Tom Watson

We Live in Public

Jenna Jameson has sad, old and unsmiling eyes, which for all of her sex film glory, stare back from the bookjacket of her best-seller with an ironic dearth of spark and flame and the heat of life. The surgeon's knife has not been kind, "fixing" a weak chin and over-amplifying the already well-endowed assets on which she bases her fame. In interviews, the 30-something porn star talks about the quiet life, her now-limited on-screen appearances, her business plans, and her ideas about love and retirement.

Jenna may not be 100% real but she's 100% mainstream, a business story from the Wall Street Journal, the living embodiment of the acceptance of porn in middle America, and of the hypocrisy of the so-called cultural backlash against liberalism. As Frank Rich points out in his Oscar telecast preview in today's Times, the same media companies that shill for Bush and the social right also make hefty margins on pornography; this reminds me of the British Admiralty's attitude toward English pirates during the rise of the Empire: when the sea-borne brigands brought profits for the crown, swash-buckling letters of marque were just fine. When it wasn't convenient, the Tower and the block also worked. (You know, invade a pushover Iraq regime while giving North Korea a pass, no matter the warheads trained on Oakland. Same deal). Whatever is expedient and profitable.

Funny that Rich's column today deals with the hypocrisy of our public media mores, because it's a roiling undercurrent on my favorite blogs of late (I'm sure Frank follows my blogroll when trolling for weekly ideas - he'd be stupid not to). To Rich's mind, the moralist view is winning elections, but losing mainstream America, led by big business:

The power of the free market, for better or worse, will prevail, and the market tells us that it is still the American way to lament indecency even while gobbling it up. This is the year that Sports Illustrated for the first time published the number for its subscribers to phone if they wanted to skip the swimsuit issue - and almost no one called.

The Federal Communications Commission campaign for decency is flaming out, leaving pathetic, smoking embers and the tatters of Michael Powell's reputation. Funnyman shock jock Howard Stern sold the rights to his programming - which features porn stars and little else these days as his originality fades into mere immitation of himself - for half a billion dollars to Sirius Satellite Radio. Said Sirius boss Mel Karmazin in today's NYT: "Our brand awareness is at an all-time high and much higher than before the announcement." Of course it is.

Jeff Jarvis is a big Stern fan and his diatribes against what he calls the "prudes" of the Bush Administration, coupled with a couple of hilarious FOIA requests that showed most FCC complaints were dirty little chain letters, are justly praised. Funny then that my compadre Jason Chervokas (he and I ran @NY back in Silicon Alley days) slams Jarvis in his fascinating post on the nature of pornography and our growing willingness to undergo public media exposure:

Is there anything more tiresome on God's green Earth than Jeff Jarvis? J-Lo is less exposed. Like Dominique Wilkins was "the human highlight film," Jarvis is "the human sidebar." He's everywhere, all the time, on TV and radio, answering the ubiquitous sidebar question. Or he's blogging about answering the ubiquitous sidebar question. Does Jeff still have a day job?

This cracked me up, of course; Jeff does turn up everywhere! But Jason and Jeff share a Stern passion and a strong disdain for enforced community sexual mores, even if Jeff's more conservative than he thinks he is these days. And I think he'd agree with Jason's central point: that amateurs are everywhere in media these days, from blogs to reality shows to porn. Self-made media is growing, not shrinking, and the line between professional and true amateurism is growing blurry - and this is a 20-year trend, not some big-bang blog emergence mushroom cloud. Jason is entirely right when he says that the most successful blogs are done by under-employed writers and media hounds (like he and me) just like the semi-pro, under-employed videographers who create "amateur" porn flicks. Hell, old Josh Harris did his insane but brilliant WeLiveInPublic.com Website experiment with his reluctant girlfriend after Pseudo blew up - and that was like five years ago.

