Why PETA is Being Dumb about Sea World

When I was younger I had a housemate who had a dog.  Barney was a gangly retriever mix: a rambunctious, untrained pain in the neck.  Since my housemate lacked both the time and willingness to train him she resolved to get rid of him. 

This was back when hippies were real hippies, not the ersatz kind we have now.  Accordingly, they were mostly dumb and drug-addled.  Some of them were arrogant as hell.  They believed, for example, that just because the Vietnam War was finally over, they must have had something to do with it.  Nixon had been forced to quit and they took credit for that too.  Most significantly they figured out if you took the baloney off a sandwich and put avocado on it, not only did you appear more virtuous (see: Love Animals Don’t Eat Them), but had invented a new kind of tasty lunch.

So my housemate, her fierce belief in “natural” things reinforced no doubt by both avocado and alfalfa sprouts, decided to turn Barney loose in the wild.  The problem was that we lived in Los Angeles and the only “wild” she knew was Topanga Canyon, a brambled rolling land of sagebrush covered hills punctuated  by ramshackle houses occupied mostly by more hippies and possums.  Hopefully, someone found Barney and rescued him.  But it is more likely he was run over or starved to death.  He could no more have caught a possum than flown to Mercury.

This is the problem I have with PETA and its insistence that Sea World release its captive orcas.  I’m not on Sea World’s side.  I worked at a marine park with two captive orca whales in the late 1970’s and from the first day I saw them in that tiny 500,000 gallon tank, which sounds like a lot of water, but isn’t when you consider the fact that the bigger whale was actually slightly longer than the depth of the tank so his tail flukes were curved at the ends, you get the picture. 

Everybody knew that situation was wrong.  I asked an old keeper one day whether he thought those animals would every get out of that tiny tank and he said, “only in pieces, Catherine.” (fortunately, that did not come to pass.)  When the female had babies, they starved to death.  She couldn’t nurse them.  There were several theories as to why.  One was that being on her own, no one had ever taught her how.  Orca whales, which live in matriarchal pods, are highly social animals and they learn just about everything from other whales.  Another idea was that since the pool was round and she couldn’t really straighten out, her calves couldn’t get into a nursing position.  The problem has been solved at Sea World and it has successfully raised many orca calves, which is good because at this point the animal loving public would raise holy hell if it began snatching baby whales from the wild again.

PETA’s answer to the Sea World problem however, is naïve at best and moronic at worst.  Let’s take a look at the only example we have of humans trying to rehabilitate and release a lifelong captive orca:  Keiko.

In the early nineteen-nineties production began for a movie called “Free Willy.”  It was about a kid who makes friends with a captive orca and resolves to get him back into the wild.  Most of the whales in “Free Willy” were animatronic, but inevitably the studio needed a real whale for a few shots.  Like all movie productions “Free Willy” had a limited budget and needed to get the cheapest whale they could find. They found him in a rundown dump of a seaquarium in Mexico.  He was two-thousand pounds underweight, had a nasty skin condition—the result of living in warm Mexican waters instead of the cooler waters of his native seas—and was overall in extremely poor health. 

The movie was a minor hit with the kids and somewhere along the line questions arose that would lead to one of the greatest let’s-put-our-money-where-our-mouths-are experiments of all time.  There was no choice.  Keiko had to be removed from that situation, but because of his skin condition he could not simply be purchased by another Sea Park.  No one knew whether it was contagious or not, and nobody wanted to risk putting him in with other valuable captive orcas.

The “Free Willy/Keiko Foundation” was formed.  Keiko underwent 2 years of rehabilitation in Oregon.  He had been captured in Iceland as a baby in 1979, and when he was healthy again he was transported by cargo plane back to his home waters.  He was trained to eat live food—having been fed dead fish from buckets for most of his life the change was something he had to get used to—taken on numerous open ocean swims, (accompanied by his caretakers in a boat)—and after being tagged with a tracking device, released into his native seas. 

Some wrongs simply cannot be righted and as humane as its motives no doubt were, The Free Willy/Keiko Foundation did not succeed.  Keiko did not, as was hoped, re-integrate with his family pod.  He did not speak their language, having never had the chance to learn it. Three weeks after his release he was found in a Norwegian fjord seeking human companionship and letting little kids ride on his back.  On December 12, 2003 he was found dead in Taknes Bay, Norway.  The cause of death was pneumonia, common in starving marine mammals.  Without a thick blubber layer they get as cold as we would if dumped in icy Icelandic seas.  They are warm blooded animals.

The cost of freeing Willy/Keiko, a project that took nearly ten years, was over twenty-million dollars and it was a failure.  He could not readapt to the wild any more that Barney the dog could have.  He did not know how to be a Killer Whale.  The sea is a wondrous but harsh place.  Thriving there takes a lifetime of learning and practice.

