The Robinsons—Sara And Evan, Came To Town Ten Days Ago.
Dinner, Drinks And Hours Of Conversation Later In Harlem With Jen, We All Left.
But My Soul Remained—As It Always Does.
What is my earliest memory of this place, Harlem?
Where I grew up, and The Big Fella grew up?
No, we didn't “meet cute” young, like old friends do in the movies..
I never met The Big Fella until two-thousand-and five.
But he was a child of Harlem, just as surely as I was.
Me: West Side. Him? East Side.
A hundred hills, cobblestones, and brick-strewn yards between us.
My first memory is of a brick-strewn yard—
And an angry dog
Who chased my just-stopped-being-bow-legged ass through it.
Me stumbling and falling in that flesh-tearing expanse of nothing
But sharp and rough.
My knee gouting blood as I hoarsely screamed “Daddy! Daddy!”...
And him coming from the other side of the car—
A peach and white Rambler.
“Oh Lord. Honey! Put some iodine in a towel and throw it down!”
He yelled up to the fourth floor.
“I can't bring him all the way back up those steps now!”
“We got someplace to be!”
That's the first memory.
Next is Daddy-done haircuts with a Salem dangling
cooly from his mouth as Sam Cooke's “Live At The Copa!” blared
From the little mono record player on the table.
“Sun, moon and stars belong to everyone...
The best things in life are freeeee...”
There was the Piggly Wiggly on the corner
Which I was told never to go past...
But who wanted to—as their CreamSicles™
Were perfect on a hot summer's day.
Nights on the fire escape, beating the heat in the house,
Sprawled next to Mama on a plush blanket.
Listening to The Fifth Dimension on 77 WABC...
“Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon...”
Someone tosses play money off a rooftop across the street,
And in the wild scrum of poor folks
In the street below, one doesn't get up,
As a sickly pool of night's burgundy mercury
Expands under his still body in the middle of 115th Sreet.
It's 1968 now, and every other week as the spring smears into summer,
Something's happening.
There and here. What's going on isn't exactly clear.
Oh Lord...Who got shot now? Plumes of desperation-fueled smoke rise
From the courtyards nearby and hang
Like dull, ugly streamers in the air—topped off with a grey haze
Just above the tenement rooftops...
For what seems like months.
One night, I can hear windows breaking and shrieks. I still don't know
What the cause of it was, but I remember looking out from the fire escape...
And a carting truck hauling garbage from in front of a store.
Panicky driver, I guess. Hit reverse instead of drive
And backed into the facade
Of the liquor store next to Deacon Jones Fish & Chips.
Caved in the front and then
Fearfully peeled away.
And the angry people in the street staring providence
In its spirits-flushed face...
As they carried off
Case after wooden, excelsiored case of “The Good Shit”.
And not the bottom shelf rotgut.
Ecstasy and agony all in one minute.
Saw my first pair of breasts on a Lenox Avenue corner.
As a woman ran east on 116th. Mocha. Beautiful. Shirtless and wild-eyed.
She looked like a crazed “Thelma” from “Good Times”
Flashing by in her bell-bottomed jeans
And little else.
And then I saw her back—bubbling like an egg cracked in a hot skillet?
A heroin dealer had thrown lye on her
For welshing on a poppy-swollen IOU.
The hot dog man tackled her before she ran into traffic on Lenox,
Dumping ice
From his soda bucket onto her boiling back.
And then her nerves-ablaze scream.
Me thinking “What kind of pain must that be?”
Cousin “W” and his wife “J” were worse off. The heroin killed them both.
Cuz—a year out of Vietnam, and poor, desperate “J”
Escaping the agony of his death a mere year later.
Heroin Alley. West 115th Street. My block.
Watched a junkie nod out for twenty minutes straight—
Pardon the pun.
Swimming, Undulating like a twisted beam of light on an oscilloscope.
He could NOT fall. But my God, he could drool. A strand five feet long,
From a drooped mouth mouth to the ground.
Viscous. Scary.
Made up my mind right there, that I would not touch drugs, and I have not,
Thank you for that, rubber-bodied junkie-man.
The apartment was too small and there were too many of us.
Six kids. Two adults.
And one frighteningly huge rat....so big he should have been a dependent.
Chewed through a wall and looked at me like I was the Goddamned visitor.
Daddy caught the beast in the kitchen one day and crime-scened the room
With a well-swung dinette chair.
And with that, we were out of Harlem in two weeks.
But we came back every week.
Daddy to do business, and to get the things
That Queens didn't have.
Things that we still loved.
Deacon Jones Fish n' Chips, Steak n' Takes
And the frosty-cold watermelon slices
From the brother's shack over on 129th and Seventh.
Barricini and Breyers ice cream from Daitch Shopwell on 116th.
Toys from Darling Toys down St. Nicholas Avenue.
Tools and conversation at Moskeyee Hardware on Lenox proper.
To see The Delfonics at The Rockland Palace or the 369th Armory
A ways up and west...
“Ready or not, here I come...you can't hiiiiiiide...”
I stayed in school in Harlem, and got the school bus there every day.
A cop bit the big one nearby and Five-O raided the school
Busting up everything—looking for the “perp”.
Snuck in to see Pam Grier flicks
At The Loews Victotria down from the Apollo.
My God. Pam Grier!
And when I would drift towards getting “out of pocket”,
Daddy would take me with him
Where he rolled.
With his friends. Grown-ass men.
And they'd debate everything, Sports. News.
Politics—national and international.
There I'd be—eight, nine, ten years old—In a circle of men in their thirties,
Forties, and Ffties, hashing through the issues of the day.
On the steps of a storefront in West Harlem.
And one day I got off a good one,
Straightening out a fella's conflating Kenya's Kwame Nkrumah
With the Congo's Patrice Lumumba.
A silence fell, and the owner of the store said to the mistaken man,
While slapping me on the back...
“You need to go get the professor a bottle of Yoo-Hoo, brother!”
And a gale of laughter rose from all.
It was a place of wide sidewalks.
Maybe the widest sidewalks in all of Manhattan.
You could play box-ball three abreast,
Two sets of three kids facing each other, easy.
Lots of space to walk,
And maybe stop to look down the wide-open avenues downtown.
Lots of space too for a man to set up a rostrum, or a step-ladder,
Or an empty plaster bucket
To stand at a corner and speak, preach, break it down, run it down,
Expose while being verbose, for all to hear.
Ellison wrote on it, I saw it happen. On 110th, 125th and 135th—
Which was the official “Speaker's Corner”.
You couldn't go to 135th and run the jackleg game. You had to have skills.
Malcolm X was the “Don” of Speaker's Corner.
I was too little to remember seeing him there,
But my Daddy and Mama did—
And they noted that no one was better, save for maybe...
Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
When he would descend from the mountains of the floor of the House...
Or the pulpit at Abyssinnian Baptist.
Harlem's streets—the ultimate open-air/open mic/open forum.
Long gone now.
I moved back as an adult.
To Columbia U's grabbing all available land west of Seventh
And north of 110th.
Morningside Heights was the name for the expanding, new neighborhood
That was a few small blocks in my youth.
I was on W. 137th, past the geological dip the West Side takes at 125th...
Uptown's bottom falling out as the subway becomes an El for a hot minute.
Took an icy spill down the steep, steep hill of 137th one winter's morn,
Spinning nearly half a block on my back like a down-clad, upended turtle—
Til' I grabbed a parking signpost twenty feet from the intersection. Whew!
Saw a rat one night on the walk home from the subway.