Lance Mannion picks up on this semi-pro media movement by contrasting his brief experiment making films with nudity back in college to today's more free and easy amateurism - when "live college girls" may actually be the real thing. After all, real college from Boston University girls (and boys) are behind a new, explicit sex magazine called Boink (knowing that makes its mildly shocking cover much more appealing than anything in Jenna Jameson's long career; its editors and publishers are its models). Lance's memoir shows how much things can change in 20 years - and got guys like Lance, and Jason, and me that 20 years is really the entire history of the self-created media movement, that is we witnessed the whole thing as semi-professionals:

Outrage and a convenient memory are useful in helping one not mind so much not being young anymore, not to mention in helping to disguise a voyeuristic tittilation.  And of course jealousy, voyeurism, and prurience disguised as moral indignation are useful politically. Students nowadays may be wilder and less inhibited than we were. They may be a whole lot more strait-laced in their way. I wouldn't know.

Yeah, we wouldn't know - but we're all consumers. And many of us are also producers. Used to be a tiny percentage of the populace created movies and magazine and books for the great masses. Now we're all creators. Sure, the money will still be made in (mostly) professional productions and (very) professional distribution. But we're approaching an equilibrium between the creators and the consumers, and between the private and the public.

Turns out, Josh Harris's crazy experiment with Web-connected cameras in his New York loft was prescient. And it lives in the very public life of Paris Hilton - star of the most popular sex flick in recent years, a purely public face and body and sex life that belongs to everyone. This week, the contents of her digital PDA turned up online and suddenly, Eminem's cell phone was ringing off the hook with calls from all the little people. You know what? They felt entitled - entitled by The Apprentice, by Dirty Debutantes, by porn producer Jeff Gannon nee Guckert in the White House, and by bloggers like Jeff Jarvis. Perhaps they were right; perhaps there are no more stars, no lives that are mysterious and larger than life in America. Pay attention the the Oscars tonight. Are these people stars anymore? Aren't they just reality show extras who make movies?

Because these days we all live in public. And fame is more fleeting than ever.

UPDATE: Mannion follows up on Jason's piece (I love creating a web of thought like this) about the triumph of the semi-professional, while Wolcott, in his link to this post, makes a great point about it:

This phenomenon was brilliantly anticipated and analyzed by the late Albert Goldman, whom many regard and will forever despise as the Anti-Christ because of his biographies of Elvis and John Lennon. The result is that his pop journalism remains criminally underrated; and like so many scattershot geniuses (Seymour Krim, Lester Bangs, R. Meltzer, Nick Tosches), his best work was often done on the fly or for zero-prestige rat-bag publications.

Following the blog trail on this post further yields this insightful thought from Michael Hussey:

...Americans talk about moral values as they head to the adult video store to make a purchase. If the country was really as prudish as the conservative gatekeepers like James Dobson claim then Jameson would not be a celebrity.

Tivo Killer, Qu'est Que C'est?

When I miss something on Imus between the shower and the closet, my trigger finger gets itchy. That's the finger I use to hit rewind on my remote control for the cable box from Time Warner when there's something on TV I want to see again, like the steam from Chris Matthews' ears or Art Carney addressing the ball. But I can't do it with radio, although someday I am metaphysically certain I will be able to - and easily at that.

While Tivo remains the sadly sputtering pioneer of time-shifting the form of media formerly known as "broadcast," the concept is picking up steam and the big boys are getting wise. From my perch in the worn leather chair 18 feet from the big Sony, the Time Warner box is video media central; it has become the way to watch televised media in my house. That said, it's a piece of crap. It constantly reboots itself in the middle of American Chopper, its menu design makes programming into a chore, and it has this weird habit of playing two seconds of some middle-aged French guy asking "l'ensemble, vu?" - in what context, I know not.

Oh, I've longed for the grace and ease of a Tivo, from a design standpoint, the iPod of its genre. But Time Warner has always been quicker, though always less elegant. And let's face it, they've got the homes pre-wired for their gizmo. If you're thinking Microsoft (big cable) and Mac (Tivo), you're more on target than a swift Eleanor Clift elbow shattering Tony Blankely's notorious glass chin.

But cable, my friends, is winning. The robber barons, er, I mean, the visionaries at the franchise-swilling monopolies of cable television understand the power of on-demand programming. sure, a personal video recorder like a Tivo or Replay is terrific; you can record anything you want, watch it when you want, you get the drill. But Time Warner is constantly adding more on-demand programming, and it's moved way beyond the most profitable (porn) and into the niche markets (home improvement, cartoons, documentaries). And let's face it, you can imagine the day when the whole shooting match becomes an on-demand buffet - heck, it just takes server space and that ain't getting anything but cheaper.