Sea World currently owns 29 captive orca whales, which have lived their entire lives in captivity.  Many have been born there.  The question becomes, if some grand hand were to come down and demand it release its animals, who would pay for it and more importantly, is there a chance in hell it would even work?  If it didn’t, could the suffering imposed upon real animals by uninformed ideologues be greater than the suffering they already endure?  These are valid questions.  These animals are not just used to captivity.  They are functionally dependent on it. 

Dramatic solutions often look great and make us feel virtuous, but in the case of captive orcas at Sea World, or at any other marine parks and believe me, there are a lot of them worse than Sea World, isn’t it better to put pressure on such organizations to phase out their captive breeding programs thereby eventually stopping the practice of keeping such large and majestic animals in captivity in the first place?

Sometimes, as it goes in life, mistakes are simply compounded.  The first captive orca was Namu, caught in 1965, made to live in a small sea pen in the Pacific Northwest.  He lasted one year in captivity before he died.  That’s not to say they didn’t try.  When he seemed lonely they even caught him a mate and called her Shamu, the performing name of every orca whale Sea World owns.

Maybe it’s time we admitted our mistake and simply turned around.  But like anything that takes years in the making, the solution will not happen overnight.

On Wit, Depression and Robin Williams

Robin Williams killed himself yesterday.  This probably didn’t come as a surprise to people who knew him well.  He’d been in and out of rehab several times and endured a life long struggle with substance abuse and depression.

I have thought about wit many times.  Mostly because so few people have it.  Many quote jokes, smile, laugh as a form of social engagement and enjoyment and have occasional witty moments, but chronic wit is rare and those afflicted live troubled and conflicted lives.  Groucho Marx destroyed most of the people close to him.  He couldn’t turn off his scathing humor regardless of any love he might have felt for the people at whom it was directed.  The joke, barb, the surgically precise observations continually burst through, shredding anyone in its path.  He made several wives miserable and died a lonely and exploited old man.  

Richard Pryor, a first class wit by any measure was miserable, angry and violent.  There would have been no “Blazing Saddles” without Pryor—Mel Brooks, as funny as he was, was bolstered and advised throughout by Mr. Pryor.  Those of us who witnessed his stand-up in its heyday remember being shocked into speechless insensibility as he talked about his past in whorehouses and on the streets, turning the fact that he grew up under miserable circumstances into a brand new kind of comedy.  Richard Pryor rarely pulled a punch and he made us laugh like hell.  He also eventually set himself on fire then proceeded to die miserably over a period of twenty years.

The ability to see the world, to remain intimate with the horror and cruelty of it devoid of sugar-coating, then spin it into something that makes us laugh, comes at great cost.  Most of us filter realities' harshest barbs with conclusions, belief, mindsets and philosophies thereby remaining at least partially buffered.  Dawn Powell said, “wits are never happy people.  The anguish that has scraped their nerves and left them raw to every flicker of life is the base of wit—for the raw nerve reacts at once without any agent, the reaction direct with no integumentary obstacles.”

True wit is a razor’s edge.  Rosanne Barr was funniest when she’d just got out of the trailer park, the same goes for Whoopi Goldberg when she was on welfare.  Both situations were exceedingly painful: children, no money, desperation saddled with roaring intellectual acuity that never stops collecting information, sharpening it, and presenting it back in particular brands of stark relief.  But this stark relief provides both insight and pain.  The act of turning the pain on its head is the very thing that makes it funny. 

One of the most quoted lines of Groucho Marx, that he’d never want to be a member of a club that would have him as a member, isn’t what people think.  Back in the 1930’s the best and most exclusive social clubs disallowed Jews.  That’s what Groucho was talking about. As a Jew, no matter how famous or rich he was he could not get into the best social clubs.  Anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, these are all the rich veins from which comedy comes.  

They’re also extremely painful.

Dave Chappelle walked away.  Everybody thought he was nuts.  In truth, he was probably the sanest comedian ever to come down the pike.

I don’t know what Robin Williams’ personal demons were.  I’m sad that he’s dead.  He made me laugh more times than I can count.  But maybe what killed him was a function of who he was, the way he saw the world and spun it into humor as told to us.  And maybe for all he said, it’s the things he didn’t say that killed him, the leftovers, the things we were spared.

How very tragic that he could not spare himself. 

The Evolution of Sideboob

                 Noisy USC students celebrating something.  Who knows what?  The twenty-something blond with the broad back flashes serious sideboob.   That in itself is not worthy of celebration.  It is a side dish.  We are in a Tapas bar.

Sideboob is a twenty-first century invention.  Thousands of generations of women all over the world have launched endless assaults with cleavage, but sideboob is only just emerging.

