Why Cathy Seipp Shouldn’t Be Allowed Near 15-Year-Old Boys: Correction to her post -- my terrible, wife’s-in-Europe reddish-brown beard is eight days old, not three!

06/07/2003 01:43 PM  |  Comment (3)

Great Mark Steyn Interview About Writing & Career Management:

American daily papers are the dullest in the English-speaking world - duller than Britain, Australia, India, Singapore, and Jamaica... They're mostly big city monopolies hiring on the basis of diversity of race, diversity of gender and diversity of orientation. Everything except the only diversity that matters: diversity of opinion. So they're almost all leftish but in a rather prissy self-regarding way. If I want to read left-wing drivel, I'll take The Guardian or The Independent over The Boston Globe or LA Times any day. […]

The danger isn't that you run out of stuff to say, but that all the stuff you say only repeats the same point. It's like, (to use a musical comedy analogy), one of those Broadway laundry list songs where whatever happens: "A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces/ An airline ticket to romantic places..." all serves to reinforce the same central thesis: "These Foolish Things/ Remind me of you."

That's what was happening to me between 9/11 and late March this year: there were lots of different examples but they all led to the same point - we need to topple Saddam. That's not healthy for a columnist. […]

My only advice on journalism is there's no point unless it's easy. I don't mean the facts shouldn't take time to assemble or the argument shouldn't be carefully constructed, but at a low point in my life, a few years back, when I was on my uppers, I did a book review for The Daily Mail and the guy called me back and said, look, this opening's too oblique, why don't you move the point you make in paragraph twelve up to the front, cut the section that comes next, etc, etc.

He might have been right, but you can't make a living like that. So you have to write where you're comfortable, otherwise it's not a viable economic model. I've lived in Britain, Canada and America and I think I know those societies from the inside. So I'm quite comfortable writing for those audiences, with slight modifications. One of my favourite moments of the week is taking out the obscure Canadian reference and replacing it with an obscure American or British reference. […]

Can you give me a brief personal journalism history? Did you go to journalism college? Why the move to the States? What if anything, do you miss about England? What are you glad to leave here?

No J-school. Don't believe journalism is a profession and trying to teach it as such only worsens the quality of the writing and narrows the socio-economic pool from which journalists are drawn.

I quit education at high school and became a DJ - country, rock, classical, easy listening - and then got fired and, like a lot of other people, turned to journalism in the hope that something better would turn up. It never did. […]

I last visited the National Post offices in Toronto in 1999, when I happened to be in town for a family funeral. I last visited the Telegraph in December 1997, and the security guard wouldn't let me in. I last visited The Chicago Sun-Times when I was a teenager and dropped a note at reception saying I'd like to write for them and eventually heard back several decades later. So I'm not doing a lot of 'networking'.

06/06/2003 12:18 AM  |  Comment (16)

Tony Pierce Wants To Suspend His Hero, Sammy Sosa, For the Rest of the Season: Also, he has many hot pictures up of Miss Universe.

06/05/2003 12:02 AM  |  Comment (8)

Sgt. Stryker, on That Much-Linked Column the Other Day About Anti-Republican ‘Bigotry’:

For a bunch of gung-ho tough guys just itchin' to shoot something, Republicans sure are sensitive all of a sudden. Next thing you know, they'll be heading off into the woods to get in contact with their inner-Marthas to the shouts of "pansy" from those mean old Democrats. My only guess is that Republicans are starting to feel left out of this whole aggrieved victim thing. Maybe they should change their name to the Pity Party.

06/04/2003 11:51 PM  |  Comment (19)

Eight Little Songs, One Big-Ass Grin: I’m listening to Dr. Frank’s acousticky demo right now, and it’s already one of my favorite records in two years. This is all part of an art-feedback experiment from an established recording artist, and I for one am plan on giving him a few dozen earfuls of terrible & predictable advice (More harmonies! Also, more harmonies! Did I mention backing vocals? etc.) Do yourself a favor and go buy it.

06/04/2003 10:28 PM  |  Comment (3)

Book Recommendation -- The File: I just finished The File, by Timothy Garton Ash, and I heartily recommend it to all of you. Garton Ash, the Oxford historian-journalist who has witnessed and written books about the Solidarity movement, the Central European revolutions of 1989, and West Germany’s Ostpolitik policy (while compiling two books of Mitteleuropa-related essays, one pre-revolution, one post-revolution), wrote this modest little 1997 volume about researching his own Stasi file, then confronting the people (including friends) who spied on him.