Saw him cornered against two garbage cans by a young, overconfident cat,
Who wailed and thrashed when Mickey suddenly pounced on his head,
Biting ears, and neck and all the shit a cat never expected a rat would attack.
That cat screeched and bumped the cans...and I couldn't watch anymore.
Hunter is hunted. Man bites dog. Rat whips cat.
Maybe kills him from the sound of things.
Moved away, and came back again.
165th opposite the Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X preached his last,
And breathed his last.
Washington Heights some call it.
Still all Harlem to me before you get to the bridge.
Caught Robin Givens in the Wendy's on the corner,
Ragging the counterpeople
As she walked out with her Mama
And two huge bags of conditioning-killing grub
For Iron Mike, laid up a block away at Columbia Pres Hospital
After wrecking his whip 'cross the river in Jersey.
Caught a cop beating the shit out of a dealer
At the dark end of the 168th St. Station Mezzanine.
Ducked behind a thick, riveted pillar.
Witnesses get billy-clubs In the mouth too, you know.
Cop grabbed a wad of bills thick enough to choke Godzilla off the dude,
And told him to walk away.
Then for good measure as homeboy did,
He cracked him with the side of his piece—back of the head,
Behind the ear, as dude tried to tough it out, but lost his equilibrium
And fell in sections it seemed.
“Please don't come back this way...” my heart beat out in morse code.
Five-O didn't, unlocking an iron gate at that darkened end
And disappearing Into the night. Like a thief. Man!
Came out of the subway one night at 155th to stop at Wilson's for take-out...
Straight-up stumbled into a prime-time drug bust to end 'em all.
Helicopter hovering, shining lights into fourth floor apartments
In the middle of Amsterdam Avenue.
Po-po buses lined up on the street with news trucks, and behind that?
About a hundred dudes lined up against the building fronts themselves.
Arm to arm like sneakered, track-suited paper dolls.
Headed downtown on a Friday night for a weekend
Of rotten bologna sandwiches,
And holding pens
That smelled of piss in the big hoosegow “downtown”.
Had to play it cool, and not run back in the subway...
Didn't wanna be pegged as a man runnin' away from somethin'.
I hate rotten bologna sandwiches, and pissy-smelling jail cells.
So, I chilled and walked all calm and shit, into the cuchifrito store,
Bought a bag
To give myself purpose to be in the vicinity,
Got my change and went back into the subway all natural-like.
“Enjoy!” I said to the homeless guy near the gate,
As I tossed him the greasy bag.
That was my cover. “Wow!” he said. “Thanks, brother!”
“Might wanna eat those down here, man.” I said
As he shuffled towards the steps.
“Five-O's vampin' hard upstairs.”
“Ohhhhhhhhh...”
Moved away and came back one last time.
Lived with a Diva. A real, live one. Sang opera for a living.
Lived in a building full of Black opera singers. Men and women.
Comin' up Madison Avenue, cross 125th to the sounds of operatic
Vocal warm-ups echoing
Off the buildings at night.
“Ne-nay-nah-no-nu...Neeeeee!”
Then a piano note to set the next octave and again—higher this time...
“Ne-nay-nah-no-nu...Neeeeee!”
Two Baritones, a Tenor and a Mezzo.
Not downtown.
But in Harlem. Living. Loving. Singing 'round the corner,
And down a block from Sylvia's.
“Ne-nay-nah-no-nu...Neeeeee!”
And in between the two? Mt, Moriah Baptist Church
Where the choir's band could break it down
Like the Stax studio rippers.
Not just Sunday—but even on Thursday night rehearsal
When you walked on by.
Oh, the old Renaissance ghosts must've smiled every time they heard it.
In our Harlem.
Where Daddy sang at the Apollo...
As did James, and Marvin, and Dinah, and Ella
And every first-name-only needed star
To light the indigo firmament.
It's where Castro booked rooms
At the Theresa Hotel instead of The Waldorf
When he came to town.
“The Lindy” was born here, and this was where Chick Webb's band
Vamped the swingin' shit
Out of Benny Goodman's crew in a play-off.
Made Gene Krupa sweat through shirts
Hangin' in his closet downtown, it was so damn bad.
The seat of power of the GREATEST politician
African Americans have ever known,
And who did more for poor folk in general than anybody then or since...
The Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr,
High-art central for Black folks in the whole wide world in the twenties.
Dancers, poets, writers, musicians, painters and historians.
Langston on E. 127th—middle of the block.
The blowin' and box-bustin' hepcats
In the high ceiling-ed palaces up on Sugar Hill.
Tito Puente and crew on the Spanish East end.
Near La Marqueta again—stretching for blocks
Under the old ConRail tracks.
Guayabera shirts and lacy communion dresses hanging by the dozens
In front of a hundred teeny, tiny stores.
Saltfish, Cod. Bacalao. The aroma wafting from the open stalls.
The “piragua” man at the corner of 116th & Park...
Shaving ice into a cup and pouring cold, cold sweet syrup
Over a blazing summer day.
Maybe twenty different hills that crest
With a hidden world below on the other side.
St. Nick Park near Convent Avenue
Where a craggy baby mountain busts the neighborhood in two.
Go to go down and around it to get to the other side, baby.
Manhattan Valley, and Coogan's Bluff where Willie Mays
Was an orange and black clad undertaker in center field...
Where sure extra base hits went to die as mere fly balls.
The Polo Grounds is gone now. Along with Small's Paradise.
The old Rockand and The Audubon—where I climbed a dumpster
And filched an “A” off the marquee
When I feared it's total destruction.
Piggly Wiggly's but a memory and Deacon Jones
Is maybe someone at a church
These days, but the fish n' chips are gone.
My building on W. 115th is history too.
New projects or some such complex sits there.
Steak n' Take, The Salaam and most of La Marqueta too.
The shell of Peter's Hardware, next to Daddy's old restaurant,
There for forty years.
Now becoming something else.
All the old “Bucket o' Bloods” are gone, just about.
Nikki's. The Seaman's Net.
At least they landmarked The Lenox Lounge.
And the infamous “Zebra Room” in back
Where the real Players hung tough.
There's a Starbucks on the corner of 125 and Lenox.
Magic Johnson owns it.
Big Wilt's (Of 20,000 conquest's fame) Small's Paradise it ain't.
But you can sit and nibble.
There's an H&M on the main drag.
A Movieplex nabs the crowds that walk past
The now-shuttered, Pam Grier-less Loews.
The Apollo marquee is computer controlled, now. Big-ass LCD.
I stood atop that marquee one Sunday night
With folks as the ladder-man changed
The coming attractions by hanging huge enameled letters.
Too many “M's” in the copy and you'd see a “W” turned upside down
And you had to laugh.
Now, somebody on a computer taps in words,
Hammers “Enter”, and poof!
Folks on the street can see it. “Blink!” “Swoosh!” “Blink!”
The “American Gangsters”
Have been replaced by the “American Hipsters”.
Scruffy Abercrombie and Fitchies dragging themselves
Through the Lenox and 125thNegro Black
African American streets
Looking for the perfect...Macaroni and Cheese these days.
But it's still Harlem. My Harlem. Steve's Harlem.
Jen and Sara and Evan and me rode up last weekend.
Grubbed hard at Sylvia's.
Cornbread and Beef Ribs and Chicken Livers.
Banana Pudding and Red Velvet Cake.
Then, down the block to The Lenox Lounge for drinks.
Still an Art Deco wonder. Tall half-obliqued sconces
And plush booths.
The long bar and buffed walnut and steel bathroom doors.
