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News flash: You're a crackpot | page 1, 2, 3
Am I too narrow in my view of what it is possible to achieve in this world? Am I fearful of failure? Did I remember to turn off the coffeepot this morning? Then I heard a comforting voice in my head saying, "Shut up, you asshole," and I knew it would be OK. But what about these people who had paid $39, or $29 if they were members of the Learning Annex, to learn how to get press coverage? Would they be OK? I talked to a couple of them afterwards by phone. One of them had his life purpose statement on the back of his business card and he was a carpet cleaner but I only got to talk with him for a minute because I was busy copy editing when he called. His name was John Stewart, his business was called Healthy Choice Carpet Cleaners and he did not just want to clean my carpet. He wanted to save my life. He said his cleaning methods can help prevent childhood asthma and cancer. "I try to get people to write articles not just for myself, but to help people avoid getting asthma and other diseases," he said. "I went to one house and showed them where all the dust was. I said, 'You can get lung cancer from that.' And they told me the man who lived there had passed away from cancer." He also said he had statistics that showed that six to eight carpet cleaners die a year because of the chemicals they use. For an instant, the pit bull of skepticism relaxed its jaws on the carpet cleaner's leg. But then the pit bull said, "Dude: This is just a small-businessman looking for press coverage. What did you expect him to say?" You can always count on a small-businessman looking for press coverage to return your phone calls. The psychic, however, did not return my phone call because obviously she knew what I would say anyway. I did reach Julie Hastings, the ceramicist who made "non-functional ceramic teapots." She told me about how she'd been selling real estate and doing a little ceramics work and then she got breast cancer. "Up until then I'd made kind of timid ceramic pieces," she said from her East Bay home. She had been staying down in Mexico. "I came up and had surgery and all that, and all of a sudden I was making really strange pieces. I thought, I might not live forever, I might as well express my personality now." She has a friend in the same studio in Berkeley who makes tiny ceramic replicas of the beds that divas die in in operas. Is that interesting or what? I also got Harrow on the phone. She's the one that told us how to sell ourselves without selling our souls. Getting a publicist on the phone is a little like breathing air: If you can't do it, you can't do anything. "The essence of what I teach is how to be useful to other people," said Harrow. She really means it. In American business, whose speech and manners clothe a spiritual longing in the rubric of material necessity, magical words redolent of deep, practical truths come and go with the seasons of commerce. "Synergy" combines the wordlets "syn" and "ergy" to make company names sound scientific, mystical and technical. (If I were a company I'd be CarySyn, or SynTen, or TenSynErg.) By inviting journalists to sit in on her class about how to get press, Susan Harrow was creating "synergy." Not only were there 19 potential little profile stories packed in one room, but the class itself was a story. "I thought I should take my own advice and get some publicity," she said. "I'm a shy publicist." So she became her own client. That's synergy! She says her idea was, "How can I benefit not only my students but the journalists in the community?" That's synergy, too! "A lot of these people have a talent but not necessarily for promoting themselves," she said. That was definitely true. But who's to say that their blissful ignorance of the catechisms of journalistic practice is not actually a great good fortune? Who's to say, for instance, that one is not better off having never gone to bed with someone who, before slipping off into a sleep filled with dreams of foreign correspondents and the White House press corps whispers, "I love you -- but that's off the record"? What's more, to hear a monkish-looking woman in her 50s ask, "What is the difference between a press release and a bio?" is to witness a purity of life experience akin to never having tasted coffee or tobacco, or having never heard the big snare shot on "Midnight Rambler." What journalist, once the intoxication of access and notoriety has worn off, would not pay a pound of prestigious clips for an ounce of such serene innocence? | ||
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