Only In My Dreams

The Democratic primaries have been interesting, and I've certainly been paying attention. However, unlike a seemingly disproportionate number of people, the candidates have not yet entered my dreams. Yes, many of us have been dreaming of Hillary or Barak, and if you're interested in seeing how the candidates interact with the subconscious, check out this site, where such dreams can be sent in and posted. Once on the site, use the links on the left to navigate from Hillary dreams to Barak dreams. In the spirit of fairness, a link for McCain has been added, but as of yesterday poor John had only entered the dream life of two people.

I'm not sure that any meaningful information can be gleaned from the site. Obama holds about the same lead in percentage of dreams as he does in delegates, while dreams about Clinton are on the whole more emotional and centered on feelings. Clinton dreams are also on the whole more sexualized. Obama more often comes across as cool. Mainly, it's an interesting read, and inadvertently quite funny.

Here's one about Obama:

I became best friends with Barack Obama. We had a sleepover at his house and played board games all night, like it was middle school again. In the morning, he went to the kitchen to cook up some pancakes. While he was out of the room, I took the opportunity to call my friend on the phone, all excited, saying, You have to come over! I'm at Barack's house and we have pancakes!

She replied, Yeah, whatever, me and Barack are BFF. We’re going to hang out later this afternoon.

Many of the Clinton dreams involve her clothes. Generally, she's wearing pants suits, and some sort of wardrobe malfunction is immanent. Here's a malfunction of a different kind:

I was reading a magazine article about Hillary. Then I got to the part that read: Also, she can be cruel. She enjoys wearing $1 billion dresses, one of which is made from the fleece of an endangered penguin.

There was a picture of Hillary in the penguin dress; it looked like a zip-up penguin costume made of polar fleece, and would probably keep you warm.

Sometimes the dreams verge on nightmares:

Keanu Reeves was voted in as the next President of the United States. He was giving his acceptance speech, dressed in jeans and a hoodie. He looked good, but we were all shocked. How did he win? Did we even know he was running? I set about urgently painting him a sign, twelve metres long, with a too-dry paint brush, reminding him of all the things he had to remember: Prioritize education. Provide medicare. Cap corporate profits. The environment! There were two brief interruptions as we fielded interviewed reactions from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. They were both equally stumped. They didn't know he was running, but were gracious losers.

I'll leave you with my favorite dream. It has it all: finding oneself in an inappropriate situation, fear of discovery, food as a stand-in for sex. Happy REM cycles to everyone:

I was at some kind of county fair and Hillary walked up to me and said Hi Dan! (I didn’t know how she knew my name.) I’m Hillary Clinton. Are you going to vote for me?

I told her that I hadn’t decided yet, but wanted to know more about what she stood for. She told me that she had to go to the restroom, but that if I went with her into the bathroom she would talk to me while she took care of business. I followed her into the restroom and she went into one of the stalls. She started talking about her platform but I wasn’t paying attention because I was trying to get the bathroom door locked. I didn’t want to get caught in a women’s restroom with Hillary Clinton.

She came walking out of the stall with a Dole pineapple whip (like they sell at Disneyland). She said, Look what I found in the stall. This is delicious!

I told her that she shouldn’t be eating that because who knows where it came from and who knows how long it had been in there, but she wouldn't listen. I said I had to go, but I would definitely be voting for her. I was lying so I could get away. She thanked me and asked if I knew where to get some ribs.

Picked It Up on the Wire

There are a myriad of reasons why The Wire is my favorite TV show of all time, but up there on the list is the fact that I've learned lessons invaluable to a white girl from Pennsylvania. It occurred to me yesterday that Eliot Spitzer probably could have avoided his whole mess had he just been a fan of the show, because every Wire fan knows the following:

Avoid a wiretap - use a burner.

Actually, in order to really protect yourself, use a new burner for each call.

"Client 9" is not a complex enough code.

If you want to move large sums of money around, start with cash. Take the cash to your lawyer, who will find a corrupt non-profit to send the money offshore for you. This will cost you 20 on the dollar, but you'll end up with a clean cashier's check.

Don't use a prostitution service that has a website.

Reform is impossible from inside the system. In other words, you can't fight prostitution and organized crime by being a john any more than you can fight the corruption of Wall Street by purchasing stocks.

You'll wear the crown for a while, then you'll fall. There's always someone waiting to replace you.

Most importantly: The game is rigged. When it's your time, the forces that control the institution in which you operate will do you. That's just how it be.