A Jr. Walker lookalike toting his sax in the back
To blow the stripes off the walls in the Zebra Room.
Place still looks like Bumpy Johnson
Could walk in any minute
In ankle-length camel hair —
And a coterie of gabardined and spats-di-fed button-men
Flanking him.
But instead, a large group of Japanese tourists file in.
Agog at this bit of Old Harlem tucked into the rapidly expanding “new”.
And we see Sylvia herself—of the restaurant's fame.
Near the parking lot / cutaway
She bought between the restaurant proper and its annex fifty feet away.
“Hey Ms. Woods” I say,
As she seems a little bit befuddled while looking around.
“You looking for your ride?”
“Oh...yes.” she sighs.
“But I don't know where my daughter is with the car.”
The night air has the lightest breeze on it, and yellow cabs abound.(!) (!)
We bid Sylvia adieu and walk down Lenox a little ways.
I look back and see her again.
A smallish woman In the middle of the impossibly wide sidewalks
I can never forget.
My Harlem. The big fella's Harlem.
Everybody's Harlem now, it seems.
Cabs are hopped. Jen's to points east. The rest of us back downtown.
I roll the window down and let its air hit me. Harlem's.
I smile for a second.
And know I'll be back sooner than I even think.
Because you know what?
I'm never really ever gone.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
“H” Is For Home. “H” Is For Harlem.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Why I Write
My Customized Red “Mogul” Apple PowerBook—Steve Wanted To Bop Me In The Head For This Thing...
I often wonder when you, the reader opt to point your web browser Group News Blog-ward, what goes through your mind. What are you expecting to find? It's a hard thing to consider as a contributor here, so I often find myself in those moments when I'm not writing clicking my way here just to check up on things, you know? Not so much monitoring, but mainly to live outside of my skin as a writer here and try to see the place as you see it.
I work hard to put myself in your shoes as a reader and outsider, kind of in the DeToqueville mode. Were I the stranger in a strange land coming here, what would go through my mind?
And when I do that, the question that keeps rushing to the forefront is this one...
Why do they do it?
Why do they write this stuff?
Why do they write?
It's the question I find myself asking as I stumble about Blogtopia as areader and not a writer. Not so much the “why” about agendas, but more to the point, “What is it about 'the word' that drives them to expend the effort to express themselves?”. I understand that leaves out the shills and de-facto party operatives like an Instapundit or PowerLine, who expend little or no effort to educate or engage. These are “bots”. Unthinking advocates for the usual crimson-necked, stogie-chomping, snickering masters who paragraph re-arrange or dumb-down to 10 word posts official GOP talking points. It also leaves out those for whom raw hatred is the “Good N' Plenty” candy that makes their evil train go—The Little Green Footballs and Malkins of the dark side of our world.
No. I'm talking about places like this one. We make it a point NOT to do what those folks do. Nobody's bought and paid for 'round here, and there is no “blast fax” we consult for the “talk of the day”.
Why do we write?
It's a damned good question to be honest.
When I first discovered “blogs” per se in late 2003 / early 2004 I came across a few good ones, and a lot...and I mean A LOT of awful ones. The bad ones colored my view unfortunately and I assumed the driving force behind the phenomenon was mainly overweening ego. But then I found myself falling in love with the good ones I'd unearthed via my web-skipping and it became evident to me that there was something more here. Something drove folks to so boldly speak. And then I started commenting at these blogs every now and then—much the way I did in my earlier web incarnations on sports message boards, and in so doing, something struck me like a bolt from the blue. That lightning strike hit while reading two blogs in particular—Tony Pierce's Busblog, and Steve Gilliard's News Blog.
They were writers of the highest order, and they were fully exploiting the new arena—the blogoverse—as a means to get their words out there. I was a writer too, and reading their work—particularly Steve's—it restored something in me. Something that had been dying a slow death for several years. When you work as a professional writer, there is the elation of the word firing in your mind, that trigger of the nervous system down the arm to the pen or keyboard and then the thing in black letters on a white background before you, making perfect sense and expressing your feelings explicitly. And then...there is the sick, storm cloud colored heartbreak of knowing the pitfalls of getting your creations out there for the world to see. The reality of writing as we knew it up until the web democratized things....could beat your soul into the concrete like a hot nail through butter. I would not be exaggerating to say that many writers like myself were in a state of disillusionment and in many cases—outright depression until this world opened up.
The News Blog did that for me. I can truly say that it inspired me. Energized me. I'll thank Steve for that till my dying day. The daily checking in to see what he'd written about—and how—was a thrill for me, and the ability to join the conversation in comments made my heart leap. I could expand, and explain. Compare and contrast. Snappily snark or be heartfelt. In real-time and reach people. You have to understand what a rush that can be—to reach people with the word. But then, words had always reached out to me for as long as I could remember.
I fell in love with writing as a small child. My father taking me to the park every day as he convalesced from ulcer surgery—Mount Morris Park in Harlem to be precise, and reading The New York Times to me. I was two years old. I learned to read about a year later. It wasn't long after that when I entered school—just before my fourth birthday, and my father's implanting of that love for reading grew in me to where by the time I was five and half, I was familiar with journalists like R.W. Apple and Tom Wicker. I was a news addict by that time as well, what with my dad's having that addiction too. Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley, and my then personal favorite, CBS' essayist / editorialist Eric Sevareid.
I read everything I could get my hands on. Newspapers. Dictionaries. Every magazine i could find. Look, Life, Ebony, Jet, Time. I read books on history supplied by a family friend who worked for Time-Life. Ancient Egypt. India. Rome. World War 2. 18th Century America. Then on to science. Diseases. Biology. Physics. I remember a book on jet engines that I read and re-read at least ten times trying to understand how those massive rockets Walter Cronkite was describing with a catch in his voice on lift-off managed to get off the ground. I read Mama's copies of Vogue and Bazaar (It was in an issue of Bazaar where I learned who Germaine Greer was). And when there were no new books or magazines or papers...I read food cartons.
“BHA & BHT added to preserve freshness.”
“Products may have settled somewhat during shipping.”
“Serving Suggestion”.
Xanthan Gum, Lecithin, and the oh-so-tasty sounding Whey Solids.
I remember the day I got my first library card at the Langston Hughes Library in Corona, Queens, and I remember what my first two books were that I checked out. J.A. Rogers 100 Amazing Facts About The Negro, and the two-Sci-Fi books-in-one “When Worlds Collide” and “After Worlds Collide” by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer.
I was seven years old.
A thing happens when you read all that stuff. It starts to stick in your head. The words themselves, and oddly—the styles they're used in. It colors your every day vocabulary. I called one kid's stating that Marvel Comics' Hawkeye could somehow fight off the Hulk “ludicrous” in an argument. I'd picked the word up from a NY Times Editorial on the Ohio National Guard's excuses for their deeds in the Kent State massacre, and I grabbed the word infinitesimal from a “Dr. Strange” comic describing his journey through a mystic Microvese. So, see? You can learn from comic books!
Yes, I fell in love with words. Hard and true.
And what I found before long through all of that reading was that I could use those words I'd absorbed. I could use them any way I wanted. i could mimic a news story, or pen my own “Sevareid”-style editorial. I could even ape Shakespeare with some effort. (Those damned pronouns!) And I could take all of those styles and run 'em through the way I felt about things, and combine 'em into one person's style. Namely, my own. I found that through repetitive watching and now having a writerly ear and brain, I had also inadvertently broken the code of writing for television. You watch every first-run episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” from episode one through one sixty-eight as a diagnosed autodidactic, polymathic sponge and there's no way something doesn't rub off on you.
