The writing is on the wall, or rather on the web it could be said.  Newspapers are getting thinner and more scarce, not what they used to be certainly, but are they a lost medium? Have we fallen out of favor with ink smudges and cloak and dagger disguises? Will the subway commute be replaced by iPhone and Kindle podcasts?  Riders of Chicago’s L train have reason to wonder how long they’ll have an actual newspaper to flip through as the Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune, has filed for bankruptcy under chapter 11.  

In other cities like Detroit, the Free Press is no longer delivered to one’s doorstep. Here in Atlanta, a city which sprawls like a 1950’s sci-fi blob, unconstrained by your typical metropololis’s natural barriers of water or mountains, the hometown paper, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, has not only gotten increasingly anorexic, but has also stopped delivering to the outer hoods.  If you are OTP (outside the perimeter of that circular highway 285) and haven't the internet, well then you're up the creek, paddleless, unless you can stand the TV news, be it 24 hour cable or the locals tuned to with rabbit ears and tin foil.  

Arianna Huffington, a left of the dial media personality, has been running a website called The Huffington Post for about 4 years.  She’s never made any pretensions that the site is something other than a blog, but it has been hugely successful, and has recently enjoyed an influx of capital which has allowed for true investigative journalism, something that is typically the territory of newspapers with their army of lawyers and what used to be immense financial backing (through bribes in the yellow days...I'm kidding, no I'm not.).  Where does the duty lie/lay in this conversation?

In any case it is good to see Huffington proudly announce her blog’s shift from being 30% an aggregator of found news to a source for original journalism, the kind that’s fought long and hard for.  The sort you have to avoid a facebook profile for to get involved in, so’s to better be a spook (well you can always have multiple identities, and with the plastic surgery now - Rourke’s now in real life outdoing Bogart from Dark Passage - there’s hope for us journalists yet to get back undercover.)  I don’t know what the future has in store, be it a Minority Report form of media on pixelated foldable scrolls, the rest of the news following you with suggestions of what to purchase as you walk through a neverending mall.

But no need to be nervous.  What has seemed a Darwinian triumph in the development of Perez Hilton, Gawker and Jezebel (not to mention a lot of other web sources trying to pass off as journalism) is a passing stage, I think (god I hope).  Unless Idiocracy is true prophesy, I see the web utilizing its multimedia edge to the best of its abilities.  Technology put a better man in the White House finally (I hope, Obama knew how to Twitter better than John McCain I'm sure...John McCain doesn't...um...anyway), and hopefully our nostalgia for the texture of a newspaper, taken with coffee, perhaps with a smoke after breakfast, can be seen as what it is, nostalgia (I used to like a lot of retro metal toys with sharp lines that you could get at "Richard’s Variety Store," but there are reasons those toys aren’t so ubiquitous anymore, and are now relegated to the kitsch heap).  Journalists will adapt too. 

The real value, the real commodity today if you can grasp it and ride the wave, is reticence, patience, and delivering the goods when you know you got them.  If you want to see Fanzine do that, join us in backing us and be sponsors, then you will see that what has been done on a shoestring for so long can ultimately blossom into. In the past three years we have sacrificed for the sake of content in order to build a reputation, but now it's time, just as every medium is curently forced to, to buckle down and produce the best we are capable of. -CM

CONSPIRACY! More ominous words are rarely uttered in the English language! I call conspiracy! on Blizzard Entertainment! I returned back to Delaware this past weekend, as I sometimes do throughout the year, to visit the family. Occasionally I have mail waiting for me when I get back. Usually it's in the form of junk mail like pre-approved credit cards (which I'd never get because I have terrible credit already), Delta Sky Miles, my high school alumni newsletter... but this time there was one with DVD-like packaging and lo and behold! A free copy of World of Warcraft! With a free complimentary 1-month membership! Once again I could be taming the horde of monsters, mastering magic spells and grinding out the XP, of which I'm so familiar due to my experience with FFXI. Well, I told you all how that one ended.

