The New Journalism

I’ve wanted to have a weekly column since I was in my late teens. Now, of course, anyone can have one.

Your own free blog through, ahem, WordPress. A self-written Substack of your own fact-based or fictional stuff with a minimum paywall. Or an ongoing spot on an existing website which you contribute to for nothing or for which you are very, very, VERY seriously underpaid.

I’m not sure if a continuing stream of your own TikTok videos or Instagram posts counts as your own column but in the world of 21^st century “journalism” I suppose it has to. I don’t say this as begrudgingly as it sounds because I occasionally watch them and find some of them amusing. But, yikes, there is sooooooooooo much stream of consciousness stuff by nitwits or morons or fringe characters looking to insight anger, an argument or a riot by any rational human being.

Much like our current POTUS.

Except he does it live from the White House and it gets picked up by not only every social media platform, but all the major networks and newspaper outlets. It might not cost us money to watch them, but rest assured we pay.

As his exorbitant tariff plan for pretty much every country went into effect last week (Note: 25-125% for foreign goods, which is pretty much most of everything the way manufacturing works in the modern era), he caused the stock market to crash by almost 20% (Note: Dropping our worth by $6 trillion), only to then bounce back to three-quarters its worth, and then go back down again – only to partially recover once more – but not before it shook up the bond market.

No, I didn’t know what that meant either. Though after some basic reading (Note: Imagine that!) I learned it meant that big world investors, who often dump their excess money in things like the sure thing treasury bonds of the United States for safe keeping, were spooked. Meaning the international financial world no longer sees the U.S. as stable – aka a sure bet for almost a century – which in turn means any real faith the rest of the world economy has in us as a reliable “safe place” in the future is cratering. Fast.

The Great Orange One vamped that this was all his plan all along to the TV cameras and in front of preening White House aides and hand-picked members of the press, and that he only modified because a few naysayers began to get “yippy.”

Yippy? #CallingDrMarty

Even though when he announced the deal he said he’d never modify it.

Of course, we have all of this on tape from a few days ago but that was forgotten as quickly as yesterday’s Truth Social post and replaced with talk about being “nimble.” And, in the next few days, by messaging from his minions, who kept repeating “the art of the deal, the art of the deal,” “the art of the deal.”

The messaging was supposed to bolster his expertise on dealmaking by using the 1980s bestseller he supposedly authored. But everyone except his voters seem to know journalist Tony Schwartz famously wrote The Art of the Deal AND coined the phrase, figuring out a way to package the Orange One’s tangents into something vaguely coherent. Not only did Trump never pen a word of it but Schwartz has publicly stated numerous times that he isn’t to this day convinced that he’s ever read it.

Speaking of reliving the past, the Oval Office talk continued for what seemed like forever with a series of softball questions and rambling word salad answers where he went on to wax nostalgic on his first presidency, claiming the stock market was at an all-time high when he left in 2020 and the country was in the best shape it’s ever been.

Except, well, I was there and so were you.

And I don’t know about you, but my 401K was way, way, waaaay down, and the country was still reeling and masked (Note: Okay, we in the blue states were) from Covid.

Again, I know because I was there and so were you….

Thousands of people were dead in its wake, many more businesses were bankrupted and Trump himself came close to death, likely due to his refusal to wear a mask. And then the uniquely-rare treatment he was given of monoclonal antibodies. (Note: The treatment was approved for him by Dr. Peter Stein, the director of New Drugs at the FDA, who the DOGE bros just fired).

Yes, Covid happened. This isn’t a senior citizen golf tournament where you ask for and receive a gimme because you own the course.

And yes, I’m a partisan, but facts, real facts, don’t lie.

The only time facts lie are when they are alternative facts.

In other words, lies.

Lies go unchallenged in the zeitgeist these days because there is little real journalism that is read by a majority of voters in the country. Sure, there is lots to be read, and watched, and listened to. But it’s become niche. Networks for niche political points of view. Some real newspapers but they were years ago branded as “fake news” by the Orange One and, in turn, by MAGA voters.

So mostly it’s HIS word. And, if rating numbers and polls of MAGA voters are to believed, it’s far, far right (Note: Formerly fringe) podcasts and blogs and social media posts. Many non-factual and often written by conspiracy theorists like Laura Loomer, a 9/11 truther who now advises and travels with the president and recently recommended the firing of several key and accomplished members of his National Security Council because of disloyalties she imagines in her mind.

Let’s not even get started with the guy who runs the Health and Human Services Department that finds vaccines suspect. After two young children died of measles in Texas, he went on Fox News and touted medically unproven alternate treatments by two doctors he called “extraordinary healers” , one of whom was seen on a news report in his own Texas clinic treating a child when he himself was recovering from full blown measles, acknowledging the remaining measles spots on his head to an offscreen reporter, and confessing he was “achy” yesterday but today was just a bit tired.