It wasn't long after that when I grasped that I could sort of do this stuff that I realized that beyond the fun aspect of messing about with words that they had power. With these strings of letters into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters, books, scripts, articles, poems, songs, haikus and sonnets, I could do just about anything. I filled blank books with stories and reportage of my own making. I could, with the use of a bit of brain-power, create worlds of my own making, and look at the world I lived in and analyze it openly so that I, and maybe others could better understand it.
Is there anything in the world more fun than that?
Flash forward thirty years.
College has gone by, and more than a few years plying that “fun” craft as a livelihood in radio, television and theatre. I'd hit an ebb. A low point. The “fun” was draining out of the practice. Oh yes, I could still do it—but not with the zip and vigor I once did.
And then I stumble onto Steve's News Blog.
You may find this hard to believe, but within three weeks of my reading Steve, I knew he was an African American. How? As Louis Armstrong once said to a questioner asking “What is Jazz?”, “If you've gotta ask, you'll never know.” Here was a kindred spirit, a fellow child of Harlem who'd managed to do it.The wit. The bold, informative style. Passion. Professionalism. An almost explosive penchant for justice. Mix in an ability to tie in all of the disciplines he'd acquired into that blog of his. And when I started commenting there, I found that I could do the same thing. What a release that was! In time, a few of my comments were brought up onto the front page, and I wrote frequently enough to where a few people asked to see more. “You should get a blog of your own!”
But I didn't have the time. To write as frequently as Steve did or as well as often, or to do the management things involved in running a blog. So kept up commenting.
And then the big guy got sick last year.
Me, Jen, Jesse, Hubris, Jim, Sara and a host of wonderful folks stepped into the breech to do the best we could in Steve's absence—see-sawing emotionally all the while as his health rose and ebbed. Until he was truly, and sadly gone.
I don't think I can tell you the depth of my despair that Saturday morning when I read the e-mail noting his passing. I ached for the loss of the man. And in days, I ached for the loss of his work.. Most mornings, I'd boot the Mac up and had The News Blog as my home page. I couldn't bear looking at it in that black backdropped post-passing version. Instead, I went back to old e-mails he'd sent me, particularly one around Christmas that still moves me. In it he thanked me for my commentary on his blog, and complimented me on the quality of them as well. He was effusive and heartfelt—something a lot of folks didn't grasp he could be if they'd only read the blog. I missed him even more and basically weaned myself away from the blogoverse (beyond brief sympathy messages in a couple of spots.) and mourned. His funeral came, and I met his family, and Markos, Jane Hamsher, Lindsay at Majikthise, Zuzu, Maha and Liza at CultureKitchen (a place you really should visit often). We eulogized, we talked and we cried. Then cried some more.
And shortly after that, a few of us began talking and figured we'd try to keep a bit of Steve's reader community together...by doing on a permanent basis what we'd been doing since he'd fallen ill in February. A name was chosen, some art created, the techier minds between us built the powerful frame on which the writers would hang the muscle and sinew of writing on, and then, some thirty days later...The Group News Blog was born.
It's been a blur since then, but I will tell you this: Loss is a remarkable thing. I readily admit to the fact that I am an abysmal handler of loss of people I care about. I am hopelessly immature about it. It devastates me...and I know from whence that comes.
When I was eight years old, my best friend “E.” and I were hanging around my dad's restaurant playing after school. It was a Wednesday afternoon, sunny and bright. As my dad ran the place, there were perks, like knowing the secret switch on the jukebox to get free plays. “E” loved Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band's jam “Express Yourself” and I played it for him maybe seven times in a row until I got a dirty look from Daddy's No. 1 waitress that said “Enough.” “E” and I laughed about that. Laughed long and hard that day. He left a little while later with his dad...and that was the last time I saw him alive.
He fell early that evening in the driveway at his dad's meat-packing plant and broke his arm. He just broke his arm. The next day, he went in to have the break reset. He was given anesthesia and evidently got too much of it (This was the early seventies and anesthesiology was nowhere near the science that it is now), and lapsed into a coma which he never awoke from. “E” died that Sunday morning and I. Just. Could. Not. Understand. It.
We were playing the hell out of a jukebox. Firing straws weighted with paper clips into the air—our own ghetto-ass Apollo rockets, and wolfing down cookies fresh off the racked sheets in the restaurant's basement bakery. And now, he was gone.
I went to “E's” funeral the following Wednesday along with a couple hundred classmates. This was before grief counselors, so there was no real prep for what we would see...which was an amazingly placid “E”, looking to all the world as if he were merely asleep. I filed past his casket and stopped for a long while staring at my seemingly somnambulant friend, hoping he would maybe wink, or sneeze—anything that would give me proof of life. Of course, he didn't. And I went home that day and I don't think I spoke to anyone until I was ready for bed and my mother asked me if I'd laid my clothes out for the next day's school. Oh, they tried to talk to me, but...there was nothing I could say.
My friend who I truly loved...was gone and I would never be able to speak to him again.
The finality of that has scarred me ever since. I've lost my father, the man I respected more than anyone on God's green earth when I was twenty-eight years old and a father myself. And while I did not totally, and externally break down for the sake of my family—inside, I was a basket case. I'm in tears writing this about it. Friends, other relatives, a woman I nearly married—all of them gone , and me a wreck every time. I am a Goddamned baby when it comes to loss, here a a few years shy of a half-century's living.
Steve's loss was devastating, too. Because I felt such a bond with him through all the zeroes and ones, and the electrons and bits of cyber this and that. He and I barely had a chance to meet each other, but thank you God, we did, and I'm so glad I got to see him healthy and hearty. I showed him my crazy red “Mogul” custom Mac PowerBook, which he joked about bopping me over the head and filching from me. But our main bond is through the words we shared, tossing them up onto the blank canvas of the blog's front page and the little Haloscan windows. He challenged me mentally every day, and he also challenged my sense of moral justice too with his taking up verbal arms against those who so thoroughly deserved it. But again, he was now gone.
This group of us decided to do something, though. Not necessarily a continuance of “The News Blog”, but a step into a new future for those of us who loved what that place was. And so it began. I didn't really have the time for it that I thought I should have to get anywhere near to the level of or quantity of work Steve was doing back in the day, but I plodded along. Consuming news, and keeping an eye and ear out in the world as I always have, but now with the mindset of bringing that world to readers in an entertaining and informative written form.
It was impossible. Un-doable. Scary. A nightmare. And then...
It wasn't so much.
I couldn't come close to what Steve was doing, but I could at least, even if half-assedly blog a little. That terribly daunting thing I had no time for and not enough focus to devote to, I found that I somehow did. I could sort of do this thing. And Steve's loss is what in effect enabled me to discover that. Oh, I'd seriously considered doing it while he was still with us, and I remember all the well-meaning calls to do my own thing and get the hell out of the comments section. I even nabbed a couple of blog names via Blogger for “that day I would do the damn thing”. But I never did, until Steve got sick and eventually left us.
Loss is a remarkable thing.
