SAINTS PRESERVE US

Stop the Presses! Please.

The fourth estate, an objective, free and tactile press, is a pillar of democracy. Therefore, paid display advertising must be its plinth. Things have changed.

I remember watching a CD-ROM demo on my work station’s brand-new Apple computer (a confusing and intimidating upgrade from my IBM Selectric typewriter, set of Letraset font sheets, clip art, ruby tape, hot wax and blue pencils) that explained how the Internet (a proper noun back then) worked. It was, I don’t know, some overly sophisticated arcade game, a Star Trek upgrade to radio waves and television signals. A telecommunications step forward provided you had a machine to access it. A visual medium underpinned by print, the Internet would simply be another magazine, a compendium. I couldn’t grasp the difference between analogue and digital. How could I?

Slide rules are clever, elegant instruments. I could never get the hang of them. God bless Texas Instruments for their calculators which I found difficult to employ beyond their grade school arithmetic functions. My essential advertising production tools were a little more primitive. Two newspaper-branded rulers: one for broadsheet publications which displayed column widths in inches, centimetres and picas (a printer’s measure) and another for tabloid formats. Tabloid papers scale their type horizontally on vertical broadsheet newsprint, so four pages become eight. One display ad becomes two, completely different dimensions. This arcana really matters as deadline nears. Time is always too tight to massage panic.

When I eventually broke into the advertising industry, I was beyond ecstatic. No more grimy sweatpants on the midnight shift. Work became more interesting even if the negative dynamics of my new job were no different from my old one. Other people. If you’re on a career path, man, you better be engaged. Over time I became aware that some of my practical skills – shaky expertise with an X-Acto knife – had become utterly useless even as the fundamental theories of producing a good advertisement remained constant. While the message remained, the means of production and methods of delivery were transitioning. Digital disruption is something akin to encroaching floodwaters. You can sandbag it for a time. It seems like a little extra work, a little extra hassle, but everything will be preserved as it was, damage minimal. A a carpet to replace, a little paint, an insurance claim. Then the big surge comes and everything you’ve known is scoured away.  

Yesterday’s papers used to drop on doorsteps like editions of the Yellow Pages or perhaps cinderblocks. There were special sections on certain days: Tuesday fashion, Thursday careers, Friday real estate, Wednesday automotive. “Thanks to St. Jude for favour received” classifieds always. Weighty weekend editions were stuffed with features and inserts: flyers, television magazines, colour comics.

Last Saturday’s Edmonton Journal print edition (an increasingly crucial distinction these days) dropped on the Crooked 9’s front porch as skimpy as its Monday edition except that the Journal no longer publishes a Monday edition because nothing happens anywhere over a weekend. The Journal, a broadsheet, was once the newspaper of record in Alberta’s capital city. Its sports section (24 August) consisted of four pages tucked away at the back of another section. There were 14 stories in the sports section, one of which was a four-sentence cut line beneath a photograph of a golfer searching for her ball in the rough at the British Women’s Open. Other stories were datelined Japan, Netherlands, Czech Republic and United States. The Canadian stories, just three, were out of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

Sports doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things; it’s just another form of leisure distraction, ultimately meaningless. We all know this. But it can be an interesting diversion from hard news. I also know that here in my town last weekend the U Sports University of Alberta varsity teams were gearing up; I know that the professional football Elks are no longer a community-owned club; I know the hockey Oilers are in a twist over salary cap issues; and I know there is talk of the baseball Riverhawks jumping a level from the West Coast League. And I assume some Albertans, perhaps even a few Edmontonians, will be competing in some capacity in the Paris 2024 Paralympics. If your big city daily is incapable of covering local sports, not one jaded reporter on the beat, you’re compelled to wonder about more important stuff, city hall and civic issues. Just how slack is my newspaper’s coverage? There’s only one conclusion.