Now I take vitamins and believe in free speech as much as the next American – and these days likely more so. But with our niche media landscape, when anyone can be widely read or widely seen, we are in the midst of a real catastrophe. See, here’s the real problem for me:

I grew up reading people like Jimmy Breslin, Nora Ephron and Fran Lebowitz in publications like the Daily News, New York Magazine and Andy Warhol’s Interview and there was a personal nature to their writing that hooked me. Breslin covered politics and related human interest stories. Ephron talked about social issues, entertainment, food and behind-the-scenes power struggles. Fran Lebowitz would mostly give humorously snide opinions on pretty much anything and anyone.

They were all columnists but they all also wrote best-selling books that were considered a type of new journalism that was opinion-based but, at its root, relied on F.A.C.T.S.

Love them or hate them these were learned people. I don’t even mean they were all college graduates. I mean they were smart and savvy and thoughtful. Meaning they did research, spoke to people, observed all kinds of things, gathered facts from all corners and then filtered it all through their own point of view. It might have been opinion but it was informed opinion. Not made up sh-t looking for a result.

I loved the 1970s – the writing, the singer-songwriters (Note: Long live Carole King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Cat Stevens and all the people I’m leaving out), even the fashion (Note: I soo miss my platforms shoes!).

But it wasn’t all great. Far from it.

In the first half we had Richard Nixon and his group of corrupt clowns lying and cheating their way through the White House. When he was running for the presidency, Nixon went behind the scenes and derailed a pending peace deal in Vietnam brokered by a Democratic president, promising them they’d soon get something better from him if they backed off since he was likely to soon get elected to the presidency (Note: The latter especially if they backed off and didn’t give the Democrats a deal. Which they did.)

This cost the lives of thousands of young American men, not to mention national and international respect once the facts of the Watergate break-in and the various lies told to protect him, and by him, finally surfaced.

And they only surfaced because the independently owned Washington Post – and two reporters they employed named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – doggedly reported on the corruption for years, with the stoic solid backing of the place that published the vetted, fact-based stories – at the time deemed treasonous by the far right – they were writing.

Amazon’s billionaire Jeff Bezos now owns The Washington Post. He might still be reporting news but after meeting with Trump and publicly contributing $1,000,000 to his inauguration fund, he’s not looking for the next Woodward and Bernstein. Meaning what? He soft caters to him, already changing his plaything’s, I mean paper’s, editorial page to reflect a “healthy diversity of opinion and argument” that precipitated the loss of many of its most prestigious lead editors and columnists who value the latter more than anything. Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Instagram and Facebook, made a similar contribution and analogous pronouncements – e.g. ending “fact-checking” – that reflects the same point of view. We won’t even discuss the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk, it’s conversion to “X” and his conversion to a chain-saw wielding, Nazi saluting cheesehead.

I could go on.

But suffice it to say, none of them have any interest in Breslin, Ephron, Lebowitz or anyone else of their ilk or pedigree.

What they seem preoccupied with is personal power and prosperity through any means necessary. The freedom to do what they want, when they want and to whomever they want. Unchecked and untethered.

Much like everyone else who continues to turn away from the obvious facts that are unfolding in our nation’s Capital right before our eyes.

Not to mention the man behind the MAGA curtain who’s supposedly running the whole show.

But please, pay no real attention to him.

Bob Dylan – “Blowin’ in the Wind”

12.08.24

by notesfromachair

A Complete Unknown

I was nowhere close to voting age through the entirety of the sixties but even then it never struck me as a simple time.

My earliest memory of politics was sitting on my Dad’s shoulders in a crowd so I could see about-to-be Pres. John F. Kennedy when he campaigned in the Bronx, and later hearing about the issue of the “Negro.” That was followed by the assassination of our youngest president, bloody images from the Vietnam War on TV, and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. By the time the seventies rolled around I was anxious daily and secretly terrified on the worst of those days.

Imagine having anxiety and fear and wearing this? #darktimes

Until I grew up and went into therapy.

That’s why it’s been strange to lately look back on the sixties with such longing nostalgia. This is likely because despite all the turmoil, the counter culture youth movement offered mantras of peace, love and hope if WE managed to bring the world together. It never occurred to me in my late teens that things wouldn’t work out, especially after we, and many others, got Nixon to resign and the world to “sort of” move on.

At that time I didn’t realize history was, indeed, cyclical, and likely all those terrifying occurrences would occur again, albeit in different forms.

Given this perspective, it was still surprising for me to have found comfort in the new, “sort of” Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, and how masterfully Timothee Chalamet captured not only the “original vagabond” (as his onetime girlfriend, Joan Baez, once referred to him in song), but the unflinching spirit and infinite possibilities of change the music of those times, led by Dylan, offered.

