crabwalk

levy mwanawasa dies

The president of Zambia, Levy Mwanawasa, has died, almost two months after a minor stroke that led to complications. Death, of course, being a particularly serious complication.

Now, I don't pretend to have more than a cursory knowledge of Zambian politics. (I spent six weeks reporting there in 2003, a time when I would have rated my knowledge of Zambian politics ever so slightly higher than "cursory." What's next highest, "perfunctory"?) But Mwanawasa struck me as one of the good guys in southern African politics. He seemed to make a serious effort to fight corruption within his government. The Zambian economy certainly improved during his time in office, although that's much more the result of Chinese demand for copper than anything he did. And Mwanawasa was the first and for a long time only African leader who was willing to openly criticize Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

(Mugabe, of course, could not pass up the opportunity Mwanawasa's stroke provided to be a dick.)

Here's a blog post I wrote in 2003 about my trying to get an interview with Mwanawasa.

cosloy youth

Ah, the days of desktop publishing on the Mac SE, when New York (top right) was the classiest font available!

Just stumbled upon this two-year-old blog post about Cosloy Youth, which was apparently a late-1980s Houston-based zine cum homage to Gerard Cosloy. (Not to mention a homage to a certain guitar band.) Cosloy would later become known as half of the team that runs NYC indie label Matador Records, but back then he was best known as the producer of his own zine Conflict.

I was born slightly too late and significantly too uncool to really get into zines at their peak; by the time I exited small-town orbit and headed to college in 1993, the scene were already starting to trail off. But I remember one of my first acts of potential college coolness was writing off for a Matador catalog -- which back then meant sending a physical letter into the city and getting in return a smudgy xerox with every Matador release listed in dot-matrix glory -- and mail-ordering a couple back issues of Conflict in the bargain. (I'd gotten the Matador address from the back of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's Extra Width, which I think was the first non-classic-rock CD I ever bought. Spencer namechecks Cosloy in at least one JSBX song, but I can't for the life of me remember which one.)

1993 was the start of Matador's hey-day: Teenage Fanclub, Mark Eitzel (on a 7" I couldn't order because I didn't have a turntable), Toiling Midgets (hey, they were good!), Superchunk, a little band called Pavement, and a one-octave singer named Liz Phair with an album called Exile in Guyville.

I mention this only because that 1990s music/zine scene has been making feel old lately. I've given two talks to journalism classes the past couple of weeks, and each time I tried to describe how the distribution of news and information was so different when they were still in the womb, before the web. It's hard for them to grasp, just as a horse-and-buggy world will never be much more than an abstraction to me. Both times I mentioned zines, which are a pretty direct precursor to blogs and self-publishing online. I got blank stares both times. (I decided right then not to continue with my Factsheet Five-as-early-Google metaphor.)

The other bulletin of my creeping senescence came at a couple shows earlier this summer at T.T. the Bear's in Central Square. If you've spent any time going to shows in Boston, you know T.T. the Bear's is a third-tier venue -- for acts not big enough to fill, say, the Paradise or the Middle East. Within a week or two, I saw Sloan and Eef Barzelay. It's been a few years since either act reached their commercial peak, and neither one was particularly Himalayan; Sloan got its biggest buzz around '94, while Eef's former band Clem Snide had a very small boomlet around '01. I loved them both -- still do. And both are actually still doing really strong work; there's a lot of good stuff on Eef's new record, and after a seven-year run from quality, Sloan's last two albums have been really good.

But both ruefully noted in their stage banter that this was not their first time playing T.T. the Bear's. Sloan's Chris Murphy said they had played there the night Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993, back when they were a bunch of young scrappy comers on the way up, not 40-somethings who don't seem to have enjoyed each other's company for the past decade or so. And Eef mentioned his second gig ever had been at T.T. the Bear's opening for the Gin Blossoms, around the same time. ("They were assholes," he told the maybe 30 of us in attendance.) The two shows each had a completing-the-circle feel, but not in a healthy, holistic way. More in a I've-been-doing-this-almost-20-years-and-I'm-still-playing-T.T-the-fucking-Bear's way.

