Partying with Eugene Hutz of gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello

Eugene Hutz, the frontman and ringmaster of the gypsy-punk-cabaret band Gogol Bordello, is dancing inside the cramped DJ booth at Mehanata, a Lower East Side ethno-mesh club—Hutz’s favorite hangout in New York City. On this hot night, he is wearing tight, black pants and sweating profusely. His hair hangs like long, wet straw, but his vaudevillian walrus mustache manages to stay pretty dry.

Hutz is a multitasker. As he is deejaying, he is also dancing with a beautiful, Arabic-looking twentysomething, while D (his girlfriend) is making out with some hot Asian chick—all in the DJ booth, which can barely fit the five people dancing here right now. I’m guzzling a cold beer and dancing with someone I’ll call Zoya. It’s humid, loud, and dizzyingly wild. And I quickly realize that the hot Asian chick whom D is making out with is one of Zoya’s best friends. The crazy train is speeding…

Suddenly the music stops.

Silence.

Looks like D and her makeout partner have unintentionally hit some controls while their tongues were happily slapping. After about five seconds, which feel like five long minutes, Hutz hits a couple of buttons and the party’s back in full gypsy swing. It’s almost not a Mehanata party with DJ Hutz at the controls if the music doesn’t stop at least a few times a night—and always for some deliciously carnal reason.

Next thing I know, the Arabic-princess chick Hutz was getting freaky with is gone. But Hutz is at the controls, playing his signature Eastern European dance-rock-party tunes. Everybody’s dancing, jumping and gyrating in every conceivable way. Energy is brewing…  And then, all of the sudden, Hutz is gone—nowhere to be found. Zoya’s hot Asian friend and D have also vanished.

It’s about 1:45 in the morning. The crowd is well into the music but some notice the DJ is missing. Hutz has a tendency to vanish briefly, but of course he’ll be back—that’s the hope, anyway.  But then the music stops. Again. Shit!

Silence.

Lips press against cold beer bottles and some people let out an I’m-so-hot-and-sweaty sigh. With a mix of euphoria and panic, I take my hands off Zoya’s ass and look at the unmanned DJ controls. I yell out to my friend Alek to “fucking do something” about the music. Alek hits a button and we’re back in business.

Party! Party! Party!

Maybe there’s a fantastic sexual explanation for Hutz’s absence, and maybe there isn’t. I don’t know. But what I do know is that disappearing without a trace for a long time while he’s supposed to be deejaying is weird, even for a drunk-off-his-ass party monster like Hutz. Andy, a regular DJ at the club, doesn’t want to take over for Hutz out of respect, but I make my case: “Yo man, Hutz is gone and we need a fucking DJ right now!” Andy quickly gets to spinning.

Although Hutz is missing, anyone who knows anything knows Hutz will be back. But when? When?

2

Earlier that day, Gogol Bordello gave a concert at Brooklyn’s McCarren Pool, a venue that was once an outdoor public pool with a capacity for over 6,000 swimmers. The most plentiful liquid in the “pool” that day was canned beer, and it flowed freely. With a beer in hand, I looked on toward the stage.

Hutz ran around, singing in his Ukrainian accent, strumming his guitar, and wearing only Capri-length blue pants, pointy black leather shoes and a slingshot around his neck. Behind him and the band was an insanely huge black flag—“Gogol Bordello: Gypsy Punks”—which prominently featured the band’s symbol (a slingshot) and the title of one of their best songs: “Think Locally, Fuck Globally.”

Gogol Bordello is some sort of three-headed cat—something that shouldn’t exist. At least that’s what the band’s violin player, Sergey Ryabtsev, tells me. Yet the band not only exists but keeps growing in popularity, which is mostly due to Gogol Bordello’s insane continent-hopping tour schedule.

“The bands that keep getting bigger are the bands that are on the road,” Hutz told me in an interview before the show. “And it all goes back to troubadouring. The fine, old-fashioned tradition of bringing your music physically to people… I talk after the show with people who are wishing me the best most ultimate best, just the way I wish it to them with my music.”

But troubadoring is not the only reason for the band’s explosion. In 2005, Hutz starred alongside Elijah Woods in the film “Everything Is Illuminated”—his first real acting role. The film is based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s book of the same name, which Hutz was actually reading before he ever knew he would play Alex, the story’s “humble” narrator.

“The audience for that movie is only growing every day,” Hutz said. “There are a million of people who fucking discovered Gogol Bordello because of that movie. And there are a million people who discovered that movie because of Gogol Bordello.” His second movie role was in “Filth and Wisdom,” a film directed by Madonna, which led to another huge break: To everyone’s surprise, Hutz and some of his band-mates played onstage alongside Madonna at the 2007 Live Earth festival in London. About a billion people saw that broadcast.

After concluding the Brooklyn concert with a long, energetic five-song medley, Hutz announced to a crowd of thousands that the after-party would be at Mehanata—a.k.a.  Bulgarian Bar. Mehanata is a two-story club that can fit a few hundred people at most. When Hutz pulls this shit, the club always gets super packed, but there’s never really a line, which is a musical miracle of sorts.