Not only does he play Dylan but he offers an uncanny spiritual interpretation of the essence of Dylan and those times. The film is wisely set over only five years (1960-1965), beginning at the moment a 20-year-old Dylan arrives as a committed, near obsessive singer-songwriter in Greenwich Village who can barely contain his expression of those times through the poetry of his words, guitar chords and embrace of multi-cultural musical history. By the end of that period, it makes perfect sense that it was the unrelenting creative observations of an unknown kid in his early and now barely mid-twenties to not only move the music industry and the world towards evolution – but to take a cold look at reality and join everyone together for some sort of better tomorrow.

Religions have been started with more. Or, so they like to say.

Quickly putting Timothee prayer candle on my Christmas list

But back to the sixties —

Perhaps in a world where you actually had to put a dime in some available phone booth to make a call, or better yet simply show up on someone’s stoop to hang out, it was a little easier for singer-songwriters to create an endless series of anthems that spirited a movement of social change. Yet what saves A Complete Unknown from being some sort of Hollywood fairy tale of social revolution is that Dylan’s self-expression was merely that, something he never meant to shove him to the forefront of a “cause,” especially as a young guy. In this telling, which seems close to the reality and not the elusive enigma of the Dylanesque legend, all he really seems interested in is music and girls.

Sure, he wanted to be recognized but not as the hot tip of the spear of societal transformation with so much of the controversy, politics and love/hate of power brokers and ardent, often crazy, admirers that came with it. He had no idea how to handle it and retreated within.

Chalamet’s performance is reminiscent of what Joaquin Phoenix did on film with Johnny Cash in Walk the Line and how Sissy Spacek so uncannily brought to life Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter. The closest to it I’ve ever seen onstage was how completely Hugh Jackman conjured up the spirit of gay cabaret, and later Broadway star-songwriter, Peter Allen in The Boy From Oz. Not only did they all do their own singing but they didn’t get hamstrung by trying to be an exact carbon copy of the phenom they were portraying. Instead, they found the essence of who they were and evoked their humanity.

What’s particularly great about Chalamet’s Dylan is it’s a guy with a lot of emotional flaws, someone who excels at expressing himself in words and music but is often inarticulate, withholding or simply, and even perhaps purposefully, falling short in person. He feels like a lot of young guys in their twenties who exist too much inside their heads and are not sure exactly how to live. Were it not for his talents and a desire to get laid that sometimes pushes him out of his comfort zone, you’d likely pass him by in the street. Which is exactly what you want from an actor taking on the task of playing a legend.

He’s helped a ton by director/co-writer James Mangold, who does not fall into the “cutesy sixties” trap of filmmaking but simply presents the time period as he would any decade – blunt, historical accuracy (Note: Mostly) and without over-reverence. There are a few stylized newspaper headlines and some edited television coverage but they’re minimal and don’t take over. The atmosphere on the Manhattan streets, the clothes people are wearing and the stoops they sit on reminded me of the ones I experienced as a little boy. I also appreciated that much of the New Yawk accents were kept in check. (Note: Seriously, so many of us did NOT TAWK like there was a “w” in every other word. Not that there is anything wrong with that…).

Three final points.

At a talkback after the movie, Mangold related that despite recording all the music beforehand in a studio, he honored Chalamet’s request the first week of filming to try and do his own singing live on set in his first scene. It was so good he allowed him to do so on every song, which led to all of the other actors in the film choosing to do the same. It shows and far exceeds anything you’d get with pre-recorded tracks.

If he nails the harmonica, give him the Oscar

The project was originally at HBO with a different script, got put into turnaround and was picked up by Fox Searchlight. At which point Mangold agreed to do it but only if he could rewrite the screenplay and include more of Dylan’s personal life. They didn’t have those rights but like most savvy people in the industry Mangold did it anyway and hoped for the best. The studio read it, liked it but was terrified of Dylan’s reaction. At which point, Covid happened, the world was put on hold, Dylan asked to read the script everyone was “afraid” of and wound up really liking it, when shooting was postponed once again due to almost a year of various Hollywood union strikes. Yet through the months and years, the many accomplished actors and department heads, working for far less than their usual salaries, agreed to stay on, supporting the notion that “if you build it well and build it properly they WILL come. ” And in some cases stay with you. Even in 2023 and 2024.

Finally: I imagine through the holidays and in awards season, there will be any number of showy, gritty, intense, timely, torturous and generally over-the-top meaningful films that will get written about, lauded and garner the lion’s share of the attention. But none for me, and I bet any number of you, will be as evocative as A Complete Unknown. It’s a reminder of a still troubled but very different America. A time when lots of stuff was wrong, scary and hard but the music of people who cared was actually listened to en-masse and helped lead a thinking revolution that was not seen as corny, quaint or UN-American by most of us. In fact, it was exactly the opposite.

“A Complete Unknown” – Timothee Chamalet and Co.

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: the 1970s

The New Journalism

A Complete Unknown