Random things found while typing this up:

-- The Ray who helped run Cosloy Youth is this Ray Shea, whose web site features a prominent statement endorsing crawfish fat. I like Ray already.

-- A piece from and about '90s culture (referencing Cosloy) by a young Ana Marie Cox, who would later find glory at Suck.com and fame as the original Wonkette.

-- MP3s of a soundboard recording of Sloan at a festival in Vermont in 1992. (Also Codeine, Come, Beat Happening, Six Finger Satellite, Eric's Trip, Giant Sand, and Barbara Manning, among others.)

-- Cosloy is still co-president of Matador, but he (oddly!) now writes a frickin' sports blog. Here's an interview from 1999 in which he kinda sounds like a dick. Here's a post by Will Leitch where Cosloy sounds a little more like a dick. But hey, one Slanted and Enchanted gives you a lot of dickishness leeway.

-- Mike Gunderloy, the founder of Factsheet Five, now writes books about Visual C# programming and is available for hire for your Rails development needs.

be my assistant

Have you ever awoken from a dream about me and thought: Man. I would sure love to work alongside that guy on an important project. One that could affect humanity as we know it today. Or at least one that would pay me a salary and give me kick-ass vacation benefits. And a Harvard library card!

Today is your lucky day! Recently posted on JournalismJobs.com is the job of assistant director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University. (The director = me.)

So if you're a talented journalist and you get the Internet at a deep, cellular -- maybe even mitochondrial -- level, I'd love to see your application. See the ad for the link to the official Harvard jobs site.

mr. rogers breakdancing

Jesus, two months without posting? I should have my blogging Original Gangsta card revoked for that. It's amazing how much Twitter saps away one's blogging impetus. (I'm still twittering with semi-wild abandon.)

To make up for my absence, I offer two things: (a) a promise to do better, and (b) Mr. Rogers breakdancing.

the white night riots

An interesting first-person account of the White Night Riots in San Francisco in 1979. That was the largely gay/lesbian riot in response to the verdict in the Dan White case, he being the assassin of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and gay city supervisor Harvey Milk.

(Speaking of which, what a bizarre 10-day stretch that must have been in San Francisco in November 1978 -- first, the Jonestown massacre (which involved a San Francisco cult and the murder of a San Francisco congressman), then the mayor gets murdered in city hall.)

White got only a seven-year sentence for the murders -- in large part, many believed, because the jury thought that killing a gay man was basically not that big a deal. (There was also the famous "Twinkie defense" to contend with.)

The most interesting part of the first-person account is the series of videos from TV coverage of the Moscone-Milk murders. They're all interesting, but these stand out to me:

-- NBC national coverage of the murders. Notice how there is no mention of Milk being gay until the very end of the clip (which cuts off). It's understandable that the focus was on Moscone -- he was the mayor, after all -- but if anything it's Milk's death and his status as gay martyr that is remembered more today. Listen to the pronunciation of "homosexual," too. Another era.

-- Then there's this big of video from local TV of the gay pride parade that followed the White verdict. You'll see Robin Tyler, who was the named plaintiff in the case that just legalized gay marriage in California. There's also the odd tactic of giving almost two minutes of airtime to a guy straight out of central casting -- a boxer named Mick Kowalski, for heaven's sake, who goes on about how gays are the downfall of American civilization.

Kowalski on his two-year-old son, now being raised by his lesbian wife: "I'd rather have him have an attitude, be senile, stupid, and make trouble, like the real...I dunno." Reporter: "Than what?" Kowalski: "Than be a sissy, you know?"

cajun diseases

So my always-bet-on-the-Cajun-jockey horse-betting strategy seemed to have failed at the Belmont, where Kent Desormeaux had his Triple Crown dreams quashed by Big Brown. Sorry if I lost you money.