Most of the people who go to these after-parties are regulars (like me), but there are also a few wide-eyed hipsters, nostalgic Russians and extreme Gogol Bordello fans trying to catch a glimpse of The Man in the flesh. Whatever their reason for going, when they get there, they quickly learn that this place has some of the craziest fucking parties in New York City.

Hutz waxed lyrical about Bulgarian Bar when I talked to him before the concert: “It’s a place where you go and we know our friends gonna be there,” he said, with his conspicuous Ukrainian accent. “And that’s the hardcore family that you wanna see after the show. We have complete control of the place. We can play acoustic, we can DJ, we can do whatever we want.”

The Bulgarian Bar is a curious place. For one, it has no sign outdoors to indicate what or who is inside. In fact, the only sign that you can’t miss is at the basement-level bar: “GET NAKED, FREE SHOT. GET FUCKED, FREE BOTTLE.”

Hutz has a long history with the club: He used to deejay there before it moved, two years ago, to the Lower East Side from its original location, on Broadway and Canal Street. One night, Hutz played there and really impressed the owner, Alex Dimitrov. So Dimitrov asked Hutz to DJ there regularly, and he did, every Saturday night.

But being a tall, lanky drunk-ass party monster that he is, Hutz often broke musical equipment, club furniture and glasses. On at least one occasion, Dimitrov punched Hutz in the face and told him to take his shit and leave. Eventually Dimitrov allowed Hutz to come back and deejay, but only on Thursdays, which soon became the day to party at the old Bulgarian Bar. Hutz and Dimitrov had a love-hate, stop-smashing-up-my-bar relationship that has eased over the years, mostly due to Gogol Bordello’s mad touring schedule.

3

So back to the Bulgarian Bar party. Hutz, who’s supposed to be deejaying, has been missing for at least twenty minutes. But soon enough I see the first sign that things are about to change. The girl whom you know as “Zoya’s hot Asian friend” is back. She steps into the crowd to interrupt my dancing with Zoya and looks like she has something to say. I once again withdraw myself from Zoya’s ass and try to listen to her friend’s explanation. She whispers a few things into Zoya’s ear, but the music is too loud for me to hear anything.

Once again, I must plead ignorance about the possibly fantastical carnal goings-on that may or may not have taken place. (But a few days later I found out that Zoya’s friend was invited, and went, to some hotel after-after-party that consisted of Hutz and several hot and willing women.)

Looking paradoxically refreshed and drunk, Hutz strolls back inside the DJ booth and resumes his duties as if nothing happened. It’s about 2 in the morning and crazy, ethnic dance-fever is gripping the crowd. Hutz steps outside the DJ booth for a second with a cigarette in his mouth. (There’s no smoking allowed in the bar but, as we all know, rock stars make their own public-safety rules). As Hutz puffs away, he looks at home, content, as if he’s the host of the wildest house party on the block.

Debauchery usually makes me thirsty, so I go upstairs for another drink—my eleventh or twelfth. Yura, the band’s balding accordion player, is sitting at the bar. I order a beer and, without saying anything, give him a sweaty hug. The DJ on this floor is playing the Gogol Bordello song “Wanderlust King,” and just as I’m about to take my first sip, I can’t resist singing along to the Russian lyrics of the chorus: “Ya ne Yevrey, no koye shto pochozhe/ Sovrat’ ne dast, ne Yura ne Serezha.” (Literal translation: I’m not Jewish, but there is some resemblance/ Neither Sergey nor Yura will let me say otherwise.) Yura, smiling, gives me a semi-amused look. I nod approvingly, take my beer and go back downstairs.

Every Bulgarian Bar regular will tell you that when Hutz deejays, he also likes to go into the crowd, dance, jump, put his arms around people and, with a few seconds to spare, get back to the controls just in time to play the next song. He’s got this deejay-and-dance routine down by now.

Also in the crowd are a few other Gogol Bordello members, such as Oren (guitar) and Sergey (violin). Compared to Hutz’s shenanigans, their partying is relatively mild. (They hang out and drink, but they don’t go bonkers.) But, to be fair, compared to Hutz’s shenanigans pretty much everybody’s partying is relatively mild.

It’s now after 3 in the morning and Hutz makes his way up to the ground level of the club, where he starts helping himself to a bottle of red wine behind the bar. (Despite your expectations or stereotypes, I can assure you that he doesn’t drink vodka. At least, he hasn’t for years.) Dimitrov, the owner, is back there, working the bar, wearing a black “Gogol Bordello: Gypsy Punks” T-shirt, looking happy as can be.

Without warning, Hutz starts to “accompany” the DJ by playing rhythm on the dozens of wine glasses that are hanging upside-down above the bar. Hutz is slapping the hell out of those glasses! Ding, ding, DING, DING, DING! … This goes on for minutes, every second punctuated by another DING. How a single glass doesn’t break I have no idea—another musical miracle I guess.

It’s late. My brain feels like a hot, wet sponge that’s been trampled over by every runner in the New York City marathon. My lungs and throat—exhausted from talking, drinking, interviewing, drinking, smoking, drinking, yelling and drinking—are ready to retire for the night. And that son-of-a-bitch Hutz is looking as bright-eyed as ever! How the fuck does he do it?

When he finally gets out from behind the bar, I put my arm around him, still shirtless and sweaty, and say, in Russian, “Genya, I’ll see you soon.” He gives me his typically quizzical look and nods with his eyes.