Just this month, Time Warner quietly added on-demand options for BBC America, ABC News, A&E, and Home & Garden, among others. HBO on-demand is now the only way I catch Deadwood anyway, and has been for some time. Blockbuster? Blockbusted, babe - I get my newly-released digital videos via the good Time Warner servers. Even the kids have discovered that their favorite PBS shows and Nick cartoons now have handy on-demand menus. Per Ron Popeil, I can now set it and forget it - sans the setting, of course.

Now, Imus remains a radio show, even if he and McCord have jumped the shark with their hideous new Paramus set on MSNBC. Yet I suspect MSNBC and its cable partners will soon be in the on-demand game. So my trigger finger may just get some work - just not when Lieberman or Santorum are on.

UPDATE: The fertile Pamela "Dorothy" Parker has an arriviste West Coast take, and offers insight on time-shifting radio. Pamela - as you well know - is the best analyst on digital marketing in the world.

Drum Major Instinct

Couldn't let the day pass without a tip o' the blog to my little sista at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, where I'm lucky enough to occupy a board seat: Andrea Batista Schlesinger scored a big-time "Public Lives" profile in today's NYT. Quoth Andrea: "What Social Security did was guarantee that people wouldn't have to grow old in poverty and now young people need to be involved in a conversation about whether that safety net will exist for us. Nobody is talking to young people." The profile pitches Andrea as a "young person taking on the world" type; but I know differently. She's got an old soul, one that goes back (at least) to February 4, 1968.  So read the piece, pop over to DMI's terrific site (we're out-thinking the right), and pop for a contribution if you've got some dough. Peace out.

Habemus Papem

Much as it does with the fictional Stephen Maturin, the born-in pull of the Catholic Church sometimes tugs against my social liberalism; the realities of suffering in the modern world conflict with the strict course set out by the Church patriarchy, particularly where it applies to sexuality and women's bodies. Maturin, the Irish-Catalan surgeon/spy of O'Brian's classic seafaring series, is a devout believer in both ritual and liberality; he prays on his knees in Latin and treats venereal disease and the ravages of prostitution without fault or judgment. Indeed, he reserves his harshest judgment for the punishment and customs of the Royal Navy, where disfigurement or death was the penalty for homosexuality below decks.

A concern for the unjustly punished, the victims of war, the poor, the powerless has always been at the core of Catholicism to me, from the bright Godspell-influenced Vatican II style catechisms my more devout altar boy youth to these lapsed, doubting, wilderness times. And while I disagree with Pope John Paul II on the many strictures of family and personal morality, I find I agree with him on the big issues of social justice and war.

And whatever your feelings for either the Church as an institution, or the Pope as a man, his long suffering in gradually passing from the world stage clearly writes this headline: we are saying good-bye to a giant.

When I was a child in parochial school, the Pope was a distant, almost mythical figure, an Italian relic that somehow spoke and breathed but lived his life behind the gauze of history and time and tradition. This Pope, who came to power in healthy, full-bodied strength of middle-age with the experience of a cruel real world in his past, changed all that. Karol Wojtyla was a playwright, a poet, a Polish patriot, an athlete and an anti-Nazi, anti-Soviet freedom fighter. He had heft, he had time to experience life, he glowed character.

And so I honor his suffering and his will to continue, and I will eventually mourn his passing. My liberal friends, a couple of whom I've spoken to about the Pope's failing health, will not agree with me in celebrating that life, arguing that he set the Church back a hundred years. My conservative friends will no doubt mourn the passing of a true conservative. Both will be wrong; this Pope wasn't red state or blue and his legacy should not be viewed in our alarmingly absolutist American debate.

Ask me if John Paul II was liberal or conservative and you'll get this answer (which will not qualify me for any attack poodle time on TV): he was both.

UPDATE: My bro Ralph gets off a righteous jab at the New York Press blabberer Matt Taibbi for dissing the Pope. The Sawpit dude is no church-goer, but I think he's right in slamming Taibbi's stupid, blatantly controversy-hoping, piece of hooey.

