tears and support, as can be seen in the comments here, as can the pasting Griffith comes in for, being called a "Dirty Lowlife Scumbag" for questioning Storro's story. News flash, folks: this is what journalists do, or are supposed to do.

It seems that all I do these days is write about liars, false prophets and sociopaths, and the people who believe these people's stories despite remarkable evidence to the contrary. [An interesting discussion about this continued, here.] The more I write about fantasists and charlatans, the less mysterious their reasoning becomes.

This morning, the Vancouver police are apparently still baffled that a woman would make this up. That the force spent many hours and dollars on a goose chase. They do not yet say, they are angry. They say, instead, of Storro, "It's obvious to everybody here that she's got a fragile mental state." They have also just announced, they might bring charges against her. And I think they should.

But here's a bet: there will be cries that we should not further persecute someone who is obviously in enough pain to disfigure herself in a bid for attention. That had -- and I might call this the Laura Albert rationale -- Storro only been given the love and support she needed, she would not have had to resort to such drastic measures, and that she did only proves, we were not there for her when she needed it.

Why Not to Follow a Cult Leader - "The Rajneesh Chronicles"

I am fortunate to be writing for an editor at the Oregonian who lets me dig into ideas I find important to disseminate and/or debunk. One of my favorite (least favorite?) is anything having to do with liars who convince others to believe their lies in order to amass personal power. I sometimes think I could write a book called, "Cult Leadership for Dummies," the actions of these charlatans and sociopaths are so proscribed and tawdry and small, a sort of one-two-three in which the manipulator worms his or her way in, worms and worms and worms until the host maggoty and broken. We cannot always protect people from being foolish and weak, but we can and must alert them at every turn not to be so. The opening from today's offering, a Q & A with the author Win McCormack, in the re-release of "The Rajneesh Chronicles."

It is axiomatic that each generation gets the guru it deserves. In the 1970s, fired up by freedoms proffered by the sexual revolution and women's lib, voyeurs to the Beatles' and the Beach Boys' spiritual brushes with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, those seeking a pleasurable enlightenment looked east.

There was someone looking back, someone who, in theory, had feathered a nest just for them. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh preached an admixture of mysticism and the Human Potential Movement, and bound it with a goo of free love. "Know your sexuality," read a Rajneesh ad in Time magazine, "and one day you will stumble upon your spirituality."

The message proved irresistible to thousands of Westerners. And if, upon arriving at Rajneesh's communes, life proved less than idyllic, with encounter groups devolving into sanctioned gang rapes, and meditation giving way to 120-hour unpaid workweeks, and sterilization and abortions strongly encouraged if not demanded due to Rajneesh considering the institution of family "a symbol of all that is ugly," then perhaps these were the costs of building a better world.

Read the rest here.

Do You Read the Newspaper Online?

At the risk of sounding like dodo brain #92/asking a question that's been posed for a decade: do you read a daily paper online? I read plenty/link plenty. But we still get a daily paper (The Oregonian) delivered, and I still try to read the New York Times every day, in its paper form, "try" because I no longer have it delivered at home, but a copy to each of the shops. This latter is an imperfect system, in that people often steal the paper (if I catch the person who keeps taking the Sunday Magazine, I am going to give them a giant tongue lashing), or I don't feel I have the time to linger and read.

I've been traveling a lot this year, to bigger cities, NY and SF and LA. When I was in NY last week, I felt great. I felt like myself, with an endless number of museums and restaurants and places and people to interface with, if I so chose. This is another reason why Matt Davis's goodbye, Portland post resonated with me. One of Matt's commenters astutely wrote, Matt is going where there stories are, to New Orleans. (He will make his bones there, as I made mine in LA.) Portland is not a big enough city, there is too little cultural collision and too many people with thin skins here to really sink your teeth in and do serious journalism (to say nothing of local places willing to publish it). A recent example: a little nothing piece I wrote for the O, in which I quoted a local PR person, who in several emails to me had a quasi-nervous breakdown because she thought the piece did not show her in the best possible light. I did my best to explain, the piece was not about her. A long-ago example: the editor of a paper I was writing criticism for musing aloud at a staff meeting that if the paper were to run anything negative about a venue, perhaps the paper should call the night before and alert them, a suggestion that made the editor I worked directly beneath bust a nut.

