Radical Statement in Plain Sight
Hi Eric: Unfortunately, you’re right. The internet is like a wind tunnel for ideas. As soon as an idea barely forms, it gets blown into the public space, and once it’s there, there’s no reason to develop or modify it, because it’s already there. It’s done. Plus, there’s another idea already entering the wind tunnel. -- Mick LaSalle in Datebook
I originally titled this post "Radical Statement in Plain Site" but someone mistook my play-on-words for a malapropism.
LaSalle was responding to reponses to his earlier column in which he remembered planning to pan a live performance by falling star Andy Gibb, but changed his mind when:
Somehow, seeing him up close, close enough to see the sweat on his temple, I suddenly understood that he was an actual person. Of course, I’d known that before, but there’s a difference between knowing something and really knowing it. In that moment, I realized this was a young man, working hard, who was barely holding it together. And I knew I didn’t want to be the person that made him come apart. I realized then that I had my limits, and understood, for the first time, that critics should have limits.
This is why I emailed Dave Winer and said it pisses me off when you trash "journalism". "Journalism" is not a person. Mick LaSalle is a person who noticed Andy Gibb also is a person.
Winer appears to be whining to the TV channels he watches, and news paper articles he reads from, which influenced the Iraq war. They were all based in New York and Washington D.C. And not all news "wants to be free" Dave. Some writers need to eat, so they need to get paid. Some quality publications choose wisely in deciding not to scale indefinitely, which your friend and early fellow blogger Josh Marshall said in the Atlantic a few months back, but you didn't notice.
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Further Reading:
Scale Was the God That Failed: theatlantic.com
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
