Author: jbenton

In Memory Lane news, ten years ago today I wrote my first newspaper story.
(Of course, if you count my high school newspaper, my “career” goes back a bit further. But the Eclectic [as it was and still is known] was really just a photocopied dork zine, not a real newspaper.)
It was a story for The Yale Herald, my college weekly, about the closing of Conran’s, a furniture store in downtown New Haven’s Chapel Square Mall. It was the first time I’d ever had to actually interview someone.
I wrote about 500 words, managing to squeeze in quotes from six differnet sources. My editor Abbe was shocked — I don’t think she’d ever seen so many sources crammed into a story. (I was nervous and wanted to get everything right. So I kept calling people. Thank heavens that habit went away over time!)
My two talented editors on that piece are now covering Washington state politics for the Associated Press (Rebecca) and clerking for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Abbe).
Here ends this self-indulgent post.

As Margaret mentioned in the comments a couple posts ago, Mark Kozelek is playing solo at the Gypsy Tea Room January 25. While I’d rather see him in a band context than solo (since there’s a greater tendency for abject weepiness when it’s just him and a guitar), I think I’ll go. Lemme know if you’d like to join me.

Holy Toledo, Mister Pants — proprietor of one of the Internet’s most wonderful sites — is back from a year-long hiatus. It’s like The Return of the King. Or something.
Another crabwalk.com music recommendation: Natacha Atlas’ album Ayeshteni. Warning: This is a substantially different recommendation than the sort I usually give here. Atlas is a Belgian-Egyptian belly dancer who plays Eurodance-meets-Arabia booty shakers. Have you ever been in an Indian restaurant and thought: “You know, this awful music they’re playing could be good, if it had substantially better beats and a fat slice of hipness?” That’s sort of what Atlas sounds like. Worth checking out — of particular interest is the cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You.”
Maybe Elliott Smith didn’t kill himself after all. Most surprising item in that autopsy report: Smith had been smack-free for a year.
A question for the runners out there: I’ve been having a heck of a time sleeping lately. Last night at 2:30 a.m. I finally put two and two together — I can’t sleep on the days I run. (Five miles yesterday, thank you very much.) I could understand if I was running at 9 p.m., but yesterday I ran around noon and still couldn’t sleep. Should I be doing something differently? (Particularly since I prefer to run in the evenings.)
Finally, it was a pleasure throwing back a few beverages last night with Mrs. KittySays, an old CDMOM trader pal, and Mr. KittySays, freshly returned from Iraq. The missus just made partner at her law firm — always good to see a sorta fellow Louisianian (even if she is a transplant) goin’ good.

From the History Repeating Dept. (NFC South Division): Growing up in early 1980s Louisiana, New Orleans Saints coach Bum Phillips was our state’s biggest sports hero. “Hero” probably isn’t the right word, since the Saints never had a winning season under ol’ Bum. But they came awfully close (8-8 in 1983 — by Saints standards a miracle), and he gave us fans some degree of hope. Bum was a legend in the making.
I mean, look at the guy. The East Texas jowls, the 743-gallon cowboy hat — he looked like an ornery high school football coach. He was funny, he was country, and he performed pretty well on game day. That’s all you needed to be big time in Louisiana. (He even contributed to the canon of classic football coach one-liners, when he said in admiration of Don Shula: “He can take his’n and beat your’n, then he can take your’n and beat his’n.”)
Still, he eventually got the boot and was replaced in 1986 by Jim Mora, the coach who led the Saints through their golden years, including their first four playoff appearances and their first division title. Mora was a crazy man — he always seemed to be on a cocktail of meth and depressants. He also added a few classics to the quotable-coach canon, including his famous “We couldn’t do diddly poo” tirade and his “Playoffs?!? Playoffs?!?” break-with-reality moment after a tough loss. But he, too, was beloved by Louisianans.
I go through all this to mention the strange coincidence that has just taken place at Atlanta Falcons headquarters. The Falcons — the Saints’ traditional rivals — have just named Jim Mora Jr. as their new head coach. Jim Jr. is, of course, the son of you-know-who. The man he replaces? Interim head coach Wade Phillips, son of Bum Phillips. Eighteen years later, it’s Phillips-to-Mora all over again.

If you’re wondering why posting has been sporadic these last few days, it’s because I’ve discovered if I want to get a lot of writing done, the best thing to do is take my laptop, go to a distant cubicle, and live without Internet access for the work day.
Yes, you heard me — live without Internet access.
Okay, maybe not completely without — I do come back to my desk every 90 minutes or so to check my email. But it’s amazing how much more work I can get done without porn to download er, I mean, important educational research to read online.
In the meantime, if you need to reach me ASAP, try my cell phone.

Wow: Jack Kelley resigns from USA Today over allegations that he’s made up stories.
In some ways, this is a bigger deal to me than the Jayson Blair stuff. Blair just wasn’t very good, whether he was reporting things straight or blowing smoke. But Kelley consistently put out “holy shit” stories that were, without a doubt, the best thing about USA Today. (Yes, even better than the sports section.) He was one of those reporters whose stuff you’d read and think: “Wow, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do that.” (And when you’re an arrogant asshole like me, that’s saying something.) If he’s been making them up, well, that would explain quite a bit.
From Howie Kurtz’s article, it’s unclear to me if Kelley really has been stretching the truth. (Kelley’s got some defenders over at Romenesko.) I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.