For the first time in my life, instead of a loss addling me for an eternity, it was moving me to take a positive action and move forward. That something, is creating what I create here at Group News Blog. And the person I thank for being able to do it, after reading him for the years I did is Steve Gilliard. I soaked it up. From “I'm A Fighting Liberal”, to his historical pieces that described the war in Iraq using the past as prologue and pattern, to his take-no-prisoners local reportage on things like the NY transit strike. He taught me and he didn't even know it. I called myself simply enjoying reading his stuff and I didn't even know I was learning. But learn I did, and what I learned is manifested here today. God-almighty I miss the hell out of him (What he would do with Saturday's Harriet Christian tape—“Harriet Christian's Soldiers” perhaps?) every day, while sometimes checking back to the old mint and buff version of The News Blog first thing in the morning some melancholy mornings, but I'll be damned if his passing on hasn't finally matured me a bit in terms of dealing with loss. There are other people who've moved on whose places I'd gladly switch with him so we could still have him around every day doing his Steve-a-licious thang, but I can't. Fate is what it is. Leave it to Steve to book on up to that great pitch in the sky and in his passing, end up make me a better person. But there's that bugaboo again that haunts me. I can't talk to my friend any more. I can't tell him...“Thank you.”
Well...I can actually. By doing what I do here as many days as I can. This place has unlocked in me a lot of long-blocked potential. I can write every day on politics, sports, food, history, film, television or any damn thing I like that's affecting somebody out here in the world. I can be funny or profane. Mean or caring. Professorial or ghetto-ass grimy. I can do videos, or grind out short scripts, and oh yes...those fun and funky photoshops that accompany the pieces, or are sometimes the pieces themselves. The main thing is to create, dammit. Create and change. Be an artist and be involved—which absolutely played to my family's sense of activism to make the world a bit better. I write here for all these reasons, and these two mentioned before mainly:
“To create a better world, and to better understand the one in which we live
I do it for you. I do it for me. I do it because I'm the kid who read The Times at four, loved Eric Sevareid and Jimmy Breslin at seven, and thrilled when I found out what infinitesimal meant in the dictionary. I do it because I came to love it and because I love the guy who got me to learn to love it all over again—Steve Gilliard.
And I love this country and this world too damn much to not do the things I do relatively well that could possibly make it better.
Thank you, Steve. For bringing me here. For bringing us all here...and kicking us in the ass to do something we never thought we could. That's what truly living life life is all about, isn't it?
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Pain: Pt. 3
Meta Watershed: LOL Weekly Roundup
“Ouch!” (We're still healing...)
Quick update on your intrepid bloggers. And other notes.
LM had his dental surgery Thursday as scheduled.
Lots of ice, rest, taking his meds, watching old comedies, being a good patient.
He's recovering well, if posting a tad too much while still in pain. (And yes, as he pointed out, the Sean Bell verdict came in when it did. So he posted. Still. Take it easy, dammit. You're recovering from fracking surgery. “Doc” has spoken.)
*waves to LM sweetly*
As for me, I met with the pain doc Tuesday as scheduled. I am also recovering, and hope to resume a quarter-normal posting schedule late next week.
We -- my medical team and I -- think we have a fix, but it's been three, increasingly long months. Last month was the worst month I can remember having in, well, a long time. Probably a year and a half, back while I was still not myself quite yet. Pain is rated on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the worst. Each month when you visit the pain doctor, you answer a number of different question sets, in order to draw out a baseline over time.
One of these questions sets is:
What is your current pain level?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
What was your worst pain in the last week?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
What was your least pain in the last week?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
What was your average pain in the last week?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Normally, I average -- this, mind you, even with all the medications I take -- about a 4. We try and keep me in a range where I don't peak above 6, with lows of 0-2 pain; that's a good week (month.) This is normal for me, as much as I have a normal.
Three months ago my minimum pain was 4 with breakthrough pain up to 8. Two months ago I averaged 6 with peaks to 8. Last month I averaged 8 peaking to 10. Everyone who is around me closely, noticed. Bad month. Bad. *smiles*
This month my pain doc and I aren't getting fancy, we're just hitting the pain head on with more of the same drugs already known to work with me. So far, so good. My pain levels are dropping and associated issues are getting back under control.
If all goes well, sometime next week, I'll likely start posting again. Not at my normal pace; taking it easy. Now I'm still waiting to see if the meds really do bring the pain levels all the way back down to normal.
'Cause we sure as hell don't want the pain levels going up to an eleven.
Hmmm... I wrote about that once.
Group News BlogBottom line... If you need time to get well, take it.
“Ooooowww... Fuck!”
Furthermore, the numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven. Most blokes you know, will be torturing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten. Where can you go from there? Where? Nowhere. Exactly. What we do with the Raytheon ray-gun if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? Put it up to eleven. Exactly. One more painful.
There's more...
The rule at GNB is, wellbeing comes first. Period.
All of us at one time or another have taken a break to handle life issues. We love journalism, and we love you, but in order to do any of that, we must take care of ourselves -- and honor our parents, too. (Yes, I did talk with my Mom today, thanks for asking. And thanks again for those wonderful photos from your trip to Tucson. [That was a shout out to a regular whom I'm not going to mention.] But if you take a trip to Tucson, you can score with me by sending photos. I'm just saying I miss Tucson. Still. Always.)
People ask me sometimes, “what is it that makes GNB fundamentally different from other blogs?” Is it that people here are so smart? Or classy? That our men and women are so damn sexy? Our military coverage?
All these help. And yes, we inherited Steve's legacy. But more than all this, it's that at Group News Blog, we are profoundly committed to making sure people are left taken care of, in the interactions they have here. A year ago right now, the heart of who GNB is now was forming, as we worked together to make sure communication stayed in, and that everyone was taken care of, that people remembered to breathe.
You're our people.
We're in our tenth month, and committed to taking care of you.
Thank you for being here. There's more...
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Passing: Arthur C. Clarke
One of Science Fiction's True Masters Passes On
Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died at 90.
The world is poorer today than yesterday.
In a world where millions are born and die daily, as wars and poverty rage on, I morn this artist who along with Heinlein and Asimov, wrote Science Fiction into a golden first age and beyond.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke. photo Fiona Hanson/AP.
Los Angeles TimesMy personal favorite, is his 1953 short story (also the title of a short story collection), The Nine Billion Names of God.
Among his best-known science-fiction novels are "Childhood's End," "Rendezvous With Rama," "Imperial Earth" and, most famously, "2001: A Space Odyssey."
"It's better to be recognized for one thing, especially something of which I'm quite proud, than not to be recognized at all," Clarke told The Times in 1982.
Although he never intended to write a sequel to "2001," he wrote three: "2010: Odyssey Two," "2061: Odyssey Three" and "3001: The Final Odyssey."
Clarke, who was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1986, won innumerable international awards for his fiction and scientific writing.
"Rendezvous with Rama," his 1973 novel about a space probe sent to explore an enormous celestial object speeding through the solar system that turns out to be a mysterious alien spacecraft, was one of Clarke's greatest critical successes. It won the prestigious Nebula, Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, as well as the British Science Fiction Associate Award, the Locus Award and the Jupiter Award.
Clarke was not only known as one of the 20th century's most prolific science-fiction writers but one of the best-grounded scientifically, with a remarkable record of foreseeing future technologies.
Indeed, he was known as "the godfather of the telecommunications satellite."
A radar pioneer in the Royal Air Force during World War II, Clarke wrote a 1945 article in Wireless World magazine in which he outlined a worldwide communications network based on fixed satellites orbiting Earth at an altitude of 22,300 miles -- an orbital area now often referred to as the Clarke Orbit.
Clarke's seminal article, for which he received $40, was published two decades before Syncom II became the world's first communications satellite put into geosynchronous orbit in 1963.
For pioneering the concept of communications satellites, Clarke received a number of honors, including the 1982 Marconi International Fellowship and the Charles A. Lindbergh Award.
