Lost In The Woods

*

There had always been a bar on that corner, by one name or another, since the beginning of time, or the end of Prohibition, which were the same thing in my hard-drinking hometown—Manhasset, Long Island. In the 1930s the bar was a stop-off for movie stars on their way to the nearby yacht clubs and posh ocean resorts. In the 1940s the bar was a haven for soldiers coming home from the wars. In the 1950s the bar was a lounge for greasers and their poodle-skirted girlfriends. But the bar didn't become a landmark, a patch of hallowed ground, until 1970, when Steve bought the place and renamed it Dickens. Above the door Steve hung a silhouette of Charles Dickens, and below the silhouette he spelled out the name in Old English lettering: dickens. Such a blatant display of Anglophilia didn't sit well with every Kevin Flynn and Michael Gallagher in Manhasset. They let it slide only because they so thoroughly approved of Steve's Cardinal Rule of the Barroom: Every third drink free. Also, it helped that Steve hired seven or eight members of the O'Malley clan to bus his tables, and that he took pains to make Dickens look as though it had been shipped brick by brick from County Donegal.

Steve intended his bar to look like a European public house, but to feel quintessentially American, an honest-to-god house for the public. His public. In the heart of Manhasset, a pastoral suburb of eight thousand people, seventeen miles southeast of Manhattan, Steve wanted to create a sanctuary where his neighbors and friends and fellow drinkers, and especially his high-school buddies coming home from Vietnam, could savor a feeling of safety and return. In every venture Steve was confident of success—confidence was his most attractive quality and his tragic flaw—but with Dickens he surpassed his greatest expectations. Manhasset quickly came to see Steve's bar as the bar. Just as we said The City to mean New York City, and The Street to mean Wall Street, we always said The Bar, presumptively, and there was never any confusion about which bar we meant. Then, imperceptibly, Dickens became something more than The Bar. It became The Place, the preferred shelter from all life's storms. In 1979, when the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island melted down and fear of apocalypse swept the Northeast, many Manhassetites phoned Steve to reserve space in the airtight basement below his bar. Of course everyone had their own basements. But there was just something about Dickens. People thought of it first whenever doomsday loomed.

www.thetenderbar.com

In the vast sad reaches of that magnificent place, the planet swarming with millions of life forms, the rich, dense biosphere, his brain rotating like a slide show on speed. It wasn't fair what was happening, what had happened. There's been a lot of injustice in your life, the psychiatrist said, and his ego bounded in delight at the recognition, deer jumped in great arcs against moon lit skies, fragments of stories formed and disappeared at great speed, half formed stories gathered and disappeared in seconds, one after the other, and everything, the grimy soul which had led him back into recovery, was there to answer him. He was shattered, there wasn't any doubt of that, shattered by fate and strange circumstance and his own difficult nature. I want to be old and ugly so people will love me just for myself, he could remember thinking as a drug effed rent boy around the Cross. Now he had got there, nothing could be more laughable.

I wish she could be more like Grace, he thought of his daughter, who was struggling at school while Grace topped literally every single class she was in. But academic achievement comes easily to some and not others; and the children he had always assumed would be super brains weren't quite so. How many other parents had been taken aback by the mere mortality of their own offspring? He hadn't wanted to die a drunken, alcoholic old queen on a bar stool, he was shattered and the snivelling lengths to which the other queens went to put him down was nothing short of astonishing. At times he had fantasised about being Toulouse Lautrec, painting and drawing in the bars, leaving the sanil trail of genius for others to pick up, the fragments of novels, the unfinished projects. But of course, there was no one listening, no one cared, his own self indulgence had been beyond measure.

The drawings which he did produce in that period were somehow easily identifiable as being in gay bars, the exaggerated poses, the limp wrists, the young men leaning their heads together at the bar, the desolation which we would always seek. Cut off from the mainstream world by their sexuality, their life choices, their lifestyles, he adopted those streets as his own spiritual domain. Nothing could be more profound than step upon step, the ancient cold, the alcohol fueled fire which kept them all warm and the wolves, or in this case the night terrors, at bay. Lewd images, crude sayings from the television, pocket rocket, kept popping into his head. There was no excuse for the way he had destroyed his own consciousness. Oblivion seeker. Never happy until he heard that click at 3a.m., like an artist or an author recognising the signs the work was a complete, artistic whole. The click which said from this point on you won't remember anything, and anything could happen.

He sought, and then promptly went beyond, that moment night upon night. He knew it was there, a target to be reached, first in the crush of the Oxford, when he switched from beer to bourbon and cokes, the black drink for a black life, then on the dance floor in the bedraggled crushes of the early hours. His oblivion seeking was entirely deliberate. He thought there would be no consequence. He thought it was the way things were meant to be. He was shadowed by the hounds of God, as if seeking had been his whole life. He was burdened by strange thought, damaged emotion. His childhood beatings would not stay repressed, even though he had done his best to relegate them to a box in the basement, bury me deep in love. The basement was both spooky and practical, a place to store the things which he could not live with, to bury the past and forget about it.

I bet you're a nice man normally, the queen had said to him in the early hours, the only moment in the entire night he could clearly remember. Dancing on glass floors littered with acid trips, down on his knees amongst the dancers searching, searching, for the drugs he had lost, as the music pounded on and he became sicker and sicker. He didn't realise what was happening. He had written his sociology thesis at university on gay bars, but had never realised part of his obsessional interest with these places was because of a love of alcohol. There's nothing wrong with temptation, the wise voice said. But he knew things had gone beyond common sense. That he was diseased. That whatever happened he would never be whole again. The person he was meant to be would never reappear. That the time for rejoicing was at an end. That from here on out he would struggle with the greatest, most profound of depressions, a crushed bug on the floor of a mercury aquarium, crushed by the weight of the environment above him.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2009/07/04/web-abandons-michael-jackson-well-before-old-media-lets-go/

Web abandons Michael Jackson well before old media lets goThe death of Michael Jackson has shown up the differences between old media such as newspapers and rolling news stations, and news media such as blogs, online video sites, and social networks. An important barometer of how each of these mediums work is how quickly they have let go of the story and moved on to the next big thing.