                “Don’t be so obvious!”  My dining companion’s head pivots 180 degrees like Jerry Manhoney’s and when it comes back around his mouth is hanging open.  “Pretend like you’re looking at the wine list.”  The wine list is chalked up on the board behind the revelers.  They have Verdugo and Andalusio, and Toro and Spaino and loads of other vintages all from the sun soaked plains of that land overseas that just missed inventing tortillas.  It could have become a great civilization but for that. 

                He gives it another go.  The Catalonia Picado is a very spicy vintage, no doubt, and man holy shit, you can almost see nipple.  Blond locks flowing, hiding the knot at the neck of the flimsy black halter dress with a back so low it’s possible there’s no dress at all.

                Something happens.  The students roar.  Their conversation is mostly roars.  “The scallops are really good,” hollers my companion.  I cup both ears like a radio dish trying to receive faint signals from outer space.  Roar, roar and more roar.  The scallops, grilled in a number of things I’ve never heard of before, include carrot goo.   I order them.

                Sideboob cuddles her boyfriend, flesh barely teasing his upper arm.  She whoops about something and I don’t blame her.  Young, well-fed and cared for as if raised on a farm for beautiful girls, she should be whooping about everything.  The world that unfolds for her is not the same one the rest of us muck around in.  It welcomes and embraces her gently and lovingly.  Everybody in it is “nice.”  It puts its coat over puddles in the road lest she dirty her Italian slave sandals.

                Historically, women have been looking for ways to both show and not show their breasts for millennia.  The dilemma first presented itself back in caveman times when someone with big, well-formed breasts got the best guy in the place.  He really liked those breasts but he liked them so much he didn’t want any of the other guys to get a look at them, even though most of them already had.  The “best” guy in the place wasn’t necessarily the smartest.  He was just the best at hunting, running, all that.

                “Now that you’re going to live in my cave,” said the Best Caveman, “you’ve gotta cover those things up.”

                The Best Caveman’s woman was not thrilled by this pronouncement.  She had a baby who ate ten times a day and putting a yak pelt on and off all day long seemed like a big pain to her.   Those suckers are heavy.

                People say a lot of bad things about cavemen, that they’re domineering, short-tempered, inclined to club women in the head and drag them around by the hair, which is mostly true, but this one was pretty reasonable.

                “What if,” said the Cavewoman thinking on her feet, “I cut a ‘V’ in the top of the yak pelt.  That way when the baby needs to eat, I can just reach down and whip out a breast and when I’m finished, put it back.”

                This idea caused the Best Caveman some consternation.  It made sense, but there was still so much wrong with it.  A full time crew-neck yak shirt was a heavy burden to bear, which wasn’t really fair to the Cavewoman, the ‘V’ would allow for easy access, but damn!  It would still allow all the other cavemen to see the creamy smoothness of the tops of her breasts.  But wait, were those parts even a big deal?  When both he and the baby were having at those magical orbs, they went straight for the nipples.  It occurred to the Best Caveman that maybe, just maybe, those were the only parts that really mattered.

                “Okay, fair enough,” said the Best Caveman.  “But if you whip those things out when the second best caveman is around I’ll club you insensible.

                “Fair enough,” said the Best Caveman’s woman.

                Over the centuries, women have found hundreds, perhaps thousands of ways to exploit this initial, and for reasons unknown, definitive masculine decree.  The Roman’s, generally ignorant of Stone age humanity and anybody’ else’s but their own, allowed massive cleavage on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, none on Tuesday and Thursday, and on the weekends changed the rules without telling anybody. This occurred only after the invention of the Julian calendar.  During the dark ages most people were starving and women actually had concave breasts, so nobody cared.  But by the time the European Renaissance rolled around there was bustiered, corseted, wired, strapped, and default cleavage on display and in abundance.

 The Victorians got goosey about breasts, but that high-necked, bowed and lacey nonsense made everybody miserable and by the time the 20^th century rolled around women were beginning to rediscover the fact that cleavage was an enormously powerful tool in making men act the way you wanted them to.  Cleavage displayed correctly could poleaxe most anything with 1 “X” chromosome, makes them buy you drinks and eventually say “yes,” when you wanted new furniture for the living room.

                But then something happened that no one had anticipated.  Breast implants.  Breast implants made cleavage so common it got boring.  Tits and fannies began to look alike.   Everybody had massive cleavage: children, fat boys, young girls, old girls.  There were fifty and sixty year old women walking around with the tits of 25 year olds. Rich people got their dogs breast implants.  Someone simply had to come up with a better idea.  That’s when the the genius of this latest generation comes in. 

While breast implants look great from the top, all round and symmetrical, from the side those suckers look lousy!  From the side they look like, well, blobs of manufactured plastic.  Fact is, you can’t fake awesome side boob.

