Re-opening the stables

It’s rather obvious I love blogging. I have so many blogs!

As a thinker and writer, it helps me both compartmentalize and also look for relationships across supposed boundaries of interest. For example, one would not perhaps normally see a strong connection between the philosophical works of Blaise Pascal, the issue of heroism and sex and the branded image of a Volvo 1800 se in the consciousness of a generation (Boomer males).

But I could state a case not so much for it’s natural or obvious appearance, but as a fun way of exploring the relationship of those issues once thrown together.

In the same way Nora Ephron uses varying cultural icons to depict males (The Godfather as the I Ching for business in You’ve got Mail; and The Dirty Dozen as a faux male chick-flick in Sleepless in Seattle), mixing cultural contexts can be instructive (if not entertaining).

Anyway, I have taken the padlock off my garage of vintage blogs and am tuning them up and taking them around the track to see how they are doing.

Today’s is the Postmodern Pensees site.

It’s a vintage site that explores meaning, death, love, sex and relationship. This is done often via fiction…just short pieces meant both to jar and entertain.

Today’s volley is part one of a short story about telling the perfect story. It has all the above ingredients except the Volvo 1800 se. If I can work that in later in a natural way I will.

It features, as some of my writing on sex does, the Jennifer Connelly “brand”. I chose Connelly not just because I once had a bit of a crush (so the path to various issues is well known), but because Mrs Connelly-Bettany continues to be iconic despite major cultural shifts the last 25 years.

I swear, I am not a stalker.

Dear Jon Letter: The Other 98 Cents

The SF Chronicle Two Cents column that is being held in a statis field like most good newspaper ideas.

A letter of response to Jon Carroll’s column today in the Chronicle and on SFgate.com. Read it first for good stuff and context.

Dear Jon,

Good article today…online.

Some of what you say resonates to be sure. I love newspapers. There is a certain irrational, near magical, love for print that probably started when many of us were kids and spent a week using stamp pads to produce seven copies of our cul-de-sac’s new “newspaper.”

I remember when the newspapers of the Bay Area were great and fat. Now only the Chronicle has really survived. In Sacramento, where I was editor of many small and doomed community newspapers (and an alternative weekly before the SN&R showed up with an actual budget), the Sacramento Bee was actually damned fine in the mid-80s starting with Pete Dexter on page 2.

Now it sucks big time.

I watched the demise and it was not the Internet. It was bad writing and allowing the publication to become basically a Macy’s ad with filler copy. Cowing to advertisers and lowering the bar for great writing. And when Pete Dexter became famous, he moved to an island and started to suck as well.

I hope you are right about more than the “news aggregate” thing…you are right about that. I may get all my news from the Internet, but SFGate.com is my first stop even before MSNBC.com or Google. Excellent point.

The key is content. I realized 10 years ago when I switched (sold out) from print media to Internet that “Content is King”.

Okay, so I was 7-8 years early. It was fun working at a grocery store for awhile.

But now it is obvious. Content is King, and one of the best things I get to do daily is help people get the best content to draw and sustain a new and healthy audience. It is precisely because people expect free content that it must be provided.

The Internet is great for content because great writers can publish without running into short-sighted folk who disagree with some minor point or are afraid to offend some imaginary person somewhere. I publish four times a day minimum in a variety of areas I have expertise in. I don’t get the usual Old School approach that are sinking newspapers left and right.

You don’t like it? Fire me…of that’s right, you can’t. All you can do is argue with me in a public forum via comment, or stop reading.

I like my odds.

The real question of the ever-illusive paying model goes a little deeper.

I’m not gonna give away the store here, but here is a small example of a misstep by the Chronicle. The Two Cents column is gone or on hold right?

Dumb.

Your point about opinion is right…except for reaching readers and how they can provide you with good content. Learn from the viral and relational aspect of the Internet and your paper will be stronger.

I was a (pre-screened) Two Cents column guy. As such, I got to ask questions or make points that are being missed by your newspaper. I went four-for-four on questions in 2007 before they shut it down. The best one is in the attached art. “A question the candidates have not been asked?” My answer was simple but I have never seen the substantial answer to it covered in your paper.