ESPN did this piece on Kent's kid Jacob, who has a genetic disease that made him deaf at birth and will most likely leave him blind by his early 20s. But the piece doesn't go into detail about the disease, Usher syndrome.

Usher is one of a handful of genetic disorders unusually common among Cajuns; the others are Tay-Sachs, Charcot-Marie-Tooth, and Friedreich's ataxia. Since all Cajuns are descended at least in part from around 6,000 Acadian exiles from Nova Scotia in the 1700s, a few mutations about 10 generations ago and led to their bizarre frequency among Cajuns. Oddly, Tay-Sachs (usually thought of as a disease for Ashkenazi Jews) is also common among some French-speaking Quebecois communities, but Cajuns have the same mutation as the Jews, not the same as their Francophone cousins.

More about the Cajun diseases here and here and here and here (warning: music at that last link).

yale expands

I probably shouldn't be too pro-Yale here, considering I am about to enter the formal employ of Harvard, but bravo to my alma mater for expanding its undergraduate population by about 16 percent and adding two new residential colleges to its current twelve.

It's one of the unfortunate realities of higher education that, while the number of Ivy-qualified applicants has soared, and the scale of economic resources to those universities has skyrocketed, the number of spots available in each year's freshman class has remained largely constant. (Here, I'm using "Ivy" in the broad sense, including the Stanfords, MITs, Cal Techs, et cetera.)

When I applied to Yale in 1993, 22 percent of applicants were accepted. This past year, it was around eight percent. In 1993, Yale had an endowment of around $3 billion. Now it's over $22 billion.

I'm all for Yale having more money. (Its money manager, David Swensen is a longtime crabwalk.com fave.) But if its mission is the education of talented people -- or, more broadly, the advancement of human knowledge -- why not use some of that mad cash on giving more people access to a Yale education, instead of happily becoming an ever more exclusive club year after year?

There are a host of culprits for the institutional resistance to expand, but high on the list is the damnable U.S. News ranking of top schools that comes out each year. Among the mathematical factors those rankings ding schools for are acceptance rate, average SAT/ACT scores, and average spending per pupil. Each of those is negatively affected by expansion; schools interested in maximizing their U.S. News ranking are encouraged to stay small and exclusive. It's another reason I give Yale credit for expanding -- they'll probably be penalized for it in the public arena.

Harvard, of course, has the only endowment larger than Yale's, at around $40 billion, and while it certainly has expanded in myriad ways over the years, its undergraduate population has been essentially stable over the past few decades. (Starting a couple weeks from now, that endowment will be paying my salary, so I should probably keep quiet.) Its impressive (and still newish) president Drew Faust used her commencement speech last week to defend its epic scale, particularly from those who want to tax it.

Brad DeLong, himself a Harvard grad, had some interesting thoughts on the matter a few weeks ago. And I do have to endorse his concluding thoughts on "[t]he question of how Harvard should expand if indeed it should expand: it doesn't seem to be nearly as good as the small liberal arts colleges or even its rivals Yale and Princeton at undergraduate education."

moving to boston

As careful readers know, I've been away from Dallas since August on a Nieman Fellowship. It's a one-year sinecure for journalists to step outside their newsrooms and take advantage of all the resources at Harvard -- courses in any of its schools, the (estimating now) 3,000 lectures around campus every day, the brilliant professors, the cultural facilities, anything. It's a good gig.

More importantly, we get to take advantage of our fellow fellows -- 28 brilliant journalists from top news organizations all around the world. Amazing people all; after spending 10 months drinking cheap red wine with them, I'm proud to call them all friends. A few hours ago, we had our little graduation ceremony and got our little certificates from Drew Faust. We looked a bit like six-year-olds stepping out of kindergarten. (The metaphor is imperfect, since first grade isn't a dying industry.)