WRITER’S NOTE: Last year I wrote a profile of Gogol Bordello and a profile of the band’s violin player, Sergey Ryabtsev. Since then I’ve gotten to know most of the members and have partied with them on a few fantastic occasions. The events described above took place one summer night in New York City in 2008.

PUNCHED in New York City

It was close to 2:45 in the morning, and I was walking to a friend’s house in Bed-Stuy [a neighborhood in Brooklyn] when I was unexpectedly punched in the mouth. Hard. As soon as I felt the numbing sensation in my face and the warm blood gushing out of my nose and mouth, I felt it was time to get the hell out.

The nurses who examined me that night said that I should have expected something like this to happen walking alone in Bed-Stuy on a Friday night. Maybe that’s true, but I figured walking would be faster than waiting for the G train. They probably thought a “white” guy walking in the neighborhood should know better. But, the thing is, I only became “white” about 15 years ago when I immigrated to this country with my family at the age of 11.  …To continue reading this column I wrote for The New York Press CLICK HERE

Trouble at JFK — a (fictional) humor piece that was humorlessly rejected by The New Yorker

I’m standing in the security line at JFK and my mind suddenly freezes. I realize that in my carryon is 101 Degrees, an unbelievably rare and expensive French cologne, the key ingredient of which is the aromatic sweat the endangered African rhino releases while mating. (I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to get close to a mating African rhino, but if you have, you’d know why the cologne costs $10,000 per milliliter.) What’s that? You want to know about the name of the cologne? Well, it derives from Simplicity itself: It weights 101 ml., you see. And you don’t have to be a fancy French philosopher-slash-mathematician to conclude: Ergo, the bottle costs $1,010,000.

But, without exception, liquids weighing more than 100 ml. are not allowed on board, so I quickly consider my options.

What if I offer the security people half a bottle? Then I’d only have 50.5 ml. And besides, wasn’t it Socrates who wisely stated, “The line between bribery and generosity is often more slippery than a nude, oiled wrestler”? But—and this is just my manly intuition talking—the security folks don’t look like they want to discuss moral relativism. Instead, their look suggests a strong desire for a lunch break.

Okay, but what if I spray one milliliter of this cologne on myself? Then it’ll weigh 100 ml. Brilliant! So I step away from the line for a few minutes and spray forcefully, like I’m watering my enormous front lawn—about which I actually know nothing, since my gardeners Jesus, Maria and Joseph take care of the lawn.

Soon an armed and camouflaged security hotshot tells me it’s the size of the bottle that counts. Then another heartless bastard leans over and tells me I have to throw my precious 101 Degrees away or check it in. “But my plane leaves in 40 minutes!” I plead. “And uber-first-class boarding is in 20 minutes! Don’t you understand the concept of time, people!” My Julliard-perfect cries of despair fall on deaf, insensitive ears. So I do what any self-respecting aristocrat would do in this situation: I spray the entire bottle on myself, and, needless to say, feel like a million bucks.

Smelling like a thousand rose gardens and one fragrant rhino, I fall into seat 2B in uber-uber-first-class (an upgrade!), hoping no one will bother me. Just as I’m about to start reading the feature story in Diamond Smuggler’s Weekly, a middle-aged Englishman approaches me, thinking that I have taken his seat. With reluctant politeness, I show him my ticket, but this chap can’t make it out because his thick trifocals are on his forehead instead of his Limey nose. “Are you 2B or not 2B?” he asks. After realizing that he had made an unintentional pun, he starts laughing frantically. Soon he starts to cough, cry, burp and hiccup merely because the manly scent of my cologne is beginning to spread faster than the thickest, milkiest San Francisco fog.

It doesn’t take long for the nearby passengers to start complaining about the “strong scent from the gentleman in the second row.” Like a series of car alarms, one baby starts to cry after another after another after—well, you get the idea. Oh, hello! Just as I’m about to slap the closest infant to my right, a beautiful young woman wearing a green, V-necked SAVE THE AFRICAN RHINOS T-shirt comes up to lecture me about how “cruel and inhumane” the sweat removal process is and how it affects the rhino psychologically. “Do you ever stop to think about that?” she asks. “Do you? These beautiful animals have thick skin, but they still have feel—

Suddenly I hear my name over the intercom. “Mr. Belvedere, the captain would like to have a word with you. Please come to the front of the aircraft.” The captain, Alexander Nosovich, appears gentle, but speaks bluntly: “Mr. Belvedere, there is no easy way to say this. The passengers and my staff have requested that you be removed from the airplane. Immediately.”

“What?! Is it the cologne? Look, I had no—

“No, it’s not the cologne,” the captain retorts, “although the smell does make it look like you have something to hide.” Nosovich takes a deep breath and looks directly into my beautiful royal-blue eyes. “It’s your beard, Mr. Belvedere. It’s so dark and unkempt. It makes everyone nervous. Frankly, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Why that’s absur—

“Whoa! Take it easy, Mr. B. It is the cologne. That was just a little pilot humor. Now please exit the airplane. This flight to Cologne must depart in five minutes.”