Deemed a scientific visionary, Clarke also foretold an array of technological notions in his works such as space stations, moon landings using a mother ship and a landing pod, cellular phones and the Internet.
"Nobody has done more in the way of enlightened prediction," science fiction author Isaac Asimov once wrote.
Clarke died in his beloved Sri Lanka.
Tat Tvam Asi. There's more...
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Passing
William F. Buckley Jr. Dies at 82
The Associated Press has the story.
Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right's post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.
His assistant Linda Bridges said Buckley was found dead by his cook at his home in Stamford, Conn. The cause of death was unknown, but he had been ill with emphysema, she said.
Editor, columnist, novelist, debater, TV talk show star of "Firing Line," harpsichordist, transoceanic sailor and even a good-natured loser in a New York mayor's race, Buckley worked at a daunting pace, taking as little as 20 minutes to write a column for his magazine, the National Review.
Yet on the platform, he was all handsome, reptilian languor, flexing his imposing vocabulary ever so slowly, accenting each point with an arched brow or rolling tongue and savoring an opponent's discomfort with wide-eyed glee.
"I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition," he wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1986. "I asked myself the other day, `Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?' I couldn't think of anyone."
There's more...
William F. Buckley Jr., Hotel Vancouver, Vancouver. 1980s. photo Alex Waterhouse-Hayward.
The progressive blogosphere's Rick Perlstein writes a beautiful obituary.
Blog for Our FutureThe model here is Steve.
Why William F. Buckley Was My Role Model
By Rick Perlstein
William F. Buckley was my friend.
I'm hard on conservatives. I get harder on them just about every day. I call them "con men." I do so without apology. And I cannot deny that William F. Buckley said and did many things over the course of his career that were disgusting as well. I've written about some of them. But this is not the time to go into all that. My friend just passed away at the age of 82. He was a good and decent man. He knew exactly what my politics were about—he knew I was an implacable ideological adversary—yet he offered his friendship to me nonetheless. He did the honor of respecting his ideological adversaries, without covering up the adversarial nature of the relationship in false bonhommie. A remarkable quality, all too rare in an era of the false fetishization of "post-partisanship" and Broderism and go-along-to-get-along. He was friends with those he fought. He fought with friends. These are the highest civic ideals to which an American patriot can aspire.
I first met Bill in 1997. When I contacted his assistant to ask for an interview for a book I was writing about Barry Goldwater, Buckley was immediately accommodating, though I had very little public reputation at the time. He was, simply, generous with people who cared to learn about conservatism. I sat with him for a good half hour in National Review's offices on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, and he answered every damned question I asked, in searching detail, and then answered a few I hadn't even asked. He also opened his papers to me at Yale University without hesitation. Would that all conservatives honored these ideals of intellectual transparency.
When my Goldwater book came out, he was generous in his praise of it—again, acknowledging all the while that we were ideological adversaries.
There's more...
Buckley was an out and out Conservative. He was for conservative ideals. In his time, he was for bombing China, segregation, against the Freedom March on Washington, against African self-government. He was Conservative. Gilliard was Progressive. Gillard's ideas are and were as offensive to a solid third of the country as Buckley's ideas were and are to our third of the country.
No matter how strongly anyone believes their beliefs to be "the truth," any hope for true change, for genuine reconciliation between red and blue America, does not start with attacking the memory of a man who has just died.
With the exception of the Freepers and a few genuinely disgusting people, friends and enemies alike came together to acknowledge Steve Gilliard as a liberal lion. Let people be as unstinting in their praise of William Buckley as people were in their praise of Steven Gilliard. Death is no respecter of politics; she comes for all of us, one death per life.
I didn't agree with William F. Buckley's politics, but I admired his spirit. He was a genuine conservative, a person unafraid to disagree with you politically, without needing to attack you personally, threaten your family, or resort to name-calling or insults.
He was, an old-fashioned gentleman.
Rest well, William F. Buckley Jr. There's more...
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Battlestar Galactica Interview
Concurring Opinions Interviews BSG Creators
Roughly one hour of on-point interview (QuickTime) is available with Ron Moore and David Eick, creators of Battlestar Galactica.
Recommended for BSG fans ONLY. Everyone else, watch BSG first, or this will ruin the series for you. See my comments below.
Concurring OpinionsI think Battlestar is the best program on television today, possibly the best drama I've every personally watched on television. And yes, I include Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The West Wing. Possibly Hill St. Blues was this good, in how it got people to care so deeply about a serialized multi-character single-camera show. But BSG is the culmination of decades of television writing.
We are thrilled to offer readers of Concurring Opinions an interview with Ron Moore and David Eick, creators of the hit television show Battlestar Galactica. Daniel Solove, Deven Desai, and David Hoffman ask the questions. We would like to thank Professor John Ip for suggesting some of the torture questions. Our interview lasts a little over an hour.Our goal was to explore some of the themes of the show in a deeper manner than many traditional interviews. Ron and David graciously agreed to give us an hour of their time, and we had a fascinating conversation with them.
Our interview is structured in three parts. Part I, available in two files (see the end of this post to download), focuses on the issues of legal systems and morality. It examines the lawyers and trials in the show. It also examines how torture is depicted, as well as how the humans must balance civil liberties and security.Part II examines politics and commerce. It explores how the cylon attack affected the humans' political system, and it examines how commerce works in the fleet.
Part III examines issues related to cylons, such as the humans' treatment of cylons, how robots should be treated by the law, how the cylons govern themselves politically. Additionally, Part III explores the religious issues involved in the show.
The show is heavily influenced by modern events, especially terrorism, war, and torture. In a time of emergency, how should we balance security and liberty? How do we deal with enemies who may be burrowed in among us? How does a society decimated in a war reconstitute its political, economic, and legal systems?Battlestar Galactica was honored with a prestigious Peabody Award and twice as an official selection of the American Film Institute top television programs for 2005 and 2006.
PART I-A: LEGAL SYSTEMS
Topics: The legal system, lawyers, trials, and tribunals.
Length: 11 minutes, 51 seconds
File Size: Approximately 11 MBPART I-B: TORTURE, NECESSITY, AND MORALITY
Topics: Torture, necessity vs. moral principles, deference to the military
Length: 18 minutes, 1 second
File Size: Approximately 16.5 MBPART II: POLITICS AND ECONOMY
Topics: Politics and commerce
Length: 13 minutes, 57 seconds
File Size: Approximately 13 MBPART III: CYLONS
Topics: Cylons and humans, cylon rights, cylon society and governance, religion
Length: 16 minutes, 15 seconds
File Size: Approximately 15 MB
There's more...
It really is that good.
One word of caution for those of you whom have not seen Battlestar. I strongly urge you to not:
- read any of the comments for this post, and
- watch any and I do mean any repeats or reruns.
However...
My point is, Battlestar, much more so than most shows, is serial. There are slow builds, character development, arcs, reveals, and surprises which will leave you in tears, anguished, shocked or stunned to your core. Should you watch the series out of order even for one episode in a season (depending on the episode), let alone skip seasons, an enormous part of the enjoyment of the series will be ruined. This is NOT a series to be spoiled for.
People in comments will talk about the series and that's fine. No doubt the creators will talk about the episodes to date, possibly even the final season to come. Go watch the series first, in order. It's worth everything you put into it.
The fourth and final season of Battlestar Galactica starts Friday, April 4, 10 ET/PT.
To Order:
Season 1 (Includes the mini-series)
Season 2.0 (Episodes 1-10)
Season 2.5 (Episodes 11-20)
Season 3 (Coming soon)
Battlestar Galactica: Razor (TV movie from Fall 2007)
h/t The Volokh Conspiracy There's more...