The Edmonton Journal is a Postmedia property. Postmedia is a national newspaper chain (providing integrated multi-tiered advertising platforms that blah, blah blah …). It remains the financial hostage of an American hedge fund (Chatham Asset Management) that squeezes out cash in the form of endless interest payments with the indifference of a hungry boa constrictor. Wall Street loan-sharking. Regular people visit the pawn shop or skip town. Struggling corporations hollow themselves out – always the core (editorial staff and capital assets such as printing plants in Postmedia’s case), never the incompetents in the executive suite. The next step was a plea for government welfare, because, fucking hell, the corner office never saw the paradigm shifting.

Advertising is a simple game: a compelling message delivered to the widest target audience by the most effective and cost-efficient means available. And the advertising industry is the same as the porn industry in that any upgrade to an existing medium or, even better, the creation of a new one, can make it better. Bang for your buck. The internet provided cheap space in a popular place while continuing to refine its reach. Location, location, location. At the same time, a funny thing happened on the way to the digital chat forum.

Newspapers such as The Edmonton Journal began posting exclusive content, traditionally paid for in part by subscribers and casual newsstand readers, for free on social media in exchange for a “Like” and a “Share.” Whatever the initial free-for-all spirit of the internet, there was no value proposition there for an entity that sold curated information, be it news or advertising (advertising can be helpful information you never sought out). The aftermath is Ottawa’s Bill C-18, the Online News Act. Postmedia lobbied hard for the new medium to subsidize its publishing of its same old story, the song and dance being the threat to informed democracy – this from a media corporation (its name is now ironic) shilling irrelevant content. Google complied. Meta (which owns Facebook) refused, rightfully arguing that it’s a mere platform for all kinds of shit and not a publisher, subsequently blocking all Canadian news from its sites. Advertisers sided with Meta.

Postmedia last week completed the purchase of SaltWire Network, an insolvent chain of newspapers in Atlantic Canada. Cuts to editorial staff were instantaneous. Why shouldn’t a failing company buy a bankrupt one? Makes sense. Postmedia is now the proprietor of unread newspapers from coast to coast. And now let’s cut to the chase or a journalism crime – a very wordy lead: An incompetent and failing newspaper corporation beholden to American financiers and propped up in part by Canadian government regulations extorting cash from American tech companies has reinvented itself as a near monopoly and a paragon of local journalism. Something’s got to give.

There’s got to be a better way. Postmedia must die and not just palliatively, its death must be hastened. Rip out Ottawa’s IV tube and snuff it with its own pillow. Something else will take its place. I cannot imagine what that, or they, may be, but people whose mission it is to competently inform other people who demand to be properly informed will find a way and make it pay. Advertisers will follow. Content is a draw, a lure, a reason to read. The death of Postmedia doesn’t mean the death of journalism.                 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is a little dusty, but up to date. 

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Field Notes from a Strange Land, Strong and Free

Summer’s here, all is quiet on the western front. The political scene in Alberta is relatively dormant, the legislature is on recess until the fall session. Irregardlessly, a couple of items in last week’s news caught my eye.

The CBC reported that the Banshee of Invermectin, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, has been holding closed-door town hall meetings around the province with the United Conservative Party membership, the good folk who have paid their dues. She’s aware a leadership review is scheduled for November and she’s very aware of the fate inflicted upon her predecessor, Jason Kenney, by the UCP’s lunatic fringe which she has placated and pandered to.

I was amused to death to learn the premier, architect of an ersatz Alberta sovereignty act, deflected a question about chemtrails in Calgary. What did her government intend to do about them? Contrails occur when condensation generated by jet engines meets awfully frigid air at 30,000 feet. Chemtrails are a little more sinister. They are evidence of an ultra-secret federal government plot to sterilize the populace by spraying a sort of, I don’t know, libido retardant. Obviously, Air Canada, WestJet and Porter are onboard with the program. Why Ottawa would sterilize a populace skewing older is something of a mystery to me. On the other hand, if you’re anti-immigrant, wouldn’t it be a good thing if all the shifty foreigners in this country were unable to reproduce?

(This just in: I’ve since been informed chemtrails are an element of a grand international cabal’s mind control scheme and they’re working beyond a doubt because people like me think that’s ludicrous. It’s common knowledge the cabal is comprised of German and Jewish bankers, Bill Gates and Ernst Stavro Blofeld but not Elon Musk.)

