The Pioneer Hour

Tonight at Vinegar Hill I saw outtakes of Albert Maysles films and spoke to him briefly afterwards. With his brother he made Gimme Shelter which is one of my favorites. I had been thinking about this movie a lot lately--about the way the camera lingered on certain scenes longer than you would in other types of films. I realize now that it's an approach called Direct Cinema or Verite, and that I've probably been thinking about it in relation to my own radio work.

I'm working on a story now, about The Extraordinaires and I'm narrating. Because it's a short piece (maybe 5-6 minutes if I'm lucky) this means I won't get to use much of the verite tape I gathered. I have arguments, hanging out, crying, storming off... all these revealing moments I could use to tell a much different story. And while I think the story that I'm working hard to tell is true, I'm not sure it's the story that intrigued me in the first place.

I think now that if I had pitched the story as non-narrated, I could have done it much differently, and perhaps told the story I wanted. Narration seemed like an interesting challenge (it's often scared me and I do think I'm a lot better at it) but as of now, I officially want to make a non-narrated version. And If you want to give me 1000$ to do it, I'm listening.

Reviewers are people with steady jobs denigrating the people out there working harder and having more fun.

I suspect.

I don't know Ms. Maslin personally so I'm willing to admit I could be totally wrong. But what she's basically saying about Stephen Colbert's book is that the only thing good about it is he wrote it. Maybe it would just be better to say that it's a bad book (which it sounds like it is). I don't know. Reviewing is a weird sort of industry.

I haven't figured out how to delete this... So I'll simply say that this is a freebie. It's a flashlight beam shined at Proxima Centauri.

One day, perhaps I'll be called upon to make a speech at somebody's graduation. I like to collect lines that will serve me well then.


Some of you are so brilliant and so directed that you actually know what you want to do with your life. You have a plan, and if anything, much of your college experience has seemed like a waste of time. Michael Dell dropped out of college at 19. Bill Gates left Harvard without completing. James Carville thought college was a waste of time. All brilliant guys. All succesful. (nice long pause) And then there's the rest of us. Brilliant maybe. Destined for greatness... But definitely confused.

Last week, a friend told me about the surreal show swapping between Colbert and O'Reily. Each went on to each others shows, and the word from my friends was that O'Reily got pretty well shown up. I don't think this is so.

I watched both appearances on the internet and felt that although Colbert held all the cards, O'Reily was able to fight him to a draw. He did this by being extremely bland and by not getting particularly offended by anything. Up to this point, Colbert has done something that nobody else has been able to done; he's pulled O'Reily's teeth. O'Reily was a scary ultra-conservative host who was very popular, presumably still is. He was intimidating, and because he was so insistent, any decent open minded person would feel, in listening to him, that perhaps they were wrong. Perhaps they ought to feel a little guilty for opposing the war or defending immigrants.

Our decent protagonist would fight back in his head, trying to score points with an imaginary O'Reily. But it's impossible, you can't score points arguing with O'Reily because he's totally aggressive, crazy and insufferable. Another type of protagonist would just dismiss O'Reily out of hand, and although that's tempting, I don't think it's viable. Not time to discuss that part though.

What Colbert was able to do was simply be just a little bit more ridiculous than O'Reily. Just enough to very cleverly suggest how ludicrous O'Reily was without O'Reily having the slightest recourse. Usually, he has to act crazy, but when he does, Colbert either agrees with him, which pulls his teeth, or acts even crazier, at which point O'Reily has to MAKE HIMSELF SOUND REASONABLE in order to reign Colbert in, very clever.

So in this particular debate, Colbert holds all the cards. However, he doesn't win, he doesn't really make O'Reily look ridiculous, unless he can make him really mad. Not fake mad like he did on the O'Reily factor but really hopping, ridicoulously crazy-ass mad. And mad for no good reason. Mad because somebody's telling you he likes you, agrees with you, emulates you. O'Reily refrained, he held it in, he even laughed at himself a little bit. He certainly couldn't win, but he played to not lose, and succeeded. He didn't come accross as crazy, he didn't come accross as dumb. Just kind of bland. I think that's the best he could do.

I wrote that my blog sucks a few weeks ago. It does, and I've decided to work on that some. The blogs I like (there are maybe 2-3) have a focus or a strong voice. That is to say, the posts are either about something I care about or are rendered in a way that I find striking. I don't have a creative thing that I do that is immediately suitable blogging, other than that I think. I think alot about the world, and I sometimes come away with truths--knowledge that is true for me in a certain moment--that I would like to think are worth sharing.