So how the hell did Blizzard get my address? Am I on some kind of list for people succeptible to unlimited hours of entertainment? Did they seek me out personally after I wrote that article? Is there an Unseen Hand coming after us all who've abandoned the MMO life? I almost felt the MMO-claw creeping over my shoulder. Maybe I could be the next Best Paladin In The World? Too late though... hockey playoffs are coming up. I tossed the disk in the trash and hopped back on the wagon.

sidenote: I did pickup Left for Dead for XBOX 360 this weekend, though. Fighting a different kind of horde now.

-mkl

From the Screen Tests to Chelsea Girls and on, Ronald Tavel was best known as Andy Warhol's screenwriter.  Above is an interview from 2007 with Tavel, but flip around Youtube and rewatch some of the old Warhol flicks.  Speaking of Warhol's movies, we are headed out tonight to see a Jack Smith documentary called Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (a part of a three week series of underground film, the first of which, which includes the Smith documentary, is titled "Is My Brain a Germ or Disease: The Underground 60s" curated by Brad Lapin) at Whitespace Gallery here in Atlanta.  Warhol said of Smith that he was "the only person who I'd ever copy." Oh yeah, bet Tavel would argue with that line, but hey... Tavel died late Wednesday.  He was much more than simply Warhol's screenwriter, and if you are unfamiliar with his total impact, can start with the Village Voice obit here (then follow up on your own).

There have been some awful teetotaler leaders, i.e. Hitler (okay minus all the meth he was getting injected towards the end there), Osama Bin Laden (is he? there in the land of poppies, or wherever he is? anyway his once protectors, the Taliban, well they all count), and of course let's not forget our last president, GWB (the recovered party animal; think he’s switched back from O’douls to Budweiser now that he’s back in Texas?). And no i'm certainly not putting Bush in a class with the other two, but man, for a leader of a free nation, touted as the most free on Earth, well...

Anyway, it’s refreshing to see Obama kicking back and having a beer while watching the Chicago Bulls, as the Times caught him here. Obama has admitted to doing cocaine in the past, smoking marijuana (and inhaling), and he still smokes the occasional cigarette.  Sounds more like a libertarian huh? Rush Limbaugh out to be proud.

Meanwhile, kids like Derek Copp are getting shot over marijuana.  Ridiculous. Just as the Great Depression became a lot less depressed after the repeal of alcohol's prohibition via the Blaine Act¹, I say it’s time (during these hard economic times, and no I am not buying this recent rally; NYU Professor Nouriel Roubini seems to know what's up) to consider legalizing marijuana, tax the heck out of it and start paying down our ever increasing debt.  It’s a better way out of a slump than going to war, which is what countries usually do in such a crisis. 

Sign this petition if you agree on the Copp case, and there are many more ways to get involved of course. -CM

_{drawing above by Danny Jock, and 1. sorry had the Volstead and the Blaine Act mixed up there for a sec. And the Blaine Act was the kickstart to the 21st Amendment which is what actually overturned prohibition.}

Yet more Eye Candy....What? you thought I was gonna blog today about Tim Geithner?  And the new powers he is seeking for the feds to have oversight not only over the banks, but hedge funds, derivative markets and those large companies like global insurer AIG who bet the farm on exotically packaged securities?  No, you can read the economist for that. These are just dogs. And Nico. Gotten from a blog called Textism.  -CM

Just another day of eye candy, but this cat is talented.  The video above takes some patience to watch, a bit like an Antonioni flick.  If you want more action check this one.  Anyway trying to read the past two days (books), which seems impossible recently.  I don't know what happened, but just as a torrent of people were about to leave Facebook over privacy issues (and now loudly unhappy over design), it seems everyone is on at hyperspeed (I think it's the larger font no one likes in the new design, but that's what keeps the feed more fast paced; if you don't pay attention for a bit, stuff goes below the "fold" as they say in the newspaper biz, and you miss out), and yeah it's a little addicting I have to admit.  And of course since the "twat" heard round the world from Stephen Colbert, twitter is catching on with more folk, and taking up my time now too. 

Two people whose words mean a lot to me, Dennis Cooper and Ed Park both just added mammoth reading challenges on respective sites. Click this Cooper link and then ask yourself if you have actually read two books by all of the authors mentioned so you can judge which is the author's best and worst book. If no, then hell, get offline and read.  The Ed Park list is great too, it's what he is teaching at Columbia currently in a "Comic Novel" class.  So with list in hand, you can now be a virtual student and read along. -CM

Going up, going down, this is pretty badass. In related visual badassness, someone just shared Boards of Canada's first video Dayvan Cowboy by Dir. Melissa Olson. Not new news now, but whatever.