The premier replied that aviation was a federal jurisdiction. Apparently in this particular instance, fucking Trudeau wasn’t overstepping his bounds. The premier then allowed that her pertinent minister would follow up with their federal counterpart regarding the matter.

On Saturday the Calgary Herald’s Don Braid, seemingly the last Postmedia political pundit left standing in these parts, related a chat with UCP MLA (Calgary-Lougheed) Eric Bouchard who said he was working closely with Premier Smith’s minister of health to ban covid-19 vaccinations in Alberta. Said minister has, sensibly (somewhat UCP unusually), maintained her distance. Libertarians are a curious bunch. They resent government but they like to be part of it. And individual freedom of course, so loved, so valued, is best exercised when there are no choices available to muddle your thinking.

This is hazy, summer under the radar, crazy stuff. But the calendar turns. These people will soon get back to work writing and enacting legislation. Albertans should be aware that their premier patronized a lunatic by not simply admonishing them for being batshit crazy. There are some 42,000 people in Bouchard’s urban riding, about 29,000 of whom are eligible voters. I’ve my doubts they cast their ballots in favour of a mutating virus, a legislative super-spreader and another pandemic (all in one!). Just a hunch. Fortunately, the health care system is like a Philips TV, solid state, and there’s more beds available in the ERs and ICUs than there are at the Jasper Park Lodge. Calgary-Lougheed was former premier Kenney’s seat, founder of the insane big top UCP circus tent. In retrospect, his tragic flaw was being something of a rational man, Jesuit educated and all, only to be undone by intellects that strike moderate conservative partisans as a bit backward two and a half decades into the 21st century.

Winter’s just around the corner.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is slightly dusty, but up to date.

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Just a Shot Awry

Our world has reached the Platonic ideal of an existential state, filled with dread and threats both real and perceived. Absurdly, some of us wonder what happened and how we got here. Others, myself included, become cynical, jaded and, ultimately, numb.

Last Saturday some kid in Pennsylvania took his one shot at immortality, winging der Trumpenfuhrer in the ear as the former United States president and current Republican presidential nominee was speaking at a rally. The weapon used was an assault rifle, as easy to acquire in an open carry state as a Phillies or Pirates baseball cap. The result might’ve been very different had the shooter shelled out for a bump stock, a device which transforms an AR-15 into a machine gun.

I read the CBC New report while on a union break, five minutes for a cigarette on the front porch of the Crooked 9. I thought, “He missed.” It was an objective thought: just another gun incident south of 49. Ann, like me, is a reluctant and self-loathing news junkie. I assumed she’d seen the story. I didn’t bother mentioning it. I went downstairs and got back to whatever it was I’d been scribbling away at.

Sunday morning while we were enjoying our al fresco coffees Ann looked up from her iPhone doom scroll and exclaimed, “Somebody tried to assassinate Trump yesterday!”

Because I’m Canadian, I said, “Sorry!” I continued, “I thought you knew; it didn’t strike me as news.”

“Just another day in the USA,” Ann replied.

I said, “Yeah.”

From Kennedys to King, concertgoers, school children, religious congregations, nightclub patrons and even Batman movie fans for Christ’s sake, the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America has exacted its toll. The depressing fact about a loaded gun is that like a directional arrow it can be pointed in any direction. The national carnage is self-inflicted. Its victims, some famous and privileged but most anonymous, are all equals now – just like the US Constitution’s preamble states. This latest and particularly odious survivor of gun violence (as of last week, so, stale data) during his first presidential run speculated that maybe “Second Amendment people” would address the problem of “lying Hillary”, sort her out – but he didn’t really know.

Ann read on, read aloud. Der Trumpenfuhrer’s post-incident statement, surprisingly non-combustible, expressed incredulity that such a thing could happen in America. Ann and I looked at one another and said to each other at the same time, “Really?”