Soon -- some in a few days, some in a few months -- we fellows will be heading back into the real world. For Nieman Fellows a decade ago, "the real world" would have meant returning to their old jobs. But of the 15 American fellows in my class, barely half will be returning to the news organization they applied for the fellowship from. In some cases, that's their own choice; in others, it's the recent brutality of our business, where layoffs and buyouts and cutbacks have turned journalism depressing. Romenesko, formerly the news world's gossip column, lately feels more like its obit page. Newspapers are in a world of pain -- not because their journalists have lost their skill or because people don't want to read their work, but because the Internet has broken the business model that supported them for decades.

I love newspapers. There's no environment in the world better than a newsroom when a big story breaks -- the electricity, the frenzy, the communion of smart people asking questions and righting wrongs and sifting out the truth. Without newspapers, who do most of the real reporting in the news business, you'd know an awful lot less about your government, your city, and your world than you do. For decades they have funded the investigations and the beat reporting that have made America a better place to live.

But I also love the thing that is killing newspapers. It's almost impossible to overstate the influence the Internet has had on my life. When I was a small-town kid in south Louisiana, starved for information about the world beyond the bayou, the idea of a machine that gives you access to every piece of information in the world would have seemed utopian. I got online via BBS in 1990, built my first web page in 1994, and started my first blog (on Blogger, where I was user no. 2,246) in 1999. I read 600-plus RSS feeds nearly every day, and the vast majority are produced by people who aren't paid a dime. Whenever I hear a journalist bad-mouth Wikipedia or bloggers or Craigslist or the intelligence of the hoi polloi, I get mad and defend their honor.

I love the Internet. How ironic then, that one of my loves is killing the other. And there's another irony, this one personal: I've kept my two loves separate. I tried to keep my blogging secret from my employer for years; I was never "the web guy" at my newspaper. I was an enthusiast for both sides, but never the twain did meet. Neither side seemed to understand the other, and it seemed like too much bother to try to play translator.

This is all preamble to an announcement. I won't be going back to my old employer, The Dallas Morning News. It's still a terrific newspaper; they've been great to me over the past eight years. But I think I can be of more service to journalism elsewhere -- and try to break through the ironies of my life in the meantime.

Starting July 1, I'll be the founding director of something altogether new called the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard. (The name, like everything else about it, is very much in beta.) It's the Nieman Foundation's attempt to help the journalism business figure out its future. How do reporters use the tools the Internet provides to improve their journalism? How do newsrooms have to change their values, their mindsets, and their procedures to adapt to the new era? And, maybe most important of all, can anyone make a decent living doing good journalism? We'll be asking -- and, hopefully, possibly, maybe, helping to answer -- big questions like that. We've got some great partners, and I hope we can do good work.

Much more to come as the weeks and months go by. I'm sad to be leaving the DMN and Dallas. But I'm excited about the chance to do interesting work that has the potential for a big impact.

cajun jockeys

Wow, a month without posts. I've gone incommunicado on a number of fronts, for which I apologize. All to be explained eventually.

In the meantime, horse racing! As the one reader who has ever accompanied me to the races knows, I have a singular betting strategy: Always bet on the horse with the Cajun jockey. The contemporary art of jockeying is basically in the hands of Latinos and Cajuns, and being a Cajun myself, my rooting interests lie in that direction.

And the best part is: It works! The Kentucky Derby couple weeks ago: won by Kent Desormeaux, from Maurice, La. Last year's Derby: won by Calvin Borel, from St. Martinville, La.

Saturday is the Preakness, and your Cajun options include Desormeaux again (on the favorite Big Brown), Jamie Theriot on Kentucky Bear, and Robby Albarado on Racecar Rhapsody. (Note to the discerning race-better: Julien Leparoux, despite what would appear to be a very Cajun name, is not Cajun. He's just French. Bet accordingly.)

