ruts

Roots

"I am Kunta Kinte" I'd wanted to shout from a hill in an open field somewhere, the milky way above me, maybe holding up a baby.  Maybe not.. "I am Kizzy, Chicken George."  But alas, I am skirblog and live on 35th Ave in Oakland... and oh yeah, I'm white.

(btw: that's Maya Angelou in the photo behind Cicely Tyson...)

Felicia gets credit for this idea: why wouldn't we want to share the epic television mini-series, Roots with our son, the way we were exposed to it as kids, as we were so impacted and moved, perhaps permanently by the story.  Do you remember the event?  About a week of consecutive nights of made-for-TV, harrowing, gut wrenching, box-of-Kleenex history?  I hadn't seen it in over 30 years, but still carried many of its scenes fresh in my memory: the hatcheting of Kunta's (John Amos) foot; the rape of Kizzy by Tom Moore (Chuck Conners); Lou Gossett's incredible "Fiddler," and of course Ben Vereen as Chicken George, his chicken plumed hat, his triumphant return as a free man. Such a mix of sadness: the whippings, the humiliation, the racists, one expertly played by Lloyd Bridges; and redemption: the raising of newborn baby to the heavens: "behold the only thing greater than yourself."

Its also worth noting (for the one millionth time)  that storytelling and acting trump any and all special effects. With what limited visuals they had available to them for TV in 1977, I'd argue that the impact was greater than later treatments (Amistad) with more full blown graphics. I don't know why exactly this is so, probably something to do with our, ahem, imaginations maybe? But I've yakked about this before perhaps ad "nausea."

Now with your good friends, Netflix, or whatever you use,  you can relive it all sans commercials (although I'd love to see what ad got the slot after some of the more dicey moments...  horrendous whipping, then K-Tel Hits from the '70s?  The new Dodge Dart?) It's 6 discs (+ one bonus disc which we didn't watch) of essential viewing.  Depending on how you order it, you can watch one each evening gathered around the glowing LCD flat screen, just like in the ol' days.

Ruts:

disclaimer: the following is a work of fiction. Any confluence toward accidental resemblances is highly irregardless and should be legally and symmetrically ignored.

You may have heard that some paper named the SF Chronicle is having a bad time of it; has said they will either sell or close down if they don't get bla bla bla... So I thought I'd take this opportunity to throw out a giant and probably ill advised "I told you so (motherforkers)" to the San Francisco Chronicle, which among other newspapers (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Rocky Mtn News, Cincinnati Post, Baltimore Examiner, Philly Inquirer and Daily News, and lets face it, all newspapers everywhere) seem to be going out of biz:

I was there when the tide could have turned.  I happened to be working in a management position (I know, insane)  right when the Chron could have chosen the red pill and faced the distant train that was the Internet, (hows that for mixed metaphor. Also I may have red and blue reversed... so slack me some cut) a train which seemed so far down the tracks, but would obviously get here one day, and did we want to be fooling around on the tracks and get our foot caught in the ties at the last minute as the train gets closer and closer?  Or take the blue pill and actively and with full conscience ignore that faint headlight, hoping somehow it would never reach us, and just in case lets spend all our money NOW.

I was (sort of) in charge of the Chronicle's Classified recruitment advertising dept at the time (I know, yawn), but "help wanted" ads were one of the highest dollar per inch pieces of advertising you could buy from the Chron.  We knew we had you over a barrel too.  At the time there was nowhere else for you to go if you were a company trying to hire people, at least nowhere that actually worked. We could do whatever we wanted, double our rates, triple 'em, hang up on people, swear at them, screw up their ads, who gave a damn?  Nobody could do nothing.  They had to use us.  We routinely turned away as much advertising as we ran, just because we could and because we were as stupid with money. Plus we were also stupid.

At the same moment -  editorially,  the Chron was busy ignoring Silicone Valley as a newsworthy subject and let the San Jose Mercury News take all the cookies there. Companies like Apple, IBM, Intel, Genetech had to scream their lungs out to get coverage from us, and conversely had trouble believing our paper could reach the kind of people they wanted to hire.

But then you had mr. skirblog sitting in his office, way uncomfortable in his monkey suit and baboon tie, who had been surfing the internet since its pre-graphic days, when all you had was Lynx, and Mosaic and nuttin'.  This is funny: one day I had to give the Chron management team a little primer, a little sucky Powerpoint demo on this whole Internet thingy, because they were sick of me yammering about it and wanted to know what the hell it was.  Fer instance we hear people were actually searching for jobs on the thing. A little site called Monster.com showed up (run by one of the paper's arch enemies/friends TMP Advertising, who routinely skimmed 15% of our profits by simply placing ads for clients we couldn't reach...), and another upstart called Hotjobs was also in the game.  "Look folks, boss," I said, "Classified ads are a list, a DATABASE, and anything that's a database works even better when you can sort it, and search it, rather than hunt and peck down printed lists for hours. Yes you can read the paper on the can, or on the bus, but we need to get in the game, our site is already one of the most recognized, well read sites out there (how this had happened is some kind of weird miracle or something) we will be left way behind."

