Ed Koch, 1924-2013

Ed Koch, after his primary election victory in 1985

I disliked most of his policies as Mayor, but I have to thank Ed Koch, who died early yesterday at the age of 88. He taught me a crucial early lesson about being a reporter.

In 1985, in my first full-time newspaper job, I was covering several neighborhoods for a weekly Brooklyn tabloid called The Phoenix. Since no one else on the staff had an interest, my beat also included the massive subsidized real estate deals that were being planned for the borough. So, when the Mayor announced the first new office project in downtown Brooklyn in decades, I left the tilted second floor room above Atlantic Avenue that served as our newsroom to attend my first City Hall press event.

I sat on the side and out popped Hizzonor. As Koch spoke, I flipped through the press release his staff had handed out. I made some quick calculations in the margin and discovered that the value of the government subsidies allocated to the building amounted to more than the cost of building it. So I tentatively stuck up my hand.

He called on everyone in the room before he deigned to recognize me. "Mr Mayor," I said when he finally nodded my way, "I've added up the numbers in your press release and from what I can tell, this building is 110 percent financed by the state and the city. So my question to you, Your Honor, is this: how much money is the developer putting into the building?"

Koch peered at me as if from a great distance. Then he spoke in three choppy bursts: "Where? Are You? From?"

All these years later, I still recall the cold sweat I felt as I gave my name and affiliation. It was a humbling yet valuable experience. Ed Koch taught me to ask my questions despite my fears.

Thanks, Mr. Mayor.

a snapshot of my desktop

A partial view of my desk and some of my trusted companions.

RAW campfire get-together

Come on over!
We hope you can visit us next Saturday, Jan. 12 between 2 pm and 6 pm at 1067 Pacific Street in Brooklyn.

Come join the fireside chat and check out the new RAW space we’ve taken on since January 1, 2013.  Say “hello” to the new challenge. For the next five years, we’ve taken on an extremely RAW space: a 600 square foot garage with a lot of 1900 square feet. We’d love to have you with your own creative visionary being together with us as we take the first baby steps in the RAW space...

Dress warm. Bring your warm or cold thoughts. Sustain yourself in the RAW situation. Bring your children and, as well, be open to invite others you think would love to participate in this beginning as we search for ecstasy in impediments with embracement. You fill in the blank: Transient designed shelters for _____? Temporary innovative ______ point for _____? Permanent floating movable _______ platform for _____? Provisional sky  ______? Part-time archaeological garden of somatic _______ for _____?   _____ Guernica outdoors in Bed-Stuy -- but, at 75 feet, three times the size of Picasso's famous anti-war painting? You name it!

RAW Campfire Get Together Chat---SATURDAY, Jan. 12, 2 pm - 6 pm
1067 Pacific St. in Brooklyn, (it's the blue corrugated metal gate between Franklin & Classon) Map: http://goo.gl/maps/1WUZr
Subway: Franklin Avenue (A/C/Shuttle) is just three blocks away, or bike -> plenty of parking space in the lot

Come and Check It Out! Dress Warm. Bring What You Want. Toast Marshmallows. Share Tea (or Whisky.)  Let us know if you will join us. Andrea + Rob

Jonah Lehrer in the Whale

The most dangerous sentence ever written: I think, therefore I am.

The Cartesian cogito (in Latin, the sentence reads Cogito ergo sum) is a fundament of the modern era. But it is also an expression of radical subjectivity. It’s not we think, therefore we are. Or you think, therefore you are. Or even, I think, therefore you are and you think, therefore I am—which, though wacky, would at least indicate the improbable, oddball and interdependent nature of life.

Instead, existence is all about the self. As Popeye had it, I yam what I yam, and that's all what I yam. Honest, maybe, but where does that leave Olive Oyl and Wimpy and Swee’Pea? Talk about egocentric.

I started thinking about the ‘cult of the self’ implicit in the cogito when I read that science writer Jonah Lehrer had been caught fudging and fabricating a bunch of Bob Dylan quotes—and, just maybe, a bunch of other stuff.

I don’t presume to be able to psychoanalyze Lehrer, and I don’t want to universalize his predicament. But it does seem that some authors care more about themselves and the fact they’ve got something to say than about the things they are saying and the people they are saying them about. They’ve got way too much me tied up in their memes. I mean, if Lehrer cared about Dylan and wasn’t just using him to make his own mark on the creative process, would he want to mash-up the Master’s words?

Of course, we all have conflicted and ego-driven roots for our desire to say stuff in print. So here's a kind-of anti-cogito--five principles, all based on humbling experience, that help rip apart any ridiculous desire I may have to make myself the hero of my work:

1. I am no better than the people I interview and write about and come in contact with as I’m reporting. Indeed, I am frequently worse than them—not as honorable or hard working or consistent or hospitable or open-minded or intelligent.
2. I learn more from the people I interview and write about and come in contact with than they will ever learn from me.
3. When I am the story, I have failed. This doesn’t mean no first person reporting. It means that any tales that are primarily designed to call attention to me -- Jonah tweets a jpeg of himself from inside the whale: ‘here I am in the belly of the beast!’ -- are suspect.
4. Write what you know is self-involved and, far too often, self-congratulatory. Rather, write what you don’t know about what you know. Or, what you know about what you don’t know. Or, perhaps even better, what you know you don’t want to know.
5. I will never have the answers—but I may have bumbled onto some relevant and potentially meaningful questions.

For more on these points, here, so simple and sensible it makes me want to cry, is The Envoy of Mr. Cogito, by Zbigniew Herbert. And here is another touchstone—Roque Dalton’s Tense Conversation:

What would you do if your worst enemies
were infinitely better
than you?