With Russia’s last free election, the free speech experiment ended

Russia’s last free election was eleven years ago, but it is still relevant today. The degree to which Russian journalists did everything in their power to re-elect Boris Yeltsin—including cooperating with his campaign team, spreading rumors about the Communist party and making sure Yeltsin appears regularly on television in a positive light—was hardly mentioned, if at all, in all the recent obituaries and editorials about him.

Yet the 1996 election was a turning point, and it placed the media into an uncomfortable position: help an unpopular president get re-elected or go back to communism. Many journalists did what they thought was the right thing to do. As the press raised Yeltsin’s popularity from below five percent to above 50, Vladimir Putin, then largely unknown, took notice. The lesson was clear: get the press on your side and people will believe what they’re told. Of course, this is not a new lesson, but the specifics were different, especially when it came to television.

“Yeltsin made news that we helped him create,” said Igor Malashenko, who at the time was president of NTV, one of the top three Russian television networks. Malashenko said he regularly met with Yeltsin’s campaign team, including his speechwriters, and even discussed the kinds of sound bites he thought would be best. The networks wanted to get Yeltsin out to the country, even to the Far East, and for people to see him holding babies, shaking hands and even dancing. They also wanted to see him giving many speeches. But Yeltsin was not a great orator, so Malashenko bought him a teleprompter from the States. “In Russia, there were no teleprompters,” Malashenko admitted.

The media helped Yeltsin on many levels, and it was a serious effort—Russians can be nauseatingly nostalgic. The Ne Day Bog (God Forbid) newspaper was exclusively set up to re-elect Yeltsin. In fact, most papers—with the exception of communist publications like Sovetskaya Rossiya (Soviet Russia) and Zavtra (Tomorrow)—gave Yeltsin positive coverage. (Some of the journalists hired to write those positive pieces were known as “gold pens.”) In addition, rumors of communist training camps where young men were taught armed combat were widely discussed on television and in print. And some news, like Yeltsin’s major heart attack before the final round of voting, was simply withheld.

Paradoxically, the same television stations that actively supported Yeltsin did not hold back from continuing to show the horrors of the Chechnya War. This made the war extremely unpopular, but Yeltsin did not try to restrict the coverage. He accepted the consequences of free speech. And when oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky—who didn’t want to see their wealth taken away by an unpredictable communist government—threw their support and money behind Yeltsin, he accepted that too.

Whereas the oligarchs had one motive, the journalists who worked for them had several. Some simply followed orders (Berezovsky owned Channel 1 and Gusinsky owned NTV); some did it for the money; some for ideological reasons and some for a combination of the three.

The lesson from all this was twofold: 1) television in Russia is the most influential mass communication tool; 2) the political persuasions of a handful of oligarchs can influence the entire nation.

Putin learned both lessons well. Now there are no independent owners of mass media because Putin presented them with a simple choice: stay out of politics or lose your wealth. Now the government controls all national television stations. The reality of the Chechnya war is not on television. Journalists like the recently murdered Anna Politkovskaya—whose thorough knowledge of the war matched her fierce criticism of it—are banned from television. Last year, during Russia’s financial dispute with Gazprom, the state-owned natural gas giant that now owns NTV, the TV networks did not give Ukraine’s perspective. After the former KGB agent Alexander Litvenenko was poisoned in London, the main television networks in Russia focused on the “panic” in London as opposed to who may have killed him and why.

Although there are countless such examples, some dispute the argument that the 1996 presidential election was a major influence on Putin’s current policies. Nikolay Petrov, of The Carnegie Moscow Center, says Putin learned much more from the 1996 mayoral election in St. Petersburg than from the national election. A mentor of Putin’s lost the mayoral election because he focused on ideology and not on what the people cared about most: high wages and full supermarkets. In addition, Malashenko says that Putin’s hold on free speech is like that of the old Soviet Union—i.e. state control. In a general sense, Malashenko and Petrov are right. Putin does emphasize economic wellbeing (as opposed to ideals like free speech), and the state-controlled networks support him. Yet this is only part of the picture.

What makes the 1996 presidential election a relevant precedent is that Putin, along with the rest of the country, got a real taste of how influential an independent press can be. Soviet leaders never had such a tangible reference point. They didn’t have to deal with independent oligarchs who could influence an election with their own media outlets. So Putin did his best to get rid of such oligarchs, such elections and such speech. Sounds like a lesson well learned.

Bob Dylan’s Dream #2007

Here’s a bit of surprising news: Bob Dylan has a blog. And it’s on MySpace—the very popular social network of friends, or people who call each other “friends”—where else? Modern times indeed.

If you go to myspace.com/bobdylan, something 1.7 million people have already done, you will be greeted by the sad, sharp sound of the blues guitar that opens “Thunder on The Mountain,” the first track of Dylan’s latest album, “Modern Times.” And if you stick around long enough, you’ll hear another song from that album. Wait around a little more, and you’ll hear a classic like “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

If you’re not sleepy and have no place you’re going to, scroll all the way down the page and check out what some of his 80,000-plus “friends” have to say. “cool! bob dylan is my friend,” wrote Melissa on April 19. “I lovvve your stuff. keep it up.” Four minutes later, she posted another comment: “do you really read this???”