Gonzo Esta Gonzo

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time - and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

Hunter S. Thompson said that in 1971, already proclaiming his elegy to the decade gone before, sensing that something had happened, that it was already at an end, and that people would discuss it for a long time. But as Thompson famously said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

What's amazing about Thompson's famed gonzo writing career - which ended yesterday with a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his firearm-filled compound - was that it was profoundly professional. That is to say, Thompson cultivated and exploited a market for his off-the-trail brilliance. Some say his was the start of the "revolution" against mainstream media (MSM to the right-wingers) but I said that misses by a wide mark. Thompson didn't spill for just anyone or anything; he spilled for a paycheck plus expenses. And given his own proclivities and style, that's a hell of a story to me.

As for influence, I think others have already said it better today, so I'll take liberties here and quote freely.

Jason, a hard-core Thompsonofile with whom I'd been talking about the dearth of a gonzo-style spring training Website just the other day, turned on the pitch and crushed it:

He was a man who made himself into a myth, but in the end, his friends would tell you, the myths were all true. That was Thompson, blurring the line between reality and unreality was never a problem for him. But unlike the billions of self-indulgent imitators he spawned, hopped up on MDA and cheap blended scotch, dribbling nauseous words onto page after page, Thompson was a pro.

Mannion has a take on his brand of journalism that features some demon-chasing, and Digby's right when he says: "For some of us of a certain age who follow politics, his view of the game informs us in ways that we will never wholly shake off." The other Tom weighs in from the House of Commons, whilst Ralph recalls some key Thompson moments in his life and even pays tribute to his last years as a sportswriter. Gothamist files HST as "a fiction writer, a fact reporter, a deadline deferrer" and Wolcott casts the death thusly: "So much good, impassioned writing has been done in homage to HST, to his pirate gusto and spirit of marauding frontier justice." Yup. Jarvis argues that Dr. Thompson "was really the first reaction to one-size-fits-all journalism." Hmm, to some degree Jeff - but his was an intensely personal trip, an intensely personal anger. I'm not sure the line from Fear and Loathing to millions of blogs is unbroken. JD might well be closer to it, or to why at least, Thompson was an icon: "... the idea was that journalistic objectivity was pretty much bullshit, that the writer was very much a part of the story he was covering." Gilliard, I think, draws the dotted line from Thompson's anger and excess to blogs, with the right amount of perspective:

Blogs follow in the tradition of outlaw journalism, but without the flourishes he liked. It's not about just being outrageous, most of the bloggers are little different than their peers in newspapers, clean living young men and women. They don't get drunk and naked for fun, they pay their bills, stay faithful and maybe have a beer too many. However, it is the spirit of what Thompson meant, to be outside the laws of journalism, not the rules, but the laws. The laws of not offending advertisers and friendly pols. The laws of family friendly copy. Those laws. Not the rules about honesty and decency.

Lastly, there's another reason by Hunter S. Thompson is so mourned today by so many "guys I blog with and link to" - the man was a freaking gas, a great writer, and his writing was entertaining. Never underestimate the value of fun to the reader. This pro didn't. So to Dr. Thompson, here's the line he used on the death of his buddy Timothy Leary: "He is forgotten now, but not gone."

Sunday Papers

Reading I urge upon you whilst worshipping upon the sacred altar of the McLaughlin Group, bacon and eggs close at hand:

• New York Times editor Bill Keller fisks Jeff Jarvis big-time (and with some style and humor) and Jeff - to his infinite credit - reports the entire thing.
• I read Bill Gallo's short memoir of Iwo Jima in yesterday's News, and then I read Gilliard's more epic post, which includes the Gallo piece. Sixty years ago, Americans landed in Hell. This tale never pales.
• My old buddy Pamela Parker comes out, but her pregnant pause has not yet begun. Cheers! (Hey Alan, give her a big raise - she's the best).
• I agree entirely with Daniel Henninger's screed in the WSJ - namely that Modernism and Post-Moderism represent pre-Tsunami art criticism and categorization. (OK, he said pre-9/11 but mine is the liberal view).
• Joanne Wilson complained about eBay and PayPal driving her batty and Meg Whitman, CEO, responded on her blog. Now that's clout.
• Chervokas nails the vital role in rock of the Basement Tapes as he continues some of the most incisive (and under-employed) music criticism in the blogosphere. (And yeah, Dylan is coming to the Beacon, folks).
• Mannion cleverly writes about how to get blog traffic as he takes on Google's formulas. To wit: Scarlett Johansson naked, Scarlett Johansson naked, Scarlett Johansson naked, Scarlett Johansson naked.
• Jim Wolcott flays the flesh from the bones of newbie conservative film critic Michael Medved: "quit pretending that Hollywood is 'out of touch' with the audience, when it is you and your mustache who no speaka their language."

Laugh and Say I'm Green

For at least a dozen years, I have resisted Green Day with the toughest of age-tinted stoicism. To me, they seemed like Sha-Na-Na at Woodstock or the Stray Cats in the 80s or The Knack in the 70s - pure throwback nostalgia and imitation. Who were these guys playing pure punk in the 90s, anyway? Phaw, man, I spent too many nights at CBGB, Max's, Mudd Club, the old Pep Lounge - you know, back in the day. Bought Johnny Thunders a beer at Zappa's in Brooklyn, man. Who do these young fellas think they are, some kind of Stiv Bators and Cheetah Chrome tribute band?

Bridge and tunnel wannabes. And worse. They were playing over-clipped machine gun downstrokes on low-slung Gibsons a generation after this bridge and tunnel wannabe closed up his short-lived punk rock lifestyle. Didn't these poseurs from Oakland know Max's was a nail salon? That the Sex Pistols were a dinosaur lounge act? That the surviving Dolls were co-headlining oldies festivals with Chubby Checker? That Johnny was dead, man?

I was even more dismissive of their planned "punk rock opera" project. Oh yeah right, like Billie Joe Armstrong was gonna play Pete Townshend?

But I love American Idiot.

I play the damned thing every day, unwinding the iPod and headphones from my backpack during my commute in a Brooks Brothers suit, feeling much as Townshend must've felt when he penned Rough Boys as an ode to the Pistols and Ramones back in '80 (ok, maybe not that evocative). This mofo rocks from start to finish, tells a compelling story, and sets out a lush musical basket-weaving that reaches - yes, reaches - well beyond anything in so-called popular music these days.

The structure of the record is simplicity; A-D-G chords strummed Steve Jones style, rumbling easily from everyone's garage circa 1979. And then the scene-setting words, which I admit, get my attention:

Don't wanna be an American idiot.
Don't want a nation under the new media.
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mindfuck America.

Anti-media, anti-war, anti-Republican, anti-Bush, anti-digital vocal compression, but relentlessly pro-American in a way that harkens back to Hank Williams and Lost Highway. That is to say, there is no normal America, no typical America, and no actual heartland. This is a brilliant and deadly straight assessment. Armstrong tugs that five-decade string leading back to ol' Hank in Jesus of Suburbia:

City of the dead
At the end of another lost highway
Signs misleading to nowhere
City of the damned

Jimmy, the lead man in this power chord musicale, is a familiar urban character - a junkie, hooked on Novacaine, down on his luck, getting older, prone to violence and suicide, obsessed with his idea of a girl. Yeah, Quadrophenia, although the GD guys swear up and down that it's not an ode to Sir Pete.

But it's an older Jimmy, a 30-something who hasn't made it in life, not a teen mod battling rockers in Brighton. On this boulevard of broken dreams, twenty years slips by quickly and there's no irony and art in urban angst, just loneliness. In the end, American Idiot is not really a political work, although it's been played as a Bush-bashing ode by the MTV crowd. That misses the point: the record is an inner story of failure, of facing up to busted dreams. Our current landscape of politics and media is simply the backdrop - the light soundtrack.

Armstrong has said he spent a month in New York, away from his wife and kids and millionaire's McMansion, getting wasted on red wine and writing. That's the method of American Idiot. Staying up late in the Chelsea Hotel, writing Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you. "I felt like I was too old to be angry anymore," Armstrong told Rolling Stone. "I didn't want to come across as the angry older guy. It's sexy to be an angry young man, but to be a bitter old bastard is another thing altogether."