When I was a young lad¹, I had a neighbor friend who's dad had every Playboy that ever existed (thus far) in his attic.  Needless to say I didn't get much reading done then, but there is some great reading to be seen, I mean read, here in this exhaustively scanned archive (is that what the Playboy reality show interns have been busy with behind the scenes?). Great Design too. A fan of Mad Men?  Gander at the classic (if sometimes clumsy) ads in these pages.  Over the years Playboy did interviews with Bobby Seale, the Jimmy Carter "I have committed adultery in my heart" one, a Marshall McLuhan interview that a friend said was a "face-melter" etc.  Oh why do I even have to stump for this, all the girls are there too, check it: http://playboyarchive.com/

<sub>Note: at first thought it was the entire archive, but is only 53 entire issues, one for each year Playboy has been operating, through 2006.

1. Robin says I sound like I am 80 years old by using the term "lad."  So how old is a young lad, I dunno, 8?  Pretty young.</sub>

So you'll likely miss Morrissey tonight. Getting a ticket for Moz is like winning the lottery sometimes.  But was just thinking, you know we might never see the Morrissey and Marr reunion everyone hopes for (if it ever happens for a full on tour, they'll make more money than The Who, Led Zepplin, the Pixies and a few other reuniters combined).  But since the show's tonight at the Bowery Ballroom in NY (see FZ listing), I was reminded (and yeah this video is old news) that Thom Yorke has proven he can be a one man MOZ/Marr by himself (by his "damn self" as we say here in the South).  Watch above and enjoy (okay true the rest of the band is prob playing the hard parts...still).  Radiohead, in their studio cam sessions¹, really know how to work the giving it away angle.  Amazing.  Still I wish I could be there midst Morrissey's new young fans. And here's to all the future fat Elvises of the world! (as I repose with laptop on belly). Moz you still look fine, I think, that's what I hear, but your bowling needs some schooling. -CM

_{1. Good Joy Division one too}

...to use the the term Stephen Colbert prefers.  If you want to follow this editor's twats - I meen tweets on Twitter, I'm doing it @ caseyfanzine. Like many, I didn't quite get the value of it all at first, but it's a darn good tool. Especially for writers, bloggers, and journalists, as Market Watch's Jon Friedman writes here.  Yeah there's a bunch of "I had some soup today, made me sick" and "Guess what jail Linsdsay Lohan is in now! tiny.url..."  kind of things, but also a good scroll into the collective unconscious, and a good source of ledes. The critic's job I guess is to be the good guide and filter, but also to take part in the Big Dialogue. So tweet on I say.  For those still unbelievers out there, follow Paddy Johnson's posts on Art Fag City; she's been doing it for ages, and the growth of her site's fanbase I believe may be partly due - beyond here dedicated reporting - to her expertise in the landscape of web 2.0.  Me, my dinosaur egg is just hatching.  And I've learned best of all, you can always tweet: "I'll be away for two weeks in the woods, strolling and reading books" and that way people will know why they don't see you on Facebook or get your emails returned for a spell. And then you can actually get some real work done.  Doesn't that make life easier?  -CM

PS- Another point, for anyone interested in poetic forms, well the classic sonnet is 140 syllables (wiki it if you don't know) and Twitter's limit on character input is 140 characters, not a jot or tittle more.  So I see a challenge there, for OCD people (like myself at times, not literally) who fancy the occasional poetic constraint.  Should start a facebook twit poetry group... but not today as it's too sunny and nice, and for the first time in a few days I'm glad not to be in a dank venue in Austin crammed together en masse watching the latest bands du jour at SXSW.  Almost packed up last minute and split for it. Maybe next year.

From Bookgasm, here are 50 reasons your first book might not get published.  Which is kind of, what, funny? sad? scary? but then hell there's a point made made about scary - make the book scarier.  Where are the vampires?  Heh...Anyway...interesting read.  Check it.  Meanwhile I'll get back to crafting my Civil War novel written all in sms texting jive... It'll be the resurrection of Private Samuel Watkins of "Co. Aytch", and will outshine George Saunders so much they'll forgo the MacArthur awards for a couple of years and hand Fanzine a double sum bounty...ummm.

