blogging

So I’ve been reflecting a bit on my reasons for engaging in this hellfired pursuit we call “blogging.” The last post I made was written, like a lot of my posts over the years (and personal paper journal entries too), in a fit of confusion and uncertainty and unhappiness. Expunging angst through sheer exposure is one of the benefits I get from the whole thing, a kind of cleansing exhibitionism.

And indeed, after putting it out there and deciding to take care of myself and rest easy for an evening, my attitudinal gyroscope corrected; by Sunday I was feeling quite alright. Mission accomplished.

My original reasons for starting this up were to let people keep up with me, to help provide an easy way to keep those stretchy/elastic social ties over the years, and to nudge myself lead a more honest and open existence. My intended audience is my friends and family and comrades, who (I think) appreciate the perspective I articulate, or at least get a kick out of my stories, even though I’m sure at times they’re shaking their heads thinking, “oh no, honey. Noooo…”

Over the years, the exhibitionism angle has come and gone; activism has waxed and wained; and I’ve come to really deeply appreciate the outlet and daily practice of simply writing. It’s a muscle, and it gets better with exercise. That’s a constant value, and one I didn’t really think of when I started.

So I’m happy to cast my words into the ether, and sometimes the ether answers back. It’s flattering really, that I can string sentences together good enough to provoke a response, and more often than not I find nuance and insight from the contributions of others.

I try as much as possible not to couch my prose, to spin myself. I’m not perfect at it, but I aim for the gonzo, for that Ginsburg maxim of “the only good writing is the writing that scares me.” It gets harder the closer to the heart I get. Way back in the day when I first set up a page about love I had my worries:

I’m a bit paranoid that girls I’m trying to have relationships with will see this and realize what a fuck I’ve been/can be/am being and avoid me. But that probably ties in with that whole “truthful living” stuff that got me into this mess in the first place. The truth always feels better, and comfortability with one’s self is ultimately attractive.

This concern has never gone away. It’s only gotten to be more of a hang-up as I’ve learned that, yeah, from time to time people I may be interested in — not just women, but prospective employers, business partners, clients, etc — will find this huge pile of prose. And egads! What will they think? I’m more than well aware what a turnoff my mental guts can be. But the truth is the truth, and I fall at the bottom of the percentile for “willingness to engage in tactful pleasantries to make other people feel good.” It’s just who I am; gonna come out sooner or later. Better to be Out Front, I’ve found.

I think as a culture we have a problem with putting up too many false face and walls and facades. It’s natural to hide your shame, but it’s inhuman to try and pretend that it doesn’t exist, that we don’t all make terrible mistakes or think unattractive, immoral, illegal, admonishable thoughts. I don’t know. There probably are pure and godly and angelic souls out there who walk on a higher plane, but I think they’re few and far between, and I think it’s better to be a Full Human, and live with your Shadows, and own all that, than to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Oh wow. This is fucking amazing. You have to click on the Archive links at the right to go more than four posts back, but it looks like a year or more of solid gold.

G-D it, this is why I love the internet. Stellar knockout writing, foulmouthed and perverse, and no dang gatekeepers. Content makes me miss NYC, too.

And also, my sister has a new bit up that’s really good. On another level, really.

Here we go, yo.

I decided I liked this simplistic layout enough to make it the new theme for the blog as I rebuild. I want (need) to get back to using this outlet, and building it up from scratch is appealing. So here it is, dirtstyle, with big ass images.

There’s more on the way. The writerly mission is to start delving into the sorts of things you’d find in the archives, a kind of personal wiki. I’m toying with the idea of mixing in real gonzo-style stuff with the usual autobio/about-me crap, taking things a little bit further, maybe making up a bunch of pseudonyms. In any case, I’m going to get back into writing about the juicy stuff.

On the coding end, I need to figure out some clever way to deal with categories and the like. I also need to figure out how best to incorporate all the varied content. Not just the archives, but also the old blog content, and disparate things like Vagabender. It’ll be an evolution.

I’m looking forward to it.

Lately it feels like I have been forgetting the magic. This old website is in its sixth year of operation, and my original reasons for starting it up — to retain meaningful connections with friends and family, to tell (and therefore to live) a compelling life-story, to embrace several values that I hold dear… all these seem ever more pressing.

My life has changed a lot since November 2001. I’ve changed too, but I still need the same things. It’s time to remodel, to return to some first principles. So, until that gets done I’m going to put a lid on the blog.

It’s still there, under the hood, but I’m not going to post anymore until I get some things figured out. This is partly how I spur myself into action, carrots and sticks. However, if you want to get a ping when I come back, here’s where you go.

In the mean time, I’m still going to be active online in the usual spots:

• Chapter Three LLC (work)
• Future Majority (politics)
• Drupal Dojo (nerding out)

So maybe I’ll put a little more here sometime, but for now I’m going to go back to digging for the magic. See you on the other side.