Tell me about it, Billie Joe. Yet, how to avoid the fate? Time barrels onward, we grow up, we move away. Over simple major chords played on the downstroke, American Idiot holds that story together, with scenery on the side of the road we all can recognize, Hank Williams road signs, scenery that does not shift from red state to blue and back again.

And in the darkest night
If my memory serves me right
I'll never turn back time
Forgetting you, but not the time.

Paging Grantland Rice

One of the eternal mysteries of February revolves around the mass manipulation of the media known colloquially as "spring training." The central question after a long off-season is always this: why, day after day, do all the highly-paid beat reporters file the same damned stories as their competitors? I mean, does Jay Horwitz give the News and the Post their marching orders? Today is the perfect example. I envision Horwitz handing the press corps their message. "Ok fellas, today the story is Mike Piazza. Last year of his contract. Just married a Playboy model. Feeling good about moving back behind the dish. Hoping to go out with some big numbers." And bam, there it is in the papers the next day. Starving baseball fans desperate for real reporting, analysis, and a feel for the training grounds of their heroes get a near press release. And it happens every damned year! It's almost as if the Mets scribes on the dailies, away from their wives on a fully-paid junket in the Florida sun for a month, spent every night knocking back Seagrams into the wee hours on the slimy outskirts of St. Lucie with the friendly women from the local strip club before stumbling into the clubhouse an hour before deadline back in New York. Oh. Just got it. Never mind.

Gated Community

Steve-o told me: "Don't blog the Gates, everybody is blogging the Gates, you blog the road less traveled." A high compliment indeed, but I simply can't resist. And that's because I've come to understand what the Gates are really about: me.

Oh, I didn't realize this when Steve-o and Susie and I strolled the southeast corner of the Park on a warm luncheon turn earlier this week. The orange fabric billowed in the city breeze, the NYPD's myriad command units hummed with the sweet song of Bloombergian overtime pay, and the Secret Service readied the walkways for Laura Bush. My friend Susie - a snarkily brilliant observer of New York with a political pedigree nonpareil - described it all thusly: "it's a clever advertisement for Home Depot." Or as the Christo volunteers said, borrowing both the nuke-glow orange vest uniform and the slogan from the home center megachain: "You can do it, we can help."

No, it took the the magic of the blogosphere to show me the artistic light. (Have you heard? Citizen's media is the font of all wisdom. A revolution. Jeff Jarvis said so.) A brilliant poster on this little digital experiment, nom de rant "Buttdrinker," wrote the words that changed my life in response (strangely) to my sarcastic coverage of Paul McCartney at the Super Bowl:

Has anyone told you lately what a wanker you are? I mean really. Did you learn to type one-handed so you could play while you post, or did you get a special attachment for your keyboard? Yes, yes, you've lived a long important life during important times, now get the fuck over yourself and start writing about things which don't include you or your personal experiences. Or, when you write about yourself, stop pretending you're writing about other people. Yes, yes, you like the Mets. Great, you remember The Beatles. Oh, Watergate was central to your youth, fabulous. Who cares to actually read about those things when we can instead learn what they meant to you? After all, Darryl Strawberry was only brought on to this earth so that you could contemplate what his existence meant to yours ... Wake the fuck up. You're embarrassing yourself.

Buttdrinker, my friend, yes - yes, hast seen the white whale! And recalling our circumnambulation of the park on a late winter's day, the revelation in blinding saffron blew my mind. Yes. The Gates are about me! Indeed, they can only be viewed through the peculiar lens of my experience. Let's see....hmmm, yes, it's becoming clear. Against the brilliant blue sky, the Gates represent the color scheme of the New York Mets and my 35-year obsession with a tortured franchise. No wait! They may stand for the "phantom flag" that never called offensive pass interference on brilliant wide receiver Drew Pearson as he hauled in the Hail Mary pass from Roger Staubach that beat the Vikings in '75. Wait, wait, it's those beach umbrellas at Jones Beach. Ah, see how the fabric billows - that's my mitral valve prolapse!

