dreamranch

Obituaries today for the famous editor John Carroll opened a window for me on late chapters of traditional newspapers and newsrooms.

The lede on the Washington Post obituary said this: “John S. Carroll, who guided the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun and Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky to Pulitzer Prizes and who was considered one of the most distinguished and inspiring newspaper editors of his time, died June 14 at his home in Lexington, Ky. He was 73.”

The New York Times led with this: “John S. Carroll, a widely admired newspaper editor who restored the reputation and credibility of The Los Angeles Times in the early 2000s even as he fought bitterly with the paper’s cost-conscious corporate parent, died on Sunday morning at his home in Lexington, Ky. He was 73.”

The sixth paragraph of the Los Angeles Times obit said this: “Carroll, a courageous editor whose instinct for the big story and unrelenting focus on the craft of journalism guided the Los Angeles Times to new heights, including a record 13 Pulitzer Prizes in five years, died Sunday in Lexington, Ky., of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, a degenerative brain disease. He was 73.”

Both the Post and the New York Times went on to note one of Carroll’s best-known critics, David Simon, writer of the much-praised TV series The Wire and a Baltimore Sun police reporter who left the paper during Carroll’s reign.

This led me to read about David Simon. I came across a long piece by Mark Bowden, published in The Atlantic in 2008, called The Angriest Man in Television.

Bowden acknowledged that he was a friend of Carroll and that Simon had big criticisms of his story in The Atlantic. Bowden is critical of Simon.

I’d recommend reading each of these stories.

I came away admiring Carroll and fearing there are few like him left in the business.

Patch job

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June 13, 2015

Frustrated and depressed after a recent attempt to write about politics and the New Mexico Legislature, I decided to head out on my evening walk and, in the process of gathering my gear — house key, hat and headlamp — was reminded how reliant I am on duck tape.

The two — my frustration and tape — really have nothing to do with each other, but duck tape is handy stuff for pulling things together, maybe even loose thoughts.

At any rate, I resolved my frustration by starting to understand that I simply am tired of politics and impatient with politicians. I just retired after 40 years in the newspaper business, almost all of those years spent covering government and politics. I believe in the institutions and the process. But the rhetoric has worn thin.

Trying to write about it, I realized I was mostly expressing frustration with the tedious and difficult and probably inescapable ways of getting things done. Politicians are necessary, and many I respect. I just don’t have to cover them anymore.

I will watch and I will vote, I am telling myself. And I still might try the occasional potshot from my keyboard. I might even send some worthy would-be leader a dollar or two of my retiree chump change. I don’t like the modern brand of take-no-prisoners politics. I am tired of brinkmanship and, of course, platitudes. But I don’t think I can turn the battleships around.

I just hope I haven’t gotten lazy.

But I fear that’s maybe what’s suggested by all the duck tape around here.

My tools are gathering dust in the garage. I reach for duck tape for almost any kind of structural problem. I have gone far beyond using it for tears in tents and jackets and sleeping bags and rejoining the soles of ski boots — all of these now gathering dust, too. Now, I am going down the road of furniture and appliance repair.

But, you know, it works. And it’s quick if you keep it around. And colors make it all the more appealing. As a New Mexican, I am particularly partial to the turquoise made by none other than Duck brand Duck Tape.

As I researched my habits, I found a roll atop a can of pine tar on the kitchen counter. The pine tar was a gift I forgot to give to my sister Jane in Washington state, although it was a gag that she probably is tired of hearing about. She was famous once for using the sticky, blackish stuff for repairing and restoring anything, including her husband Bill’s white fiberglass boat.

I found another roll on a bookshelf, left over from a window repair. And, as I headed out the door, there was an orange roll, maybe where it most belongs, among the shelves of packs and hats and rain jackets.

So, don’t feel bad about the pine tar, Jane. I have a confession to make.

I have a duck tape thing.

(Footnote: For those concerned about the usage of duck tape versus duct tape, here’s a fine piece published in Adweek in 2014).