This is one of those interviews that shouldn't be missed, so if you did, here's a reminder.  Whether you are calling for Ben Bernanke to stand for treason charges for the Federal Reserve's expenditure of roughly a trillion dollars so far as one group on facebook is (others are calling for AIG bonus takers to comment seppuku), or whether you actually believe the Fed's actions will begin to bring us out of this recession before year's end, as he purports it may, watch the Ben Bernanke interview on 60 minutes.  The Fed concludes a two day meeting today that will likely leave interest rates unchanged (they can't go much lower).  But more liquidity may be injected into the market if the Fed decides to purchase long term treasuries, which would may help improve the credit situation and get some banks lending more freely.

*Update: from CNBC - "The U.S. Federal Reserve on Wednesday, in a surprise move, said it will buy up to $300 billion worth of longer-term U.S. government debt over the next six months and expand purchases of mortgage-related debt to help ease credit market conditions." See rest of article here.

_{**And yeah that was a typo, had Ben's name spelt wrong for a day (only in the title), whoops, it happens, no spell check in the admin, sorry.}

Saw a fun, danceable band here last night at the Earl.  'Let's Wrestle' is the name, from "London town" as they announced the start of the set.  A nice mix of old school jangle rock a la The Wedding Present or R.E.M. - i.e. Let's Wrestle's bassist, Mike Lightning, carries the melody, fingering all around the frets at a fevered pace in the manner of a young Mike Mills, while songwriter guitarist Wesley Patrick Gonzalez mixed in some Blur riffage (how it sounded live, not so much here in myspace), a song about Lady Diana's hair, and a longing to be in Hüsker Dü.  I  looked them up when I got home, and dug this video, so check it, and if you missed them, they'll be at SXSW shortly. Also saw The Love Language, the reason I came out last night; they need their own post so gimme a sec.

No editorial here, except that it was the collapse of AIG that really accellerated the entire stock market fall this past year.  And small businesses are suffereing right now from a lack of liquidity, since no one is lending, so the second part of his speech is certainly of importance for say a company like Fanzine, that we be able to take a loan when we need it.  Good speech but the ire over the AIG bonuses seems a bit of posthumous spitting in the wind (by the way what is that lozenge Obama is enjoying there?  As a fan of nicotine gum, I wonder if it's packed with more than vitamin C). And I'm not sure how well this cap on executive pay is going to fan out unless the government completely buys out the company.  In any case, I'd be happy to run AIG for $500,000 a year (um, ha ha?), but not sure many CEO's out there actually competing for CEO kind of slots are ready to take such a cut (awe, I know. Poor guys would have to sell a few chalets on that kind of salary). -CM

Author James Purdy Has Died at age 94.  He was the author of one of my favorite books, In A Shallow Grave. Brian Pera suggests Narrow Rooms.  Anyway, there's a ton to go through and reread.  Here's the Times obit for now.

I feel it’s a little late to be pointing fingers at Mad Money’s Jim Cramer.  Fanzine blogged that Cramer was likely our country’s Rasputin this past summer. And it wasn't too long after that post that I guess some little Dutch boy must have gotten tired of holding all of America’s toxic mortage backed securities behind a brittle wall, took his thumb out of the dam, and started sucking it.

In any case, Jon Stewart has finally been getting on Cramer’s case this week, asking him why he goes on his own not so vastly known internet website (one which I can’t imagine he’d believe his Mad Money viewers would never see...hello? Google? Google being one of Jim’s once Four Horsemen {of the apocalypse?} stock picks]) and spells out just how hedge funds (like the one he once ran) manipulate the market via a mixture of some heavy collective cash and a few ehhh ... spurious? perhaps, rumors to the media (a practice which is typically illegal by the way). And "the media" doesn't exclude shows like Mad Money and Fast Money,  but he didn’t mention those of course. And I won’t imply he’s purposely ever lying or fibbing or... tweaking info on his show. That would be dumb and slanderous of me. And again dumb, so I repeat I am not saying that.

