In Memoriam
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07.03.07
I’m saddened to learn that Jim Capozzola, of the Rittenhouse Review, died last evening.
Susie Madrak of Suburban Guerrilla, who calls Jim her “fairy blogfather,” knew Jim better than I did, and has posted a wonderful remembrance of him which includes links to many posts commemorating Jim’s life. And my pal Richard Cranium, of The All Spin Zone, has done a wonderful job of describing the man I knew:
Deadpan is one word I could use. Intelligent to a fault. Angst ridden. Passionate. Searching. Always reading something. Jimmy was a guy who had been through the worst that life could throw at him, but still maintained a finely-honed sense of humor.
Jim was, as Susie notes, a founding member of the liberal blogosphere, and a central figure in the Philadelphia scene. I always enjoyed seeing him at Philadelphia’s Drinking Liberally. He was, in fact, one of the first people I met there in late 2004, and I’ll always remember the generous words of advice that he gave me.
In addition to running the Rittenhouse Review, Jim started TRR: The Lighter Side of the Rittenhouse, which did for Philadelphia what The New York Times’ Metropolitan Diary did for New York.
Jim is survived by his family, by Mildred (the bulldog that he loved), and by a multitude of fellow bloggers and readers who mourn the loss of his distinctively pithy and sardonic voice. May he rest in peace.
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06.03.07
Steve Gilliard of The News Blog has passed away.
I never met Steve, but I did have some run-ins with him over the years, most notably over the Downing Street Memo. I was pushing for blogstorms; Steve thought the whole thing was a waste of time.
In response to the people who disagreed with him about the DSM and a few other issues, Steve wrote an important post titled “Why We Fight.” In it, he exemplified the pugnacious, take-no-prisoners approach to political blogging that made him such a star:
What people have to understand is that we’re going to have a lot of fights, internally, externally and we need to make sure that it’s the other side which doesn’t want to take us on. We have to make sure that when they want to lie on us or attack us unfairly that the world comes down on them.. We have to be a very different kind of liberal/progressive/democrat/leftist, which is to say, we have to be the kind not only willing to stand up for ourselves, but the kind who takes the fight to the opposition effectively.
When I dismissed the Downing Street Memos out of hand, some people were pissed. Well, they missed the point. Congress doesn’t care. They need Bush or think they do, and short of being caught with his dick in Jim Guckert’s mouth, impeachment ain’t gonna happen. People need to take this fight local. To start bringing the war home to the chickenhawk Congressmen and Senators who voted for this war then didn’t support the troops. It means standing outside their local offices questioning their votes. You have to go to them at home, you have to make them squirm. Not talk about memos, but people, their constituents. You have to move from the Beltway to the home district. You have to endanger their seats, not speak nicely to them about something they don’t take seriously.
It’s not about being right, being right is easy. John Kerry was right. It’s about being effective. It’s about getting out your message and stomping the shit out of people who fuck with you. If Carol Darr wants to fuck with Kos, then her mailbox should be flooded. If they want to run their mouths about Dean, not only do they get the same treatment, they find out he’s raising money hand over fist from regular folks.
If some weenie wants to start shit with you, he can be humiliated on two of the most read blogs on the Internet.
This isn’t about agreement. This is about power and using it. We have to basically make people pay a price for starting in with us. Because we know their motives are not about policy. They want us to go away. So we have to show them two things, we’re here to stay and we can hurt them if we have to. And people get squeamish when power is used. Anyone think Kos is making an idle threat? No? Then shit, let’s back his ass up. We agree with him, so let’s act like it for God’s sake. Let’s not play the Judean People’s Front/People’s Front of Judea game,. where we argue over minor differences.
[. . .]
Politics is a hard business and you have to impress upon some people that you can fuck up their plans before they respect you, especially when you can execute your own.
posted by Steve @ 8:10:00 PM
[emphasis added]
Steve understood, before most of us, that Karl Rove and the Bush Administration had changed the playing field. All the heartfelt pieties and rational arguments in the world were moot; we had to learn how to fight, and Steve was the one who taught us how to do it.
Again and again, I’d watch Steve argue with his readers in his comment section. He’d debate them for a while before finally telling them to go start their own damn blogs.
I bet he launched a hundred bloggers that way.
If you want to remember Steve and honor his legacy, get the hell off of my damn blog and go start your own. Then go fuck up the other side’s plans, even if you piss off a few people along the way.
