P.S. A Column On Things

Pieces of String

I don’t know where I heard the phrase “pieces of string” used to describe the detritus a columnist stores up for a three-dot column. I read Herb Caen starting when I was 12 and had to buy the Sunday Chronicle out at the Portland Airport, continuing until the day he died, so I suspect I got it from him.

During my seven-year hiatus from this column, the ball of string got quite large. And yet, I am surprised, but shouldn’t be, to see how the maw chews up a big pile at an astounding rate. In my current period of fervid creativity, driven by my muse, I am still staying ahead. But my feelings are well summed up but this quotation, from my journalism quotes page:

“I can tell you what it’s like to work for a newspaper. Imagine a combine, one of those huge threshing machines that eat up a row of wheat like nothing, bearing right down on you. You're running in front of it, all day long, day in and day out, just inches in front of the maw, where steel blades are whirring and clacking and waiting for you to get tired or make one slip. The only way to keep the combine off you is to throw it something else to rip apart and digest. What you feed it is stories. Words and photos. Ten inches on this, fifteen inches on that, a vertical shot here and a horizontal there, scraps of news and film that go into the maw where they are processed and dumped onto some page to fill the spaces around the ads. Each story buys you a little time, barely enough to slap together the next story, and the next and the next. You never get far ahead, you never take a breather, all you do is live on the hustle. Always in a rush, always on deadline, you keep scrambling to feed the combine. That's what it's like. The only way to break free is with a big story, one you can ride for a while and tear off in pieces so big, the combine has to strain to choke them down. That buys you a little time. But sooner or later the combine will come chomping after you again, and you better be read to feed it all over again.”

--Ray Ring

from the novel Arizona Kiss

Sam Patch

Only a small handful of you have ever heard of Sam Patch, The Greatest Story Ever Told So Far, a musical tragedy I wrote in 1971, based on a short story by Michael Wildermuth, with music by him and Clark Smith.

I consider it the peak of my lifetime public creative fictional output—better than Captain Zommarr and the Galaxy Pirates, the New Eugene Oregon Show or Vernon Jones, Super-Scientific Detective (the novel and radio serial, now lost, that gave me carpal tunnel syndrome when I typed it on Mom’s portable computer at age 12). My memoirs are better, but they aren’t public. My poetry is better, but it isn’t fictional.

My wife recently noted, “a half-century is a long time to be obsessed with a radio play.” Well, not if you once believed “Broadway in 75 or die.” It has still never received a real-life performance, or even a staged reading, but if some amateur dramatic company were willing, I have the script, the lyrics, and could obtain a karaoke soundtrack. Royalty-free! In fact, there might be a generous donation involved.

Well, my point here is that, after 50 years, I found a freelancer on the Internet who was willing to “sweeten” the original musical soundtrack—adding horns and percussion to the original instrumentation of accordion, guitar and piano. I’ve always loved the music; now it takes my breath away. It’s fun, whether you’re listening for the first time, or were there at the inception.

My favorites: Why Jump and Pittsburgh, PA. If you can tell me why these things called hope and happiness exist, then you can ask me, why jump.

This and That

Pet Peeve: Journalistic Innumeracy

Please, report health numbers on a per 100,000 basis. Raw numbers are virtually meaningless and of course certainly misleading. (As meaningless as comparing uninflated historic money amounts). Of course California, Texas and Florida have high numbers!!! They are the biggest states.  This is an extension of the general innumeracy of journalists, of which I was proud (as an MIT grad) not to be a part.

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More Trump

Another great Richard Gross column: A Festival of Distortion

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Shoeless in Minneapolis

I told this story to an old friend in an email and then came to the astounding realization I have never shared it in my column. Thanks Dan Janal!

I was in Minneapolis a dozen times at the turn of the century, but then the division was dissolved and that was that. I did discover that many of the skyways (second-floor over-street tunnels interconnecting downtown Minneapolis buildings) close at midnight. I had gone coatless, in stocking feet to a movie three blocks from my hotel, and had to do the return trip, in sub-zero weather, on surface streets. Still, what better place to be a hamster than Minneapolis?

