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Acting

In keeping with my intention to do what I’ve so far avoided for no good reason, I’m taking an acting class.  Far fucking out.

I like the theater, I’ve been a theater critic, and Janice’s family is thoroughly theatrical in a professional kind of way.

Acting is very difficult and very far from anything I’ve done.  I knew that.  My producer once sent me out to do a walk-and-talk commentary on Lake Street in South Minneapolis.  I only had to walk about 30 yards and say maybe a hundred words, which I had written.  Walking and talking ain’t easy, I found.

Try talking to somebody you hardly know about gut issues using the words of somebody you’ve never even seen and moving around doing stuff at the same time.  And you have to memorize all of the words and say them with all the pauses and emphases that the writer put in like you just thought them on the spot because you’re involved with this other person onstage with you, and you don’t know from moment to moment what she’s gonna do, except you damn well better know.  Or he.

I’m also doing it because I’m old enough not to care about looking like a ninny.  At this point it doesn’t matter what kind of fool I look like, or what kind of fool I am, for that matter, which is quite pleasant.  I didn’t realize how much energy I used up trying not to look silly until I stopped, which works out pretty good because I need all the energy I can scare up.  I’m gonna practice my lines now.

Journalism

Note: Having recently been kicked to the curb by a professional journalist, I thought I’d repost this from 2009.

When I was growing up, there were four daily newspapers: the Chicago Herald-American, the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Sun-Times. The first two went under years ago, and the other two are bankrupt. Newspapers have been going down the tube for years all over the country.

I used to read daily newspapers—you probably did, too—at least one a day. I don’t know when that started to change, but by the time I had a DSL Internet connection at home, those days were over. A newspaper is obviously not the place to look for news. Newspapers are too slow.

Newspapers and other print media put me in mind of a story about a company at the beginning of the 20th century that made the best product of its kind. This company’s product had performed better than any other for many years, but the company was steadily losing money with no end in sight because it made buggy whips.

Much of what corporate media, print and electronic, offer is guesswork and speculation, useful for fear mongering and useless otherwise. Hard news—that most likely to engender fear or awe—is expensive to produce and has been losing credibility for a while anyway. Mindless reporting on imaginary weapons of mass destruction and irrelevant fluff is an example of what corporate media do for public discourse.

Even if you somehow still believe what you read in newspapers, dealing with a wad of paper that needs at least handling and recycling is way more trouble than closing a browser on your computer. Same drivel, less waste.

Having done no research whatsoever, I’m gonna imitate a journalist and speculate that newspapers are dying all over only partly because of the clear superiority of the Internet as a source of current information. I think the other reason that newspapers are fading out and journalism generally has lost status is that most journalists went to an accredited school of journalism.

Journalism is a profession because its practitioners profess to think the same way and to approach things the J-school way. That way may actually involve a standard that was once thought to be somehow higher; it may not.

The only thing certain in any profession is that a lot of people are invested in a particular way of thinking about what they do and believe that what they do is the best thing that can be done, especially if they’ve been at it a long time. The Roman priests who read chicken entrails were the same way. So is the medical industry, where new ideas are dangerous unless they’re patentable. And, of course, public education.

On the Web site of a Northern California daily four days after Michael Jackson’s death, this was the TOP HEADLINE: “Jackson still had pulse when found.” All the editorial staff could think of to put on the home page was trivia about a dead singer. The first issue of the Chico News & Review after Tom Gascoyne got canned had a cover story about Barry Bonds, a corporate athlete from far away.  Brought to you by professionals.

Sid Lewis

It’s too bad about Sid Lewis.  No matter how things shake out with the corporal injury and assault charges from 2013, this silly reckless-masturbation charge is likely to do him in professionally.

Lewis is apparently a great music teacher, and a lot of people really like him, although I expect that’ll change, because some people are obsessive about sex of any kind, especially if it has anything to do with children and even if it’s imaginary.  I think laws about sex, including age restrictions, are automatically unnatural and give too much influence to the most neurotic and fearful among us.  The goddamned Puritans are everywhere.

I can see how a 17-year-old girl would be alarmed at finding her employer looking at her while he masturbated, and one source says her reaction was to look away.  Smooth move.  She looked again, of course, and she says he was still at it.  Sid apparently takes masturbation seriously, which I respect.

Actually, I don’t know if any of this is true.  I read a couple of articles online, and one said that when the girl saw him she “walked away.”  The Enterprise-Record site says she “looked away,” so who the hell knows the details?  Not me.

There’s something wrong with a society where a man can’t jack off in his own home.  Whether the girl walked away or looked away doesn’t matter.  She was free to go.  There’s no good reason for Butte County to be involved.

Lewis apparently has his full complement of demons, and now he’s looking at hard time.  I feel for him.  He and the girl have known each other for years.  He surely knew the risk, and yet he trusted her enough to rub one out in front of her.  I suspect he’s made other bone-headed decisions.