In reference to this, I just happened to crack open my copy of Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, and here’s what I found… In a letter to Tom Wolfe, 4/20/1971, this is in reference to the experience of writing Fear and Loathing:

The first draft to Part One, for instance, was written by hand on Mint Hotel stationary during and all-night drink/drug frenzy while I waited for dawn to come up so I could flee without paying. I typed the section you have in a motel in Pasadena, but hardly changed anything from the original crazed draft…

So in terms of Gonzo Journalism (pure), Part One is the only chunk that qualifies — although even the final version is slightly bastardized. What I was trying to et at in this was [the] mind-warp/photo technique of instant journalism: One draft, written on the spot at top speed and basically un-revised, edited, chopped, larded, etc. for publication. Ideally, I’d like to walk away from a scene and mail my notebook to the editor, who will then carry it, un-touched, to the printer.

But I think that will take a while to hash out.

The marriage of blogging with actual field-experience is where the hot action is. And, for balance, here’s an earlier (March 3rd) letter to Wolfe in response to his description of being on a lecture tour in Italy:

Dear Tom…

You worthless scumsucking bastard. I just got your letter of Feb 25 from Le Grande Hotel in Roma, you swine! Here you are running around fucking Italy in that filthy white suit at a thousand bucks a day laying all kinds of stone gibberish & honky bullshit on those poor wops who can’t tell the difference… while I’m out ehre in the middle of these goddamn frozen mountains in a death-battle with the taxman & nursing cheap wine while my dogs go hungry & my cars explode and a legion of nazi lawyers makes my life a goddamn Wobbly nightmare…

You decadent pig. Where the fuck do you get the nerve to go around telling those wops that I’m crazy? You worthless cocksucker. My Italian tour is already arranged for next spring & I’m going to do the whole goddamn trip wearing a bright red field marshal’s uniform & accompanied by six speed-freak bodyguards bristling with Mace bombs & when I start talking about American writers & the name Tom Wolfe comes up, by god, you’re going to wish you were born a fucking iguana!

And there’s plenty more where that came from.

A while back, I got the url democrobot.com, based on a conversation with Jon Berger and Eric Klotz about how there aught to be a digg.com for political news. At the time it was sort of trendy, and not especially needed (this was in early 2006 IIRC).

I think the time for such a site may be drawing near. The relationship between the established blogosphere, the newsmedia, and the major Democratic political campaigns is becoming increasingly symbiotic. Many major bloggers walk the line well, but quite a few don’t. Trust is on the decline as people play favorites without acknowledging their biases, and/or take professional gigs with no disclaimer.

Add that to a campaign season which seems to have a very strong top tier, and you have a very different scene than 2003-04, when the internet fueled disruptive insurgent candidacies. At this point, online communications are a fully-integrated integrated part of the political establishment, and that includes much of the widely-read blogosphere. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but it’s not like before.

However, at the same time, there are a large number of new/upstart citizen journalism projects which will produce a large volume of (relatively) independent campaign journalism. There’s also a much greater chance that staffers will post anonymously about the inner workings of some campaign operations in more obscure fora. There will also be a glut of low-quality audio and video content to sift through. This is all new.

The sifting is what’s needed. That’s where democrobot might have a purpose. If you added in Zack’s old “PPipes” idea of aggregating progressive/Democratic mailing-list messages, you’d have something that would be pretty interesting, and pretty useful too.

I clearly don’t have a lot of bandwidth to take on additional projects, but it might not be all that much work to get up and running. We’ll see.

The notion of a “blogger ethics panel” is a sort of big inside joke, and it’s a nice snarky comeback when people in the traditional media wail over the tone or reliability of some content from the “fever swamps.” After all, it’s not as though members of the traditional press, especially the political press, have any sort of actual leg to stand on.

And so fair enough. Joe Klein doesn’t get to lecture Atrios. Reasonable people agree.

However, I have an issue in that I don’t really want Joe Klein as my yardstick. I like reading blogs, and I do it because there’s real information there. As this is the first political cycle where the medium will be fully embraced (even Hillary comes out swinging with live webcasts), I expect we’ll see a lot of trickery.

And that’s a shame. It’s a shame that people who carry the title blogfather will go and say things like:

As a historical note, I was semi-involved with the Draft Clark effort. Markos and I had formed a consultancy group in January of 2003. I liked Dean; he Clark. We agreed that whichever hired us first we’d both work together on that campaign.

After they were hired, Jerome did not disclaim, but promoted Dean heavily. Markos posted that he did “some technical work for Howard Dean,” while helping to spread the word as well*. Somewhat misleading, I have to say.

Ah! But James Carville does the same thing! It’s true, you’re right, and as we said Joe Klein owes Atrios a million beers, but see that’s why I don’t listen to James Carville or Joe Klein, and haven’t for several years now. They’re both in their own way egotistical shills. Klein and Carville I mean. Armstrong and Moulitsas? Well, the jury is still out.