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Remembering HHH

I deeply respected Hubert H. Humphrey, who would have made a much better president than Nixon. Actually, my cat Patrice would have made a better president than Nixon (and his dog Checkers would have made a better president than Trump). In these bleak times, take comfort in the fact that an American presidential candidate once said, “The moral test of government is how government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

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Refuse to Accept Results? Historical Perspective

If Trump refuses to accept defeat in November, the republic will survive intact, as it has 5 out of 6 times in the past

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Stories We Never Told

In a nutshell, Stories We Never Told by Sonja Yoerg, is a taut, brilliant, twisty novel about the inside of human minds. Turns out people are complex, something she’d appreciate, being a psychologist. It has been years since a novel had me literally on the edge of my seat the way this one did. I read the last 1/3 of the book in a straight shot, because Vicki refused to tell me who did what to whom.

In the meantime, I was struck by this aside: “Maybe happiness wasn't durable and portable. maybe it was something you could have in only one place at one time of fixed duration.” It's probably like my observation about projects being on time, done right and under budget: you never get all three.

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Thanks again, David Mamet

Another of his perfect films, Place in the Sun, with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, is brilliant. Vicki and I were enthralled. By the way, it is loosely based on a real event.

Fun with Trump

My respect for the New York Daily News is enormous. The New York Post will always have Headless Body in Topless Bar, but this front page is a worthy competitor for the Tabloid Front Page Hall of Fame.

Also, this full page ad in the Times

Paul Schindler on TV

I was on WBZ in 1972, I’ve been on five game shows, and I did four appearances to promote my book, Aspirin Therapy. If you’re interested, find all this Paul video here.

Shameless Plug Department

If you read blogs like I do, you scarcely ever glance at that column full of stuff on the right. If you aren’t signed up to receive a weekly email notification, you’ll find that box at the top.

Way down, under my books, is the section Paul's Permanent Content. Every item in it is a timeless gem, but let me highlight the ones of which I am proudest.

First, there are two links that point to content I’ve created that I confidently believe are World Class. My 19-year-old fan site is still, in my opinion, the best single place for commentary on the greatest film ever made:

Groundhog Day: Best Film Ever

The other link of which I am especially proud is

Journalism Quotes

Thanks to a suggestion from my wife, it includes positive quotes as well as the usual negative ones.

Check out the others too, if you have tired of either Netflix or watching paint dry.

Sam Patch: How desperate would you have to be?

How desperate would you have to be to download and listen to either the 30-minute sound track of the musical I co-wrote as a freshman, Sam Patch: The Greatest Story Ever Told... So Far -- A Musical Tragedy in Two Acts,   or to the entire 90-minute radio musical? You can download either as a podcast if you are smart enough to paste the link into your webcast player as a podcast URL. Or, you can click on the link and listen to it for 90 minutes (30 for the sound track) while sitting at your computer, depending on how your computer and browser display XML files. It works best in Internet Explorer.

It’s all right here:

https://psacot.typepad.com/ps_a_column_on_things/sam-patch.html

No Footnotes

Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this is not a real journalism site. The New York Times led the way in digital journalism, by deciding that any time an article was changed online, there was a note about the change. I am not required to do that. But I did make two changes in the “hand I was dealt” section of my Black Lives Matter post.

I have been blessed by the guidance of women who care for me during my entire life. In this case, a former lover noted I had left “male” off the list of my sources of privilege; she also advised me that, since I wasn’t rich, my Full House was king-high instead of ace-high. My daughter noted that in addition to straight, I should have said cisgender. I resisted her advice to add “abled.”

But in any case, the stealth correction is there, and future readers will not assume I blithely forgot the male source of my privilege, or ignored wealth as a relative factor.

The SF Chronicle on Covid

The Chronicle coverage of Covid has been detailed and first rate. This is much to my surprise, as I always considered the newspaper to be a newsprint comic book. I loved the fact that it was family owned for four generations and feared for its future when Hearst took over. Imagine my surprise when it actually became a better newspaper.

The Mercury News is OK, but I think the Chronicle has been untouchable on Covid, especially Covid in California. Good coverage of the TickTock that anyone can get as well as admirable enterprise coverage.