But Two Cents is just that. What about the rest of the buck?

For example: Why hasn’t someone sat down this week and done an in-depth interview with Mac Sutherlin and Duane Martinez who not only were two the of the three who scaled the Golden Gate Bridge with protest signs this week, but were arrested and then released a year ago in Nepal for planning a Protest of the Olympics on Mt Everest?

Gee… that would not be interesting to readers would it? Who would want to read about an inside scoop like that in the Bay Area?

Now Jon, I know you would take that interview. So I assume this letter should really land on your editor’ desk. To miss the obvious only reinforces your point about newspapers committing suicide.

Because here is the deal. You are the news aggregator. But if you guys don’t get real and smell the espresso I’m gonna go and find that story first and post it on the Internet and get a gazillion hits by posting it virally.

Get it?

The core philosophical point for newspapers is that they are passive (not the writers…the medium). We have shifted from a word based culture to an image based culture (newspapers did the same) and now are moving back to word-based…or at least some balance…but it is now active, not passive.

It is active not passive.

Have Phil Bronstein call my people, er…me and he can stop calling “emergency meetings”.

Seriously Jon, good column. I have enjoyed it for many years.

And there is a hint there too.

Oh…and I’m gonna point people from my online daily frontpage blog to your sfgate.com column as my lead story today. If you read it and comment that gets a short dialogue going that is public. People prefer that and it goes deeper because new questions come forward. You cannot do that in print in a timely fashion but you could do it as a “best of” weekly, taking such exchanges and printing them. Another thing I like is I can do my own art in seconds and it really works. I also don’t miss web press checks at 3 a.m.

Make your case but this letter and the artwork will be up at http://www.azotuscafe.wordpress.com in about 25 minutes max. Probably before you get and read this email.

Let me know next time you are in San Anselmo and we’ll have coffee if you like.

Mac.

Christopher (“Mac”) MacDonald
Azotus Consulting

San Anselmo, California
Online Content Management

SideDoor Marketing
Digital Media & Web Design
mac@azotuscafe.com
415-785-8672 (new number)

Wednesday Poem on Salon.com Blog

A blogger at Salon.com’s relationship site for the last year (Wednesday’s are Poetry Day) here is today’s entry by Mac: The Lunchbox.

Mac on KPIX Obama Video

Comments for KPIX News piece on racism on Easter Sunday at St. Andrews Presbyterian.

Fear of Fishing?

First, I suggest you read the following lead article in Fast Company on “The Brand Called Obama.”

It doesn’t matter who you support in this one regard…the cultural landscape is being changed before our eyes, whether Obama is elected president or not.

So, if you are at all interested in politics, advertising, branding, culture, the arts, relationships or the future please read the Fast Company piece and comment here, or elsewhere.

We have made two classically related mistakes. We have, up until recently, allowed real discourse to become arcane, and we have become passive/cynical. Both play to the politics of fear and smear and subvert real debate, progress and a gritty hope.

If this were fishing we would be afraid to get in the boat…the wrong boat… and so stay on land and watch others fish. Sure, we would critique them, their tackle and technique, but stay on shore…watching. Later, we would go by Andronico’s and buy a slab of salmon for $12.99 a pound and consume it.

I am watching Barack Obama’s campaign from a sociological view. On the edges, what his team is doing is not really subversion so much as subliminal re-cognition. It’s ignoring what does not work and does not resonate and daring to do what does work and is resonant. They are re-educating America by action and words.

One glaring example is the Rev. Wright “scandal.” Meant to derail Obama, he used it to go deeper into the very heart of the beast and open up deeper dialog and national soul-searching on the issue of racism in his now famous speech.

Yesterday the media was abuzz about the introduction of Sen. McCain by a zealot who exclaimed that “you can have your Tiger Woods, we have our McCain.”

Putting race aside (which he did not), the analogy is not unfitting as two men who have unusual “game” and have literally changed the cultural landscape by the sheer trajectory of their talent and careers.

MSNBC Hardballer Chris Matthews remarked that he knew golf was changed when he saw Woods slice a ball onto the wrong fairway in his first Masters, then proceed to drive the ball up over the trees, back into the right fairway and land it on the green not far from the pin.