Blank stares and cuticle examining from the assembled. "No, Lee, YOU don't understand.  The internet is our ENEMY, our competition, we must shun it. When they turn right, we must turn left. When they approach, we must ruuuuuuun screaming down the street.

And the Internet did approach. The train showed up.  Many trains. A fleet. An armada. All friendly like too. Hardly hostile to the good ol' Chronicle.  Web companies were falling over each other trying to team up with us.  They desperately sought legitimacy in their very crowded fields; they wanted to team up their incredible databases with our brand name and let the riches flow.
  As the Recruitment dude, I was approached by Hot Jobs and Yahoo and many other big names (most defunct). "Let's partner," they'd say, "lets make some money." I begged my managers to listen, to explore, visionary that I was am.  And you know what they we did?  They said, "not only won't we partner or explore with those PEOPLE, but we will not even let them run ads in our paper either.  That will show 'em! How about that?  Did I mention we had money coming out of our asses back then?

 Then the guy named Craig with his nifty database came and cannon-balled into the pool and blew everyone out of the water. He single-handedly killed classified advertising, first in the Bay Area, then in every city he set up in. Craig's not evil either, he waited plenty long, waited until all newspapers were long past the point when they should have done what he did.  And folks were overjoyed about  Craig.  He did everyone a favor:  he released them from the tyranny of the newspaper, our fickle and greedy whims.  He took his database and offered it for free.  He let Apple and Intel and Joe's garage all advertise jobs for a flat rate of $75. And all other ads were free. You could rent the apartment that actually existed and not some newspaper come-on, and see pictures of it to boot. Same with a car, or anything without a middle man or paper skimming off your meager profits.

As we loved to say with solemn, shaking heads around the Chron at the time: "you can't compete with free."  But we coudda, we just chose not to. 

It wasn't all bad, Craig also killed Monster and Hotjobs while he was at it... so there.

I ended up leaving my managerial position in 2000 to try my luck at getting some last minute cash out of the Internet.  I lasted about two years before it all went to hell.  Then I worked for the zoo.  Then I tried to sell advertising for a bunch of really wretched orgs.  Then I had no choice but to go crawling back to the Chron, begging them for a job, cause after actually reading my resume, looking at my work experience and skills, I realized I was only really marketable to one firm: the flippin' SF Chronicle.  They weren't crazy about the idea of hiring me back a THIRD TIME (long story) but after me harassing and pestering them, and waiting for some of my enemies there to retire, and my unemployment running out and trying three or four more times, they relented because there was a job available that nobody wanted: obits. Death notices. The dreaded.  So I gleefully took it.

I settled in and laid low.  I found it curious, then comical, that never once in the intervening years did anyone in the ever-shifting mgmt team ever approach me about my former position, acknowledge that I'd worked there at all for many years, or wonder if I might have an opinion about the still losing battle with the surprise Internet that sprung on them out of the blue so many years ago.  No, I'm like the American Splendor guy in the basement, toiling away, drawing stick figure comics on the side. Why didn't I ever mention it to them?  Another long and ill fated story.

Jump to last week, nine years later, I hear the paper is losing $50M a year in advertising revenue and is thinking about throwing in the towel.  Really? Izzat so? I wonder why?  Crocodile tears people.  Yes, its gonna suck when I and my downtrodden brothers and sisters are out on the street, because as I just observed, I'm marketable to about one company in the US and unfortunately happens to be the bleeding SF Chronicle.  But it's no surprise.  It's only happening because the Internet is BETTER and we ignored it when it literally came to our door and laid itself on our mat like a submissive dog!  Our smugness and greed killed our own biz, and its not a mystery why as soon as something BETTER finally came along, people couldn't wait to get away from us.

The only reason I still have a job (apart from the fact my bosses don't read this blog) is that ol' obit job that nobody wanted?  Well it still brings in money,  cause for some reason nobody has come up with a better way to do public death notices... yet.  They will, its yet another train down the tracks that will come but isn't here yet.   For obits, people still feel the paper is the place of record to publish and to read, Legacy.com is laying in wait, and so are our old friends over at TMP, still licking their monster.com wounds.

It was just shocking to hear the words said out loud,  "we will close this paper," whether they really mean it or not.  The announcement came abruptly and has been sitting there like a brick for one week now.  People are sad about it for different reasons.  As much as people like to hate the Chron, it keeps some people honest, if not the paper itself. Plus to witness it sinking is depressing, as I worked there during its glory days, Herb Caen still writing, over 100 people working in a beehive-like Classified Dept.  Halloween parties and big boards and sales contests and a "family" of amazing people who put out that paper.  I was in the building during the Loma Prieta Quake and came in the next day to put out the famous desk-topped edition, that yes even that had ads in it!  I have a lot of years and a lot of history there, including meeting my wife Felicia, if you didn't know. 

So it's still about roots. But we'll pronounce it "ruts" so as not to devalue Alex Haley's staggering story. Also meaning stuck. In a. We know its been a rut, and now its roots are  waterlogged and disintegrating quickly like a stack of soggy newspapers left out in the rain. No, its not a tragedy, but it is a shame.