Because of that, I have arrived at this simple manifesto:

Certain ideas will arrive from various conversations and moments. The blog will be away of getting those ideas in a raw form to the public. It won't be attributable to me. It won' be searchable by name.

The ideas I share are intended to be part of the larger human conversation wherein we try to make sense of this world. Generally, I'm not interested in sharing factual information, resources, stories, etc. Topics that I am interested in writing about include aesthetics, ethics, books, popular culture, politics, music, philosophy, history and culture. Mostly, I'm trying to figure out what America is, what it ought to be, and what might help get it there.


My name will not be published with the blog. I do not consider it secret, I just do not wish that anybody could google my name and find this instantly. I don't want a potential job, interviewee, editor, date, hang out friend, or colleague to suddenly be able to find my blog and use that to figure out who I am.

I will try to post once a week.

I will not talk about my weekend or other petty and routine adventures, unless it relates to the topic. Nor will I talk about such things people would normally, until recently, consider private.

I will not swear.

This is not intended as a confessional. It won't be designed for people to get to know me better. It will be like a column in a newspaper. Nobody will give me a column right now, presumably because in the world of people who give columns, there's no reason to expect anybody would want to read what I would have to say. In some ways, the experiment is to see if those people are right. I'm curious as to whether I deserve and audience, and whether this tool can help me find one.


Even though some of the below posts do not quite fit into the manifesto, I will leave those posts in place as historical documents that might shed some light on the ongoing evolution of this project.

And so it goes.

Lately, some friends of mine were telling cop stories. You know, those funny stories we all collect about absurd encounters we have with cops investigating something at your house, breaking up a party, at the border, at the airport, etc. Generally, it involves the cops being rigid and ridiculous as they bumble around trying to accomplish something that doesn't seem all that important.

I like these stories, but I also like to keep in mind that what we are lampooning in some ways is our selves; our society at large and each and every one of us. I believe that the police, on some level, embody certain necessities in our society. That is their job, their role. I also believe that it's dangerous to embody any one social force or need in one person or type of person. I'm not a cop, and thus have little control of what cops do. I do have some say about what I and my friends do, and I have a belief, perhaps naive, that when our society is able to better embody the necessity the cops represent--order, some restrictions on who comes in and who leaves, certain types of security, etc--then the cops are free to be more human and humane. Do I believe they always take advantage of this freedom? Obviously not (and I'm sure lots of us have stories to share to support this) but, and here's the important part: I believe that cops will usually act more human and humane if they feel that's a choice.

I know this because recently, I've been put in situations where my role is to embody certain forms of necessity: schedule, safety, shelter, food for groups of people. This happens when I go on wilderness. When the group I am with is successfully able to embody these forms of necessesity, I find myself acting like a human being--by which I mean relaxed and fun to be around. When the group does not embody the necessities of the moment, if I am the only person thinking of schedule, safety, shelter, and food, then I become more rigid. I start to resemble the keystone cops of our shared stories.

It takes some faith to act as though you expect the best out of people, and if you do, there are times when you are let down. Still, it is the most powerful way to get the best out of people. So, I think we're all better off if we treat cops like they are in fact human and humane, even though it can be tempting to stonewall and denigrate them. Sometimes, you have to stonewall them or they'll abuse you, and the trick is being able to know these times when they come.

It seems to me that in democracy, bureacracy and ridiculous authoritarianism are the result of creating specific jobs to embody various necessities. I'm sure that in some cases, bureaucracy is the only effective way of dealing with the incredible organizational complexity of something like the self-governance of the United States of America. It gets so complex that we forget that it is actually self-governance. I don't know where the solution lies in the bureaucracy, but I suspect it has to do with collectively embodying certain necessities so that the bureaucracy doesn't have to. I'll leave it at that.

OK, I'm sort of new and wading out here, but I, like many other bloggers, need to acknowledge that I suck at this. For evidence, I suggest you check out Indexed which was basically the first "Blog of Note" that Blogger ever showed me. This is so much better than what I, and so many other people are doing which is basically, just writing without organization, clarity, or sense of personal boundaries.

I feel as though I ought to go back to the drawing board, or write these things offline for a year or something until it can be good. There are those people who are truly experimenting with a new media succesfully; finding, as in the case of indexed, a way of communicating with an audience that would never have been found before. Most of us are just sharing snippets of our diary. This is not to say we should stop, because for most of us, nobody's reading anyway, so we're not really hurting anybody. But perhaps we ought to be working on a new aesthetic of lean communication, now that we're all a little famous.