Another music recommendation: Ghosts of the Great Highway by Sun Kil Moon.
Sun Kil Moon is the new project of Mark Kozelek, best known as leader of the Red House Painters. I’ve always been a fan of Mark’s, particularly in his early days when he seemed to be moving on a career track parallel to crabwalk.com favorite Mark Eitzel. (Both started out with noisy punk bands in Ohio, then moved to San Francisco and made slow, depressing, but gorgeous music — Mark E. with American Music Club, Mark K. with RHP.) The second Painters album — known as the rollercoaster album because of the cover image and because it’s, confusingly, one of two albums named simply Red House Painters — is an absolute sadcore classic.
Like Eitzel, Kozelek wandered a bit through the late ’90s, releasing work of sporadic brilliance and sporadic crud. RHP has released only one album in the last eight years (2001’s so-so Old Ramon, which was actually recorded back in ’97). He released a couple solo records, notable mostly for their fixation on AC/DC. (One album, What’s Next to the Moon, was composed entirely of AC/DC songs reworked, irony-free, into Leadbelly-style acoustic blues. It’s actually surprisingly good.) He seemed restless and unfocused.
Sun Kil Moon is his new band, and their record is my favorite Kozelek work since the rollercoaster album. It’s not a new sound — it’s very much in the dreamy, languorous RHP tradition — but it is tighter and brighter. Kozelek once relied on slowness to express melancholy, which made even his best work boring and mopey in spots. Here, he uses melody more prominently for the same purpose. Even the (by now obligatory on a Kozelek release) 14-minute track “Duk Koo Kim” never drags. The layers of acoustic guitars evoke half-forgotten memories; it sounds like the soundtrack of a childhood summer, remembered 20 years on.
It’s hard to describe (at least for me), but it’s really very good. Not everyone will love it, since Kozelek is still an acquired taste, but it’s worth a listen.
(Lyrical bonus: No fewer than three four of the songs are about boxing, which may be replacing AC/DC as Kozelek’s current Wimpy Singer-Songwriter Masculinity Overcompensation target. And one track, the opener “Glenn Tipton,” is named for a Judas Priest guitarist and namechecks Jim Nabors.)
(Interband reference bonus: “Krazy Koz,” a song from Mojave 3’s excellent album Excuses for Travellers, is about Kozelek.)
(Film bonus: You may remember Mark from his acting debut, playing the bassist in the band in Almost Famous.)

Three morning links:
This man should be King of England.
A lesson for undergrads facing a 20-page paper: Don’t mess with your margins. Just use Courier instead.
One of the saddest stories I’ve read recently — a 73-year-old man who bought into a Nigerian email scam to the tune of $300,000.

Alas, it appears that Adobe Pagemaker is finally dead. Sniff. My college paper was published entirely on Pagemaker for many years (I think they just switched to Quark a year or two ago), and I spent many collegiate hours futzing around in Pagemaker 3.0 and 4.2. (I’ve still got a pirate copy of 4.2 somewhere on floppy.) I’ve heard Glenn Fleishman, who was one of the paper’s early editors before becoming King of all Things Wifi, tell some great stories about cutting and pasting together Pagemaker printouts on dorm room floors at 5 a.m. before going to press.
I think someone should write a book-length ode to Pagemaker, arguably the single most revolutionary computer application ever written (yeah, Mosaic would probably edge it out, but it’s close). It democratized publishing and access to the media in a way few technologies had since Gutenberg. It’s no coincidence that the Herald was founded in February 1986, only seven months after Pagemaker 1.0 was released. And I know the Herald was far from the only one. Credit for making those sort of small-scale publications possible really goes to Apple and Pagemaker.
The Pagemaker portion of that credit goes to many people, of course, but the organizing force behind it all was Paul Brainerd. He was a newspaper reporter who thought the young Mac would make a good platform for publishing. Read that last link for a good summary of Pagemaker’s early days and Brainerd’s ideas. As one person puts it on that page:
“PageMaker was the app the Mac had been waiting for to give customers a reason to buy it. Without desktop publishing, the Mac probably would have followed the Lisa into oblivion and Bill Gates would have nothing to copy and we’d still be typing in at the C prompt. In a fundamental way, Paul Brainerd saved the universe.”
After selling his company (Aldus) to Adobe in 1994, he focused his energies on The Brainerd Foundation, whose goal is protecting the environment of the Pacific Northwest. He’s also the founder of IslandWood, an outdoor learning center for Seattle-area kids, and Social Venture Partners, a group that uses a venture capital model to link up worthy causes with philanthropists.
I know Pagemaker fell out of favor with professionals a long time ago, first to Quark and more recently to InDesign (my layout program of choice). But here’s a tip of the hat to the late great Pagemaker, the revolutionary. Perhaps Steve Jobs, when he talks about the upcoming 20th anniversary of the Macintosh at his MacWorldSF keynote tomorrow, should heap some praise on the program most responsible for his company’s success.

How ’bout them Tigers! Geaux LSU!
LSU’s defense was just tremendous (at least until tiring in the fourth). They made the Sooner offensive machine look silly. I mean, to hold the top-scoring team in the nation to 137 yards? To hold the Heisman Trophy winner to 13-of-37 passing, 104 yards, no TDs and two picks? Truly an inspiring performance.
Plus, I can take special pride from the fact this national championship is truly a Louisiana production. Unlike Oklahoma, which picks and chooses its talent from across the country, LSU’s roster is home grown. The OU roster has only 42 Oklahoma natives on it; LSU’s has 89 Louisianans.