Good question Melissa. Almost 15,000 comments have been posted on the site since it went up a year and a half ago, and it’s a safe bet that Dylan hasn’t read any of them. One reason to think so may be that he has never posted a blog entry. Well, there is actually one entry. A few weeks before Dylan’s latest album was released, Columbia Records posted an invitation to listening parties in cities like New York, San Francisco and Boston. “Winners will be notified via email.” Modern times indeed.

But don’t you want to find out what this guy Bob Dylan is all about? The “About” section in MySpace is where members usually post their biography or any other information they deem pertinent—in the loosest sense of the term. “All About Bob Dylan” is a six-paragraph press release where Columbia Records Chairman Steve Barnett is quoted as saying, “This is a staggering record by any standards, and is a major priority for our company, worldwide.”

Bellow the various advertisements for the new album is a video screen, on which baby faced Bobby (circa 1965) is wearing sunglasses and a black suit. Press play. It’s his latest video, “Thunder on The Mountain,” a collage of concert, studio and press conference footage from the mid-’60s to the present: Dylan in the back of a car with John Lennon in the ’60s, Dylan on stage in white makeup in the ’70s, Dylan at a jam session in a wide-shouldered suit in the ’80s, and so on. After every other music video there’s a 10-second commercial for Loreal, Puma or rare Dylan paraphernalia. And after six Dylan music videos, the tide changes—to videos by the Dixie Chicks, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera. And so it goes.

So is this even a blog? Since Dylan has never posted a single comment, and blogs are supposed to be about communication, the answer has to be “No.” It’s a non-blog in blog’s clothing. Most likely, the human relations department at Columbia Records runs the site, which gives them the ability to reach a mostly young audience in a new way. It also gives them a chance to make the fans feel closer to their idol. It is, however, a triply false sense of proximity. When you first meet people, you cannot claim to know them (layer one). When you look at someone’s MySpace page, you cannot even claim to know a person (layer two). And finally, if you come across a MySpace page that’s not run by the person whom it’s about, then you cannot even claim to know that person’s MySpace page (layer three). Modern times indeed.

Supposedly, Dylan has always either avoided the press or provided interviews so confrontational or cryptic that some reporters wish he avoided them. Some of Dylan’s Socratically sarcastic exchanges with reporters in D.A. Pennebaker’s “Don’t Look Back” serve as prime examples. So the idea that he would just shed all that and chat freely on a blog seems ludicrous yet exciting. But after seeing it once, you’ve seen it all. There is no conversation here. No insight. No intimacy. No Dylan.

Photojournalism and Art — Where is the dividing line?

What is real in photography? More specifically, when we look at a photo, what in it is real? Some of us think about these questions often, but even if we don’t, every once in a while we see a photograph that leaves us without an escape route. We simply have to ask.

Consider Philippe Halsman’s “Dali Atomicus,” a surreal photograph that is made up entirely of real, tangible things: cats, water, paintings, chairs, and a smiling Salvador Dali. Yet the moment we look at it, we know something’s not right. Cats are flying, water is suspended in mid-air, a chair is floating and Dali is levitating as he’s painting. Because these things don’t happen in real life, we know right away that everything in the photo has been manipulated. We just don’t know how.

Well, it’s simple, really. On the count of “four,” Dali jumped up, the photographer’s wife held up the chair, and his assistants threw three cats and a bucket of water into the air. After a few hours and several dozen tries, Halsman probably decided that he had enough material to work with. (And the cats most likely got tired of being airborne and wet.)

In the end, Halsman made a work of art—or at least that’s what we determine it to be. Do we consider it a work of art because it’s not communicating any single or conspicuous truth? Or, do we not look for such a truth because we prejudge it as a work of art? As the latter question gnaws on the tail of the former, we can skip that semantic cannibalism by acknowledging something about our own feelings toward “Dali Atomicus”: The fact that everything in the photo has been made to defy logic and gravity doesn’t bother us. We actually enjoy the product. And if we don’t enjoy it, we at least have no ethical objection to the blatant manipulation of people and things.

But when it comes to journalism, we do not have such a relaxed ethic. Is there anyone who would consider “Dali Atomicus” a work of journalism? I doubt it. Well, why not? Whether it’s because we think the photo is art and art only or because it purposely manipulates us—this cannibalistic python is similar to the one in the above paragraph—matters much less than our view of journalism. Photojournalism is supposed to answer the question “What happened?” with a picture (and maybe a short caption). A simple example would be a New York Times photo of President Bush during an important speech. Yes, there were probably dozens of photos taken and The Times ended up using just one. But most people are aware that a photograph is a moment in time. The photograph may also have been cropped. Again, people are aware of that. Selecting a good photograph and cropping are not the same as manipulation.

There is, however, a long, slippery spectrum between artistic and journalistic photography. Picking out one photo of Bush from a dozen nearly identical ones doesn’t compare to picking out one Iraq War photo out of hundreds to put on the front page. In the latter case, the process of selection itself can arguably entail manipulation—whether it’s intentional or not is another question. Whatever the case, there is at least an attempt to point out what happened. But doesn’t artistic photography sometimes point that out as well? It does. Yet it doesn’t have to.