So Stewart brought Cramer on the show after a week of WWF-style back and forth soliloquies on their respective home platforms, The Daily Show vs CNBC (which Cramer is ubiquitous on, aside from his romper room Mad Money show). Stewart argued that they are both snake oil salesmen to a degree, and comedians, but that at least he, Jon, admits it. 

Jim Cramer continuously claims to stick up for the little guy on Mad Money, and even goes so far as to quote Vladimir Lenin often (and often while raising a portrait of the Marxist leader/philosopher beside his own profile on the show), but if you ever follow say the Google Finance message boards of stocks Cramer picks, the short sellers are delighted, just tickled pink for a few days to know what he’s picking to go long with so they can know just what to short (short selling is the opposite of betting the stock will go up). Many short sellers feed on all the little fishies out there so anxious to buy what Jim’s casting. 

I have to say Mad Money is entertaining, in a twisted way. It’s like Pee Wee’s playhouse. It’s supposed to be one thing, but there’s more to it going on.  Lots of seemingly off the cuff references to not only Marx, but Beckett and Shakespeare and whatever else I guess Cramer’s nephew Cliff Mason (his sole writer) dreams up while typing away in his “pajamas” (as Cramer described to Stewart his nephew's attire when writing....yawn, okay).

True, Jim Cramer lived out of his car for a while (I guess that’s true, it’s what he says) and had some early notoriety as being the first reporter on the scene when Ted Bundy was caught.  Hmmm... Speaking of which, serial killers that is, like I’ve always said, Bret Easton Ellis is one our generation’s most important satirists and if people had listened a little better to his American Psycho, maybe a few would have gotten the message and not trusted their futures and 401ks to the big brokers gambling with absurd non-linear derivative schemes, pushing beyond the legal - or sane anyway - limits for "Fast Money," as that other CNBC show's name implies.  

The news has become a populist (whatever that word means anymore) popularity contest these days.  But for this round, this week, I gotta hand it to the real comedians, Stewart and compadre Stephen Colbert, for finally handing a shit sandwich back to CNBC. But so as not to completely rain on Jim, I guess Rick Santelli was the real rat of the week, as he threw some absurd, self-envisioned, elite class simulacra of a Boston Tea Party on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile exchange; and still, don’t get me wrong, it's hard not to be captivated by the "money honeys" like Maria Bartiromo, a real Hawksian heroine if there ever was, who even had Joey Ramone captivated on his deathbed as he further immortalized her in song on his last album:

What’s happening on Squawk Box?/ What’s Happening with My Stocks?/ I want to know./ I watch you on the TV every single day/ Those eyes make everything okay, o-o-o-kay/....

Sheeez.  It really is all so alluring. As Jon said, many (and yeah I threw away most of my savings last year too) got swept away for a bit by the barker's cry, forgetting at times that it's actual work that is the only sure way to make money and secure for the future, work meaning not some scheme you hear off an infomercial (something so easy you can do in your bathtub), or by sitting back and throwing darts/sifting through the ticker names on Lightning Round, but the production of something useful and lasting.  We have so many things that need fixing in this country, jobs that need to be created to assist in the transition away from fossil fuel energy sources and....oh but that's another rant.

Cramer, you could, could, be the good guy you proclaim to be, but it's gonna take some real work on your part to change.  Just saying you have a charitable stock fund isn't enough, because obviously, with the Dow about half what it was last year, no matter how diversified you are, unless you were all in short ETFs, that charity isn't doing too hot now is it? -CM

Bernie Madoff plead gulity today on all charges of his Ponzi scheme that cost investors billions.  A federal judge accepted his pleas and he was sent immediatly to jail (no passing "Go") to await trial.  While watching on Bloomberg, awaiting word, I saw another ambitious capitalist being interviewed outside the New York courthouse. Though a young man, he appeared to have lost a great deal of money via Maddof's black hole of finance and is hoping to recoup some loses by selling golfballs with Mr. Madoff's face on them.  If you can't smack him personally, you can smack this ball! was the line, or something similar.  He said next in line for a personalized set of Sleazeballs, as he called the balls he’s selling, was Sir. Stamford, the Texan with a brazen sackful big enough apparently that he had the whole country of Antigua bought and fooled, not to mention countless investors around the world.