The bottom line is I want a better opinionsphere and I want better politics. Retreading the old paths isn’t going to get us there. If you want to blog a campaign blog it, and do it right and honest and open. Hidden agendas do not become us.

*Full disclosure, I really do do technical work for a friend of Markos’.

Jerome Armstrong, who I still have to post a recap about, continues to behave like a thug on MyDD. The latest example is a popular diary written by an Edwards supporter which takes Barak Obama to task for using similar language to Joe Lieberman. Jerome put it on the front page, and edited in an image from Google News with Edwards using similar language.

The image is two and a half years old, so that’s pretty weak sauce, but the point here isn’t the substance of the argument; it’s what Armstrong did with his admin powers.

Here you have a community site that’s had a pretty good vibe to it over the past year or two. It’s a community that has good things bubble up from the diaries, and has a smaller (but in many ways sharper) community of commentators than the bigger blogs.

On this community site, you have one of the admins taking a community contribution, editing it without permission to completely flip it around on the author, and putting the result on public display.

That’s thuggish, bullying behavior, and it’s destructive and wrong. Even if Jerome’s an Obama fanboy and was hurt by the community member’s diary — or maybe as he said was the case with Dean in this post and they’ve put him on the payroll so now he’s carrying water — this is a shitty way to behave on a community website. It’s a petty violation of what anyone would consider normal standards.

This upsets me partly because people in the campaign world think Jerome actually has good advice (highly debatable), but more because he really brings the whole tenor of MyDD down. Matt and Chris and Jonathan and the other posters have a good thing going, and Armstrong’s half-bright technology posts, childish abuses of admin power, and transparent frontpage shilling muddy the waters.

Jerome can say “it’s my blog, I’ll do what I want!” but frankly it’s not his blog anymore in spirit, even if he is the only one who can edit his own comments and change other people’s posts around. What MyDD has become, it’s become in large part because Armstrong left, and a more talented, capable, and community-minded group took over.

The internet is good for politics, a welcome addition to aging machine organizations, broadcast campaigning, a moribund press corps and the “infotainment” of 24-hour cable news. Even though many lament the “coarsening of the discourse” and the sharpness and vitrol you can find in the online “fever swamp”, it’s not as if this is actually new. Talk radio is famous for this, and countless other subcultural media — mostly on the right, but some on the anarchist or communist fringe — have been at it for years. It’s just out in the open now, which, if you want to address the problems of divisive politics, is a necessary first step.

The internet is good chiefly for two reasons:

1. Lower Barriers to Entry and Decentralized Authority: basically anyone who meets a minimal (and increasingly ubiquitous) set of requirements can take part. This widens the circle of participation, prevents or at least counteracts stale and unhelpful assumptions (aka “conventional wisdom”), and creates more competition to deliver good results. Win win win.

   Also, the open playing field means that authority — and by that I mean both who’s “an authority” on something as well as who’s the boss — becomes decentralized and harder to work for. You’re an authority because you put out something that builds a community of consensus, and in an open system it’s hard to do that without transparency and hard to build a consensus around lies if you can’t be opaque. Again, people will and are using this for evil as well as good, but the good is far more prevalent, and net/net it’s a much better ecosystem for civilization than the Hurst empire.

2. Transparency and Accountability: As mentioned above, getting the hot air out in the open, while not pretty, is a good/necessary thing to move forward. There’s nothing to be gained by keeping this stuff underground. Lance the boil. Let the puss ooze.

   Transparency also drives accountability, which critical for democratic systems to work. Check out this roundup of posts by right-wing megastar Instapundit on the Iraq War. It’s cherry-picked for sure, but the truth is that this guy shouldn’t have any credibility until he can explain all this nonsense. We’ve all made wrong predictions, but looking at these collected works, it’s hard not to see propaganda. This is a new thing, and it’s going to cause a shakeup, both in terms of exposing people who are consistently unhelpful, and also in setting more realistic expectations for how often any one voice can be correct.

This has been your daily reminder to believe that things are getting better. Enjoy!

So here’s an idea. I’ve been thinking more and more about the video medium. I liked making that commercial for my work, and I want to do more. I’m also attracted to the power of the form, and the fact that I’m still paying (and will be for a while now) for a shmantzy education that should give me some kind of edge on screen.

So it’s resolved. I’m gonna learn me some final cut and eventually get a better camera — the one I have makes a really annoying buzz on the audio — and start playing with the medium more extensively. The question is content.

What about just reading some of the better prose being written on blogs already?

It would probably be mostly political stuff. I don’t think I can really go for the emo/confessional personal videoblog, and I think the most important political contribution I can give is to push progressive ideas among the younger set. I’ve got plenty original content in me for sure, but part of building an audience is posting often. I’d need other sources. It seems like a natural fit.

I think of this when I read Gelnn Greenwald and Digby and a bunch of others from time to time. There’s a bunch of really good language out there and the performer in me wants to make use of it!

And now, an unrelated webquiz: