Oct
30
by Michael Winship
When I was an adolescent, Canandaigua, my small hometown in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, got its first radio station, WCGR. You can hear it to this day, at 1550 on the AM dial.
Back then, beaming out a signal of 250 mighty watts, WCGR (announcers said it stood for “Watch Canandaigua Grow Rapidly”), broadcast music, news and farm reports to a radius extending about as far as you could throw a rock.
Nonetheless, I thought it was a wondrous and glamorous place – show business! — and often climbed the stairs to their dusty studio, up above a Main Street storefront. The twin sons of the station’s owner were schoolmates and my father bought on the air advertising time for his drugstore, so no one paid much attention to my hanging out.
One day, I came across some promotional 45 rpm records. They were interviews with celebrities – with spaces left for any given announcer at any given station to ask the pertinent questions, which were conveniently provided by the record company. In an instant, you could make it appear as if your local DJ was actually interviewing Nat King Cole or Bobby Vinton or Carol Channing.
“Carol, this is Seth Cathode at WCGR. Congratulations on ‘Hello, Dolly!’”
“Why, THANK youuu!! It’s the biggest thrill of my career.”
Beat. Next fake question. And so on.
All of which came to mind last week when it was revealed that FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, held a phony briefing on the California wildfires. FEMA staffers posed as reporters, pitching softball questions to deputy administrator Harvey Johnson. Parts of it were carried live by Fox News and MSNBC.
Oct
24
Behind Closed Doors, “The Big Ask”
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by Michael Winship
Over the last three weeks, for different reasons, I’ve had inside access to two kinds of events that usually take place privately, behind closed doors.
In the first instance, I was invited — as a non-paying observer — to small political fundraisers for two major congressional candidates, one for the Senate, one for the House. The other invitees were quite well to do, possessed of very deep pockets. As opposed to me, whose pockets only jingle shallowly with quarters for the Laundromat.
At the same time, I’ve been a participant in the contract negotiations among the Writers Guild of America, East (the union of which I’m president), the Writers Guild of America, West, and the Hollywood studios and networks, represented by the AMPTP, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
When “Entertainment Tonight” asks, “Are the movie and TV writers going on strike?” this is the negotiation about which they’re speculating — between their fervid analyses of Britney Spears’ driving habits and Marie Osmond’s case of the vapors on “Dancing with the Stars.”
Oct
17
by Michael Winship
There’s a line in an old Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie of which I’m especially fond. It often comes to mind when I read the latest news from the White House.
Fred is talking to his best friend, Randolph Scott, who has been behaving boobishly. “Every day you act worse,” Fred tells him. “But today you’re acting like tomorrow.”
At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with each dawn seems to come some new passing perfidy, each day a bump in magnification of the one that went before. Blackwater contractors gunning down civilians in Iraq like the Dalton Gang shooting up Dodge City. The president’s veto of increased funding for S-CHIP, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Secret legal opinions essentially endorsing the torture of terrorism suspects.
Monday’s New York Times reported that, “With only 15 months left in office, President Bush has left whole agencies of the executive branch to be run largely by acting or interim appointees — jobs that would normally be filled by people whose nominations would have been reviewed and confirmed by the Senate… The jobs are filled by people who do not have the clout to make decisions that comes with a permanent appointment endorsed by the Senate, scholars say.”
These include three cabinet positions: Justice, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs. In the words of Paul Light, a public service professor at NYU, “You’ve got more vacancies now than a hotel in hurricane season.”
Sort of puts one in mind of that old joke: how many people work in the United States government? About half of them.
Unfortunately, it often feels like even that half ain’t working for, but against us, and in ways of staggering incompetence, indifference, and hypocrisy that favor expedience over fidelity to any kind of American ideal.
Oct
11
California: Fear, Fugue and Fantasia
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by Michael WinshipLOS ANGELES — There is an unnaturalness to much of California’s geography that makes a born-and-bred Easterner like me nervous.
It’s not just the seismic fault lines that shear the landscape and make the dropping away of a sizable chunk of the state a real possibility, like a big piece of gaudy birthday cake sliced and hurled to the ground.
Nor is it the beautifully cataclysmic coastline or the make-believe architecture that parallels the product of Hollywood’s dream engine, all stucco and design with insufficient heft. As Raymond Chandler’s private detective Philip Marlowe observed, “About the only part of a California house you can’t put your foot through is the door.”
California’s just plain weird. And a bit unreal.
Admittedly, my feelings are mixed. There are good friends here and boundless creative energy, great food and intriguing, unorthodox ideas. D.H. Lawrence echoed just my blend of ambivalence in a letter to a friend in 1923. “California is a queer place,” he wrote. “In a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort… It’s sort of crazy-sensible.”
And so, over the Columbus Day weekend, my girlfriend Pat and I found ourselves motoring northeast several hours from LA to the Sierra Nevada — spectacular mountain vistas topping barren sagebrush desert. We went to visit my friend Louis Fantasia, who this summer became president of Deep Springs College, an alternative institution of higher learning nestled in a valley between the White and Inyo Mountain ranges.
Deep Springs is a remarkable place, a working cattle ranch and alfalfa farm as well as a school, albeit one with only 26 students, all male. Over the course of a two-year curriculum, they work the ranch and pursue an intense, classical course of study, all of it in magnificent isolation. Communication with the outside world is limited, visitors are few. And yet competition for admission is fierce. To earn a place at Deep Springs is to enter an order of fine, young, unusual — even eccentric — thinkers.