                The table of USC students roars again.  Roar roar roar roar.  Someone’s ordered a round of drinks, something extremely nasty and pink colored.  It’s either watered down Nyquil or something Spanish nobody’s ever heard of.   My dinner arrives.  The scallops are decoratively arranged on a bed of carrot goo and grilled to perfection.

They are delicious.

Isla Vista, Mental Illness, and Guns

               

 In the wake of the Isla Vista shootings there is a lot of talk about mental illness.  Every time something like this happens the initial reaction is, “he must be nuts.” (It’s almost always a “he.” According to the US Department of Justice 90% of murders are committed by men.)

 I have a problem with the “he must be nuts” conclusion, because it is dead wrong.

               

First off, there’s too much separation and resignation in it.  It says, “We who are sane cannot comprehend the actions of people who commit these crimes, so we are stuck with it.”  This is patently untrue.  We can all comprehend exactly what happened.  Take that little part of you that felt hurt when dissed at the supermarket by a rude checker.  Take that little part still wounded because the girl of your dreams turned you down for a date.  Take the feeling you had when the asshole on the freeway flipped you the bird even though he was the one who cut you off.  Now magnify those feeling thousands of times until they eclipse every gentle impulse you have.  That’s who Elliot Rodgers was.  We all have parts of him in our nature.  He was one expression of human nature.

               

In a novel called, “We Need to talk about Kevin,” Lionel Shriver makes a pretty good argument for murderous behavior as inborn.  People are born with all kinds of deficiencies and peculiarities.  Low I.Q’s, high mechanical aptitude, artistic flairs, excessive kindness, sensitivity, no arms, tails, flat heads, the ability to play Chopin by the time they are two.  There is no dearth of inherent qualities recognizable in children at birth.  There is not one reason in the world that viciousness should not be one of them other than our moral, visceral objection to the idea.  We like to think of ourselves as fine fellows and enjoy platitudes like, “people are basically good.”  While it is true that most people lack the drive to go and shoot up a school or shopping mall, the ones who possess it do an inordinate amount of harm.  So it seems to me imprudent to blanketely accept the notion that “people” are basically anything.  We accept that saints and holy men show virtue from a very early age, why shouldn’t the opposite be true as well?

                

One of my sons had a school mate who, at the age of about 7, delighted in telling me how funny it was that he could repeatedly push his toddler brother down the steps and his mother assumed the child was just clumsy, thereby accounting for his constantly bruised head.  The same kid, I was informed by my son, went back into the classroom during recess and sliced the leg off the class frog.  It was never proved but every kid in the class knew who did it.

               

 If excessive kindness or musical prowess is accepted as just a normal variation of human nature, why should excessive meanness be relegated to the category “nuts.”  The answer is that it shouldn’t.   I would argue that Elliot Roger’s behavior was within the normal human spectrum.

               

We simply find it soothing to imagine this person and his atrocious actions are outside the definition of humanity.  He/they clearly are not.  Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Kenneth Bianchi, Angelo Bueno, Charles Albright, Joe Ball, Terry Blair, Richard Ramirez, Robert Yates, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Adam Lanza, Jared Lee Loughner and the thousands of other murderers and megalomaniacs humanity produces, are ample evidence that homicidal behavior is an aspect of human nature.

               

So the question becomes, what do we do about it?  The only answer that makes any sense is to diminish the lethal capacity of the population in general and the only way to do that is to limit the access of the general public to firearms, especially automatic weapons.  They are too efficient at killing.

Other arguments can be made but the solutions they propose are draconian.  Since the Isla Vista killing I’ve heard a lot of pundits, mostly propped up by the gun industry I imagine, blaming the mentally ill.  They say, “if someone had screened him, identified his pathology before it became so violently apparent this never would have happened.”  This is ridiculous on multiple fronts.  One, since Elliot Rodgers had never been arrested for a violent or any other act, constraining him would have been an abrogation of his individual rights.  Even if some mental health practitioner somewhere along the line had predicted that he was liable, at some future point, to commit violence, you can’t arrest someone for something he might do.  This is explicated clearly in the film, “Minority Report” so I won’t do it here.

               

Secondly, the assumption that the mental health sector of the health care industry is anything close to functioning is just wrong.  Until recently, few insurance companies even covered mental health care and they still balk like crazy about it, no pun intended.  When they do offer coverage, practitioners are tremendously over-subscribed with waiting lists of months.  And of course getting in does not insure adequate or even plausible care.  At your average HMO if it can’t be treated with Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors and anti-anxiety medication, it ain’t going to get treated.  Mental health is a much harder fix that a sore throat and few but the very rich are in a position to demand the precision required in treating its subtleties.

                

Again, I would argue that Elliot Rogers was not mentally ill.  He was undoubtedly a psychopath, but psychopathology is not a mental illness.  It is a “personality disorder,” and as any shrink who has ever run screaming from a treatment room will tell you, it is not treatable.