The Halsman photograph and the hypothetical one of Bush are obviously on the opposite ends of the art-journalism spectrum. For every unique characteristic that’s exclusive to one side, there are probably dozens that are important and indispensable to both. There are also countless journalistic photographs with artistic aspects, and there are countless artistic photographs with journalistic aspects. And some photographs simply put all these concepts in a blender and leave us with a soggy mess. Yet, it is important to keep the spectrum in mind when discussing photography, because what a given photo says is undeniably connected to the language that was involved in its creation.

Harvard Students and Larry Summers: What did they see in that guy?

Reading The Harvard Crimson to find out exactly why so many Harvard students supported then-University President Lawrence H. Summers was like trying to squeeze water from a rock. Both opinion and news stories covered a lot of ground but offered little analysis.

With the recent news that Drew Gilpin Faust, a Civil War historian and Harvard University dean, will be the next Harvard president, let’s hope that the campus newspaper will do a better job in analyzing her record after her term starts June 1. The Crimson should look back at its coverage of Summers’ popularity with the students, and learn from it. The most frequently cited reason for his popularity with the students was his commitment to the quality of undergraduate life and education. In a Feb. 22, 2006, opinion piece in The Crimson titled “The Economist,” a student columnist—in an attempt to elaborate on the above-mentioned reason—pointed out that Summers’ office has paid for renovations of a student pub, café and recreation center; initiated to increase participation in study-abroad programs; decided to make “Harvard’s financial aid the most generous in the world”; and “crafted an enduring vision for Harvard’s expansion into Allson,” a nearby Boston neighborhood. What’s missing from this long laundry list is a close, detailed inspection.

Admittedly, The Crimson is a campus publication, and some could argue that anyone living on or around campus is familiar with the details. However, if that is the case, why list reasons for Summers’ popularity at all? Aren’t the students and faculty who are aware of the specifics also aware of the laundry list? What service is performed by simply reminding them what they already know?

An analysis of the success or failure of Summers’ programs would help explain his popularity with the students. If he was popular despite the failure of his programs, then perhaps his attitude and approach were deemed more important. However, if his programs were successful, that may be the reason for his popularity. Of course, the connection between a program’s success or failure and the students’ approval or disapproval of him is not necessarily a causal one. Furthermore, the success of a five-year term would be more accurately measured in hindsight. But without a serious analysis of Summers’ programs, this back-and-forth rope-tugging is done with an invisible rope.

A news article that appeared in The Crimson on Feb. 22, 2006, titled “To Students, a Rock Star President,” quoted one student who emphasized Summers’ initiative to encourage education abroad. Did more students study abroad or at least express an interest in doing so in the future as a result of Summers’ initiative? The authors don’t say. The article also pointed out that Summers taught undergraduate courses, held regular office hours and attended campus events. But the reader is left to wonder as to why this is relevant. How was his teaching technique different? What went on during the office hours? Surely not everyone attended.

The article refers to a Crimson poll published on Feb. 21 that concluded “57 percent of 424 undergraduates surveyed said that Summers should not resign.” Three days after the poll results were published, an opinion piece written by an Economics Professor David Laibson, “Summers and the Students,” argued that the core reason students supported Summers was that he was “passionately interested in their ideas and their experiences.” Laibson does answer some of the questions I raised in the previous paragraph—e.g. Summers “argued with his students about every conceivable topic, from curricular reform to the ethics of stem cell research”—but, much like the rest of the coverage in The Crimson, he doesn’t examine the success of Summers’ programs, which would help explain, or at least set the discussion for, why Summers was popular with the majority of the students.

In the end, we are not only left in the dark—with the irony of having veritas as part of Harvard’s symbol—but also left wondering if the students are in there with us.

A New Generation of Swine — why Hunter S. Thompson still matters

“Political gibberish is not a purely American art form, like jazz and safety blitz. But in only 200 years we have raised it to a level of eloquence beyond anything since the time of the Caesars or even Genghis Khan.” This is from Hunter S. Thompson’s “Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s.” The book is a collection of essays Thompson wrote for the San Francisco Examiner between 1985 and 1988. I’m almost finished with it, and I must say, the parallels between that time and ours are both sobering and depressing.

An increasingly unpopular Republican president was in his second term. The White house not only had an intuitive antipathy toward sex and drugs, but its approach to the issue was clouded by a narrow-minded religiosity. And let’s not forget the looming threats from “terrorists” in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This may be surprising to the younger generation, but the concept “terrorist” existed before Sept. 11, 2001, and even before the 1990s.

Thompson’s essays—fearless and funny first-person accounts of everything from his reckless gambling and arbitrary acts of violence to critical analyses of the White House and TV evangelists—are as much about Thompson as the subjects he covers. Such a high level of post-modern self-awareness usually takes away from the subject, distracts the reader, and leads him to become lost in the hall of mirrors.

But Thompson makes it work. Some of his best writing—and this has been the case since “Hell’s Angels”—is his beautiful, angry analysis of the media. “Nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum,” he writes, “is nothing compared with the way the editors of The New York Times feel about the need for a major front-page political story on Thanksgiving Day.” What? Journalists need news in the same way doctors need patients? In an essay written a few months prior, he makes a similar point when he compares journalists’ constant expectations for big, wild news to “joining the Navy and expecting to fly gold-plated jets off the deck of a new aircraft carrier that costs more than Egypt and shoot Tomahawk missiles that cost $2 million apiece at crazed communist Arabs in places like Beirut and Tripoli.” Writing as a journalist, Thompson was all to familiar with how the media—especially of the 24-hour cable TV variety—is always waiting for news to come out, sort of like Elmer Fudd waits for Bugs Bunny, only to have him come from behind and casually tap him on the shoulder. Behind you, stupid.

