Use the f-word, save the world
By GARY KAMIYA
It is a truth universally acknowleged that publishers should be kept far away from keyboards. And Wired founder and CEO Louis Rossetto's editorial on the judicial trashing of the Communications Decency Act proved why once again.
Writing in yesterday's Netizen, the political pages of HotWired, Rossetto opened his bombastic oration with the obligatory new-media use of "motherfuckers," then proceeded to share his interesting political insights with us: "The people responsible for giving us the CDA are respectable Republicans and Democrats, liberals amd conservatives. That's worth remembering if someone asks you to vote for Clinton or Dole this fall. Isn't it like being given a choice between cancer and heart disease? In other words, a profound disrespect for the political system seems entirely justified."
Woah! Politicians pass a couple of standard-issue moral-posturing bills and all of a sudden, Clinton is no different from Dole and it's time to trash the whole system? Rossetto, it seems, is not just a giddy salesman of high-tech appliances, he's a revolutionary!
But the Wired mogul is just hitting his stride. "After the passive World War II generation and the cynical Vietnam generation," he intones, "it is the digital generation's -- the netizens' -- destiny to rebuild our families' and communities' ability to evolve spontaneous order, solve problems, generate and distribute wealth, promote peace and personal security. secure justice, and foster happiness."
We will reserve comment on the Obi Wan Kenobe-like phrase "it is our destiny" as well as the odd call to "evolve spontaneous order" (the mouse-click theory of societal transformation?). And let's pass lightly over Rossetto's baffling reference to the Vietnam war generation, widely regarded as the most idealistic in the century, as "cynical." But when he starts talking about the "passive World War II generation," we fear Rossetto has lost all contact with Houston ground control. I've never much cared for breast-beating by war veterans, but wasn't that the generation that waded through machine gun fire at Tarawa, that braved Panzers at Omaha Beach, that fought and died so that we could stay home and play with our computers instead of goosestepping to the strains of Wagner?
For Rossetto to imply that veterans of the anti-CDA war are more inspiring than the men and women who beat back world fascism suggests that the Wired head has some serious RAM problems. Perhaps his techies should look under his hood.
Metropolitan life, provincial blues
The feisty New York Observer can make even the most lotus-eating Californian long for Gotham
By GARY KAMIYA
We Californians -- especially those of us who write -- have a peculiar relationship with New York. We hate it and are drawn to it. We tell ourselves that its capital-of-the-20th-century reputation is inflated, its literary glory a shell game, its power acquired through craft and double-dealing. But we cannot turn away from its glittering spectacle. There is a little part of us that will forever be a provincial arriviste in a Balzac novel, standing miserably at the ball in our unfashionably heavy boots, thin-skinned and irritable, ready to challenge the Parisian dandies who float maddeningly about with the latest bon mot on their superciliously-curled lips.Most of the time, mercifully for us, the grand ball turns out to be less than enthralling. The wine is served in plastic cups and the aphorisms dropped by My Lord and Lady fail to instruct or amuse. Moreover, it certainly does not hurt our peace of mind that The New Yorker, that twinkling light atop the great Chrysler Building of Eastern literary glory, now seems more impressed with (Southern) California-style power than it does with great reporting and great literature. If cutting a bella figura is simply a matter of fame, bank account and referred notoriety, California can stare down New York. (The waterlogged city-state of Micro-Seattle, despite Newsweek's lame recent attempt to elevate it, remains a distant and insignificant outpost.)
But just when we're ready to light up a smug victory joint (from Humboldt County, of course), along comes a publication like the New York Observer, and damn it, it's the idiocy of rural life all over again.
The Observer, for those who have not sampled its peach-paged delights, is simply the most interesting, idiosyncratic and combative weekly newspaper in the country. To call the Observer a newspaper is somewhat misleading, for although it is thoroughly and aggressively reported, its sensibility resembles a magazine's far more than it does the earnest, centrist, "objective" tone that prevails in most dailies. It's not that the Observer has a tendentious house position. Its overall political stance, though left-leaning, is largely devoid of orthodox pieties, and it is home to several outspoken conservative columnists. What makes the Observer stand out is its attitude.
In these degenerate times, when "attitude" has become associated with the puerile online posturings of high-IQ, low-talent rookies whose main claim to journalistic fame is their promiscuous use of the word "fuck" in their leads (about as subtle a way of seducing the reader as unzipping one's fly), this statement must be qualified. The Observer's writers have attitude, yes, but they also have knowledge, journalistic sophistication and something to say. Most of all -- and this is where our New York envy problem comes in -- they have a like-minded community to say it to, a community of readers who care passionately not only about art and literature and politics, but also about who's up, who's down, who's in, who's out, all the vast buzzing business of a great, sharp-edged, self-delighting city.
The Observer perfectly recapitulates what I think of as the quintessential New York style -- where your knowledge of analytical cubism, multiculturalism and Steely Dan is not just your individual treasure, to be recollected in tranquillity, but a card to be played in a high-stakes game. It's a gloves-off world, filled with gossip and generosity and backstabbing, where it's OK to plot the degradation of your foes. Reading the Observer is like entering a room filled with people who are not only just as smart as you are, but are slightly more vicious.
There's no shortage of brains on the West Coast, but we don't have that particular combination of smarts and killer instinct, everybody being so evolved and all. It's too bad.
The Observer is basically a columnists' paper. You never know exactly what you're going to get in the mix, except that it will, in boxing parlance, stick and move. Provocative regulars like Anne Roiphe, Hilton Kramer, Todd Gitlin, Nicholas von Hoffman, Ron Rosenbaum, Carl Swanson, Allen Barra (one of the most intelligent sportswriters in the land), Richard Brookhiser and sex-beat queen Candace Bushnell weigh in on subjects ranging from Al D'Amato's latest misdeeds to the perfidy of all drug users (one of Hoffman's more demented moments) to the icky, pimple-covered buttocks of a nasty British tycoon as he advances upon a quaking model.
The columnists are joined by a first-rate staff of switch-hitting writer/editor/reporters: Joe Conason (whose reporting on Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr's conflicts of interest has irritated the Clinton-must-die editorial page writers of the Wall Street Journal into unseemly public apoplexy), Terry Golway, Jay Stowe and Jim Windolph, among others.
The latest issue features a great, textured piece on Elvis Costello by Windolph; a typically eccentric offering about "Harvoids" (Harvard grads who become possessed by the grandeur of their alma mater) by Rosenbaum (whose "Edgy Enthusiast" columns frequently and delightfully celebrate such non-top-40 worthies as Lucretius); a blast by Conason on the dubious financial dealings of Elizabeth Dole; a typically obsessive, but entertaining, piece about the stupidity of Walkman-wearing gallery goers by legendary the-contemporary-art-world-sucks curmudgeon Hilton Kramer; a vicious lampooning by Christopher Byron of Wired Ventures' laughably inflated public stock offering; and a wonderfully informed, take-no-prisoners assault by book critic Vince Passaro on the Granta Best Young American Novelists List.
Along with these juicy offerings, there are the usual in-depth reports on real estate deals and other metropolitan scams, only some of which are of interest to us outlanders. No problem: there's always plenty to read. The only problem with the Observer is that it makes you want to move to New York. Sometimes, it seems that even being devoured by the Big Apple wolves is preferable to enduring the silence of the California lambs.