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
WGA Strike: Back to Work
From 236.com. Click for LARGE.
Strike Over. Contract Vote in Progress.
Writers went back to work Wednesday.
Contract vote is next week. It will be approved.
United HollywoodThe writers lost the 1988 strike. Badly.
This was sent [Tuesday] to WGA members from Presidents Verrone and Winship:
To Our Fellow Members:
On Tuesday, members of the Writers Guilds East and West voted by a 92.5% margin to lift the restraining order that was invoked on November 5th. The strike is over.
Writing can resume immediately. If you were employed when the strike began, you should plan to report to work on Wednesday. If you're not employed at an office or other work site, call or e-mail your employer that you are resuming work. If you have been told not to report to work or resume your services, we recommend that you still notify your employer in writing of your availability to do so. Questions concerning return-to-work issues should be directed to the WGAW legal department at 323.782.4521 or the WGAE’s assistant executive director Ann Toback at 212-767-7823.
The decision to begin this strike was not taken lightly and was only made after no other reasonable alternative was possible. We are profoundly aware of the economic loss these fourteen weeks have created not only for our members but so many other colleagues who work in the television and motion picture industries. Nonetheless, with the establishment of the WGA jurisdiction over new media and residual formulas based on distributor’s gross revenue (among other gains) we are confident that the results are a significant achievement not only for ourselves but the entire creative community, now and in the future.
We hope to build upon the extraordinary energy, ingenuity, and solidarity that were generated by your hard work during the strike.
Over the next weeks and months, we will be in touch with you to discuss and develop ways we can use our unprecedented unity to make our two guilds stronger and more effective than ever.
Now that the strike has ended, there remains the vote to ratify the new contract. Ballots and information on the new deal, both pro and con, will be mailed to you shortly. You will be able to return those ballots via mail or at a membership meeting to be held Monday, February 25th, 2008, at times and locations to be determined.
Thank you for making it possible. As ever, we are all in this together.
Best,
Patric M. Verrone
President, WGAW
Michael Winship
President, WGAE
The strike lasted five months.
Eventually with the union splintering, writers going financial core, everyone turning on each other and the studios laughing, the writers gave up. After having shut down production for five full months, the WGA took the same deal offered at month three. With a smidge of change for saving face and not much of a smidge.
That was twenty years ago.
Joan Didion wrote an essay about the 1988 strike for The New Yorker. Explains Los Angeles, the politics, and writers staying out that extra hopeless two months.
'Cause even though this time was about new media -- and it was -- the failure of 1988 was never far from anyone's mind.
Meet the old boss, same as the new boss... Los Angeles Days. There's more...
Sunday, February 10, 2008
WGA Strike: A Tentative Deal
Almost Over.
The graph from last January of falling studio stock prices, shows why.
Writers met Saturday in New York City and Los Angeles to hear the proposal. The New York City membership (WGAE) generally was for lifting the strike. I don't have word yet on Los Angeles (WGAw.)
The Board can a) lift the strike on its own, b) schedule a 48 hour vote, or c) schedule a 10 day vote. I think option b, a 48 hour vote is most politically likely. That puts everyone back to work Wednesday, yet lets everyone be clear it is their choice to take this contract. Which in my view is as it should be, after this much sacrifice and work.
If the writers don't take the deal, most of it will be withdrawn. They will lose all their leverage -- the Academy Awards, Upfronts (selling the fall season), pilot season, hiring for the fall shows -- till June when SAG joins them on the picket lines. That's three more months of walking in circles for nothing, as there is no guarantee they'll get any better deal then.
The writers will take the deal (I say confidently.) Not perfect, but no negotiation is.
United HollywoodHas the strike been worth it?
Letter From The Presidents With Deal Summary
This was sent early this morning to membership. The delay in publishing the deal points, we've learned, was because the companies dragged their feet enshrining some of the final details in an attempt to renege on some of what they had promised. The last-minute fight to keep that from happening took until late last night.
To Our Fellow Members,
We have a tentative deal.
It is an agreement that protects a future in which the Internet becomes the primary means of both content creation and delivery. It creates formulas for revenue-based residuals in new media, provides access to deals and financial data to help us evaluate and enforce those formulas, and establishes the principle that, "When they get paid, we get paid."
Specific terms of the agreement are described in the summary at the following link - http://www.wga.org/contract_07/wga_tent_summary.pdf - and will be further discussed at our Saturday membership meetings on both coasts. At those meetings we will also discuss how we will proceed regarding ratification of this agreement and lifting the restraining order that ends the strike. Details of the Los Angeles meeting can be found at http://www.wga.org/subpage_member.aspx?id=2763.
Less than six months ago, the AMPTP wanted to enact profit-based residuals, defer all Internet compensation in favor of a study, forever eliminate "distributor's gross" valuations, and enforce 39 pages of rollbacks to compensation, pension and health benefits, reacquisition, and separated rights. Today, thanks to three months of physical resolve, determination, and perseverance, we have a contract that includes WGA jurisdiction and separated rights in new media, residuals for Internet reuse, enforcement and auditing tools, expansion of fair market value and distributor's gross language, improvements to other traditional elements of the MBA, and no rollbacks.
Over these three difficult months, we shut down production of nearly all scripted content in TV and film and had a serious impact on the business of our employers in ways they did not expect and were hard pressed to deflect. Nevertheless, an ongoing struggle against seven, multinational media conglomerates, no matter how successful, is exhausting, taking an enormous personal toll on our members and countless others. As such, we believe that continuing to strike now will not bring sufficient gains to outweigh the potential risks and that the time has come to accept this contract and settle the strike.
Much has been achieved, and while this agreement is neither perfect nor perhaps all that we deserve for the countless hours of hard work and sacrifice, our strike has been a success. We activated, engaged, and involved the membership of our Guilds with a solidarity that has never before occurred. We developed a captains system and a communications structure that used the Internet to build bonds within our membership and beyond. We earned the backing of other unions and their members worldwide, the respect of elected leaders and politicians throughout the nation, and the overwhelming support of fans and the general public. Our thanks to all of them, and to the staffs at both Guilds who have worked so long and patiently to help us all.
There is much yet to be done and we intend to use all the techniques and relationships we've developed in this strike to make it happen. We must support our brothers and sisters in SAG who, as their contract expires in less than five months, will be facing many of the same challenges we have just endured. We must further pursue new relationships we have established in Washington and in state and local governments so that we can maintain leverage against the consolidated multinational conglomerates with whom we bargain. We must be vigilant in monitoring the deals that are made in new media so that in the years ahead we can enforce and expand our contract. We must fight to get decent working conditions and benefits for writers of reality TV, animation, and any other genre in which writers do not have a WGA contract.
Most important, however, is to continue to use the new collective power we have generated for our collective benefit. More than ever, now and beyond, we are all in this together.
Best,
Patric M. Verrone
President, WGAW
Michael Winship
President, WGAE
Bet your ass.
The studios tried to steal the internet. Failed.
You did that.
Without massive support from everyone, from readers of blogs, to the ordinary television viewer, to the people at my breakfast diner, from actors and the writers walking around in circles, this could not and would not have happened.
We're all in this together. Good work and congratulations. There's more...
Saturday, February 9, 2008
WGA Strike: LA & NYC Meetings
See all speechless films in High Quality.
Not Over. Don't Believe Rumors. Or Articles.
Here's what you can believe.
There is an proposal.
