Rushfield Babylon

Despite the fact that I live a two hours away from the city where it was held, despite the fact that as a youth I saved my allowance money to invest in Near Very Fine Issue #27’s of Moon Knight, despite the fact that I end up however much I gripe about them seeing every movie that comes out featuring a protagonist in a cape, despite all this I have resisted these many years visiting the annual Comic Con convention.

Not merely resisted but held the proceedings in active disdain, spewed venom each July on anyone within arm’s length about how terribly wrong it was, Comic Con and all its ways.

And now, here I find myself awake in 2011, standing on the brink of Comic Con, to which I will drive  in just minutes.

My issues with Comic Con stem from my own mixed feelings about my nerd past, at once deeply ashamed of that chapter of my history while at the same time enormously resentful that I don’t get more credit for it.   In the late 1970’s (yes, that was an actual time, not just a Instagram setting), when I would ride three buses once a month to the Ambassador Hotel for a monthly comic sellers convention, there was no glory awaiting my return; no crowds of cooing girls in nerd glasses waiting to applaud my astute purchase of four copies of Frank Miller’s Daredevil/Kingpin cycle.  There were no women in sexy superhero costumes at the convention.  There were no women at all, not one, except for the guy who put the thing on’s mother, who sold the tickets.  In fact, there weren’t even any other teenagers there, just sweaty, overweight middle aged men, people who looked very much like I do now…

So now, in a new century, you all go down for a big costume party in San Diego and bask in the glow of being “geeks.”  Well, la di f-ing dah.

Yes, I have nursed this heady cocktail of shame and resentment for decades now, bringing it to a boil every year during Comic Con.  But now a concatenation of circumstances (a friend is throwing a party and I got a good deal on a hotel room on Priceline) requires me to confront the demons that have lurked within all these years and venture to my worst enemy: the enemy that is me. Only better looking.  

I will file reports as events warrant.  Please check this space for details.

(in order of appearance)

Parents, children, teachers.

Neighbors, family, strangers.

Democrats, Republicans, independents.  Liberal, conservatives, progressives, libertarians, left wingers, right wingers, netsrooters, tea partiers.

Fan boys, cinephiles, people in bands, people who like bands, people who know about bands.  Cool people, losers. Nerds.  Enthusiasts. Comic book artists. Sports fans. Numbers crunchers.  Whiz kids.

Bloggers, columnists, authors, contributors, critics. Experts, professors, ignoramuses.

Frat boys, feminists, post-feminists, environmentalists, free marketeers, immigration activists, marijuana activists.  Anti-smoking activists, PETA members. Organizers. Volunteers.

Tough guys, wimps.  Drunks, addicts, junkies, sober people.  Moderate drinkers, users, smokers.

Celebrities, minor celebrities. Local celebrities.  Office celebrities.  Rock stars. Rock star reporters.  Rock star lawyers.  

Handlers, entourages. Girlfriends of. Husbands of. Exes of.

Unfamous people. Anonymous people. Shun the limelight people.

People at this coffee shop.  People who hate coffee shops.

Successful people, unknown people, struggling people.  Bosses, labor, middle management.  Working people.  Tired, poor, unwashed masses of people.

Old people. Young people.  Middle aged people.

People I know already.  People I’ve never met. People I’ve forgotten about.  People who forgot about me.

To everyone else:  I’d love to get coffee some time.  Call me, let’s hang out.

Independence Day at Venice Beach

My neighborhood on your most summer weekends resembles a typically slightly subpar day about ten years after the collapse of civilization.  And I want to nominate this guy as our mascot.

Cruising Venice Beach tonight, this guy despite having a felony warrant out for his arrest had the bright idea to throw some fireworks at a group of cops.

Happy birthday America.

(source)

Matt Welch has a very important review in today’s WSJ of former Ye Olde Tribune Apparatchik’s new book about the fall of the Tribune company.  This review comes in a climate where some sort of counterrevolution seems to be underway, the world rushing to plant angel’s wings and halos on the crusty old newsroom folks.  This is of course seen most prominently and least abashedly in this Page One documentary now out.  

But off the center ring, another act of this drama has been playing out involving my old employer Tribune and the LA TImes in particular, and its battle with its vulgarian, money grubbing owner Sam Zell.  Zell and his cohorts were largely brought down by the company’s bankruptcy and also by David Carr’s piece in the NYT last year revealing them to be money grubbing vulgarians, who bankrupted the company with crazy financial schemes and shameless cronyism.

So far, I’m on board.  However, this narrative, being largely told by olde timey newsroom types gets generally taken one step further; that if Zell and his were money grubbing vulgarians, the people they stepped over must be the opposite (this being a Victorian stage drama, and not real life) - his victims can be nothing but saintly, mega-talented, lonely bullworks of Democracy.

Welch writes:

Success breeds complacency, greed and bloat not only in the executive suite (which Mr. O’Shea portrays in gag-inducing detail) but also on the city desk, which, aside from some early observations about the Los Angeles Times’s extravagance, emerges unscathed in Mr. O’Shea’s account. But he is a conscientious enough reporter to unearth facts that undermine his one-sided interpretation. He makes a hero out of Los Angeles Times editor Leo Wolinsky, but much of what we learn about the guy is that he drives a Porsche, fights for first-class travel privileges and praises former Times publisher Mark Willes because he “ignored the Internet, thought it was just a fad.” Similarly, former Tribune chief executive Charlie Brumback is introduced as a moral monster who, in the 1980s and 1990s, proceeded to—can you believe it?—embrace technology, find a way around the productivity-killing unions and turn a large profit.

What’s lacking is any sense of realism about newspapers’ collapsing finances and any exploration of the newsroom’s own culpability in failing to adapt. The Tribune Co. and Mr. Zell were far from ideal owners, but “bean counting” is precisely what they were obliged to do. After 2000, the forces working against the old model were so powerful that swashbuckling innovators like Col. McCormick himself might have had trouble making money. Mr. Zell has been a disaster, but he was also the last fool to think there was untapped value in big-city newspapers.

Along with Matt Welch, I was at the LA Times before and during Zell.  What the newsroom narrative leaves out is how during the decades before, the Tribune’s prospects had been brought to such a bleak state by year over year over year of decline in every key indicator (readership, advertising, influence..), that it had so completely ignored its own possible life raft (the internet) that the company was so damaged it left itself wide open to hustlers like Zell.    If you cover yourself with blood and jump into the ocean, sharks might just come knocking.

I could (and often do) go on for hours about the ways in which the self-important managers of old time Tribune slammed the door in the face of their future.   And Mr. Jim O’ Shea in his tenure at the LA Times certainly gave no indication of any sense that in the face of plummeting readership any thought might be given to shaking things up just a tad. Something that if you follow the LAT’s city coverage, has happened post O’Shea’s departure and miraculously, during the Zell era. Yes somehow, Sam Zell did not stand in the way of that breaking major local stories.  But not looking here, for today anyway, to bring down the old folks, just to say, can we dump a few million grains of salt on the beatification ceremonies please?