Yes, Virginia, American Journalism WAS Sensational

Think that today’s news media is biased, subjective, self serving or sensationalist? Does it bother you that scandal-mongerers and character assassins can hide in the blurry margin between news and entertainment? It’s a tradition! A tradition that goes back at least to the free-wheeling, two-fisted penny paper era of journalism in America, situated right here in downtown Manhattan in an area once known as “Newspaper Row.”

Horace Greeley. Joseph Pulitzer. Wm Randolph Hearst. Walt Whitman. Sounds pretty literary and historic and all-American, until you look beyond the whitewash.

In fact, it was a world of hard-boiled, sensationalist scandal-mongering, and shameful and crass vendettas.

Hey, when you’re going for cheap, popular and disposable, what better strategy than dragging standards down to the lowest possible level?

Hardly anyone in the industry was immune to it. However it was The New York Sun -- a paper which had the largest circulation in the United States within a year of its debut in 1833 -- which was probably the grandpappy of American Trash Journalism.

Corruptive? Debasing? Sure. But the sheer energy and enthusiasm of The Sun is the kind of irresistable duality thing we cherish in the train wreck we call Urban Dynamism. Call it the dark side of Walt Whitman's Barbaric Yawp.

For all its crassness, there were some diamond moments for The Sun. The paper was the first to hire boys to hawk papers on street corners. It was first to hire a female reporter, Emily Verdery Bettey. It took a lead role in exposing corruption in the Grant administration. It published a series of articles exposing crime in the world of NYC longshoreman, the basis for Budd Schulberg’s great “On The Waterfront.”

The Sun’s elaborate hoaxes -- The Great Moon Hoax of 1835, Edgar Allen Poe’s Great Balloon Hoax a decade later -- set the precedent for deceptions some of us love, today. Orson Welle’s War of the Worlds. Ashton Kutcher’s Punk’d.

And at least two of the best journalism one-liners come from The Sun. The first was in 1882, when editor John B Bogart said to a friend “When a Man Bites A Dog, That’s News.”

The second? Sep 21 1897, when Francis P Church wrote the op/ed piece Yes Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus.

“He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy,” wrote Church. ”Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no child-like faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.”

High sentiments, indeed, for a newspaper that established the benchmark for slander, deception, scandal-mongering, sensationalism and punk journalism.

Springtime In The Void: Mesaroolying With The Microbes

Revving the engines this morning for a trek up to Lowell where I’ll be tossing my two cents in with a panel on Kerouac’s Scriptures of the Golden Eternity. Strange how these things happen. Barbara Gagel, a New Mexico artist originally from Lowell has been painting great resonances of Golden Eternity canvases. She gets an art show back home during Jack‘s 90th. Somehow I get wind of it and an invite to be on the panel. Bob’s your uncle.

It’s all part of the ’ants merlying' and 'mesaroolies microbing in the innards of mercery’ thing Kerouac dug, which is what making the scene is. Synchronicities, convergences, and materializations -- great tragic opportunities of blind luck fortune and hastily conceived miscalculation.

In them all 'realities for you and me,' says Whitman.

It's the great road trip. The crazy seriousness of working men on scaffolds painting white paint. Going for a walk with friends among O'Hara's hum colored cabs.

David Amram calls it ‘hangout-ology.’

So I’ve been boning up on the Golden Eternity and it turns out I haven't had to look far to find resonances with Jack’s ideas about transience, impermanence, etc.

Everywhere I look, the whole simultaneous duality thing people like Derrida, Levy-Strauss and Gilles Deleuze talk about -- binary oppositions, happening/not happening, illusion/materiality -- a great unity in the middle of nothing which is everything.

Keeps popping up -- like weeds in spring, really. Rumi. Ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles. Great Zen Koans from Japanese antiquity.

And deeply intuitive utterances among our contemporaries in the poetry world. Heck, just last Sunday night I caught Claire Nicolas White getting to the nut of it in a flash, with her “Time’s emptiness makes the day swell…"

Kerouac brings his own take on it all. The sweet sad tragedy, the persistent emphasis on compassion. The sublime sense that our shared springtime in the void is a magic and holy goof to be experienced with a wry grin.

Reading Kerouac these perspectives happen by turn. At one moment he digs the street of life, celebrating those who “burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” At the next, he is contemplative, tranced out: ‘the perfect little No Clouds' keep popping up 'in the deepening afternoon blue’ of San Francisco's Embarcadero.

It's springtime in the void again, boys and girls. The center is everywhere and if you're somewhere, you're everywhere.

It's fine by me if we’re all ‘pretending at playing the magic cardgame and making believe it's real,’ like Jack says. OK if it's “a big dream, a joyous ecstasy of words and ideas and flesh, an ethereal flower unfolding an folding back, a movie, an exuberant bunch of lines, bounding emptiness.’

Sound to you like a good night out on the town with poet-friends? Maybe you’re ready to go mesarolying with the microbes too!

rat tat tatting the pure pictureless liquid of mind essence

This weekend Lowell Mass and LCK! celebrates the 90th anniversary of the birth of Jack Kerouac, who has been safe in heaven dead for approaching half a century but remains a palpable presence in this raindrop we call existence -- his bop poetics irrepressible, his youthful vigorous search for kicks undiminished, his vision intact, even in the middle of the holy goof which he understood so well and which is our all lot. Not bad for a guy who in his own way and in his golden mouthful of eternity reminded us that, as that good old Greek philosopher Empedocles put it, “there’s no substance to anything that perishes, nor is there any cessation of them in death.”

I won’t be making the scene this weekend in Lowell, I’m headed up mid-week for a panel on Jack at Barbara Gagel's art show. But I figure that, as long as all them in Lowell are having a great time ringing their bell in the empty sky for Jack, the rest of us ought to get busy and do something too, in our own way and wherever we are, even if it just means ‘rat tat tatting the pure pictureless liquid of mind essence.’

What I'm saying is why not let’s all just find a jazzed up moment this weekend, and suture ourselves to the beautiful, crazy, sad, spontaneous music of Jack Kerouac’s consciousness.

I don’t know, I think Jack would’ve wanted us to do that on his birthday. Like Rumi said, when you’re somewhere, you’re everywhere.

which stars to pull from the gum line

"High on Laughing Gas....I've been here before......the odd vibration of the same old universe."-Ginsberg. I started thinking about the Ginsberg poem, "Laughing Gas" as I was getting my root canal and it didn't numb out the pain or the grind of the drill peaking.  I've often thought that if Ginsberg didn't become a poet he would have become a dentist analyzing every tooth and what it bit down upon.  I've often thought that if Ginsberg didn't become a dentist he would have become a poet analyzing every truth and what it bit down upon.  I'm a little spacy right now and can't really tell what it is that I'm trying to say here but here is a thought, before you read any of Ginsberg's poetry you better have  dental insurance and plenty of laughing gas because the universe is a big metallic drill and the stars line up like cracking teeth only to feel the hot breath of breath cascade from your lips into that odd vibration providing the universe with options on which stars to pull from the gum line.