In a word (or three) old media hasn’t.

Michael Jackson died in his L.A. home from cardiac arrest on June 25, 2009. The news of his heart attack and subsequent death from it broke on the Web first, with celebrity gossip site TMZ beating all others to the punch.

Interestingly though, it was arguably old media which proved its worth in this instance. The Web may have been faster with the news but it was the long-running traditional news organizations such as CNN and the BBC that people turned to for confirmation. The story on TMZ was treated with suspicion until it was verified by multiple other sources.

So here we are, 10 days after the event, and there’s a new picture to look at - the one concerning how the media, both old and new, are treating the story now. BuzzMachine has done exactly that and shown how new media has long abandoned Michael Jackson and the circumstances surrounding his death, while old media continues to dig deep and give their audience what it thinks it wants.

Mentions of Michael Jackson on blogs went through the roof in the three days after he died, but they quickly dropped off and are now approaching the flat line state they were in just before he died. Twitter Trends was full of Michael Jackson and variant mentions for a couple of days following his death. Now, he barely even registers, unless or until a new story emerges concerning him. YouTube and Digg both show similar peaks and troughs.

Compare all this to the almost never-ending coverage of Michael Jackson, his family, his kids, his former partners, arrangements for the memorial and funeral, and tour tickets on television news channels and in newspapers and there’s a clear definition between the two schools of reporting.

You could argue that this is because old media digs deeper, looking for new angles to enlighten their readers and viewers with, but I think it’s more to do with the fact that the Internet moves at a frightening pace. What is page view gold one day is of no interest to anyone the next. I’m afraid the Web has already let Michael Jackson go, even though many of his fans don’t yet seem able to.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/01/2614148.htm?section=business

Much has been said of the decline of newspaper journalism, but a key newspaper boss says reports of its death are premature.

News Limited chief executive John Hartigan told the National Press Club in Canberra that the newspaper business had to adapt, but would survive.

"I'm here to celebrate the future of journalism, not to consign it to an analogue archive," he said.

"Newspapers can adjust to the digital age, adapt their business models and continue to reach mass audiences. What it will take is a complete rethink of the very essence of what is news."

He says the key to newspapers' continued survival and success is quality journalism.

"I believe people will pay for content if it is original, exclusive, has authority and is relevant to our audiences."

But what is this quality content? While some of it was news and current affairs, much of Mr Hartigan's speech focused around improvements in travel coverage, and recipes in the food section of the paper and website.

One of his main examples of good journalism from the Victorian bushfires was the footage of Sam the koala.

"Who can forget the images of the fireman sharing his water bottle with Sam the koala, perhaps the iconic image of the fires," Mr Hartigan said in his speech.

However, Mr Hartigan did give some examples of "hard" news that sells.

"The British MPs expenses scandal has sold an extra million copies for the UK Daily Telegraph since the story broke in May," he said.

"It wasn't simply because the Telegraph bought the story as a leak, it assigned dozens of people to the story, spent weeks preparing its coverage, and had a brilliant strategy for breaking and staying in front of the story."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/the-challenge-is-not-to-save-newspapers-but-journalism-1731813.html

Citizen hacks using Twitter and camera phones go where reporters can't.

By Matthew Bell

Sunday, 5 July 2009

More than three weeks after Iran's disputed presidential election, at least 33 journalists are behind bars this weekend. Iran now has more journalists in prison than any country in the world, says the charity Reporters Sans Frontiers. Dozens of foreign journalists were booted out of the country or arrested following the election, and the entire editorial staff of one Iranian newspaper was incarcerated.

But if the Iranian government had hoped to block the spread of information, it was hopelessly thwarted by Twitter and mobile phone cameras in the hands of ordinary Iranians, who transmitted nuggets of information and images to the internet as the violence began. By clamping down on recognised journalists, Iran unwittingly unleashed a multi-headed hydra of citizen journalists chronicling events at the frontline.

So it was timely of Google to launch a site last week promoting amateur journalism. YouTube Reporters aims to "help citizens learn more about how to report the news, straight from the experts". Videos have been posted by professionals such as Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter who co-broke the Watergate scandal and Nick Kristof of The New York Times.

Newspapers have long been accused of hastening their own demise by giving content away free online, so it's perhaps even odder for professional journalists to be queuing up to give away their trade tips. But this is a pivotal moment in the democratisation of the media. The Daily Mail and General Trust launched its Local People network last week, unveiling the first of 50 community websites. The aim is to build a network of sites in which readers contribute content by uploading stories and images. It is yet another example of the growth of collaborative journalism already exploited by US sites such as The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast.

What emerges from many of the tutorials posted on YouTube Reporters so far is, ironically, the case against it. Stories need verification, say the old hands. The first principle of journalism may be to gather information but, as Bob Woodward stresses, more important still is the checking for accuracy. While the Tehran riots highlighted the value of eyewitness accounts, credibility remains a problem. One tweet reported a massacre that never happened. Yet with few journalists on the ground, news agencies were forced to compose a picture of unfolding events from the evidence available. Even the US government became dependent on the stream of live tweets, asking Twitter to postpone maintenance work on their server until the riots were over.