               

I read the news today, oh boy, and it seems a bunch of gun rights guys are going to go shopping at a Home Depot with their guns.  They say in doing this they are exercising their right as codified in the United States Constitution, to bear arms.  Like a lot of other people I don’t think this is what the founding fathers were talking about.  They acknowledged the need for a “well-regulated militia.” The US had no standing army in those days and if you’re going to have a militia it’s got to have guns.  Having soldiers bring their own meant the government didn’t have to buy them.  I don’t think they were talking about bringing arms to Home Depot.

In any case, I don’t know what the other people in that particular Home Depot are going to be feeling, but if I was in a large warehouse with a bunch of guys carrying guns I would exit as discreetly and quickly as possible and never go back there again.   Hell, aren’t a bunch of guys who feel like they need to carry arms to go buy hoses and lawnmowers by definition, nuts?

After his son was killed in the Isla Vista shooting, Richard Martinez, father of Chris, made a heartfelt statement.  He said his family was broken and lost.  “You don’t think it will happen to your child until it does.”

“They talk about gun rights, what about Chris’s right to live?”

What indeed, about Chris’s right to live?   

Entrepreneurial Journalism

Entrepreneurial Journalism

First off, I’m prejudiced.  I’ll say it right here.  “Entrepreneur” is a fucking hard word to spell and no matter how many times I have been forced to do it—and there have been plenty lately-- I still get it wrong on the first, second and sometimes third try before I give up and spell check it.

Secondly, I hate the word in general.  It sounds fancy, French and all, but everybody, and I mean everybody from mobsters to prostitutes to drug dealers and bootleggers, have used this word to describe the fact that what they’re doing, primarily, is whoring or stealing.  These days however, “entrepreneur” has taken an interesting turn due wholly to the rise of the Internet.  “Net neutrality,” which means that if you have a product or service, you can make a website, put it on the Internet, and make big dough, has ushered in a new age of egalitarian capitalism.  Everybody’s equal on the Internet.  “Google,” is no more important than “Crotchless Panties Inc.” Except for the fact that “Crotchless Panties Inc. is more fun and probably can’t tell you whether Millard Fillmore or Rutherford B. Hays was president first.

The new egalitarian entrepreneurial model has eclipsed all the old fashioned employment models where you actually go to work and get paid.  On the one hand, this is fine because there aren’t many jobs these days.  Manufacturing has mostly been carted offshore and lots of things are automated that didn’t used to be including banks, supermarket checkers, call centers, autoworkers and airplane pilots.  Oh don’t get me wrong.  There are still some jobs, mostly at a McDonalds near you; and of course there’s always sign spinning.  But not everybody’s got the knack for that.  To be a good sign spinner you have to be young, with access to a lot of meth and even sign spinners are having a tough time these days, outflanked by those mannequins chained to car batteries.

So a lot of people stay home, write computer code and make websites.

Dog trainers make websites, people who think they might like to become dog trainers make websites, house cleaners make websites, artists, chimney cleaners, child care providers, perverts who want you to think they’re child care providers, Nigerian princes, house painters, freelance documentarians, vegetarians, Unitarians and veterinarians all make websites.

 “If you build it, they will come.”  That’s the operational principle.  And if you’re going to have a new egalitarian capitalist model, you have to have an operational principle.  Marx said that, I think.

At the dog park near my house there are loads of flyers on the fence for “dog-walking services,” mostly flying around, weather-beaten and frayed.   A lot of people love dogs but since they have to go to work they don’t have the time or energy to walk them.  So they need professionals to do it.  A few years ago some plucky individuals recognized this, started offering to do it for pay, and it worked.  These people multiplied over time and after awhile, the people who owned the dogs they didn’t have time to walk figured out how much dough these dog walkers were making and, since they hated their jobs anyway thought to themselves, “hey, I think I’ll become a dog walker too!”  Then the people whose dogs they walked came to the same conclusion, quit their jobs to become dog walkers, then a bunch more people did it, and more and more and more until there were no more dogs to walk.  The entire dog walking economy collapsed.  It was catastrophic, like with the Dutch tulips.

Another entrepreneurial thing I’ve noticed these days is “web site designers.”  If you go on Google and type in “website design” you will get, like, billions of hits in the time it takes to pull your crotchless panties out of your ass-crack.  Loads of these people will be fifty-something men, the kind who always fancied themselves good with technology and upon getting downsized from their regular jobs because a twenty-five year old agreed to do it for half the salary, taught themselves website design.  The problem is, this shit really is a young peoples’ game.  If you were born before 1963 you’ve got all sorts of debris hobbling your neurons—things like transistors, phone answering machines, V-8 engines, surfboards, leftover drugs, braless hippies, Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, bleak Ingmar Bergman movies with stark black and white landscapes occupied by rail thin men in big floppy hats.  Also, Captain Crunch.  Physiologically, this debris has calcified all that formerly wobbly grey matter so that thinking is no longer so much fluid, as it is an act of willfully pushing neuronal impulses through something the consistency of bathtub caulk.  Trust me on this.  No matter how smart you think you are you can’t keep up. 

