Tom Watson

Coast Guard Beach

Coast Guard Beach, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

What a day on the Cape - ocean by day, Provincetown by night.

The End of Summer

We did the Revolution in reverse this summer - the first trip took us to Yorktown in southeastern Virginia, and our last foray brought us through Lexington and Concord. It was a driving summer, hundreds and hundreds of miles and dozens of hours spent on Interstate-95 and its tributaries up and down the east coast. Those memories are a wicked blur: big box stores, rest-stops, exit signs, tunnel entrances and bridge abutments. From south of Richmond to north of Boston, the Eisenhower Highways were thick with semi-trucks, road debris, and buses. A nasty business that gets the job done. But a thin memory.

The names were better.

All were either Indian or Anglo, English or Native American. Towns and places named for royalty or titled Englishmen: Yorktown, Mount Vernon, Jamestown, Georgetown, Lake George, Gloucester, Cape Ann, Essex, Williamsburg. The simple English-language place names: Brant Lake, Eastham, Provincetown, Beach Haven, Rockport, Cape Cod. And the indigenous names: Annisquam, Saratoga, Mashpee, Barnegat, Sacandaga, Adirondack, Nauset.

This is old country and we rambled about in history. This last jaunt (a free-loader's delight) was a contrast - only five days and more than 600 miles of driving cobbled to gorgeous shorter days in the deeper color contrast of late summer. The first two in a favorite spot on the Annisquam River, in an old fishing cottage on the water. Watching the tidal changes and the nautical traffic was better than anything on cable this summer - constantly changing, filled with personality. We took the boat over to the beach, hit the flea market, ate several pounds of lobster each, and worked it off in the kayaks. Cape Ann is an oft-overlooked summer destination, north of Boston and packed with history and this was our third visit with our good friends Doug and Suzanne and their kids.

Then a run down the coast, around Boston to the bigger Cape. First though, an hour's side trip to Concord and a brief stop at Minute Man National Historic Park, part of our history theme this summer. We raced through Concord - there goes Emerson's house, hey was that Hawthorne's place - got a few pictures by the Minute Man statue and merged back onto I-95.

It's a long way out on the Cape to Eastham, where we spent two great days with Steve and Carla. More lobster and two beaches - Coast Guard Beach (part of the Nauset Beach section of the incredible Cape Cod National Seashore) and First Encounter Beach on the bayside, where the native Indians first encountered the pilgrims in 1620 - followed by a long shopping stroll through Provincetown. We didn't hit every gallery, but we came close.

A huge moon near full lit the way back along the giant dunes, and the next morning we drove the great, winding arc from out on the Cape, around Block Island Sound, around Long Island Sound, and down into New York - and the end of summer.

Cape Ann Sunset

Cape Ann Sunset, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

We washed our lobster rolls down with this sunset.

Live-Blogging Nixon (And Other Cultural Icons)

Live-blogging of AMC's stylish but empty Mad Men returns to newcritics.com tonight, with yours truly as the host. Previews show two central topics: sex and Richard Milhous Nixon. There's a perversity about the show that's appealing, but I'm afraid cultural accuracy isn't really its strong suit. It's very 2007, very semi-dark, very Weimer under Eisenhowerish - pure fantasy, and nothing like 1960 at all. Still, good crowd around the virtual punchbowl every Thursday. Better dialogue there. Tune in at 10, EDT at newcritics.

The GOP's Wide Stance

Larry Craig's not much of a criminal, but he makes one hell of a hypocrite. The twisted gay-phobia that drives much of the modern Republican Party's so-called "social" agenda has been (once again) unmasked in the right-wing Senator's public bathroom hijinks as just a lever to power, the turning of America's strange relationship with sexual matters to electoral advantage.

A gay Republican Senator from conservative Idaho doesn't fit the formula, so Craig did all the right things. He voted for the Defense of Marriage Act , voted to cut off debate on the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and voted against a bill prohibiting employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, which failed by one vote in the Senate. He's got the typically perfect anti-gay record of mainstream Republicans everywhere.