P.S. - Sleazeballs LLC. you can send us a check for the free advertising.  Just see our contact page. We want a piece of the action too.

For fans like us here at Fanzine, still puzzled and heartbroken over the loss of one of our generation's literary giants, David Foster Wallace, there is some clarification to his story here in The New Yorker piece  "The Unfinished" and a new novel on the way, The Pale King will be published next year.

As a kid driving down through southern GA to my grandparents' house for holidays and other occasions, my dad would always change the radio from FM to AM.  In the expanse of peanut farms from Macon to Cordele, AM’s broad swath tuned in with perfect clarity.  Dad had always liked variety shows like Smothers Brothers on TV, he introduced me to Garrison Keillor and other shows on NPR, but always had a particular affinity for the odd things you can find on small local AM country radio stations, the livestock and equipment auctions, the bizarre inflections of some Baptist preachers, maybe Larry Munson qoing crazy over one of Herschel Walker’s runs down the hedge-lined sidelines of the UGA stadium back in Athens, or the almost Hawaiian lilt, warble and twang of classic country music - the pedal steel and its frequencies in the upper treble range, better attuned to AM anyway.  And occasionally, the best treat, if you could catch him at the right time, was Paul Harvey’s radio show. 

Harvey was a journalist who told stories like campfire tales.  His subjects were strange, often banal if compared to a lot of bleed-leding news journalism.  He dealt with ordinary people, and yeah sometimes the unknown tidbit history/mysteries of famous people.  What I remember most about Harvey (and I wish there was a better archive of his clips) is that he was all about delivery.  His voice was staccato; there was a lot of “dead time” between his phrasings, which seemed to run counter to the evolution of DJs and their spitfire elocution. Harvey would introduce a story early on in the show and then tell a few others, all the while (and he was the master pioneer of this) embedding ads in his own personal voice (how many people bought a Bose radio based on Harvey’s recommendation I’ll never know, but lots I guess).  Today when I click through a website and have to put up with an embedded ad it annoys the hell out of me.  But with Harvey, you didn’t care. It was all part of the gig, the narrative, which ultimately led up to the “rrrrrest of the story.”  Yes that bit that left you hanging near the beginning of his show, you never got it till the very end.  And it was typically a doozy, and even if it wasn’t, hard not to hurmumph along, even if it was just to laugh at Harvey's laughing at his own joke.  Haven’t heard him in years, with the ipod usually plugged in nowadays when whizzing past butter beans and silos on trips back to see my kin still down in that region.  But I won’t forget his voice and his knack for telling a story. 

I'm writing this kind of blindly, as I never followed anything about his politics; as I said, I mostly remember his broadcasts I heard as a kid.  He may have been an early supporter of the Vietnam war, and has spoken frankly about other things that are awful in nature that may have been blown/taken out of context.  But to his credit, apparently he also knew when to admit when he was wrong, and when to tell a president when he’s wrong too (as I learned in this obit from the Times he confronted Nixon on Vietnam rather late). I guess as he aged, as a populist and an editorialist, that populist tone got the best of his senses at times, as Keith (shit don't stink) Olbermann¹ points out here. Well history will be the judge. Maybe Harvey is the devil incarnate as some people believe (please write and elucidate me if that's the case...there's a hell of a lot of years of talking to dig through), but as I see it, in my faint faint memory, good aside from the bad, he'll be missed. As he used to say at the close of each session, "Gooood-day."²

Paul Harvey died this Sunday at the age of 90. -CM

_{1.Keith I love ya, seriously, O'Reilly needed a 'good side' counterpart to account for the dribble of he and his ilk, but I can only wish I could one day be your evilest person in the world. As a long time Glen Danzig fan, it would be an honor. Keep up the good watchdog work. But if we had a budget for investigative journalism, I'd have moles hanging around your John.  Cause I am incredulous of the idea that you only pinch off golden nuggets. ;)}

^{2. Here's Paul doing his best Morgan Freeman or George Burns Oh God imitation with a nice 'Good Day' at the end. A tad cheesey true, but a good example of his voice.}