Category: media
We recently switched cable companies, going for one that is cheaper and offers more channels than the previous one.
I like paying less, but the greater selection isn't the boon I thought it would be. Surfing the other night I was struck not so much by the mediocrity of the fare - which has been widely documented - but by the almost total lack of anything foreign. Yes, there are a few stations in Spanish, but many of their shows are produced here.
The movies, no matter how high you surf, are unrelentingly American. The Sundance Channel, to its credit, occasionally shows French and Italian films. But what about movies from Asia, Latin America, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe? You can surf all you want and you won't find them. Is it that subtitles aggrieve a post-literate generation? Or are we as a people simply stuck on ourselves?
I have never desired Carl Kasell's voice on my home answering machine (Hania does a lovely job with hers), but I do like listening to the NPR news quiz show "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!" The questions tend to be fairly easy, but the panelists are usually funny and irreverent.
Usually. This past Saturday, the celebrity guest was Pete Carroll, the new coach of the Seattle Seahawks and the former coach of the University of Southern California Trojans. USC was recently penalized by the NCAA for a number of violations, mostly in its football program. Carroll is believed by many to have taken the job in Seattle so he could avoid the mess at USC. He has claimed that he knew nothing about the violations.
The always affable Peter Sagal refrained from bringing up this matter during his interview with Carroll - perhaps forgetting that he is the host of a "news quiz show." It is also a humor show. And none of the normally astute panelists noted that the coach now under suspicion for turning a blind eye was on the segment of the show called "Not My Job."
I like to keep well-informed, so when I putter around the kitchen I listen to our local NPR station, WLRN. Yesterday morning, while fixing a late breakfast, I heard John Hockenberry on The Takeaway ask listeners to tell him which Superhero they would most like to be.
I thought for a moment, and decided: Media mogul. So I could get rid of shows like The Takeaway.
Last year I wrote a long essay on travel writing - the misunderstood workings and the under-appreciated triumphs of those who practice it - which was accepted by The Wilson Quarterly.
It appeared at the beginning of January in the winter issue. I received one e-mail, from a fellow travel writer, commenting on the piece. The magazine sent me one letter which they had received about it.
This past Monday World Hum, the online travel magazine, ran the piece. It received about a dozen comments, and I got e-mails from friends I had not heard from in years. On Wednesday it was linked to by Arts & Letters Daily, which garnered more reactions. I received two e-mails from radio stations - one in San Francisco, one in Melbourne, Australia - requesting interviews. Then yesterday, The New Yorker online linked to the piece. At the moment it has received 29 comments on World Hum and may get more because - just as Gary Shandling said he would do if he ever experienced priapism for more than four hours - I'm calling everybody.
I love unsung cities, immigrant neighborhoods, ethnic festivals.
So Friday I e-mailed several magazines proposing a story on Buffalo's Dyngus Day. I learned of the celebration only last year, when I met a woman from Buffalo at a conference, though I recognized the name from Poland, where the Monday after Easter is referred to as Smigus Dyngus, the day when, traditionally, boys chased girls and doused them with water.
Buffalo, with its large Polish population, has turned Dyngus into a kind of post-Lenten Mardi Gras, with parades, parties, dinners, tours and water pistol fights. I suggested a story about Buffalo's historic Polish community as told through the activities of its most colorful festival.
Saturday morning I found an e-mail from the editor of a major travel magazine:
"I'm sorry, Tom. Sounds like a cute item but hardly a feature for us. More like fodder for a newspaper column. May have been a while since you've seen the magazine—just designed—but you would know that we wouldn't devote a feature to an obscure festival that few readers would practically attend."
The e-mail had a familiar tone: testy and condescending. Though the grammar was interesting. I pondered for a while the phrase "practically attend." Did that mean showing up in sensible shoes?
I do see the magazine - "see" being an accurate description - and I knew my proposal was a long shot. But I keep hoping that travel editors will discover the value of the offbeat. (I did.) If you reject the obscure you end up relying on the obvious. You keep saying the same old things about the same old places, and you wind up with people who see rather than read your publication. Most travel magazines are not written for readers, or even for travelers, but for a particular type of unadventurous, unoriginal, and usually wealthy vacationer. They are the journalistic equivalent of Willie Sutton, going only where the money is.
I was so irritated by Pete Hamill's "review" of the new Willie Mays biography that I wrote a letter to The New York Times Book Review.
Yesterday the Book Review ran three letters about the review, none of them mine. One was from a man in San Francisco writing about home runs and Candlestick Park (they don't name stadiums like they used to). The other two were from New Yorkers. The first began: "My eyes welled up with tears as I read Pete Hamill's beautiful review..." and ended with the words "which might be the difference between Harlem and the Bronx." The second ended with the sentence: "That was New York."
As in the review, the greatest baseball player in history took a backseat to the vainest city in the world.