Thompson’s essays are only several pages long, but he rarely sticks to one topic. One of the literary delights of the book is the feeling of a fast-paced treasure hunt for unique descriptions that beg to be stolen like “truffle-eating wine-sucking anarchists” and “the long screw of history” and “trying to rip souvenir teeth out of living sharks.” In his must-read essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell offers six rules—“break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous” is the sixth rule—in an attempt to save the English language from abstraction and meaninglessness. The first rule states: Never use a metaphor or any other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print. Earlier in the essay, Orwell points out, “The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.” Using original metaphors, similes and other figures of speech while expressing yourself clearly is therefore the ideal. Thompson would make Orwell proud.

Perhaps it is surprising to us that someone who smoked cigarettes, drank whiskey, shot guns, rode motorcycles and consumed almost every drug known to man can write such thought-provoking metaphors. But we shouldn’t be surprised. That’s what Thompson does consistently. He provokes us—as much, if not more, than the people in his stories. But for some reason we can’t get enough of his abrasiveness. Why is that? Because behind the madness and metaphors stand honest, straightforward personal truths that don’t belong to any political party or dogma. And if you find yourself disagreeing with him, as you certainly will, then you should at least be grateful that there existed a writer who wrote about politics without using—i.e. accepting—political language.

Undercover Journalism: What’s at stake

“I am an elegant and beautiful lady. I consider myself a good housewife. I would like to meet intelligent, passionate and romantic man.” Next to this description is a photo of a smiling, young Russian blonde wearing a cleavage-revealing black dress and holding her hands between her closed inner thighs. Interested? Then click on “Add Eleonora to My Order.”

A Foreign Affair, which has thousands of listings like Eleonora’s, is a company that for a few thousand dollars offers two-week tours of Russia, Ukraine and other countries where American men can meet hundreds of women whom they can bring back to the States as brides.

In Dec. 2005, journalist Kris Garin went on A Foreign Affair tour of Ukraine under the pretense of finding a bride. His story was published in the June issue of Harper’s as “A Foreign Affair: On the Great Ukrainian Bride Hunt.”

Whether undercover reporting is a legitimate form of journalism depends on whom you ask. Some publications have ethical guidelines that restrict or prohibit the practice, and many reporters, editors and lawyers throughout the country disagree about what its role should be in journalism. In particular, they disagree whether it’s okay to lie to get to the truth in the name of public interest and whether this can damage a publication’s credibility. But even the harshest critics of undercover reporting agree that almost every case is different.

Garin said that the only way to get his story was to go undercover. “It’s a story you’d never be able to get and an insight you’d never be able to get if you said, ‘Listen, I’m a reporter. Can I tag along with you guys?’” he said in an interview.

A farmer from the Southwest told Garin about how his wife, a former “Mexican call girl,” left him. A gray-haired, impeccably dressed Midwesterner confessed he wasn’t really looking for a bride and was more interested in the prostitutes. Another man told him how lonely he was. And there were many more.

“I’m not morally offended by what they did at Harper’s, and as a reader I might very much enjoy it,” said veteran New York Times reporter Bill Glaberson, who was a lawyer prior to entering journalism. “I don’t have a black-and-white rule.”

Glaberson also said he’s glad the policy of his newspaper is not to “trick people.” The Times’ 50-page code of ethics states: “Staff members should disclose their identity to people they cover, though they need not always announce their status as journalists when seeking information available to the public.” Although food and travel critics are exempt to avoid special treatment, as a general rule the Times does not practice undercover reporting.

“There is something a little different about being the premier newspaper in the United States – or maybe the world,” said Glaberson. “Readers have an extremely high expectation of the Times. That’s why, when we stray, like with Jayson Blair and Judith Miller,” it’s a bigger deal than when magazines like The New Republic or Newsweek stray. The Times may not get a richly detailed story like Garin’s as a result of its policy, he added, but the paper’s “reputation of extreme integrity” gives him access to people who wouldn’t trust just any reporter.

Garin, who is a freelance journalist, said that if he were a part of a large news organization like the Times, he would “probably have a much more conservative stance” on undercover reporting. But does a publication that allows undercover reporting necessarily lose credibility?

In 1989, several editors at Newsday came to then-managing editor Howard Schneider and proposed a plan to uncover racial discrimination in Long Island’s real estate industry. They wanted to send black and white reporters undercover – pretending to be customers – to about 200 real estate offices. Skeptical in the beginning, Schneider realized that it was the last resort. “We were getting nowhere,” he recalled. “We were getting people accusing the real estate industry of racial steering and the realtors saying, ‘We’re not racial steering, people are making choices.’”

Schneider’s view of undercover reporting hasn’t changed: “It should only be done under extraordinary circumstances,” he said. “Sometimes when it’s done on the 11 o’clock news or as an attention grabber, it’s fraught with problems, and it cheapens the journalism, and it’s lazy.”