I also feel for the girl, and I’m glad she needn’t be damaged by all this.  The damage has been done to conventional wisdom over many years by punk-assed, fear-mongering legislators.  A heterosexual man who isn’t attracted to 17-year-old girls is unusual.

Rather than laughing at Lewis, which he totally deserved, or rolling her eyes and finishing her work, or asking her family to take care of it, or storming out in a huff, or any other way she could respond, these days it makes some kind of sense for a young woman in that situation to call in the government.

I’ve read that he didn’t touch her or try to coerce her, and her psychic burden is whatever she makes it out to be.  She’s still in charge of her experience, and that’s good for her; for Lewis, not so much.  We could just make him go to therapy and a shaman and maybe do some Reiki.  It’d be cheaper than prison and might actually help him.

See ya

Sometimes you know when it’s time to break a new trail for yourself.  I felt like that when I tried to get out of Chicago the first time, in 1982.  I got as far as Palisades State Park, near Garretson, South Dakota, on a bicycle.  Gravity pulled me back to Chicago for another three years, when a way to make a living in Minnesota found me.

The current situation is nothing like that, and I’m not following a dream so much as being evicted.  Prudery and fear make a potent combination, and my opinions have been declared hazardous to the wealth of the corporation, so the Chico News & Review will no longer publish From the Edge, which can now be found right here—please, pass the word.

I remember saying many years ago that I wanted to sell my thoughts.  I didn’t know then what that meant, and yet writing a column has obviously let me do exactly that.  Boy, am I ever grateful.  I’ve been reading some of the old ones, and they often still make me laugh, which is as good as it gets.

When Tom Gascoyne asked me in ’05 if I’d be interested in writing a monthly column, I said no, although I would do one biweekly, because that way I thought I might be able to build a readership.  That’s what happened, and for over a year From the Edge alternated with Carey Wilson's Culture Vulture.  When The Culture Vulture was plucked, I started writing every week and have mostly kept at it since.  I came to loathe that relentless deadline, although it keeps me limber and I plan to continue writing weeklyish.  I’ll also keep doing commentary on KZFR.

I’ve been fired several times, and this time wasn’t bad.  I once announced my departure over the company public address system, which pleased me no end and yet can’t hold a candle to being able to say goodbye to you like this.  The last few years have been hard for me and my family, and I deeply appreciate the compassion and generosity my readers and listeners have shown to us.

What I’ll miss most is the occasional Gentle Reader politely introducing yourself and letting me know that you appreciate what I’m trying to do, even when I’m not sure what that is.  I like that, and without my mug in the paper every week I expect that’ll taper off.

I've lost a big chunk of income, and I'd appreciate you subscribing to this with the PayPal button above.  Anyway, thank you for your attention and please tell your friends and neighbors where I am.  Namaste.

Censorship

The Chico News & Review has refused to print From the Edge twice in two months.  Do you think they’re trying to tell me something?

The first time an editor rejected my work was in late ’97.  Minnesota Law & Politics had recently published a piece about cops, but when I submitted an article about parent’s rights the editor decided it was way more than the lawyerly community could stand.  The magazine has since gone out of business.

I started writing From the Edge in 1998, and when we moved to California I’d phone them in to KFAI radio.  My producer refused to broadcast one because I had absent-mindedly used one of the words the Federal Communications Commission bans.  My bad.

A while back whoever was my editor then—I’m on my eighth—refused to print a column I’d written about clemency for Roman Polanski.  The editor said the whole staff agreed with him.

A couple of months ago I wrote a piece about my recent experiences with mental illness and the way mentally ill people are treated in Butte County, one in particular.  That time CNR staff decided that what I’d written might get the paper sued, and they refused to print it.  Fine.  Wussy, but fine.

This last refusal takes the cake.  I wrote about the Sid Lewis mess, based entirely on published accounts on web sites of the Chico Enterprise-Record and KRCR television, and I referenced nothing that wasn’t available around the world.  I didn’t think privacy would be an issue, and it wasn’t.

I’m usually way behind the news cycle, but Lewis had only recently been arrested for masturbating in front of a 17-year-old girl, and I had something to say about both him and the girl.  I didn’t know anything about Lewis’s arrest last year on charges of assault with a firearm and corporal injury to a spouse until I read about it in the CNR.  I was feeling pretty pleased with myself for being up to date when actually I wasn’t so much current as too soon.  Unbeknownst to me, there’s apparently a limit on these things.

Here’s what my editor said, in part, “It’s a brand new case and there is way too little information available to be putting out opinions in the paper as to what's going on with either Sid or especially the girl who made the allegation.”

I’m not a reporter, and I feel no obligation to be fair or balanced.  I never thought anybody would expect me to toe the CNR’s editorial line in any way out here on the edge, because I haven’t and I don’t.  I guess that’s the problem.