Terminal Blues

Whenever my mother would return from a trip I'd ask her how it was. Wherever in the world she'd traveled, whether Argentina or Tallin, she'd proceed to describe in detail every meal consumed on said trip. For her, travel was meals she didn't have to cook. For me, travel is airports and my hatred of them. I don't mind flying at all, but hate the airports, especially since 9/11, and especially since airlines have decided to put as few planes in the air as possible in order to stave off bankruptcy.

There was a time when I loved airports. I also loved train and bus stations, so some of this was probably just my constant desire to be wherever I'm currently not, but some of it was also a reaction to what I thought was the happiness and excitement of the travelers rushing about. I now understand that some of those people in airports aren't excited but are simply petrified of flying. Still, there was a time when hanging out in a terminal for several hours made me incredibly happy.

I do think airport bars had something to do with this. Back in the day, I would be traveling for pleasure, and welcomed a layover when I could hang out drinking and smoking in a terminal bar. I'm old enough to even remember smoking on planes, but that's another story. Airport bars are now just little corners of restaurants where desperate travelers can down a quick beer, but I remember actual bars with views of the tarmac and of the runways, and sitting there smelling the jet fumes and watching the take-offs and landings. I fondly recall the time when terminals were more than one McDonald's and Hudson News and Brookstone after another.

I also fondly recall a time when one could book a flight, check to see if it was on schedule, and arrive at the airport with the reasonable expectation that one would have a seat on that plane and would take off on time. Maybe it's just bad karma, but I haven't taken a trip in the past two years that hasn't involved rerouting, delays, and in one instance a pathetic night spent in a hotel attached to a mall in Lynchburg, Virginia. Airports are now the site of failures of reason and expectation, to be approached with trepidation and the knowledge that, somewhere between security and the gate, black holes can appear out of nowhere.

It's not the journey but the destination, right? I mean, that's the attitude that can get you though time spent in the 21st-century airport, and one that I adopt each time I fly. I wish that instead of turning the clocks ahead Saturday we could have turned them back to 1965 so that I could have flown home yesterday on Braniff Airlines, enjoying cocktails served by a stewardess wearing Pucci. Meantime, I had a great trip. The food was delicious!

What Not to Wear

Liz Smith, Leslie Stahl, Mary Wells, and some friends including Lily Tomlin and Candace Bergen are starting a website for women over 40, wowowow.com. It launches Saturday. Apparently it will feature items they believe will be of interest to their demographic such as horoscopes, posts about love and marriage, health and fashion, political commentary. Oh, and conversations among the site's famous principles on such burning topics as their personal memories of Halston.

I'm over 40, but I'm clearly not in whatever their demographic might be. Wowowow will be competing with other popular sites for women heading towards menopause such as iVillage and More. I decided to visit these sites to see what women my age are thinking about. Turns out they're thinking about horoscopes, love and marriage, and how not to dress "old." Both sites look and read like a cross between Cosmo and Better Homes and Gardens. Neither site contains anything that I find to be remotely of interest.

I know myself well enough to know that I'm not a typical woman in her 40s. I'm not married, I don't have kids, home and gardening tips put me to sleep. I'm never on a diet. I don't care what my horoscope says, or about what's new in handbags for spring. I don't expect these kinds of sites to carry the sort of content found on Slate, for example. What I find disturbing is the fact that demographic research has evidently led to the determination that this sort of fluff is what women my age and older crave. This isn't just true on the web; spend a few minutes watching Lifetime, or Oxygen, or even the Hallmark Channel, and you'll see that women in their 40s are believed to care above all about their skin, shop at Chico's, and diet relentlessly. At least that's according to the advertisers. According to the programmers, women over 40 are either in constant peril due to evil men or are about to lose their daughters to evil men. And they're all played by Tracy Gold.

The women behind Wowowow are extremely successful businesspeople who shattered gender barriers in their respective fields. I was just hoping for more from this particular brain trust than horoscopes and gossip.

With that rant, I leave you for a few days. I'll be in LA, the land of women who never turn 40. Have a good weekend, and I'll be back Tuesday morning, undoubtedly with plenty to say.

Stormy Weather

I went to bed last night without checking in on the Texas and Ohio primary results, mainly because I just wasn't in the mood for Anderson Cooper. When tremendous thunderstorms awakened me around 4 this morning, for some reason I thought, "Hillary won. The primary is on." Although I wasn't glad to be up at 4 AM, I was happy to think that this primary will continue.