“I’d never seen that before,” Matthews commented. We have not seen this either (Obama).

Seen what?

Well for quick examples:

• the re-democratization of the masses as a force to not only rival the established power-brokers but depose them by sheer numbers and small contributions. Obama’s March donations from common folk (like myself and my 25 bucks) added up to a staggering $40 million;
• engaging the postboomer generation (er, those 29 – 45) in our lifetimes to political registration and activism;
• drawing in the largest and youngest group of new voter registrants in US history;
• recognition of the emerging model for global business and marketing which is not top-down and passively received, but based in social networking. The Admen are no longer in control. They have been reduced to simply major players;
• the reanimation of hope, or what I call “Intelligent Hope”;
• leadership as inspirational and not co-opted (it has been noted that the extremely competent Sen. Clinton loves policy where Obama seems to love people. Both are good, but one is core; and
• the reformation of political will in the body politic (hey I use to be a Poli-Sci major).

Those are just a few observations off the top of my head.

Large executive fishing boats sometimes cruise into Drakes Bay here in Marin (yes the Drakes Bay) and lay out their expensive poles and haul in the best from the protected waters of the Golden Gate Park Recreation Area. Only a few can afford this, and a few major fish are caught.

The point is, rather than pick just a single boat, or a few, Obama & Co have recruited an armada of small ships who, together, are able to lay down nets all the way across a major bay like Drakes and haul in a huge catch. It’s not fishing as usual. It’s smarter and everyone gets to join in.

As for business-as-usual, the Washington lobbyists and the “powers-that-be,” it is becoming like the old joke:

Question: How many Surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?’

Answer: A fish.

Fishing season is open.

Word

T-Bone Burnett has a fun album called The Talking Animals, which is us.

“Naming” is one great gift given humanity by its Creator. In the Old Testament Creation myth, the animals were brought to Adam and he named them. Even God went by the names given (or at least publicly). Whether you take this myth as historical or not (myths can be either), the fact remains that naming is our core gift.

Even our “imaging” is an attempt to name.

It looked for awhile as if new media would simply drown us in image. I suppose that is the source of the bumper stickers that use to say “Shoot your television.” In either event, the “Humiliation of the Word” (Ellul) seemed inevitable in the eye-glazing blitz that is modern imaging.

Many lecturers (myself included) marked how we had, culturally, moved from a word-based epistemology (way of knowing) to an image-based one.

Thank God for two things. One, I am not going to now rattle on about all the implications or examples of this (drive into any business section of town or turn on your tv and the point is made); and two, the Internet has reversed the tide back towards Word, while not vilifying Image.

You see, we recently added typing and near-immediate personal correspondence with others around the world to our specially-packed resume. In my book, it is one of the best moves we have made since deciding to add “Green” as a category…but then you see we did that first via Word.

Of course I have more to type on this, but for now please keep typing and hit “send” often. You might just be reclaiming a core gift that will help save the planet.

I am not kidding.

FREE TIBET

Up on that bridge yesterday, helping hang two large protest banners that said “Free Tibet” and “One World , One Dream, Free Tibet 08″, was another Marin County “Mac.” This one a known activist who was released by authorities a year ago in Nepal after he planned a protest of the Olympic Games on Mt. Everest.

In other words, Mac Sutherlin is not afraid of heights, officials or much of anything. Mac was arrested both times alongside his partner Duane Martinez, also of Sausalito (so yes, there are gay Macs).

The issue is a passionate one and I have to believe that the largely non-violent protests around the world and the snuffing of the Olympic torch is humanity’s way of admitting the Dalai Lama is right. It will take the outcry and protest of the world to end the suffering both in Tibet and in Darfur.

China is indifferent, and will be until their power is threatened, and their prestige in the world.

My suggestion? Besides active protest, quiet prayers for the freedom of Tibet should be matched with the quiet of our televisions throughout the Olympic Games themselves. Let them have them…just do not watch. A silent protest when millions if not a few billion dollars are on the line can have a staggering effect.

Read the results in the paper or in synopsis online…but don’t watch their mass media.

If you wanna see something studly and brave, watch the Mac & Duane show up on the Bridge on YouTube of via SFGate.com.