Whatever you do, don’t stop fighting. Steve never did.
May he rest in peace.
Update: Here is a wonderful tribute to Steve from Sara at Orcinus.
Update 2: Via Jon Swift, here is a round-up of posts about Steve: Tom Watson, American Street, Firedoglake, Mad Kane’s Political Madness (featuring a short interview with Steve), Sisyphus Shrugged, AlterNet.org, Daily Kos, skippy the bush kangaroo, State of the Day, The Carpetbagger Report, TalkLeft, August J. Pollak, Jesus’ General, All Spin Zone, the talking dog, The Impolitic, Happy Furry Puppy Story, The Democratic Daily, culturekitchen, Comments From Left Field, Brilliant at Breakfast, Digby, Orcinus, Avedon Carol’s The Sideshow, Meteor Blades, Making Light, Shakesville, Blog PI, Welcome to Pottersville, Galloping Beaver, Rude Pundit, The Agonist, Tbogg, Crooks & Liars, At Largely, Tattered Coat, James Wolcott, Pam’s House Blend, Rising Hegemon, Off the Kuff
Update 3: The News Blog now has a PayPal link up to collect donations to defray expenses for Steve’s funeral.
Update 4: (6/7/07) I knew — or, rather, I hoped — this was coming: the inimitable Driftglass, whose blog took flight under SG’s wing, lays down the best tribute to SG that I’ve seen so far.
Update 5: (6/7/07) Steve’s obituary in the NY Times
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12.26.06
From Jonathan Lethem’s Rolling Stone profile of James Brown:
This we know: the James Brown Show begins without James Brown. James Brown, a man who is also an idea, a problem, a method, etc., will have to be invoked, summoned from some other place. The rendezvous between James Brown and his audience — you — is not a simple thing. When the opening acts are done and the waiting is over, you will first be in the hands of James Brown’s band. It is the band that begins the Show. The band is there to help, to negotiate a space for you to encounter James Brown; it is there, if you will, to take you to the bridge. The band is itself the medium within which James Brown will be summoned, the terms under which he might be enticed into view.
The James Brown Band takes the form, onstage, of an animated frieze or hieroglyphic, timeless in a very slightly seedy, showbiz way but happily so, rows of men in red tuxedos, jitterbugging in lock step even as they miraculously conjure from instruments a perfect hurricane of music: a rumbling, undulating-insinuating (underneath), shimmery-peppery (up on top) braided waveform of groove. The players seem jolly and amazed witnesses to their own virtuosity. They resemble humble, gracious ushers or porters, welcoming you to the enthrallingly physical, jubilant, encompassing groove that pours out of their instruments. It’s as if they were merely widening for you a portal offering entry into some new world, a world as much visual and emotional as aural — for, in truth, a first encounter with the James Brown Show can feel like a bodily passage, a deal your mind wasn’t sure it was ready for your body to strike with these men and their instruments and the ludicrous, almost cruelly anticipatory drama of their attempt to beckon the star of the show into view. Yes, it’s made unmistakable, in case you forgot, that this is merely a prelude, a throat-clearing, though the band has already rollicked through three or four recognizable numbers in succession; we’re waiting for something. The name of the something is James Brown. You indeed fear, despite all sense, that something is somehow wrong: Perhaps he’s sick or reluctant, or perhaps there’s been a mistake. There is no James Brown, it was merely a rumor. Thankfully, someone has told you what to do — you chant, gladly: “James Brown! James Brown!” A natty little man with a pompadour comes onstage and with a booming, familiar voice asks you if you Are Ready for Star Time, and you find yourself confessing that you Are.
To be in the audience when James Brown commences the James Brown Show is to have felt oneself engulfed in a kind of feast of adoration and astonishment, a ritual invocation, one comparable, I’d imagine, to certain ceremonies known to the Mayan peoples, wherein a human person is radiantly costumed and then beheld in lieu of the appearance of a Sun God upon the Earth. For to see James Brown dance and sing, to see him lead his mighty band with the merest glances and tiny flickers of signal from his hands; to see him offer himself to his audience to be adored and enraptured and ravished; to watch him tremble and suffer as he tears his screams and moans of lust, glory and regret from his sweat-drenched body — and is, thereupon, in an act of seeming mercy, draped in the cape of his infirmity; to then see him recover and thrive — shrugging free of the cape — as he basks in the healing regard of an audience now melded into a single passionate body by the stroking and thrumming of his ceaseless cavalcade of impossibly danceable smash Number One hits, is not to see: It is to behold.