After 10 months of detailed planning, however, editor Anthony Marro decided not to go through with it. It wasn’t just about concerns over credibility. The logistics were “messy,” said Schnieder. A year later, Newsday ran a series of articles with personal accounts and statistics to demonstrate the facts of segregation on Long Island.

Undercover reporting has played a key role in many well-known stories of great public interest, but for some this justification has not satisfied concerns over credibility. In 1979, The Chicago Sun-Times bought a tavern and used it as a front to expose pervasive government corruption. While the “bartenders” served drinks, photographers took pictures of officials taking bribes. In the mid-’90s, two reporters for the Nashville Tennessean spent a month living in a housing project to collect information about what life was like in poor areas of Nashville. According to an Editor and Publisher article from 1995, the reporters did not identify themselves as such and ended up using the names and pictures of some residents. A few years ago, BBC reporter Mark Daly signed up as a recruit at a police academy in England to investigate institutional racism within the police force. Prior to going undercover, these journalists said they had evidence but not enough to make a strong, conclusive argument.

Garin and his editors at Harper’s decided he had to go undercover because it was the best way to find out what the industry was like and what motivated these men. “What they really wanted,” he wrote in the article, “and what most imagined they would find in Ukraine, was a fusion of 1950s gender sensibilities with 21st century hyper-sexuality.”

Although the article offers a unique insight into a world most people are unaware of, were the means justifiable? “If you’re weighing the question, you first have to consider the damage of the means,” said Garin. “If you’re just telling a story, and you’re not exposing any individuals to any embarrassment or scrutiny or not identifying them at all, I’m not sure you really need an end to justify that.”

Garin’s main concern was keeping the identities of the men on the tour private. In the article, He doesn’t even identify them by first name. He said it would be “cruel and inappropriate” to expose them and it would add nothing to the story.

The men did not know Garin was a journalist – he used his real name but said he was in advertising – or that he was audio recording almost everything they told him. (Garin said he spoke with a Ukrainian lawyer to make sure surreptitious recording is legal in Ukraine prior to his flight.)

Whether or not he broke a criminal statute is not the only issue, said David Tomlin, associate general counsel for The Associated Press. Invasion of privacy or fraud could be brought in a civil suit, said Tomlin, and even though the reporting took place in Ukraine, legal action could potentially be brought in any country the article had been published.

Martin London, a lawyer who has successfully sued the media on privacy issues and regards undercover reporting as “offensive in varying degrees,” said he doesn’t see a big problem with what Garin did. Although the men on the tour had an “expectation of privacy,” their relationship with Garin wasn’t like a relationship between a lawyer and a client or a patient and a doctor. On the other hand, London said he does not believe the reporter should be the judge of where a relationship is on the privacy scale. Generally speaking, video, photography, tape recording, and the ability to do it all covertly “exacerbate the invasion,” he said.

Ironically, Garin’s surreptitious tape recording actually allowed Harper’s not to reveal the names of the individuals involved, said Garin. From a fact-checking standpoint, not using a tape recorder may have made it more difficult to keep the men’s names out of the story.

“No one but my editors (and fact-checkers) ever heard the tape,” he said in an e-mail, “so I don’t see that using the technology did anything other than ensure the story’s accuracy, credibility and ultimately – counter-intuitive though it may be – the privacy of its subjects.”

A ménage-a-trios approach to reading magazines

“A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions tell me that’s true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

— President Reagan
Speech on Iran-Contra Cover-up
March 4, 1987

Read my lips: presidents lie. That’s no secret, and the latest issue of The Atlantic Monthly has a great article about what makes George W. Bush different—a different kind of liar. What makes Bush different can best be summed up by the last line of the article: “The most dangerous lies a president can tell, it would seem, are the lies he tells himself.”

On the Atlantic website, on the same page as the article, you can get streaming audio—a stream of lies, if you will—of other presidents’ prevarications: Truman calling Hiroshima a “military base” after the U.S. dropped the A-bomb, Nixon denying his involvement in Watergate, Reagan “apologizing” for the Iran-Contra affair, and the subsequent lies of Bush Sr., Clinton, and our current president and decider George W. Bush. Another thing available only on the online edition of the article is a link to a YouTube montage of Bush repeatedly using the phrase “stay the course.” The video was quickly posted after Bush, in an interview on ABC, denied ever having used the phrase. “The president of the United States is not a fact-checker,” White House communications director Dan Bartlet is quoted as saying in the artice. Touché.

Any person who follows the news and is familiar with American history has already seen or heard all these speeches and clips, but they are helpful in that they put the article in a greater context. I didn’t read the 15-page story online because I try to avoid staring at a computer screen whenever possible. While reading the printed version—from a printer, not from the magazine—I put the online version of the article up on my computer screen after I realized that it was going to be a three-way affair.

Therefore, I propose the ménage a trios method for reading long-form magazine articles typically found in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, etc. All you need is yourself, your literary magazine of choice and the online edition glowing on your computer screen (so you can sneak a peak at it whenever necessary). But there’s a problem: the print editions of these magazines often don’t indicate if a word is hyperlinked in the online edition or if there are any other features available online that could help put the article in a greater context or illuminate a certain point. The more these magazines do to fix that problem by encourage the ménage a trios reading method, the less they’ll have to worry about losing subscribers.