Journalism: My work has appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Globe & Mail (Canada), The Times- Picayune (New Orleans), The Oregonian, and Willamette Week, as well as in magazines including Details, Vogue, Publishers Weekly, and Portland Monthly.
Publishing: Tight Shot, my first novel, was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Its sequel, Hot Shot, was roundly ignored by everyone, but was a far better book. I'm also a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Stage: I was a member of the Groundlings and Circle Repertory West in Los Angeles, and am a playwright (see "Stage" in the right-hand rail).
From the Cincinnati Enquirer:
And you thought Cincinnati was staid:
The "World Cornhole Championship," kicked off at 10 a.m., with final matches scheduled for 4 p.m. An awards cermony is planned for 7:45 p.m....
The American Cornhole Organization, which was founded in 2005 in Milford, is billing this as the nation's first “professional” cornhole tournament.
Peter Carlson of The Washington Post has a fine exegesis of America's last great supermarket tabloid, the Weekly World News, which will cease publication at month's end.
The most creative newspaper in American history, the Weekly World News broke the story that Elvis faked his death and was living in Kalamazoo, Mich. It also broke the story that the lost continent of Atlantis was found near Buffalo. And the story that Hillary Clinton was having a love affair with P'lod, an alien with a foot-long tongue. And countless other incredible scoops.
None of these stories was, in a strictly technical sense, true, which explains why the Weekly World News never won a Pulitzer Prize. But in its glorious heyday in the late 1980s, the supermarket tabloid amazed and amused a million readers a week.But that was then. Now, with circulation plunging below 90,000, American Media, which owns WWN, has pulled the plug.
Carlson's piece confirms everything you would've thought -- under its late editor Eddie Clontz (pictured above), the WWN was the most fun newsroom in America:
Clontz's philosophy of creative credulity led to wonderful stories that excessive fact-checking would have ruined. For instance, WWN ran more Elvis and Bigfoot sightings than the more finicky newspapers did.
"If a guy calls and says Bigfoot ran away with his wife," Ivone says, "we wrote it as straight as an AP story."
My favorite part of the paper was its columnists: "Dear Dotti," "Serena Sabak, America's Sexiest Psychic," and, of course, the wonderful Ed Anger, whose "My America" columns were finally collected in a fine volume titled Let's Pave the Stupid Rainforests and Give Schoolteachers Stun Guns: And Other Ways to Save America. Ed had a wife, Thelma Jean, who hadn't joined the feminist movement because she didn't know it existed (Ed cut out all references to it from magazines and supervised Thelma Jean's TV time), and a son named Bubba who (if I remember correctly) was given quality unsupervised time with loaded guns from a very young age.
Anger was the pseudonym of Rafe Klinger, a former staffer who sued the WWN to keep them from using his character. He lost in federal court in 1994 and the column continued. But what finally did in Ed and the rest of the crew was new ownership:
The guy who took over bears the delightfully Dickensian name of David Pecker. In 1999, Pecker bought American Media, which owned the National Enquirer, the Star and the Weekly World News. Changes were made and soon a lot of WWN's old-timers were gone -- Eddie Clontz, Ivone, Berger, Lind, Kulpa -- replaced by young comedy writers....
The old-timers say Pecker ruined the Weekly World News. What does Pecker say?
Nothing. He's not talking. Neither is anybody else at WWN. On July 24, the company issued a brief statement announcing that WWN was folding "due to the challenges in the retail and wholesale magazine marketplace."
All that's left is memories and the few clips I was smart enough to save in a battered manila file, including my all-time favorite: a photo of a toddler with shoe-polish eyebrows, holding a cigarette, under the headline "2-YEAR-OLD IS REINCARNATION OF BETTE DAVIS."
Tim Hanrahan of the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire noted yesterday's covers of the New York Post and the New York Daily News, Gotham's perpetually feuding tabs:
As you can see, the Post went with "Bill and Hill," while the News preferred "Hill and Bill."
And in the News, "Mike's" move was "big," while in the Post it was just a plain old ordinary move.
Front-paged this morning at The Oregonian:
The poor dogs...
Last week, I was having dinner with a group that included a few journalists when the topic turned to "featurizing" hard news -- the increasingly common practice of burying the lede under "human interest" details in hopes of grabbing the reader's eye. At best, it ends up being cutesy; at worst, it's head-shakingly insensitive and clueless.
That was last week...and this was today in The Oregonian:
Fabulous.
From WSOC-TV (courtesy of Hoffmania!):
Patty Friedmann: A Little Bit Ruined
One of the first post-Katrina novels, and probably destined to be one of the best. Friedmann's sequel to Eleanor Rushing finds her crazy heroine still holding everything together after the storm (after a fashion), until she has to leave New Orleans and she falls apart physically as well as mentally. Mordantly, morbidly funny.
Tom Piazza: Why New Orleans Matters
The best post-Katrina book I've read. In 150 small pages, Piazza explicates the New Orleans experience simply and beautifully. I'll be passing this one on to anyone who wonders "But why would anyone want to live there?".
