You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

How wry is it that the much ballyhooed star of Disney’s new all time worst box office debacle, “John Carter”, is a guy named Kitsch.

“Creative” Writing

For those of you more than casually interested in the journalistic considerations inherent in the ongoing saga of monologist Mike Daisey vs. the truth, the surprisingly compelling non-fiction book, The Lifespan of a Fact, might be worth a read.

In it, a doggedly earnest young magazine fact-checker named Jim Fingal goes mano a mano with the essayist John D’Agata over D’Agata’s casual approach to matters of actual fact in a non-fiction piece he wrote about a Las Vegas suicide.

The book consists of 122 pages of an often acerbic e-mail dialog between Fingal and D’Agata, interspersed with excerpts from the essay in dispute.

“What emerges,” per publisher W.W. Norton’s blurb, “is a brilliant and eye-opening meditation on the relationship between ‘truth’ and ‘accuracy’, and a penetrating conversation about whether it is appropriate for a writer to substitute one for the other.”

I well recognize that this sort of thing is not everyone’s cuppa tea; one man’s “compelling” is another man’s meh, but you’ll know after a few pages whether or not it’s something you’ll want to stick with to the end. Spoiler Alert: the writers do not — en fin — resolve the issue for you; the work is, as blurbed, a meditation from which you may draw your own conclusions.

Six Degrees of Separation

I guess you have to be a retired media exec with lots of time on his hands like me to have noticed (or cared) that Limbaugh’s syndicator -- who may well have provided the arm-twist necessary to generate an apology –- is Premiere Networks, owned by CC Media Holdings, owned by Clear Channel Communications, owned by Bain Capital, which has close ties to a well-known Republican presidential aspirant.

Death of a Blogger

Wish I had the words to properly convey my respect and admiration for Rami Ahmad Al-Sayeed, a Syrian video blogger who so capably earned and richly deserved the designation “citizen journalist”, an epithet claimed by many but merited by few.

Rami was killed by mortar fire this week while trying –- via his video blog syriapioneer -- to get the word out to the world about the genocide that is taking place in Homs while society looks on, seemingly helpless to arrest it.

Those of us who follow the profession of journalism, either as practitioners or as acolytes, might pause a moment to honor his selfless devotion to his chosen calling. For details see: http://blog.bambuser.com/2012/02/we-mourn-loss-of-very-brave-syrian.html

Ars Gratia Artis

We note in The Barnstable Patriot that the management of the “new” Barnstable Municipal Airport is throwing a bash on February 15 for the Hyannis, Yarmouth and Cape Cod chambers of commerce. Also invited is the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod.

No doubt some Cape Cod artists will see this invitation as a shallow make-nice gesture to an organization which is helping to facilitate the decoration of the airport by encouraging local artists to loan their work gratis.

This corner has no dog in the fight, but we suggest that as a step to help diffuse the contretemps, the airport might also invite the Cultural Center of Cape Cod, repository of a contrary view, as a show of good faith. They might even go so far as to re-cast the event as an art-acquisition fund-raiser.

SOPA Opera Redux

Can’t help but wonder whether Rupert Murdoch, if his $580M investment in MySpace hadn’t so spectacularly crashed and burned, would be sputtering out tweets accusing the President of “throwing in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters” over the Administration’s negative position vis a vis the seriously flawed SOPA and PIPA bills now pending before Congress,

Overkill

As a former player in the MSM arena, I continue to be flabbergasted by the propensity of today’s strapped publishers to waste vast quantities of ink, airtime and man-hours shooting at paper tigers when such resources could, Lord knows, be put to far more productive use.

Case in point: The New Yorker’s Katie-bar-the-door takedown of Newt Gingrich in the lead column of its most recent issue. It’s as though a recklessly extravagant one-percenter had so much ready cash burning a hole in his pocket, he had to exhaust it all in one fell swoop or burst.

You’d think that an editor as savvy as Hendrik Hertzberg, or an avatar as seasoned to the fickleness of shifting political winds as Eustace Tilley, would recognize that Gingrich has about as much chance of being elected president as Kim Kardashian has of scoring the Pope to officiate at her next wedding.

Neither is it likely that anyone who reads The New Yorker would ever vote for, or needs to be convinced not to vote for Mrs. Gingrich’s precocious boy, a contender as much a victim of his own hubris as of Mitt’s Super-PAC.

So, why the overkill? It’s almost as though they know the guy is about to go into eclipse, and they want to fire off all the juicy negatives they’ve been saving up before they become worthless currency in the ongoing press wars.