How did it come to this? How could this happen? It’s only been bubbling under and boiling over for decades. If only those on the left side of the partisan divide would dial down their inflammatory rhetoric. By the way, thoughts and prayers for the collateral damage, the dead and severely wounded, innocent bystanders, “heroes” whose names have already been forgotten.

The Secret Service’s expertise combined with an IHOP edible petroleum product dollop of luck outside its secure perimeter averted a national catastrophe (“Tragedy” is not only an execrable Bee Gees song, it’s too strong a word) in the belly of the elephant next door to Canada. The nefarious and shadowy “deep state”, tacitly tied to the Biden crime family squatting in the White House, was foiled once more. Alternatively, der Trumpenfuhrer campaign’s brains trust could have been blinded by a light, a certain kind of light, a collective “Come to Jesus” epiphany following repeated viewings of Clint Eastwood’s Hang ‘Em High: This time the sharpshooter will miss!

This week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee resembled a deranged tour of Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. Simpering, sycophantic bandages of solidarity. The pathetic symbolism is important for a couple of reasons. Deaf in one ear obviously. What rankles is the bit of gauze, the bit of tape; the cultish gesture's props are as meaninglessly dramatic as the plastic flowers and teddy bears reverently placed at the sites of mass shootings: elementary schools, shopping malls, softball diamonds …         

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is a little dusty, but up to date.

A FAN’S NOTES

This Year’s Model

Last year the Rolling Stones released their first album of original material (a brief, sparse and astonishingly poignant epitaph/tribute excepted) in … I don’t know in how many years now – somebody else can do the math. Hackney Diamonds was a sort of K-Tel compilation pastiche: The Sounds of the 70’s! The record had no business being as good as it is. Times, tastes and sensibilities have changed, but the Stones haven’t. The business school lesson here is never intractably pivot from your core expertise, don’t dismiss what made you successful in the first place.

(Should you be prompted to delve into Hackney Diamonds, keep in mind that Mick and Keith are the same age as the President of the United States. Remember too that both their lifestyles were somewhat more excessive than Hunter Biden’s.)

This year’s Hackney Diamonds, that’s to say an improbably welcome return to form is Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. It’s a Netflix exclusive, very different from the “straight to video” kiss of death. It’s the fourth installment in the series. Who knew there’d been a third? That Netflix is reaching back to the eighties for recycled original content, standard American filmmaking operational procedure these days, is another discussion. Axel F has no business being as entertainingly diverting as it is. You can guess the plot; my sense is that everyone involved decided to have fun with the formula (the dig at Beverly Hills Cop III in one scene is subtle but priceless) as opposed to just making the best of it.

The Eddie Murphy I remember imagined James Brown in a hot tub (“Water! Huh! Hot! Huh!”), relocated Mr Rogers’s neighbourhood to the ‘hood, and mused aloud what it might be like to sodomize Mr T. 48 Hours (Nick Nolte) and Trading Places (Dan Aykroyd, Jamie Lee Curtis) were movies worth paying for. When Murphy began reprising roles made famous by the likes of Rex Harrison and Jerry Lewis I looked away.

The track record of Saturday Night Live cast members in movies is dismal. “Spotty” is perhaps more diplomatic. A sketch becomes excruciating when stretched out to feature length. I once paid a dollar to see Wayne’s World in a repertory cinema and deeply regretted the waste of money. Trademark shticks are best buried in an ensemble cast or at least offset by a co-star with a different routine and maybe even one with genuine acting chops (see above). Still, the producers and the stars keep grinding out what they believe the fans want and we usually end up with what we deserve to be served.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is a retread that doesn’t feel tired. Key members of the original cast (Bronson Pinchot!) return to share screen time with Murphy and that aspect gives the movie a refresher quality because I don’t imagine anybody alive has seen 1984’s Beverly Hills Cop recently – that’s the last time I saw it. Axel F is good enough for the cynic in me to suggest that its backers will view the film as a relaunch of a franchise now deemed worthy of being flogged to death.

I also understand that the Stones are planning another for early next year.  

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is a little dusty, but up to date.