That some of those Republicans actually are gay should surprise no one. Principle means nothing to this bunch. It's all about power. And being gay doesn't bring in votes from the faithful. Nor does it engender much loyalty in political friendships. John McCain called for Craig's resignation from the Senate and Mitt Romney ran as fast as he could from Senator Craig, who chaired his campaign in Idaho.

But I find the poses of tolerance most hypocritical - especially from self-described enlightened conservative commentators who occasionally decry the hardest-core views of their right-wing audiences as extreme, even while knowing those same beliefs are at the very core of social conservatism. Such a hypocrite is the popular Hugh Hewitt, who presents the "I have lived among them"  underpinning of his attacks on Senator Craig's behavior. Hold the Purell bottle in ready position and read on:

I spent several years living in working in Boston’s Back Bay and South End neighborhoods.  Both had large gay populations.  I won’t resort to the old clich that many of my best friends are gay, because they’re not (although I do have questions about a few of them – you know who you are).  But spending a lot of time around gays in my neighborhood, at the gym and at work, I got to know the community. Good people.  I think these experiences are partly to credit for why I’m more favorably inclined to the gay agenda than most arch-conservatives.

Behavior like Craig’s confirms the worst and darkest prejudices of people who fear and/or loathe the gay community. Larry Craig is an outlier, and his behavior a disgrace to everyone who has associated or is now associated with him – the Republican Party, conservatives, Mitt Romney, and gay America.  People who care about the gay community should be rushing to condemn Larry Craig and distance themselves from him.  And yet they’d rather score cheap political points.

Yes, "good people." All those queer folk in Boston are. It's well known. Not like those bastards in South Beach or San Francisco or P-town, I can tell ya. How cloying and self-serving and condescending, as if being a straight, white arch-conservative is anything worth bragging about. Thank God, the gays in Boston were kind to Old Man Hewitt, or he might not be so "favorably inclined."

And liberals and libertarians, yes, they're the ones scoring cheap political points by offering lukewarm defenses of Craig's cruising offense. Not the Republicans fleeing from their fellow social conservative, playing up the sexual hatred in this country for votes, whoring themselves for power - and taking a very wide stance indeed on what passes for principle in today's GOP.

UPDATE: I think Glenn Greenwald puts it quite well indeed:

The issue is not that these Traditional Marriage proponents sometimes stray from their own standards. People are imperfect and will inevitably do so. The point is that they apply these supposed "principles" only when it is expedient to do so, only in ways that are politically comfortable, thus revealing the complete inauthenticity of their alleged convictions.

Massachusetts Bay Colony

Light verbiage in these parts till next week. We're on the final turn of a summer that has put me behind the wheel for a good thousand miles at least. Lots of rest stops, from the Tidewater region of Virginia to the Northway and the MassPike. Too many trucks. But tonight we're in Gloucester on Cape Ann, overlooking the Annisquam River - a fine harbor, many boats under sail and power, and an old house full of friends and children. Lobster rolls and a sunset. Heading to the Cape on Sunday for more of the same, visiting and such (don't you dare call it freeloading, pallie). The final long weekend of a strange summer. Then it's on the road...again.

The Case for Old Comments

Fred Wilson is  thinking about closing off his older comment streams to help adapt to a new technology that will make his well-traversed blog's comments a bigger part of the clickstream. I understand the rationale - comments have been buried in blog architecture for too long - but I think it's a mistake.

I love getting comments on old posts, and I get them all the time. My Guitars R Us post from way back in 2004 is great case in point. It's become the de facto public commons for Guitar Center employees (current and former) to dissect the company's management practices, compensation structure, and business plan. My original thoughts have been long since cashiered to mere background status; the commenters have been going at it for years. The most recent post there is from August 19th - indeed, that single post has almost reached full-blown blog status on its own.

There are others. I got a comment from a friend of Marina Lakhman just the other day. In the spring 02 2004, I wrote about Marina, a terrific young woman who died tragically young. It was a short remembrance of a colleague and a friend who didn't live to see Web 2.0, but would have embraced its social aspects in all fullness. I get comment on that post a couple of times a year. Last week, I got this from Manny:

I agree with the poster who said she is one of those people that when you hear they're dead, you go "what the..." One of the saddest days of my ife is when I found out she died.