Anyway, two things happened this morning: I took the time to read much of the New York Times while standing at the new stand-up bar at Ristretto Beaumont, and drove home with two thoughts: one, I want to make a bunch of money soon and buy a place in New York, where I can spend more time and where, perhaps, Tafv can live. And two, I might start reading the Times online, on a daily basis -- something, by the way, I am willing to pay for. Politically, I realize we are all supposed to stand up and screech that the web is meant to be free, god dammit, and going behind a pay-wall -- which the Times plans to do later this year -- is as antediluvian and anti-progress as it comes. But here's the thing: as a journalist, I know first-hand how decimating not having any money to support a publication is; I had four -- four! -- of my editors (at the LA Weekly, Wired, Bon Appetit and City Arts) downsized out of jobs last year in a four-month period. That's a lot of freakin' cake not coming my way, kids. Also, I don't expect to get everything I want for free. I will be on the frontlines shouting, "Huzzah!" when the web is better monetized for writing and writers, and certainly, there are individuals and larger sites that have figured out how to make the finances work through traditional channels, i.e., ads and backers. I am also in the fortunate position to still have work. But the money? Do we really want to have this conversation first thing in the morning?

While I enjoy the range afforded by reading the paper online -- the skipping, the photos, the videos -- I also know I blow off more than when I read the paper in hand, and am divided about the idea of defaulting always to My News, divided because I see this as a good thing (deeper knowledge about fewer issues) and bad (where is Pakistan, again?).So: do you read the Times or a comparable paper online, and if so, what have you gained, what have you lost? And, any tips for me?

NB: Yes, I aware there will almost certainly be no print papers within the decade.

NB: And yes, I am aware that the medium that is slowly killing journalism as we've known it has created  the opportunity to have this conversation here, for which I am most grateful and which I find both fulfilling and full of infinite possibilities, yes.

What Communism Wrought

Six or seven years ago, we were having, as we often did in our home in Los Angeles, a few interesting people over for drinks. We would drink in the basement, where there was a full bar, and I mean a real old-fashioned wood bar, with room for eight of ten people at the rail and brass nameplates where the regulars had sat. The house had, decades earlier, been a Shriners hall, and when they left, they left the bar. Anyway, on this evening, two of the remaining people at evening's end were the political cartoonist Roman Genn, and Stuart Swezey, who owned Amok Books. I wasn't there for the beginning of the conversation, but could not help but hear the midpoint, as Roman's voice was rising; this, because Stuart was apparently expressing his admiration for communism, as it existed in the former Soviet Union.

"You're fucking kidding me," said Roman, who grew up in Moscow, and as a political cartoonist, had numerous run-ins with the police state until immigrating, in 1991, at the age of 19, to the US. "Have you BEEN there?" he asked Stuart. "Have you LIVED under this regime?"

Stuart had not, but he would not be divested of his idea that communism was a beautiful dream, all that equality, and sure, it hadn't worked out, but the ideal...

"No! No fucking ideal!" Roman was saying. Roman is a very, very funny guy, and he tried, a little, to inject some levity into explaining to Stuart that he had no idea what he was talking about, a position I roundly seconded, believing then as I only more strongly believe now, that communism is the very worst of the worst*, that it will only and only can lead to oppression and mass murder. (For a quick tour 'round, try Martin Amis's Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.)

I am recalling this today for two reasons: I am in New York, at my mother's apartment, at the breakfast table where I used to debate communism with my late stepfather,  David Levine, a lifelong communist and someone who felt as Swezey did. Always a great way to start the day. And also, because of today's NYT front page story, about journalists around Moscow being beaten, stabbed, having their brains kicked in and worse when they call out the authorities for any reason, at which point others in authority not only do not press charges against the assailants, but against the journalists. Want change? they seem to say. Fuck you. Here's a kick in the teeth instead.

*As David posits in the comments, Nazi fascism was worse, to which I will add, it was no picnic under Pol Pot. But aside from wackadoos and hate groups, you don't have people waxing poetic -- as they do about communism -- about how utopian it would have been if only those terror regimes had worked out.

A Writers' Writer: John McPhee

I dreamt last week that, in the course of and for my work, I needed to read someone named Rebecca Mead. When I woke up, I wondered who she was and if she were even a writer. I googled her; she's a staff writer for The New Yorker, so it is likely I've seen her byline but it had not stuck. I immediately went out and bought her book, and also downloaded from The New Yorker site three of her articles. One is a profile of the current director of the Metropolitan Museum, and Mead wrote (in a separate piece) that when she was doing her research, she "read with pleasure--and considerable envy--John McPhee's lengthy, fascinating profile of Thomas P. Hoving, who was the museum's director from 1967 until 1977."

You can, if you subscribe to The New Yorker, read the whole thing online, as the magazine has digitally archived every page of every issue. The first thing you will notice, if you get to the Hoving profile, which runs sixty pages, is how very many ads there are in the magazine; leafing through these is a museum experience in itself. But downloading and printing would have been a veritable bear, and so I bought a collection that contains the essay, which I read in one big gulp yesterday morning. This is the very finest writing of its kind: perfectly paced and measured, masterfully constructed, illuminating, playful. Superb in every way, it made me realize what the phrase "trip the light fantastic" means, or can mean.

Extra bonus: if you have an iPhone, you can download the images Hoving refers to as you read.