How To Survive As A Moody Journalist

A complete news cycle consists of the media reporting on some event, followed by the media reporting on public and other reactions to the earlier reports. The advent of 24-hour cable and satellite television news channels and, in more recent times, of news sources on the World Wide Web (including blogs), considerably shortened this process.

10 days is a fucking lifetime in journalistic terms.  Then again, with the amount of information coming downwire to the office every  hour, maybe Sgt. Steve is right.  The news is only entertainment.  I’m glad to hear you using your voice and putting it out there on Facebook and etc. but, at times, I find myself mired in apathy.  Sometimes it’s the bad blues that keeps me from posting on here, mostly it’s from a relentless performing&publicity schedule, but the result is the same.  I must isolate myself from the world and live on Feline Time for a while.

SAME SEX MARRIAGE…GUN CONTROL…NORTH KOREA TARGETS AUSTIN, TX…SINGER-SONGWRITER JIM TRAINER RELEASES HIS DEBUT FULL-LENGTH COLLECTION OF POETRY…

I get it.  These are the times we are living in.  But the punditry and the memes, the patronizing commentary and the chatter on liberal radio-it all amounts to a Great Noise that I must seek refuge from.  Perhaps some momentary respite from it all in thinking that I’m just a rock&roller, after all.  A court-jesting troubadour that plays three gigs a week during his off-time as a published poet and live-in Caregiver.
Perhaps my abstinence from reacting or getting involved in the back-and-forth of the zeitgeist helps me sift through it all and sink into the heart of wisdom.  Then again, maybe not.

For whatever its worth, I’ll always be aloof, a loner and a hermit.  Like The Business, I’ll always be on the wrong side of whatever side there is.  I’m not belittling your cause.  I’m glad you’ve found your voice.  I’m glad that you’re using it.  I will, however, abstain from chiming in on the Great Voice.  I will go out of orbit and lay in bed for a day and a half (or 10) without a peep.  This much madness is too much sorrow.  I’ve shouted up the mountain too long.  I don’t see any progress and I don’t believe in ideas and suddenly I have awakened in Paradise.  All of my dreams have come true and these days the worst kind of trouble is no trouble at all.
What it cuts down to, Brother, is this:  I think your proselytizing and Facebooking and picketing and sloganeering is fucking selfish (and seemingly by rote, as I look down row upon row and page upon page of photos and updates).  I guess the alternative is worse.  Everybody could be silent.  But, would that be so bad?  Must we always react to the buzz and trends that media is constantly conjuring and throwing at us?  Won’t some real-deal Bodhisattva rise and transcend the desire to be a free&loud American, march up the steps on the Hill and make some real change that could alleviate nay stop another’s suffering somewhere in the world?

What do I know? 
-Brother Dave Grohl

Anyway, I’m back from the dead.  Viva la whatever.
Brother James

…if I come into a room out of the sharp misty light
and hear them talking a dead language
if they ask me my identity
what can I say but
I am the androgyne
I am the living mind you fail to describe
in your dead language…
-from The Stranger by Adrienne Rich

WAR AND MOUTHPIECE: “We don’t get fooled again.”-The Who

“Palin and Obama lacked realistic experience for high national office but possessed star quality that – abracadabra! – made their inexperience a virtue to enthusiasts who believed that Palin and Obama were originals who’d forge stunning new solutions to our seemingly intractable dilemmas. Each had a unique way of making unrealistic generalities sound like plausible proposals – if one didn’t look too closely, and continue to look.”

Great article by Michael Ventura in the November 19 issue of the Austin Chronicle.  Ventura essentially argues that President Obama and former Governor Palin are both merely substance-less archetypes to which the public can fantasize about being the solution to all of our problems.  But Aho, he doesn’t stop there.  Good political writing at the street level is hard to find.

We may be the most informed generation in history and the yet, the most apathetic.  We need writers like Ventura, David Sanger, Matt Tabbi and Jim Hightower to cut the shit and pull back the veil. But that’s not all.  We need to be watchdogs of the Media and media-related issues so that these guys can continue to find print. 

Facts should speak for themselves.  We must consider who or what is presenting us with the facts.   All I can remember from watching a sun-burnt Ted Koppel as he stood on the frontlines in Bagdad on a March night back in ‘03 was that his hair was perfect.  No bombs, no shrapnel, no carnage; in other words no real reporting on the realities of the who-what-when-where-and-why of War.

Why, exactly, were 70 websites seized by the Department of Homeland Security?  What kind of cheap trick was the FBI pulling when they sold of a van filled with faux explosives to a 19-year-old Somalian kid in Portland over the Thanksgiving Holiday?  We need to know that 195,055 votes were discovered as uncounted in New York City almost a month after the mid-term elections.

These things that move in the night, they can be a byline in between a twinkle and a smile or they can be an alarm.

Let’s keep the channels open.  I don’t want mainstream-Media to take me out to dinner if all I’m gonna do is be fucked.  Keep media free.  Connect.  Read.  Speak your truth.

Or we will get fooled again.