Perhaps because he doesn’t feel compelled to reiterate every last detail about East German history, and instead focuses intensely on his own personal experience, this is a moving and wise read. Resonant stuff about not remembering whole important chunks of your exciting expatriate life from 15 years ago, feeling embarrassed by reading third-party accounts of your youthful fumbling, and discovering that a system you already knew to be meticulously evil was worse than you imagined. Reading it in bits over the past few weeks there have been dozens of moments relevant to today’s headlines -- questions of who is qualified to judge collaborators, reminders that life under totalitarianism forces every citizen to answer questions that most of us just can’t comprehend, and examples galore of how people justify their own cowardice. I loved the little details about the sympathetic and ultimately annoying “sixty-eighters” of Western Europe (who are the source of much of what I don’t like about France). And, because it doesn’t at all try to, it ends up giving you a tangible taste of several specific eras that no longer exist ... thank God. A good book.

06/04/2003 10:18 PM  | 

New York Post Subscription Problems, Comedy: Murdoch, who is definitely up to something in the L.A. newspaper market, offered us an eight-week trial subscription a while back. For weeks, nothing happened, even though the telemarketers would call us once in a while to ask us if we were ready to subscribe. Eventually we walked down the street, to find the red Post condom in the driveway of some apartment complex. Many testy back-and-forths between Emmanuelle and the Subscription Department ensued. Finally, they seem to have gotten the hang of throwing the issue on our driveway, and my tabloid-loving wife has been laughing out loud every day ever since at the funny headlines (except for ones containing the word “weasel,” of course). Meanwhile, my neighbors are having similar experiences:

So, a few weeks ago the NY Post sales folks called and duped me into purchasing a subscription. I wanted to subscribe anyway, so the call was welcome. Since then they have called four times to verify that we are indeed getting the paper. We're not, natch.

"Ms. [name]. This is the New York Post subscription verification office. We're just calling to make sure you have been receiving the paper."

"Nope."

"Can you verify you're at [address]?"

"Yep."

"What city?"

"Los Angeles, just like yesterday."

"Well, we'll make sure the paper gets out to you within two days. We'll give you a call to make sure."

"Um. I've received this call four times now and have never received a paper. I was charged for the paper weeks ago, but it's not actually arriving. Is this usual?"

"Well, ma'am... Yes. Yes, this happens sometimes."

"So what do I do when you call again and we still haven't gotten the paper?"

"You tell us to shove it up our bums."

"OK. Thank you."

"Thank you!"

06/04/2003 08:14 PM  |  Comment (4)

Spam of the Day: The inbox reports that BJ’s, that sorta dreadful & clean bar-pizza chain, is having a “Bohemian Pilsener and Other Czech Lagers Beer Appreciation Night.” There will be samplings of Brouczech, Crystal Lager, Crystal Dark, Klaster Lager, Klaster Dark, Lev Lion, Lev Bock, Lobkowicz Baron, Lobkowicz Knight, Lobkowicz Prince, Pilsner Urquell, Radegast, Staropramen, and the restaurant’s own Cesky Pilsener. Woodland Hills, Wednesday night, $18 gets you “all beer samples, handouts and a souvenir glass.” Sounds fun, if you like that sort of thing, though I think you’re much better off just going to Czech Point, where the Staropramen’s on tap, the smazeny syr is golden & weighs about 12 pounds, and the Czech family that runs it is really sweet.

06/03/2003 08:20 PM  |  Comment (15)

Check out That Cool Writer-Gal Logo on Seipp’s Site! One of Cathy’s many secrets is that she has a taste in cool Americana art that approaches that of Mr. Lileks (in style, not volume). Too bad she’s almost as clueless about ‘pooters as I am, or else we’d all get to enjoy it.

Speaking of the Curator of Official Matchbooks, I see that his chum, the radio personality Hugh Hewitt, has identified me (along with Layne & Postrel) as one of the “second tier of allies of the Big Four” bloggers. (The Quatro Musketeers being Insty, Andy, Mickey and Volokh.) I would just like to officially encourage this trend: Please feel free to imagine me as part of a secret society of people who would Run Everything, but are too busy drinking champagne out of top hats at the Chateau Marmont (as opposed to watching grown punks get naked at a filthy East Hollywood dive). Eventually, if all goes to plan, someone with money will be fooled enough into giving me a good full-time job or something.

06/02/2003 06:39 PM  |  Comment (10)

New One From Me -- Echo Chamberlain: A President Says Never Again, Again: Something about the impact that the Munich Agreement continues to have on American foreign policy, and whether the analogy is accurate and useful (“not exactly,” and “sometimes!” would be my answer, if anyone asked). A minor point I meant to make there but didn’t -- the Munich & appeasement trauma basically created the Domino Theory, for good and ill.

06/02/2003 06:08 PM  | 

Here's a Smart Interview With Howard Owens

06/01/2003 10:03 PM  | 

Look! Some New Deal Called The Los Angeles Review: Via the indispensable L.A. Observed.

06/01/2003 06:45 PM  |  Comment (3)

Hi! What are you doing down here?