That wouldn't be anything. The problem comes
when your best friends
are worse than you.

The worst thing is to have only enemies.

No. The worst thing is to have only friends.

But who is the enemy?
You or your enemies?

See you later, friend.

the capital of urban unrest

South Africa is leading the world in urban protest. According to police statistics, there were 27 protests in cities across the country every day, and 3 protests every day involved what the cops euphemistically call "unrest incidents." Arrests, thankfully, have gone down this year. But over the past 3 years more than 12,500 people have been arrested at these demos. It is, as the Mail & Guardian details, a "rebellion of the poor."

good governance quote of the day, 12 April

Silvio Berlusconi's lawyer, Niccolò Ghedini, admitting that the former Italian PM paid 127,000 euros to the families of three women who are scheduled to be witnesses at his upcoming trial:

"The linking of the payments with the fact they are witnesses in the so-called Ruby trial is absolutely spurious and without foundation," Ghedini said. "With his usual generosity, Berlusconi has sought to help, in a totally transparent fashion through bank transfers, those people who have been caught up in the media storm built around inexistent claims and who are living through an extremely difficult period economically, professionally and on the home front."

the journalist and the joyrider

This article dates back 18 years, but the kicker seems as important as ever. "Being a reporter," I wrote, "doesn't mean you stop being a person."

I was writing in reaction to a mostly forgotten tempest--the Jeffrey Masson/Janet Malcolm/Joe McGuinness entanglement--but that one-liner remains relevant given the revelations that many reporters in the UK committed crimes--including hacking phones, phishing for data, and bribing the police in the pursuit of scoops and juicy details.

the journalist and the joyrider.

All reporters, deep down, love good stories. I admit: I love murder. I love tragedy. I love sexy trials. I love political corruption. I love exposing the emperor's new clothes.

Working on a good story is like joyriding in a sports car after having spent your life in a sedan--you want to floor it, patch out, thrash the transmission, put the beast through its paces.

Janet Malcolm undoubtedly saw Jeffrey Masson as a good story. Her profile in the New Yorker was devastating. I am sure she heartily enjoyed every minute of it.

Last month, a jury declared that Malcolm had libeled Masson by using quotes that were not backed up by her notes or tapes. Certainly, all journalists should take note of the verdict. However, there is another concern in the case, one that has not gotten much attention--except, ironically, from Malcolm herself: The issue of bad faith.

I know all about bad faith. I have been guilty of it many times. So have most reporters I know.

I have paid for stories when I knew my money was being used to buy drugs the minute I left the scene. I have deliberately misled people I was interviewing--sometimes putting on a show of sympathy to get juicier quotes.

I have delayed calling people I was writing about until the last possible moment, trying to catch them off guard. I have hidden scoops from my competitors and lied to them about it.

I am not proud about any of this, but I can assure you that, in each case, I thought I was doing my job.

A few years ago, though, that all changed. An editor put me in touch with a man who had had a stroke. He talked haltingly, with a stutter. He could take 15 minutes to find one word. However, this was a big improvement. For almost a year after his stroke, he had been unable to speak at all.

I spent hours with him to make sure I had his story right: He believed the corrupt leaders of his municipal union had poisoned him.

I began to check his account. It was all circumstantial. He had been a member of a dissident union faction. The union president had been accused of corruption, but none of the other dissidents had come down with a mysterious illness, and there was no it known drug that could have caused his symptoms.

As I worked, I decided to pursue a different, more compelling story--the story of a man who had made the arduous journey back from a stroke and was now trying to make sense of his illness.

I told him, over and over, that I was not going to write the story he wanted me to write. He always agreed and then returned to his central theme: This happened to him. It was fact. All I had to do was write it down the way he rehearsed it.

I realized then the difference between his goal and mine. He came to me for vindication. If I told his story, his ideas would be legitimized, his world affirmed. I came to him looking for a good story. I wanted to joyride.

Ultimately, I decided not to write about his case. No story is more important than the person it is about.

I am not saying that journalists should cover up for corrupt politicians because an article might hurt their feelings. But I do believe that if we are going to expose someone in print, we have an obligation to tell them what we think--face to face if possible. We do not let them hide in their houses and offices. So why should we be able to hide behind our pages?

I imagine many journalists will argue that a person who talks with a reporter knows the risks. But I think most people, even the most self-assured, talk to reporters because they want their side of events recorded. They want to be proved right and, if you treat your sources as friends, you owe it to them to tell them straight out what you think.

That is why it was wrong for Joe McGinniss not to tell Jeffrey MacDonald, the subject of his true-crime book Fatal Vision, that McGinniss believed MacDonald had murdered his wife and kids.

MacDonald had opened up to McGinniss, had made the author part of his life, and McGinniss had betrayed that trust, not by writing the book but by hiding his conclusions from the man he was writing about.

In her book on the McGinniss-MacDonald dispute, Malcolm says all reporters are, in essence, charlatans, "preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and then betraying them without remorse."

She suggests that we should feel "some compunction about the exploitative character of the journalist-subject relationship."

Indeed we should. So should she. Malcolm spent hours talking with Masson, even putting him up at her house, as if she were his friend.

Ultimately, she concluded that Masson was, in some of her nicer words, "impudent," "complicated," "unruly," but she never told him. To Masson, it appeared that Malcolm had hooked him in and then, with no warning, vilified him. I am sure he felt it was an unprovoked attack.

Certainly, fabricating quotes is wrong. Stitching them together in a dishonest way is wrong. But I am afraid that most journalists will dismiss the Malcolm-Masson case as a simple mater of libel and lose sight of the ethical point. Being a journalist does not mean you stop being a person.