-> SMOKE & MIRRORS
KATRINA & THE LOST CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Rod Amis
New Orleans is the Lost City of America.A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Fund. The cooks, servers and restaurant workers of New Orleans have provided fabulous times and memories for millions. Now we must remember them in their time of need.
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SMOKE & MIRRORS: THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE - ROD AMIS's column opens with a look at the state of American journalism and then the problem with Web browser rendering. He concludes with another look at his (former) love life. Eee-yew!
SMOKE
"Where there's smoke, there's fire ..." Popular Adage.
13 January, 2006: In the January, 2006, edition of Z Magazine, my housemate, a self-avowed leftist, brought to my attention there is a book review my Edward S. Herman of Peter Brock's Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting - Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia. Ron suggested I read this because it confirms all the reporting that was featured here in G21 during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Among our correspondents, Ratislav Durman, Dragana Vicanovic, Adam Smith and myself, we presented a very different picture of those wars than the Mouthpiece Media (MM) and I am proud to say, as with our reporting of the Cambodian elections and Hurricane Katrina's effects in New Orleans, we never found the need to retract anything we presented you - unlike members of the MM like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
That a small independent magazine, that survives on beggared $10 and $20 donations, should so consistently give you the real story on the ground when major outlets of the MM, with millions of dollars in resources, do not should give you pause.
The difference between our reporting and that of the MM is that we actually do it from the ground, where the story is, as opposed to from the lounge of some hotel where all the "respectable" journalists are parroting each others' stories or those of the "official" sources to which they have access by dint of their prestige. Think about it.
The interesting points that Herman brings up about Brock's book are mostly messages of sadness for a journalist like myself. Of special note are his comments about two gentleman - and I use the term loosely - who garnered Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting on the Balkan wars, John F. Burns of the New York Times and Roy Gutman of Newsday. Brock documents relentlessly that the reporting these two produced about the wars constitute a tissue of lies. They totally vilified the Serbs while ignoring the facts on the ground, facts brought to light here in your World's Magazine that
As I say, these two liars went on the get Pulitzer Prizes, which speaks volumes about the Pulitzers, and G21.net went on begging for ten and twenty dollar donations.
- The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was not an organization of brave freedom fighters but rather a narco-terrorist organization that was one of the biggest drug purveyors in Europe at the time;
- Serbian claims of terrorism were well-founded and ethnic-cleansing cut both ways;
- Rather than a plan for a Greater Serbia, what we were witnessing was the implementation of a Greater Albanian.
Now ask me what I think about truth and justice.
One last example as concerns my thoughts about the MM and the art of journalism.
On the day that Slobodan Milosevic was taken to the Hague Tribunal, there was a massive protest on the streets of Belgrade. Two stories of note were filed that day. One was by Christiane Amanpour for CNN, filed from London. The other was from Yours Unruly, filed from Belgrade. Ms. Amanpour told her viewers, standing on the streets of London, that the Serbs had taken to the streets in celebration of Milosevic being taken off to the Hague. Yours Unruly reported, from the streets of Belgrade, surrounded by the Serbs chanting and carrying signs, that these people had taken to the streets in protest of Milosevic's extradition because - after years of protesting against his regime - they believed it was their right to bring him to justice.
We have two versions of the same story. The representative of the MM reported to the world from a thousand miles away. Yours Unruly reported from on the ground in Serbia. Both stories said that there was a march on the streets of Belgrade. That was undeniably true. Each story presented a different reason for why it was taking place. Both stories could not possibly be correct as to why people were on the street.
Which one of us do you suspect got the story right?
PUBLISHER STUFF: I've been designing this site for a decade now and so I'm a veteran of the browser wars. I mentioned last edition how I've looked at the new design in three of them: Safari, Firefox and Opera. This week, the cover looks EXACTLY like I want it to in the Opera browser but not the other two.This drives me freaking batty because I KNOW that only a percentage of you, depending on the browser you are using to visit this Web site, are seeing the pages as I intend you to view them. The rest are only seeing an approximation of my vision. That's simply unacceptable.
Having written about Web design for three years, having done it for over a decade, I simply can't understand why the browsers are so inconsistent and capricious at this late stage of the development of this medium.
I'll end my rant on this subject now.
MIRRORSI can't just can't over losing you
So if I seem broken in two
Walk on by - Burt Bacarach
6 January, 2006: Back during my bad old rutting days, during the 1980s, when I had my most dramatic and tragic love affair, two years of pure rapture, ecstasy, dancing late into the night, unbridled lust and madness - when I nearly alienated or lost all of my friends because of my obsession for one woman - the late, great Luther Vandross provided much of the soundtrack of my life. "If Only For One Night," I pretended was my theme song.One night was not enough, of course. It quickly became almost a thousand and one nights. I could not keep myself away. I left town. Longtime Loyal Readers will remember that. She simply tracked me down and within one afternoon had me wrapped right back around her finger, the afternoon of my house-warming party for my new place, then she flaunted her victory in front of all my friends. Powerful women like that are audacious.
It don't hurt like it didRemember when I told you that one of the Basic Rules of Life was that the one who loves most is ALWAYS going to be the one who gets hurt? I wasn't lying.
It hurts worse
Who do I kid? -- Sheryl Crowe"Literary Priest," as I had often been called by people who loved and knew me, as I had accepted as my appellation - not when she was within reach. An electrical charge went through my body when she merely touched me. I've said it before: I was in thrall.
I listened to Luther's songs from that time again for the first time in almost twenty years. Tears came to my eyes.
I remembered that man, the man at the top of his corporate life, the man with The Plan. I had always believed that thirty-six was the ideal age for any man (I almost typed "thirty-sex") and there I was with one of the most beautiful women I'd ever met. She stepped out of the fog of a northern California morning in a trench coat and changed my life forever.
I must be crazy,If you've ever been deeply, deeply in love, you know what I'm talking about. There is the "universe of two," as Kurt Vonnegut so aptly put it, in Mother Night, a book about a man who was considered a Nazi.
Standing here this way
But I'm feeling no disgrace
For asking
Let me hold you tight
If only for one night - LutherThere is no outside world. There is nothing except you and "us," that strange conjoining of two people, two souls, that supercedes every other consideration. That was the best of what we had, before the darkness started.
Another one of "our" songs was "Anyone Who Has a Heart." We listened to Luther on our trips to San Francisco to sell prospective clients for my business, on our way to Sacramento to meet a few legislators who could give us some contacts, while lying, exhausted, after making love for hours.
"I loved your first line," she told me early on, "'Got two hours to kill?' I'm glad it wasn't just a line."
Bad man.
So I listen to Luther this afternoon and cry.
We used to joke, she and I then, that I was the dragon-slayer. I miss that guy.
I was also accused, harshly, scathingly, in this period of "being in love with being in love." You get the inference: it didn't matter who I was in love with as long as I was in love. This hypothesis was troubling for me because I was so muddled and befuddled that I could not, rationally, find evidence in my own psyche that it was NOT true. How could I judge?
What does Luther sing? No one's gonnah love you like I do!
It seems fitting then, that after that, after the bankruptcy of my business, the dissolution of that sick relationship, I should have my next significant liaison with the woman I once referred to as The Count. Our love, if that was what it could be called, was in a Kingdom of Ice. It was about the sex and the mutual, cold distance we had from each other.
When I was best man for my best Black friend, his wife said that The Count and I were like wrestlers, always, always grappling with each other and the fact the Fates had thrown us together.
"I'm not your girlfriend !" The Count would insist. "Don't tell anyone I'm your girlfriend! You hear me?"
And I would snap back: "Whatever you say! You're the only woman I'm fucking and I'm the only man you have. You call me up at midnight and bring over a bottle of Tequila and expect me to just say okay but we're not involved.
"Fine! You're not my girlfriend then. You're just my Ho. Like that better?"
Because of her Catholic Guilt, fights like this made her hot. As long as we pretended to despise each other, making love was okay.