Combine those guys with the Chicago Cubs' all-Cajun middle infield (Ryan Theriot and Mike Fontenot) and the return from injury of Panthers QB Jake Delhomme and the Cajun sports year is looking pretty bright.

a cool million

I'm all for saving money, but stories like this one in today's NYT always get my proverbial goat. It's a review of two books, one of which emphasizes that saving one million dollars by the time you retire is officially not enough.

"Indeed, writing that you need at least a seven-figure nest egg is perhaps the biggest contribution that Michael K. Farr makes in A Million Is Not Enough," the reviewer writes.

Ugh. That reminds me of the people who say you just can't live in New York City on less than $150K a year. You want to shake them and say: "Gee -- don't about six million people do exactly that?"

A few facts for those who live outside Manhattan:

-- The median household net worth in America is about $55,000. That number is, if you hadn't noticed, substantially less than $1 million.

-- Even for people about to retire (the 55-64 age bracket), the median is $112,000. (See here.)

-- If you remove home equity -- which is probably fair, since retirees can't eat their guest bedroom -- median net worth for families nearing retirement is just $32,000.

On one hand, those numbers are a bit scary, and they're an excellent reminder that it is important to save, invest, et cetera at a young age. But on the other, they're also proof that the vast majority of Americans will not have anything close to $1 million at retirement, and yet they will survive. Setting a goal that, for most Americans, seems so astronomically absurd only pushes them into inaction.

two views of naipaul

I'm learning a lot about the art of book criticism this semester, from reading and (hopefully soon) from doing. It's remarkable to me how much the reviewer's preconceptions can infect their work. Take for example these two reviews of the new biography of the novelist and Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, Patrick French's The World Is What It Is.

First this one, in Literary Review, from Allan Massie:

That he has been able to achieve this owes much to the generosity, openness and fairness of his subject, Sir Vidia Naipaul...Success of this sort takes more than talent. It is also an act of will, and Naipaul's will has been exceptionally powerful. He is a master writer because he has seen himself as the servant of Literature. Nothing has been allowed to stand in the way of his work and his achievement...This is an excellent biography which does nothing to diminish one's respect for Sir Vidia and leaves one liking him much more than I had expected...

Then this one in the Times:

It is not a pretty story; it will probably destroy Naipaul's reputation for ever, this chronicle of his pretensions, his whoremongering, his treatment of a sad, sick wife and disposable mistress, his evasions, his meanness, his cruelty amounting to sadism, his race baiting. Then there is the "gruesome sex", the blame shifting, the paranoia, the disloyalty, the nasty cracks and the whining, the ingratitude, the mood swings, the unloving and destructive personality...

The second is from Paul Theroux, the American travel writer who has a very public falling-out with Naipaul some years back. But the Theroux version of Naipaul is the broadly accepted p.o.v. from what I can tell, and the details in the two reviews seem to back up the Naipaul-as-colossal-asshole theory.

Take their differing takes on Naipaul's relationships with women. He was married to Pat Hale for 41 years, but carried on a very public decades-long affair with an Anglo-Argentine woman named Margaret Gooding. Now remember, these two reviewers read the same biography of Naipaul. First Massie:

[Pat] helped him through a nervous breakdown, chivvied him with good advice, supported him from her earnings as a teacher in the first years of the marriage, organised his daily life, and remained his most devoted and admiring reader and adviser. But she could not satisfy him sexually; he had, as he confessed when already distinguished, frequent recourse to prostitutes, an addiction he found necessary but shameful. Then in Argentina he met a married woman, Margaret, who gave him for the first time in his life full sexual satisfaction. He could not relinquish her; neither could he cast Pat aside. For some twenty years he ran them in tandem, often making both miserable. However, they reluctantly accepted the position. It sounds cruel. Often he was cruel. But would it have been any kinder to have left Pat for Margaret, or to have discarded his mistress?

What a wonderful spirit of justification! Should I ever cheat on a wife, I hope I have an Allan Massie at the ready to shift the blame to her sexual unsatisfactoriness. How cruel it would have been to sleep with only one woman at a time!