It is currently being reduced from what was negotiated in the room between the principles -- our three negotiators, and two studio chairman -- to a long-form deal contract, by lawyers.
Their lawyers.
One step, one deal point, one sentence at a time.
As I write this, it should be finishing up. If it isn't... that would be bad.
I'll kick you to an article which says why.
The thing is, there is a negotiated deal. But it doesn't mean anything till it's reduced to a long-form deal in writing, because it's the final form which controls. And the lawyers try and shave off little bits here and there to please their studio bosses.
Which is why the pickets have been SO STRONG all week. To make it clear to the studio bosses whenever the lawyers have gone back to them and said, "The negotiators for the WGA have said, 'this isn't what the deal was' and they won't budge. What should we do?" The studio heads just look outside their window and see 150-200 picketers walking around in circles. Doesn't matter which window, which studio. There are the writers, on fucking strike.
And the order filters back down... "Yeah, that isn't what we negotiated. Quit fucking around and get the damn thing closed."
Today. Saturday. Two big meetings. One in New York City at the Crowne Plaza Hotel at Times Square, 2 PM ET for WGAE. One in Los Angeles at the Shrine Auditorium, 7 PM PT for WGAw. Maps at the links. These are union meetings. Current active members only, photo ID required.
Here is what is going on:
United HollywoodAnd then there's this, by the Dude:
The Strike Captains met at the WGA Theater today and we were allowed to look at the NOT FINISHED Terms Of Agreement. The reason that the Guild has not published them to everyone in the membership is because they ARE NOT FINISHED. In fact, still today the negotiating team has to fight the AMPTP lawyers on drafting legal language that the lawyers keep backsliding on – which sounds like, “Nope, my boss never agreed to that.” Then our leadership shows them their notes from the meeting. They say, “Well, here are our notes,” which contradict – so the leadership has to call up Chernin and Iger – who then have to call their lawyers and tell them to back-off. Then, the music stops and they scramble for chairs.
If the AMPTP lawyers don’t hammer out the legal language tonight in a fair way that was agreed upon by all parties, and get it signed by their CEO bosses by midnight tonight (the agreed upon deadline) then it only hurts the AMPTP and the entire town, because there is no way the leadership will show it to us until it’s finalized. They know too well how slippery these folks are – once you tell your membership this is what it will be – well then the lawyers have no incentive to improve on the legal language.
So, that is why you haven’t seen the terms and deal points yet. However, as soon as the ink is dry – they will be emailed to you both in summary and in longform immediately by your guild (East and West). Hopefully, that will be tonight, or early tomorrow morning. This way they can be studied and discussed before the general assemblies (East and West) tomorrow.
Generally, how is the deal?
Patric Verrone, Michael Winship, David Young, and John Bowman are all recommending the deal. They think it’s a good one – not perfect – but a good solid deal that we would never have gotten if we hadn’t have gone out on strike. They believe we got every last penny on the table. Like in any negotiation, neither side is 100% satisfied. But, on our side there are good gains, and notable gains in the area of New Media.
Okay, so what's going to happen at the Saturday meeting?
Well, if the document is signed and delivered – as it should be – the Negotiating Team will go over the document point by point. They will then outline what the steps moving forward might be:
1. If a majority of the assembly seems happy with the Terms of Agreement, and will likely ratify it – the greater board will take this into consideration when they meet on Sunday. Then, on Sunday they will vote on whether or not to lift the strike, and send everyone back to work on Monday. They will only vote to lift it if they feel that the majority of membership likes the deal and will ratify it. If that's the case – we go back to work on Monday. Meanwhile the traditional 10 day ratification process takes place: everyone receives ballots, sends in their vote, their vote is counted...
2. If at the assembly the feedback from the membership is that they are not happy with the deal and will likely not ratify it, then the board takes that into consideration when they vote on Sunday. If they vote not to lift the strike, we then stay out 10 more days as we ratify the vote. Keep in mind staying out 10 more days would hurt the rest of TV season, the Oscars, next year's pilot season, and the 2009 feature slate. This not only hurts the companies, it also hurts us, and the whole town.
3. If the board does not lift the strike, and we vote the deal down after the 10 day ratification process. Then, the Negotiating Team goes back to the drawing table, and begins negotiating again. This time around though, we’re likely to be out until SAG negotiates in June. An old timer mentioned that that’s the course the membership took in ’88, and they were out for 3 more months and got no notable gains. Our leverage right now is the rest of TV season, the Oscars, pilot season, and the 2009 feature slate - once we pass the point of no return on those we've lost leverage for a good while.
4. The 48 hour ratification process. If on Sunday the board votes not to lift the strike, then they could enact this process. However, this means robocalling, emailing, phoning, and getting in instant contact with every member to let them know that there will be a vote in the next 48 hours. This is called the notification period – not impossible… but not the best option because many numbers and email addresses for members are outdated – and the guild would want an accurate vote of all membership – not just the ones who update their contact information. The 10 day period gives more time for mailed ballots to find their owners. However, if the board decides to go with the 48 hour ratification process, and the majority of membership vote to ratify the terms, then we would likely be back at work on Wednesday.
I hope I’ve answered more questions than I’ve raised. I would suggest coming to the meeting tomorrow with an open mind. I would also highly suggest coming to the meeting tomorrow. It will not only ensure that you have all the information, and that your voice will be heard when the board measures their decision on Sunday, it will also ensure that the board gets a representative idea of where we stand as a membership.
Joss Whedon
Do Not Adjust Your Mindset
This was submitted by WGA and DGA member Joss Whedon.
Dear Writers,
I have good news. I have lots of good news. In fact, I have way too much good news.
The strike is almost over. A resolution is days away. Weeks. Friday. Valentine's day. Two weeks exactly from whenever my manager/agent/lawyer told me. Yes, after talking to writers and actors all over town, I'm happy to report that the strike is going to end every single day until March. Huzzah! All of this entirely reliable information means that at last the dream of the writing community has been realized: the Oscars will be saved.
Let's step back.
The Oscars seem to be the point of focus for a lot of this speculation. That either they must be preserved, or that the studios feel they must be preserved, and therefore this terrible struggle will end. There is an argument to be made for wanting the show to go on: it showcases the artists with whom we are bonded (there's no award for Best Hiding of Net Profits), and it provides employment and revenue for thousands in the community that has been hit so hard by this action. Having said that, it's a f%$#ing awards show. It's a vanity fair. It's a blip. We're fighting (fighting, remember?) for the future of our union, our profession, our art. If that fight carries us through the Holy Night when Oscar was born, that's just too bad.
And the studios? Well, the Oscars provide advertising revenue and a boost for the films that win. But the studios have shown impressive resolve in ignoring short-term losses in order to destroy us. I don't hear any knees knocking in the Ivory Towers over that night of programming. Hey, I wish I did. I wish, like a lot of people, I could hear anything from in there besides that weird clicking sound Predator makes.
I ask you all to remember: the studios caused an industry-wide shutdown. They made a childishly amateurish show of pretending to negotiate, then retreated into their lairs (yes, they have lairs) to starve us out. They emerged just before Christmas to raise our hopes, then left in a premeditated huff. They Force Majoured with gay abandon, cutting deals and 'trimming the fat' (I've met a couple of 'the fat' on the picket lines. Nice guys.) and made every selfish, counter-intuitively destructive move in the Bully's Bible. They met with the DGA and resolved quickly, as expected.
We have been advised to tone down the anti-studio rhetoric now that a deal might be progressing. Our negotiators have the specific task of forgetting the past and dealing only with th