Presidential primaries have been decided earlier and earlier. Remember 1968, when Bobby Kennedy triumphed in California in June? I don't either, but the point is that would never happen now. I've always lived in states with primaries so late in the schedule that the race was decided, and it was looking as if that would be the case once again this year, with Pennsylvania not voting until April 22. I wanted Clinton to prevail simply because I wanted the race to last long enough for me to have a say.

It strikes me that a short primary season favors the wealthy candidates, and that also bothers me. A short primary season means that no one can come out of left field, build momentum, build a coalition, fundraise his or her way through it. A short season would seem to me to favor the front-runner, and in January the front-runner is the one with the bucks and therefore the profile. I liked that Huckabee refused to drop out just because he was losing. Why should he? Do we encourage sports teams to quit games at halftime if they're behind? Isn't democracy about having choices?

I honestly haven't been taken with any candidate of either party this year, and until yesterday I've watched the results at a remove. But I did care greatly about yesterday's results. I very much wanted Clinton to pull this off simply because I didn't want the whole thing to be decided on March 4. I don't know whether I'll vote for her or Obama in April, and I wanted the chance to weigh the options and make a decision. Thank you, Ohio and Texas voters, for giving me that chance, for allowing me to meaningfully participate in the presidential primary.

On the downside, I'm assuming the barrage of annoying ads will begin anon.

Memoir in Six Words

Can you describe your life in six words? The editors of Smith magazine asked readers to do just that, and a compilation of the best submissions has been published as a book, Not Quite What I Was Planning. Now everyone' s doing it, and you can too. Here are some examples:

Failure was apparently an option here.

Crawl, step, run, step, crawl, lay.

Making shit up as I go.

California, Pennsylvania, Jersey, Manhattan, Vancouver, Seattle.

Fat man in a sweater vest.

Here are a couple that I wrote:

I meant it at the time.

Play, Stop. No FF, no rewind.

Moved one place, then to another.

Too many books. Too little time.

Dog. Dog. Cat. Cat. Dog. Dog.

So, join in - see if you can write your autobiography in only six words.

Acts of Daily Journalism

If, like me, you're a big fan of David Simon and every word he's ever written (which means you're a big fan of The Wire, The Corner - book and series, and Homicide - book and series) then you'll want to pick up the March issue of Esquire, which features Simon's essay about his years at the Baltimore Sun and the decline of the daily newspaper. You can follow the link to Esquire's website to read part of the essay, but you'll have to buy the print version to read it all, which is a business model to keep in mind when thinking about the decline of the newspaper.

I spent my first two years of college thinking that I would graduate, go to j-school, and become a reporter. Simon is just five years older than I am, and he entered the profession at this same time, the early 80s, when newspapers were still wearing their post-Watergate glow. The daily paper wasn't only a source of news, but a source of reform and change. That statement isn't just a reflection of the idealism of the young; 25 years ago, newspapers were still flush with advertising revenue and could afford the kind of staff needed for investigative reporting. 25 years ago 24-hour news channels and the internet were just a dream.

To say that the newspaper has fallen victim to increased competition is to only tell part of the story. Simon concentrates on consolidation and how the cutbacks in staff enacted by conglomerates have made reporting of the real stories important to a city impossible, and I can see that this is true. The consolidation happened because newspapers were losing money, though, and they were losing money primarily because of the decline of the department store. Department store circulars, as well as department store multi-page spreads, are the lifeblood of the daily paper. As regional department stores failed or were consolidated, so went the regional and smaller-market dailies.

Newspapers also didn't adapt well to the internet. Most of them were late in developing web content and are now trying to survive with a business model where they charge for what they should be giving away (the print version) and not selling ads where they should be (for the web version). My hometown daily is incredibly cheap, only 50 cents, but I almost always just read it online, for free, without an ad in sight. No wonder that paper was eaten up by a larger chain; consolidation is the only way the paper can survive economically.

Of course, the decline of the daily can be seen as a tragedy, or as an opportunity. For Simon, who loved his work at the Sun, the daily's loss of significance is a personal loss. However, the inability of short-staffed dailies to report on the specifics of the lives of a city's residents simply makes room for alternative media to take up the slack. The monopoly of the daily has been broken, and there's more room for the free weekly or monthly, and for the blogger, to join in the conversation.

I hope the newspaper as we know it will continue. I hope to always have the opportunity to get ink on my fingers while I drink my morning coffee. But I also hope that the shrinking of the daily leads to the proliferation of other media, other voices.