Down the river with young people

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June 12, 2015

Once upon a time, I was a teenager going to high school in Mill Valley, letting my hair grow long, smoking marijuana whenever I could, hitching rides in Twinkie wrapper-strewn cars with scroungy band members who became the Airplane, reading Kerouac and carrying a copy of Camus, heading to San Francisco for civil rights marches on the weekends and simply not seeing what older people thought were the great red and green menaces of commies and pot.

Hillary Clinton’s impending announcement for the Democratic presidential nomination made me think of this. I was reading a story about her mother in the New York Times and remembering that the daughter is 67 and I am nearly 66.

I also was thinking of JFK’s election at age 43, the “whiz kids” lining up with him, and the start of our disastrous, four-administration experience in Vietnam. And I don’t know what to think of President Barack Obama now sending 450 more military advisers — remember them? — to Iraq.

I never got U.S. policy in Vietnam — starting with Cold War view of the alleged red menace in Asia — and I’ve recently read arguments that ISIS is simply trying to suck us into full-fledged war in Syria. I have no interest in pot these days, and watching a younger brother lose to the temptations of drugs left me thinking that maybe “Reefer Madness,” although clearly weird propaganda, was most laughable for its production values.

This is not an endorsement. I’m just thinking that age 67 is not a bad thing, Maybe the bigger the window on time the better. Certainly I wish I had known at 43 what I know now.

Plus, just before the New York Times story, I had read an entertaining piece by my neighbors’ grown-up kid in my most local newspaper, the Sandoval County Signpost.

It was called, “Rafting the Grand Canyon with old people.”

It left me thinking about young people.

The Santa Fe bagel

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June 11, 2015

After reading this morning that there is such a thing in Santa Fe as a blue corn lavender doughnut, this is as close as I could come to having a Santa Fe bagel down here in Placitas.

Evening palette

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June 10, 2015

Montana cat nap

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June 8, 2015

I didn’t ask my sister Hope what her rooster was doing in the house — except that roosters have always had the run of the place wherever she lived — and suffice it to say this sound-sleeping cat was surprised when she woke from her nap. No injuries were reported, only confusion. For more rooster tales, click here or on “Rooster” in the drop-down tag cloud to the right.

Sunday virga

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June 7, 2015

The only thing that might make the morning better is a little rain this afternoon.

Fine breeze through office windows early, undermining the usual high pressure and heat of June.

Clouds gathering now and we hear thunder over the Jemez. Exciting to me but, I have to remember, not welcomed by everyone here. Cooper has taken cover beside my desk.

One of the luxuries of retirement is having real time to read — more than the minutes before falling asleep on a work day. I have stacks of books and I reach wherever my mind roams. No discipline as usual — except maybe in deeply recessed index files of my brain — but rules are out the window these days. Plus, I recently came across a great observation from a fellow mature person — a female author, but I can’t find the quote — that one of the privileges of adulthood is that you don’t have to finish every book you start.

Before I head to my books, I can’t resist sharing a photograph I stumbled to in a Maureen Dowd column this morning in the New York Times. It’s an Annie Leibovitz photo for Vogue of Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. It’s two years old but it struck me as a testament for our times. It reminds me of a Renaissance painting, but the title that lept into my head was 21st Century Madonna. You can see it here.

Meanwhile, I can’t get out of my mind American Pharoah’s amazing, long stride. Victor Espinoza, his rider for the Triple Crown, described riding him as cloudlike. “You don’t even feel him,” he said. “It feels like you are going in slow motion.” I think I saw some use of the crop in the Belmont stretch, but apparently it wasn’t as much as in the Kentucky Derby.

Watched a good little World War II drama at 2 in the morning. Circle of Deception, 1960. Worth adding to anyone’s collection of wartime morality stories. An officer is assigned to carry false information to the Germans about the Normandy invasion.

I liked this tweet and photo yesterday from the U.S. Embassy in France and retweeted them:

‏@USEmbassyFrance

#Today in 1944, 73,000 American forces landed in Normandy on #DDay. 6,603 died.

I’m off to the books and watching for the rain. I see a couple of anvils up by La Bajada and Santa Fe. I’m hoping but know from experience that down here we’ll probably get no more than the virga of last night.