Yes, the Gates is (are?) about me - and all the the hundreds of thousands of people who otherwise would never visit Central Park in late winter. Yes, the Gates are art. Yes, they're a European semi-Stalinist May Day parade of bright orange waves that signify nothing but whimsy. Yes, they're dull. They're about marching in lockstep, something New York never does. But you know, maybe Christo understands that. Perhaps the Gates merely hold up a mirror to New Yorkers, teeming through the park, moderately interested in the installation, and they show us what we're not.

UPDATE: I subconsciously (a George Harrison moment?) lifted my friend Brian's headline for this post, so the least I can do is link to his post on the Gates, which is very good. Not sure I agree with his "populist" take; to me they seemed anti-populist - but Brian's right, the crowds rocked.

The Straw Stirs

Darryl Strawberry was born on March 12, 1962 in Los Angeles - roughly three weeks after the New York Mets opened their first spring training camp ever in St. Petersburg, Florida, three weeks after John Glenn circled the globe, and the same three weeks after I slipped onto the planet in the hospital just across the street from the same suburban commuter station in Bronxville where I now catch the train every morning to Grand Central. With this week's announcement that the best everyday player in Mets history was rejoining the organization as an instructor, it seems apparent to me that Straw and I have both come full circle in the middle span of life.

I've always liked Darryl - from his introduction to New York fans as a top draft pick - the "black Ted Williams," a tall, stringy outfielder with a long, loping swing - to his final last-chance at bats with the Yankees. His were the plate appearances you didn't miss, the four or five times a game when conversation stopped, when you put down the book or the paper and really watched the game, pitch by pitch, swing by swing. The slightly open stance, the unquiet windmilling of the bat, the nervous glance back to the umpire with every pitch he took - these habits revealed the unsure Strawberry, the young man in the glare not quite comfortable with his talents, not quite sure if everyone liked him. Then the swing, that explosion of wood through the strike zone, and the sound when Darryl connected - a unique sound in those pre-steroid days - a deep, maple-tinged crack. And of course, the long, arcing moonshots to right-field.

The summer of the real moonshot, just seven years after Glenn's orbit, was the time when baseball attached itself to my life like an anchor-bolt. Tommie Agee and Cleon Jones. Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman. Bud Harrelson and Ken Boswell and Jerry Grote. And the others (all from eternal memory here, folks) Shamsky, Garrett, Gaspar, Swoboda, Dyer, McAndrew, Kranepool, McGraw, Taylor, Gentry, Ryan, Cardwell, Weis, Clendenon, Koonce, Charles. Gil Hodges on the bench, Joe Pignatano on the lines at first, Eddie Yost at third, and pitching coach/genius Rube Walker in the pen. Nelson, Kiner and Murphy in the booth for Channel 9. And in the stands, the New York glamour brigade of the day: Mayor Lindsay, Jackie Onassis, Pearl Bailey, Joe Namath, Leonard Bernstein. Shea Stadium was the gleaming five-year-old jewel of Robert Moses' World's Fair parkland, and the place to watch the Mets and be watched.

Strange, as Lou Reed says, how time turns around. Seven years from spring training in 1962 to a fairy-tale world championship - the time from birth to second grade for a couple of 7-year-olds - and then 17 years until the next title. At 24, Strawberry seemed to be on the edge of a Hall of Fame career. Still hidden were the demons, the alcohol and the drugs, and the violent anger. In 1986, I was the callow deputy editor of The Riverdale Press, the youngest newsroom denizen of that storied Bronx newspaper, learning the hard first lessons of management and responsibility. When she turned over the reins to me earlier that year, my predecessor - a brilliant community journalist - cracked laconically to this fresh-faced 24-year-old: "no more boy wonder, huh?" No kidding. My beat was Bronx politics and what an education the likes of Stanley Friedman, Mario Biaggi, and Walter Diamond provided on a weekly basis.