Kids these days have been pushing buttons since they were in kindergarten and have response times so jacked up on Pavlovian bright color payoffs, booms, bangs, tits, thrills and violent erotic imagery soaked in massive doses of Ritalin administered from the first time they wiggled in their strollers, that they can design and create a fucking website in their sleep.

But back to the reason I’ve been forced to spell “entrepreneur” a lot lately.   I took a journalism course at school.  I used to be a journalist, well, kind of, sort of.  It snuck up on me.  I lived in Arizona for a long time and being a chronically pissed-off liberal in that reddest of red states, I was forever writing irate letters to the local alternative weekly, which morphed into a “guest column” and then one day the editor called and said, “guess what?  You got the job.”  I didn’t know what he was talking about since I hadn’t applied for any job but I said, “Sure, I’ll take it.  You’ve made the right choice; you won’t be sorry sir,” etc, etc.

It was great.  I got to go off about anything I wanted to for nearly four years.  But bye and bye the bottom fell out of both the newspaper business and the economy, and I moved on.  Graduate school seemed a natural segueway at this point. 

I spent the next year learning about the “new” journalism and I learned plenty.  New journalism is a lot different from the old, the kind where you investigated and wrote stories like Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane.  All that’s gone.  The new journalism is, you guessed it “entrepreneurial.”

There are two kinds of entrepreneurial journalism.   The first is “backpack journalism.”  There’s a substantial up-front cost with this.  You’ve got to buy a video camera, mics, wires, I-phone, editing software and a laptop with high processing power to run it.  Then, and this was the hard part for me, you have to learn how to use the fucking editing program.  This involves a computer screen display of sound and video translated into lines that look like seismograph readings, snatching bits of one line with a clown hand and dragging it to another line.  In the end, it’s all supposed to run seamlessly, as in you can’t tell where the edits are.  My initial and only attempt came out looking like I’d interviewed a bad stutterer.  The whole idea is that as an entrepreneurial journalist, you find, create, edit and produce your own story, all in the back seat of your car then zing it to the news outlets before anybody else does.  If you’re lucky someone buys it.  The guy who taught us this gave us an example of excellent “opportunity seizing behavior,” his own.  He got the scoop on a nasty car accident by pulling off the freeway, walking back up the off ramp and crossing the police lines like he owned the place.  Nobody said “boo” to him.  “Seizing the day is everything, people.”  That’s what I learned about the new journalism.  It’s fast fast fast.  Report, produce and sell.  It also involves a lot of networking, branding, Tweeting, being Linked In, and being at spiritual oneness with your IPhone.

After selling enough stories this way you’ve got loads of stuff on your CV and then, ah, something happens.  I’m not sure what, exactly.  I’m thinking of that old “Far Side” comic where the professor is standing in front of a chalkboard loaded with calculations but right in the middle is a cloudy bit that says, “then a miracle happens.”  I’m also thinking that the kind of entrepreneurial journalists this works out for either have trust funds or have to live in their parents basements for very long times.  I mean, think about it.  If you’re practicing backpack journalism you can’t get a regular job at Starbucks, for example.  Suppose some terrorists blow up the dam or someone had a wardrobe malfunction, you want to go cover it, but your stupid boss won’t let you go?  “Are you kidding?  Who’s going to make these double caramel lattes?  Get back to work, you dolt.”

Of course the other thing you can do if you’re backpack journalist is create your own website.  This involves learning to write computer code and takes a very long time.  If you don’t like fiddling with a bunch of impossibly arcane crap that would drive a Rhesus monkey out of its mind in about two minutes, you probably won’t enjoy this.  Once you’ve got your website up and running you can put your stories there and theoretically, if you’re the right kind of mover and shaker, get as much traffic as the Huffington Post.  Of course you’re competing with a lot of Internet traffic including somebody’s cousin.   Butchie’s 5^th birthday party Facebook page, but you never know where the break’s going to come from and that’s the excitement of the new journalism.  No more working for “the man.”  You’re free to create, invent your own “brand,” become a news gathering universe unto itself and if the dough’s a little slow in rolling in, well, be nice to your parents.  They try to be as nice as they can but you really can’t blame them for imagining you’d be out of the house before you reached your 38^th birthday.

