First off, let me just say I am extremely hung over from last night. We went out last night with our friends Jeff and Amanda to see The Bad Downs and have a few too many drinks. I pulled a costume together at the last minute and went as a roadie, as you can tell by the picture above (I'm on the far left).
Unfortunately, I'm older than I used to be, and 8 beers and 2 Jaeger bombs affects this guy a lot more than it used to when I was a freshman in college. The Bad Downs were a pleasant surprise and I'll look forward to catching them the next time they are in town. I particularly enjoyed their cover of QOTSA's "If Only."
The Bad Downs @ Wiggly Field
Since I was couch-bound for most of the morning, I wasn't able to get to talk about any football or games this weekend, so consider yourself lucky to have a week off from that. What I do want to bring you today is some great music by an artist named James Eric Laczkowski.
Featured Artist: James Eric
I received an email from Veritas Lux Mea reader Annie about James Eric and his cover of Justin Timberlake's "Sexyback." After checking out his site, I was not only treated to an interesting cover of JT's song, but I also ran across a slew of great covers and originals from Mr. Laczkowski, who goes by James Eric on stage.
According to his website, James
"recent accomplishments include self-producing three full-length recordings (under the guise of Automatic Pilot and James Eric) as well as producing, editing, and composing the score for Meet The Monkeys a documentary directed by Collin Souter which focuses on the importance of arts education in elementary schools, and the positive effect that a non-for-profit theater company has on the Chicago community. James has also been a freelance film and music critic, and made several appearances on WGN radio as a contributor to Nick Digilio's pop culture talk show. Currently he spends the daylight hours as a digital broadcast evaluator for a media marketing corporation downtown. In the fall, he will be relaunching his Podcast, which will delve into dream analysis, existentialism, and theology. His true passion remains focused on songwriting and playing solo acoustic/electric performances in and around the Midwest."
I don't know about you, but anyone that can cover Sigur Ros gets big ups from me. Check out some of James' latest covers:
James Laczkowski - "Sexyback" (Justin Timberlake cover)
James Laczkowski - "Two Headed Boy" (Neutral Milk Hotel cover)
James Laczkowski - "Untitled No. 1" (Sigur Ros cover)
James Laczkowski - "Less Than You Think" (Wilco cover)
James Laczkowski - "Where Is My Mind?" (Pixies cover)
James Laczkowski - "Don't Cry" (Guns N' Roses cover)
James Laczkowski - "False Encyptions" (original)
James Laczkowski - "Alone is Better" (original)
More James Eric at Myspace
and very quickly, a little reading for your Sunday afternoon...
Love Me, I'm a Journalist: A profession's romance with itself
By Jack Shafer
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty
On Monday, I singled out Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz as I admonished journalists for overreacting to staff cuts at newsrooms around the country.
In his columns, Rutten warns that the threatened cuts at the Los Angeles Times will injure democracy and the "stakeholders" (as opposed to stockholders) who rely on the Times' broad coverage. Kurtz declares that news organizations' "corporate slashing" will "mean fewer bodies to pore over records at City Hall, the statehouse or federal agencies"—even though he gives no examples of a newspaper slashing its hard-news staff.
In an e-mail to me, Kurtz expands his point, writing that "some papers are overstaffed, not all belt-tightening is bad and newspapers need to adapt to the digital age. So I don't think I was playing 'hands off the newsroom or we'll shoot this investigative reporter'—just noting that some of these incredibly shrinking papers are likely to find investigative work an unaffordable luxury."
Rutten writes, too. He concurs that a high head count doesn't necessarily guarantee journalistic excellence, "but I'm just as sure that there is a number below which excellence becomes impossible. Is that number in the Times' case 939 or 800? I don't know, and neither does anybody else. I do know, though, that at some point, you have too few good and experienced people to do the job and I, for one, don't want to flirt with that edge."
However appalling newsroom downsizing may be for journalists, it will ultimately reveal what the people who run and own newspapers really think their publications are for. Scratch a serious reporter, and he'll offer volumes about the "public service" his newspaper performs in the form of investigations: It watchdogs government. It keeps corporations honest. It uncovers the dastardly deeds of foreign dictators and prevents genocide. It exposes quacks and charlatans. (It turns the common man into a Socrates if he reads the editorials!)
Newspaper people have enormous egos, if you get my drift, and don't mind massaging the big hairy things in public. Yet the press is hardly the sentry and bulwark of society that reporters imagine it to be. I don't mean to disparage reporters who put their lives on the line to file from Iraq, nor the sleuths who sift through databases to uncover wrongdoing by pharmaceutical companies, or any other enterprising reporter. But too many journalists who wave the investigative banner merely act as the conduit for other people's probing, as George Washington University professor and former investigative journalist Mark Feldstein suggests in a paper-in-progress titled "Ventriloquist or Dummy?"
Feldstein cites a 1992 piece by the late Christopher Georges in the Washington Monthly to illustrate his thesis. Georges reviewed about 800 articles by investigative reporters from the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times published over three years and found that "nearly 85 percent of them have been follow-ups or advances of leaked or published government reports." Georges' study is anecdotal since his piece did not name the stories analyzed or describe his methodology, but my hunch is that his conclusions aren't far from the truth...
Read the full story at Slate.