Over at Shea, Darryl Strawberry was being slowly brought along by veteran baseball man Jim Frey, who recognized his protege's sensitive nature and worried about the glare of New York. The kid showed plenty of promise and his homers were becoming legendary. The big numbers would come, if Darryl could "stay within himself." But by 1986, Frey was gone, Davey Johnson was in, the Mets clubhouse was the wild west of baseball, and the rollercoaster ride was on.

That year, my buddy Larry (he covered the schools) and I created our own partial season ticket plan at Shea, investing in tickets to a dozen games or so in advance. It was a good call. We were there all year, usually seated just above what Bob Murphy always called "the auxiliary scoreboard" just into fair territory in right-field, next to Strawberry. From those seats we watched him cover a lot of territory, fire the ball in the from the corner, send moonshots over our heads to the upper deck, and endure the growing taunts of fans he would never quite satisfy, the cowardly and mocking sing-song Darr-yl, Darr-yl. Even from the hometown guys.

You could tell that Straw had rabbit ears; he heard those taunts and it hurt. In truth, the '86 Mets were the team of Hernandez and Carter and Gooden more than Strawberry. But Darryl was the force in that lineup. And he was clutch - hitting crucial homeruns in the crazed playoffs with the Astros and the landmark Series with the Red Sox. But he was hurt when Davey Johnson double-switched him out of Game 6 after a big homerun, and he was hurt in future years by the jeers and the taunts.

And he began to hurt himself, and - on occasion - others. His first wife Lisa complained that he broke her nose in a fight in 1986. He fathered a child with another woman. In 1990, he was arrested for alleged assault with a deadly weapon during an argument with his wife; he is alleged to have hit her in the face with an open hand and also to have threatened her with a .25-caliber semiautomatic handgun, but charges are dropped. He goes to Smithers to dry out. He leaves the Mets for the Dodgers. In 1993, Darryl is arrested for allegedly striking Charisse Simons, the 26-year-old woman he lived with; charges were dropped. An IRS investigation ensues. He disappears from a Dodgers game and enters drug rehab. In 1994, he's indicted for failure to pay Federal income taxes and pays a $350,000 fine. A year later, he is suspended for 60 days for failing a drug test. More rehab. In 1995, he's charged with failure to pay child support. The Yankees offer a chance for a comeback. He battles colon cancer and chemo in '98 and '99, often heroically.

But the demons got worse. Three more drug suspensions and the cancer came back. More surgery and treatment. More arrests and charges. And then jail for two years - a real stretch. And always the promises with Darryl: this is the year I'll lead the team, this is the year I'll hit 50 homers, this time I'll stay straight, this time I'll be faithful, this time I've found the Lord.

And so it goes. When he was in jail in Florida a year or so ago, his last chances run out and his promises dim, I wrote him a quick letter. Just to say he wasn't forgotten. And because, as another 40-year-old with a different set of miles, I was well aware of the "there but for the grace of God" factor at play. Darryl could hit a fastball a mile, and I could write a line or two. His talents produced an arc of success and failure like the creaky, wooden rollercoaster at Coney Island - loud and scary and sudden. Mine produced what has been, comparatively, a series of more gently rolling hills. Who knows why.

Darryl Strawberry had the best year of his life in 1987, when he hit 39 homeruns, drove in 104, stole 36 bases, and hit .284. He was only 25, already in trouble off the field, with nowhere to go but down. He has two more similar years - in '88 and '90. He finished his career with 335 homers and an even 1,000 runs batted in. But there were more arrests than All Star appearances, more rehab stints than pennants.

It would be easy to point to Strawberry's upbringing in a tough LA neighborhood and his early success as factors in his downfall; these are the oft-cited reasons. Poor black guy from Compton had too much too soon and crashed. This is simple, too simple, and life is more complex, all myriad shades of gray. As I told Strawberry in that letter, everyone has demons, we're all in the midst of a titanic battle against them almost every day. The only path is forward. Because of his talents, Darryl's were played out in public, in the rocket's glare of his moonshots. Springsteen wrote: "Nothing is forgotten or foregiven when it's your last time around." But we're also a society of comebacks and, it seems, it's almost never too late, unless the pilot light goes out.

Darryl Strawberry and I are a couple of children of the late winter of 1962, when everything seemed possible. And I'm glad that the Straw is back with the Mets.