Reading the same book, Theroux gives a slightly different take, a sadist having finally found his masochist:

[Margaret] apparently refused to be interviewed for the book, but her archived love letters supply the missing narrative. They are rapturous, despairing, pleading, speaking of "his cruel sexual desires". She acknowledges that he is her black master, that he regards his penis as a god, that she will worship it, abase herself...Margaret shows up unexpectedly in Wiltshire. Naipaul is displeased with her. He beats her and afterwards explains, "I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt...She didn't mind at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her. Her face was bad. She couldn't appear really in public. My hand was swollen"...Eventually Naipaul told his wife Pat about the relationship, divulging some details and showing her intimate photographs. She was devastated but stayed with him and he was reluctant to offer a divorce. He gave her literary jobs to do, went on reading his rough drafts of his fiction to her -- in which the sex scenes were based on the rough sex he enjoyed with Margaret.

So he liked a bit of kink. But how did he treat his long-suffering wife? More Theroux, starting with excerpts from Pat's diaries:

"You are the only woman I know who has no skill," Naipaul told her. "You behave like the wife of a clerk who has risen above her station." As though to prove him wrong, Pat bitterly referred to Naipaul as "the genius" in her covert diary. French believes that Naipaul never read it, although he sold it with his papers for a hefty price. In terms of telling Pat's story, it does this poor woman complete justice. Let us not forget that much-reported admission when Naipaul said, almost swanking, "It could be said that I had killed her...I feel a little bit that way."

And the grand sexual finale:

Dissatisfied with Margaret, annoyed with Pat for having cancer ("He felt angry that [Pat] was dying and angry that she was not dying fast enough"), he meets a Pakistani divorcee in Lahore and very soon afterwards asks her, "Will you consider one day being Lady Naipaul?" He dumps Margaret without explanation. Pat (so as not to be a nuisance) forgoes more chemotherapy and dies miserably. Six days later, before the worms can pierce Pat's winding sheet, the Pakistani woman has moved into the house. There the story ends, a powerful lesson in karma as the sour and much-shrunken figure marries this peculiar stranger.

Still more remarkable details in this Telegraph story about the biography. I recognize the need to separate the writer from the written, but I have to say that Naipaul's cruel streak has deadened whatever pleasures A House for Mr. Biswas may have provided -- you can feel the barbarousness on every page, even if it's directed at targets different (the poor, the uneducated, the non-white) from poor old Pat.

louisiana vs. oregon

The Louisiana tourism people have a new web site on food tourism, featuring several articles by Friend of Crabwalk Mary Tutwiler.

But note that if you hover your mouse over the "5 Regions of Louisiana" map at top right, the tooltip says "Oregon Interactive Map."

Stealing your code from another state's tourism web site: bad. Not bothering to edit out the old state's name: worse.

cajun dance party

Not sure how I feel about there being a British indie band called Cajun Dance Party. Actually, I do know how I feel, but I'm trying to be polite.

apple equals creativity

Want to be creative? Just look at a Mac or the back of an iPhone for a second.

nazi sex orgy!

Normally, when one sees the phrase "sick Nazi orgy," the assumption is that "Nazi" is being used in a loose, metaphorical sense -- in the manner that certain angry young liberals call anything they dislike "fascist," even if it has nothing to do with the trains running on time.

But in this case -- which is one of the more smile-inducing stories of recent months -- no, they really mean "Nazi."

The Nazi orgiast in question is Max Mosley, the head of Formula One racing and the son of Britain's most famous fascist, Oswald Mosley. (Well, maybe Lord Haw Haw beats him.) His mom was the noted Nazi Diana Mitford, who is probably better known to Americans at the sister of Jessica Mitford.

(Americans may know Oswald Mosley best as the inspiration for Roderick Spode in P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves novels, or as the real "Oswald" [not Lee Harvey] in the lyrics to Elvis Costello's "Less Than Zero.")