Nobody knows about being emotionally damaged like I do.
One of my former fans, upon reading my writing about love and referring his best friends to this magazine, said I wrote the best line he'd ever read from a writer. The line was "You haven't LIVED until you've become emotionally damaged."
That's me all over, isn't it? Cynical. World-weary. You can practically see the glass of Scotch in front of me and the smoke curling up from the cigarette on my lips, can't you? That's probably why my dear friend Dragana refers to me as "Bogie."
It would be amusing if it were not so true.
"What's the first thing you thought about when you met me?" The Count asked after we'd first coupled, at her insistence, because she thought it was about time I had a new woman.
"Sex," I said.
"Good," she smirked. She was that kind of woman.
I remember that when she'd visit me at my work all the guys would swarm towards her like bees on honey. Sometimes it would make me angry. Other times, I'd realize that was why she and I were together.
It only made sense that this last wild rutting period of mine, this time before I should become the most well-known celibate in the Internet world, should end with Hacker Barbie. The computer geek babe who all my closest friends thought would be Rod's Second Wife.
I still remember the day when I came back to my place to find that Hacker Barbie had taken all of her lingerie and extra dresses (you know) away. That was her way of letting me know it was over. Yes, she had her own key to my place. She left the key behind.
It was about how I was changing. I had made a series of decisions that she could not understand or reconcile. I had quit my job in San Francisco, I sold my car. I was going to devote my life to the homeless and G21, I'd decided.
"What the Hell is wrong with you?!?" she insisted in our last phone call. "Have you lost your mind?"
In a way, I had. The letters from my college friend who had died of AIDS had rocked me. He had written he admired me because I was committed to my art and The Truth.
That was only his opinion and a damned lie.
I was just another corporate drone going out with a flashy girl from Marin who had decided that our Halloween costumes should be Antony and Cleopatra. I was NOTHING compared to the Rod he believed in when he died.
I decided to go live among and advocate for the homeless in San Francisco. That was the beginning of a period in my life that my great friend, the photographer and artist Bill Purcell, refers to as my quest for "Secular Sainthood." Comfort became my enemy.
I've been celibate from that day until this one.
Now when people call me the "Literary Priest," I don't complain.
While I lived in New Orleans, the phrase, "Rod's Confession Booth" became operative. This happened even before I became a bartender. After all I'd been through, it was easy for certain people, particularly people who knew a lot of pain, to talk to me. They could unburden themselves of their sins and excesses knowing that I would be the LAST person on Earth to pass judgment. "Go. And sin no more."
You know how it is with me, Baby,
I just can't stand myself
It takes a whole lot of "medicine," Baby
For me to pretend that I'm somebody else -- "Guilty" Randy NewmanBasic Rules of Life
The ones that supposedly "got away" end up being the women you talk to frequently in your old age. The ones you got, you never talk to again. Don't ask me to explain why.Thanks for coming back this week. Keep me in your prayers as I keep you in my own.
THINGS ROD WANTS THIS WEEK
1 - An easy means of attending the Online Journalism Review's conference of independent Web publishers in Los Angeles in March.
2 - More book sales.
3 - A chance that my publisher will support my efforts to be featured on NPR's "This American Life."
4 - As always, a new girlfriend. (Sigh.)
"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching ... "
Love,
Rod
ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at the (U.S.) Public Broadcasting System (PBS's) WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote on Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS Internet magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, r eaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.
In 2002, he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. He did stints as the Resident Philosopher at three separate gin mills in that city in the French Quarter and the Marigny, earning his stripes during two successive Mardi Gras seasons. Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia. When he's not busy here, he writes technology columns for IT Manager's Journal. Rust never sleeps.
Our Resident Philosopher has exchanged his legend mobility for a means of keeping your World's Magazine. Now he must become earnest about gaining a financial underpinning for this enterprise. (Read: Buy back his freedom and then go home.}.
In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.
He continues to be committed to integrity,
chastityand a dose of humility.
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