The second kind of entrepreneurial journalism, the kind I’m doing right now is called “blogging.”  “Blogging” comes from “web logging,” which didn’t used to be a thing but now it is.  Virtually anyone can become a blogger: human rights activists, computer salesmen, swimming instructors, religionists.  My white supremacist Nazi prick bastard neighbor before he got evicted.  Some blogs get read, most of them don’t because, let’s face it, who’s got the time to read everybody’s opinion?  Reliable surveys indicate most blog readers are woodworkers, fetishists, fans of Sarah Palin, gun enthusiasts, people recovering from surgeries whose TV’s broke, and convicted felons.

Of course just having a blog does not guarantee you’ll get readers from the aforementioned group and it doesn’t imply that you will make any money with your blog.  Arianna Huffington makes a bunch with her blog, but I have a feeling that has to do with another modern journalistic practice called “link-baiting.”  I believe link-baiting might be ethically problematical, but nobody worries about those things anymore.  Link-baiting is when the headline on the web page says, “Lose 50 pounds in two days with special miracle food!” but the story is about farming subsidies in a Republican controlled district in Nebraska.  Publications that do a lot of link-baiting get paid according to how often stories get clicked on, not on whether people actually read them or not.  My guess is that people looking to lose massive amounts of weight quickly aren’t particularly interested in farming subsidies in the Midwest, but then there is a lot about the new journalism I find hard to grasp.

Well, that’s about it for now.  I hope all of you interested in the new journalism profession have found this interesting and informative.  I will be back next week with the first in my ongoing series, “An Historical Perspective on the Dog Walking Industry: could we have learned something from the Dutch Tulip catastrophe, or are some things simply the workings of fate?”

Seagulls Reel

Seagulls Reel

                Seagulls reel.  They rise in a quasi-flock and at the edge of the surf and size things up.  To go out, make the effort against the wind coming off the water to pick at the leavings of sea lions, pelicans and cormorants or to turn back inshore, to sandwiches, chips, pizza, McDonalds, pork rinds, Doritos, cupcakes left unattended.

                Quasi-flock: seagulls are not loyal birds.  Their social structure ranges from that of vaguely affiliated hillbillies to unconstrained mobs.  Given the right circumstances they will peck each other senseless over a crust of bread.

                Seagulls reel.  Heading inland; the wind makes it senseless to do otherwise.  Pudgy brown children roll in the surf like churros in powdered sugar.  Fathers male bond as mothers watch hawk-like although a few barely at all.  And as the bright sunshine bounces off water concealing tormented and writhing sand shifting beneath the feet of all and sundry, conditioned by inflow and outflow, by the moon, the gods and worst of all El Nino, they play. 

The lifeguard watches.  Red-slickered, hooded to the point of chicken-bandy-legged and gymtoned, waving a fire engine red lozenge while the myriads watch not knowing or caring what he’s worried about.

                “How many you pull out today?”  At Zuma Beach there are always rescues.  It is treacherous to the point sensible people won’t go there.  You want a rip-tide that pulls you to Anacapa you go to Zuma Beach.  Swim parallel to the shore as long as you want to and nothing's going to happen but you swim into another one.  From Zuma Beach you can visit the entire west coast of north America for free and without hardly trying.  It doesn't ask if you want to go.

                And jellyfish, though technically you’re not supposed to call them “fish."  They are not fish.  They are 99.999% water and the rest don’t you fucking touch me.  Zuma Beach always had, has, and always will have jellyfish.  The man-o-war kind in fractions and otherwise dead and tentacled lolling on the breakers hitching rides or whatever gelatinous does.  Nothing helps a jellyfish sting but peeing on it, which probably doesn’t help.  But it is funny.

                Seagulls reel.  Inland like a U-turn on the boulevard.  A sunburned slacker with beach-buzz eyes loses his hot dog to a clear headed smart beak, feathers and sinew heading out to sea.  It’s alright now, the buffeting no problem.  This bird has acquired the fuel to get back.

                “Five,” says the lifeguard.  “Lots of holes out there.  That’s why I love this job.  Love to go into the water.”

                Where would we be without lifeguards?

                I know a thing or two about seagulls.  It is nearly impossible to identify one kind from the other because at different developmental stages they all look the same.  A gray one can be a white one on the way to becoming white and a white can be thirty different kinds of white.  Herring gulls have a red spot on their lower beaks so their offspring can target the food pump.

Were I to wake up reincarnated a seagull, horrification would ensue: “holy shit what did I do to deserve this?”  Because for a seagull, a broken wing, leg, an illness or serious wound is a death sentence.  And the wind, the force, the engineering of a creature constantly and persistently at the mercy of such, and the undoing should anything befall it.  I cannot snatch the hot dog before the other one can.  I lack the strength to fly out to sea.  I am going away and I cannot fix this.  The others don’t notice.  They just bicker and fight over the leavings, until the leavings are you.