[full text]
Rest in peace, JB. You’ve earned it.
(via Jason Chervokas, whose Living With James Brown is well worth a read).
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12.11.06
Star C. Foster, who co-edited Phillyist and blogged at Sarcasmo’s Corner, has passed away suddenly. Star was a vibrant and provocative fixture on the Philadelphia blogging scene; she quite literally embodied her name, becoming a star who used the online medium to foster the talents of other writers. Like many of my fellow Philly bloggers, I’m shocked and saddened by her passing.
Philly Future is gathering remembrances of Star. My thoughts are with her family and her loved ones. May she rest in peace.
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10.29.06
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know much about Red Auerbach. But it seems that even more important than his legacy as a winning coach is his legacy as a progressive one. From the New York Times obituary:
Auerbach coached the Celtics to nine N.B.A. championships, eight of them consecutively from 1959 to 1966. He built another six championship teams as the Celtics’ general manager and oversaw a final one, in 1986, as the team’s president, a position he held at the time of his death.
[. . .]
Auerbach was also a pioneer in race relations. In 1950, his first season coaching the Celtics, he chose Chuck Cooper of Duquesne University as the first black player selected in an N.B.A. draft. In the 1963-64 season, the Celtics became the first N.B.A. team to start a game with an all-black lineup: Russell, K. C. Jones, Sam Jones, Tom Sanders and Willie Naulls.
When Auerbach named Russell as his coaching successor, it was the first time a black had become coach of a major American pro sports team.
More from Boston.com and The Boston Globe.
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10.25.05
AP Photo/Montgomery County (Ala.) Sheriff’s office
(Booking photo of Rosa Parks, February 22, 1956; TSG has a larger version)
From an interview with Rosa Parks:
I was arrested on December 1st, 1955 for refusing to stand up on the order of the bus driver, after the white seats had been occupied in the front. And of course, I was not in the front of the bus as many people have written and spoken that I was — that I got on the bus and took the front seat, but I did not. I took a seat that was just back of where the white people were sitting, in fact, the last seat. A man was next to the window, and I took an aisle seat and there were two women across. We went on undisturbed until about the second or third stop when some white people boarded the bus and left one man standing. And when the driver noticed him standing, he told us to stand up and let him have those seats. He referred to them as front seats. And when the other three people — after some hesitancy — stood up, he wanted to know if I was going to stand up, and I was not. And he told me he would have me arrested. And I told him he may do that. And of course, he did.
From the New York Times obituary:
Her act of civil disobedience, what seems a simple gesture of defiance so many years later, was in fact a dangerous, even reckless move in 1950’s Alabama. In refusing to move, she risked legal sanction and perhaps even physical harm, but she also set into motion something far beyond the control of the city authorities. Mrs. Parks clarified for people far beyond Montgomery the cruelty and humiliation inherent in the laws and customs of segregation.
I was going to write a bland platitude such as “Rosa Parks has passed away, but her legacy will live on.”
But the truth is that her legacy will not live on by itself. The battle for civil rights, for racial equality, is an ongoing struggle, an ever-present fight. Only by engaging the problems in America’s past, and understanding the ways in which they continue to plague its present, can we hope to brighten America’s future.
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08.08.05
From The New York Times obituary:
In “The Century” (Doubleday, 1998), one of two history books that he co-wrote with Todd Brewster, Mr. Jennings recalled an early exercise that his father put him through to sharpen his powers of observation. “Describe the sky,” his father had said. After the young boy had done so, his father dispatched him outside again. “Now, go out and slice it into pieces and describe each piece as different from the next.”
Many commentators have noted that in an age when cable television and the internet have fractured the audience of the major networks, the Jennings/Rather/Brokaw generation of news anchors will likely be the last to have achieved anything like a collective American viewership.
Though we can find fault with the coverage that all three of these men provided over the years, what sets them apart from their successors is that they came of age during an era when reporting the news was conceived as a responsibility to the American public, rather than as a duty to promote the interests of advertisers and politicians:
Read the rest of this entry »
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01.27.05
Those, apparently, were Johnny Carson’s last words to his brother before he died…
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