And, of course, it brought Marina to my mind. That's a good thing. I still get comments on some of my Mukhtaran Bibi posts from awhile back. And punk rock fans of a certain vintage are always liable to drop in and defend Johnny Ramone's politics or mourn untimely demise of Johnny Thunders. That's great. Over on Fred's blog, commenter Shannon Clark nails it, I think:

There is indeed value to the comments in certain old posts - I know of many bloggers whose old posts on a given topic have sparked a small community in the comment threads for a given post (usually on topics hard to find elsewhere online).

Exactly.

We need to open comments to the distributed media model; our posts go everywhere, but comments stay home. And comment spam is an incredible annoyance. But I'd hate to see Fred close off comments to older posts - his is an influential blog and it may lead others to take the same step. and I think he'll miss the little late-arriving gems that can really pick up an old post.

If It's Thursday...

...it's Mad Men night over at newcritics. The fabulous MA Peel takes the reins tonight as we live-blog AMC's period piece and explore the 1960 world of Sterling Cooper advertising. So head on over at 10 PM EDT and join the fun, kids.

A Cold Night at Shea

Carlos Beltran is like a living Stratomatic card - filled with possibilities but bland and devoid of emotion. He either hits or he doesn't, and it doesn't seem to matter. Lately, he's been rolling on the hitter's card and right into the power alley. Last night, my daughter and I say in what can only be called a driving mist and watched Beltran drive in five runs, and the Mets give up two leads, en route to a sloppy but satisfying win that left the team with the best record in the National League. The Mets are on the move, finally, after a dissipated mid-season of inuries and men left on base. They're up five on the Phils, six on the Braves and they're driving in runs again. Last night, my breath froze in the air and it was so foggy that nary a plane buzzed Shea on the way to LaGuardia. But we had great seats behind the plate, where we could feel the snap of the catcher's mitt and the good wood crack when Beltran blasted one into the bleachers. Felt like October - late October. Let's hope.

Been There, Done That?

I'll admit it: the new Silicon Alley Insider slipped beneath my vacationing, blogging, media-obsessed radar since its beta launch a month ago. And I have to be honest. I don't think in terms of "Silicon Alley" any more, and don't know too many people who do. There's an archaic, historic quality to the term and it goes nicely mixed with two full jiggers of "back in the day" around the better media watering holes.

Silicon Alley Insider. That was me about a decade ago. I was described as exactly that many a time, and I remember it all moderately well.

Feverishly tracking mezzanine rounds while swilling free booze and picking at  massive sushi boat centerpieces while girls danced in cages to the sounds of third-rate Moby knock-offs and hungry headhunters, pr guys, and investment bankers circled the silicon slam dance just waiting for the moment when a bunch of money-sucking startups led by guys who kept their dogs in the office started to throw off cash.

In other words, that was then. That ain't now. Web 2.0 and the ever-churning media circus of New York does nothing to capture that scene, which was powered by art as much as money, by driven  free-wheeling invention and the knowing waste of overcapitalization by leering, good-time trust-funders and hungry bridge and tunnel kids.

Still, Kevin Ryan's new venture proceeds from a feeling that New York's wired and entrepreneurial community is under-represented in a world that makes Michael Arrington relevant. He may be right. And he's got some interesting partners: investor Dwight Merriman,and  former Forbes scribes Dan Frommer and  Peter Kafka. And who better to report on the post-Henry Blodget era in technology than Henry Blodget himself - he of former cheerleading Prudential analyst days, more lately a quieter, more thoughtful analyst.

I have some advice, fellas - having co-created the original Silicon Alley insider with Jason Chervokas in 1995. A wire service of deals and hirings involving New York new media companies large and small won't cut it. Nobody needs TechCrunch East. We don't have the deal-flow, to be honest about it. But we do have the brains, and we do have the advertising. Go for personality, go for analysis, go for the jugular. Or people won't care.

Poke a few holes in business plans. Question a few financings. Rattle some cages in midtown and find some under-capitalized talent out in Brooklyn or the South Bronx or Hoboken. Tell me what the kids are doing, what the artists think. Tell me something new. I want a reason to get exited about new media in this town. Give it me, and I'll keep you guys around the feed reader forever.