Seagulls reel.  And at the end of the day settle further on down the beach.  There are no people or snack foods there.  Just beak tucked into wing fluffed with white feathers and sand.  Night will fall.  For a little while breath beneath the wing is warm

Los Angeles at a Glance

Los Angeles at a Glance

No one knows where Los Angeles begins or ends.  They did once but not anymore.  It spreads out in so many directions north south east and west stopped only by the sea and then barely, that there is no obvious boundary.  It is like the universe only dirtier and with much less order.  There will be heat death for Los Angeles someday, but it will be ugly getting there.  The ocean stops the city but when it does the leavings of masses mixes with the surf and while yeah, the reason the foam at Santa Monica is brown may have something to do with churn and rainwater, but you’re never really sure.  There’s forever a nagging.  Is it or isn’t it shit I’m swimming in? Whose is it and what are they infected with?

The east.  Desert spattered with mini-malls and settlements gives way to something called “Upland,” although it is not clear what it is up land of.  Up land of more land which is bleak and waterless, sandy and shifting both in its architecture and population.  Lots of Latino immigrants have settled in Upland; they don’t mind the heat so much but the boredom gets to them as they work at fast food joints serving people driving to better or at least more exciting places burgers and burritos and send them on their way.  Go away Gringo.  We’ve got to get back to the hopelessness and meth labs, the first is always waiting—it ain’t going to go anywhere-- but the second tend to explode and burn down if you don’t keep an eye on them.

San Diego used to be south of Los Angeles but it has lost its autonomy and bled in.  It likes to imagine it is the other way around, that it has bled into LA but San Diego has never had much of a sense of self despite what T. Jefferson Parker says.  San Diego is real estate developed and yanked from under the indigenous population because it is too nice for the likes of them.  Bushy blond hairdo’s and hot rods disappeared a long time ago.  There are dolphins living in tanks now in San Diego.  One of them is going to jump out and go splat on the tarmac one of these days.  It has happened before elsewhere and it will happen again but very few people know about it.  It’s a secret.

 I live in Encino south of “the boulevard.”   “The boulevard” is Ventura and to live south of it is a big deal.  Everyone wants to live south of the boulevard since that means you’ve got dough except in my case.  In my case it means I fell on the charity of an old friend or maybe he needed the dough and fell on mine.  Either way it’s a kind of an impaling on chenielle and as you wake to the leaf blowers and middle easterners with black- tinted windows on high-end sports cars careening around the curve and down the hill, it kind of make you wonder in general about the things people crave.

My neighborhood is Jewish.  There are conservative Jews, Orthodox Jews, regular Jews, non-observant Jews and Jews who switch off Monday, Wednesday, Friday and alternating Saturdays.  There are kosher, non-kosher, short, tall, bearded, clean-shaven, men, women, and children Jews.  Many of them wear yarmulkas on Friday night and Saturday too.  I haven’t quite figured that one out yet but there’s a reason they have 2 Sundays.  Of course like the rest of us, some of them have no Sunday at all.

 You cannot go to the bathroom in Los Angeles without getting on a freeway.  Cars are a religion here and people act all kinds of ways they wouldn’t ordinarily when they are in their cars.  With a car you’ve got loads of metal, plastic, and tinted windows around you and you can act any old way you want to. If you get really mad you can crash into someone.  Of course most of the time it suffices to bully them, sidle up alongside and say mean stuff, intimidate them by acting aggressive and or crazy.  You can say things with your car you’d never have the guts to say ordinarily.  Leaning on your horn screaming “get the fuck out of the way.  My needs are a hundred times more important than yours are and even if they aren’t, fuck you anyway.”  There is a lot of fuck youing going on from the inside of cars.  Fuck youing nobody’d have the balls for if not for the metal, plastic and tinted windows.

But the fuck youing isn’t the worst thing emanating from the interior of cars in the City of the Angels.  The worst thing is the “I don’t give a fuck if you live or die because I’m busy texting.  If I don’t tell my best friend lol right now, some kind of bad electrical impulse is going to go off in my brain and I’m going to have to eat a quart of Haggen Daas when I get home.  Wtf?”  Text messaging monkeys are worse than fuck youing monkeys since at least the fuck youers have self-interest going for them.  They may act like they want to run into you but they don’t since it would damage their armor and get their insurance rates hiked.  The texters, which includes the yappers just for convenience’s sake, are in the grips of advanced addiction and while if they do run into another car or a pedestrian they won’t much like it, what they like and don’t like has nothing to do with anything.  They are compelled.  Compulsion is a dangerous thing.

Well, that is all for now.  Some Angelinos will read this and like, totally go, “Wow!  What a negative Nellie!”  I will address this phenomenon in the next installment, “The Law of Attraction, Pathological Narcissism, and Basalt.”