Blog Rally to Help the Boston Globe

I never thought that the Boston Globe would be seriously facing the prospect of shutting down. This is THE Boston Globe we’re talking about. This is BOSTON we’re talking about, a major intellectual center of the North East. I myself have been a critic of the paper, mainly because its coverage of local news has been diminishing. I don’t believe they have ended the City Weekly section: it was what I liked about the Sunday Globe the most, offering coverage of Boston neighborhoods, Brookline, Somerville and Cambridge.

The Globe’s major contribution though, has been the investigating reporting. Yes, we do need checks and balances for the executive power. The Globe’s journalists with long running connections and sharp eye were able to uncover the corrupt and the illegal. These are the stories that matter, cause we DO want to keep checks on the executive power. Yes, I want to know about Governor Partick’s new misstep, I want to know about the abuse of power from the Legislature, the Catholic church, the police, the Mayors etc etc

So we DO need this newspaper, and Boston bloggers have been rallying for ideas to save the paper. This is from the common statement:

 We view the Globe as an important community resource, and we think that lots of people in the region agree and might have creative ideas that might help in this situation. So, here’s your chance. Please don’t write with nasty comments and sarcasm: Use this forum for thoughtful and interesting steps you would recommend to the management that would improve readership, enhance the Globe’s community presence, and make money. Who knows, someone here might come up with an idea that will work, or at least help. Thank you.

(P.S. If you have a blog, please feel free to reprint this item and post it. Likewise, if you have a Twitter or Facebook account, please add this url as an update or to your status bar to help us reach more people.)

If you would like to comment with a new idea or thought on how to help save the paper, you can do that at Blue Mass Group here or at Paul Levy’s Blog “Running a hospital” here.

UPDATE: The Globe itself invites readers to propose ideas for survival. You can comment here.

First Day of Spring Rambling

So it is a sunny Friday today, first day of spring (and this is official), and if you forget it’s only 40F out there, you can pretty much convince yourself about it. It’s going to be a half day for me at work and I’m not complaining.

Last night I had my last drawing class. I loved the class, it’s amazing how fast time goes by when you are engrossed in something interesting. I was working with charcoal, and after every class I felt like there were tiny charcoal particles in my mouth and my snot had a grey-ish hue.

Recently I realized that I have a problem talking with women. You see when I talk with men it is like I am assuming a role. I’m trying to be smart and funny and I want men to like me. I want to charm them, regardless of my liking them or not. The role is clear and well defined. When I talk with women that are not friends of mine I have trouble finding the right tone, the right role. Do I want to be their mother? Do I want to be their daughter? Do I want to charm them? Should I be serious, silly, what?  I wonder if this makes any sense at all…

Anyway, I’m not going to talk about the new facebook design and how much I don’t like it because it is all over the place, but it looks like it’s a standard thing these days: whenever a website is redesigned it rarely is it for the better. Take the new pitchfork for example. The text font is way too small, a huge ad occupied half of the page when you first opened the page (looks like they might have got rid of this one), and you have to click on links like at least three times to get to watch a video or listen to a song. The new wers website is better overall, but I hate the fact that the song currently playing is not automatically updated.

Which brings me to another thing: a website that badly needs some work is boston.com. It looks like it was designed by a 5-year old. It looks flashy, cheesy and cheap. Since their paper (The Boston Globe) readership has dwindled anyway and people are migrating to the web they should invest in a serious effort to make it better. It needs to look sleek, it needs to look smart. Got it? Good. Have a weekend.

Beautiful Earth

From the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture

This simulated natural-color image of southeastern Fars province in southern Iran shows a dry river channel carving through arid mountains toward the northeast. A broad belt of lush agricultural land follows the curve of the alluvial fan and stretches out along a road that runs parallel to the ridgeline. The valley-ward margin of the intensely green agricultural belt fades to dull green along streams (or irrigation canals). The image was captured by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA’s Terra satellite on October 12, 2004. (NASA/Jesse Allen, NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team)

Harrat Khaybar in Saudi Arabia contains a wide range of volcanic rock types and spectacular landforms, several of which are represented in this photograph taken by an astronaut abourd the International Space Station on March 31, 2008. Jabal (“mountain” in Arabic) al Qidr is built from several generations of dark, fluid basalt lava flows. Jabal Abyad, in the center of the image, was formed from a more viscous, silica-rich lava classified as a rhyolite. (NASA-JSC) #

The Arabian Peninsula’s Empty Quarter, known as Rub’ al Khali, is the world’s largest sand sea, holding about half as much sand as the Sahara Desert. The Empty Quarter covers 583,000 square kilometers (225,000 square miles), and stretches over parts of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. The Enhanced Thematic Mapper on NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite captured this image of the Empty Quarter on August 26, 2001. (NASA/Robert Simmon, Landsat,USGS) #

The Boston Globe is Still a Disappointment

I used to read the Boston Globe (i.e. the real paper) every Sunday. Then about two months ago I stopped buying it. I don’t really know why, maybe because it came to be a real disappointment. The writing was getting worse and less interesting. There was never a topic in the paper that you hadn’t heard of or read about before. In other words the newspaper wasn’t doing the “news” part anymore. I would check it on-line, but the website isn’t that attractive either. It is cluttered; it is full of old top stories, especially in the A&E section.

Anyway, yesterday I picked up the Sunday Boston Globe again for the first time in two months. My impression is still the same: disappointment. The A section articles are all taken from other agencies and/or papers, the Metro (fka City & Region) and City Weekly sections, which are written by Globe staff and correspondents, are quite boring and feel stale. There are fewer advertisements. But going through the sections there were two “WOW” moments: the jobs listings were only two pages long, same with the real estate section. I don’t know, maybe it had to do with the Thanksgiving holiday and all, but I had never seen these sections that shrunken before. Are all listings migrating to the web? Or is it really a sign of the times? Is it because of the weak economy, the rising unemployment, the wounded housing market? It reminded me of a similar situation at the end of 2000, when the IT listings in the jobs section were almost four pages long, and then a couple of months later with the dotcom bust they disappeared.

I don’t know, tough times or not, but this paper could really use something edgy, something worth writing about, something NEW.

Ballast

I saw the movie Ballast, filmmaker Lance Hammer’s first feature film, at the Independent Film Festival in Boston back in April. I knew nothing about the film, it just sounded interesting from the description. The film is concentrated on three characters who live in the Mississippi Delta. I have never visited the area. The camera lingers and slowly moves and it shows the vastness of the sky and the flatness of the land. The beginning was slow, but I found it essential in order to absorb the geography of the place. You could feel the cold, you could feel the warm. And then there were the actors, speaking in low voices, sometimes it was difficult to understand. But these were local non-actors.

 

I could see how someone would prefer a voice over for this movie, explaining this and that. But that was the brilliance of this film: it showed what was going on and you were drawing your own conclusions as you were being absorbed by the scenery and the story. The cinematography was visually impressive. Later during the Q&A Hammer mentioned that he shot the movie in Super 35. And it was brilliant.

 

The movie starts with a suicide and then the dead man’s twin brother, ex-wife and son are getting involved trying to get on with life after the suicide. There is struggle, disagreement, there is difficulty and poverty, there is utter sadness. The Delta feels like another country altogether. The performances were moving. You could feel the tension in the silences, the pain in the way a word was uttered, in the way the people were moving. The pain, the drag, the disappointment, it was all there front of us, bear.

 

Hammer is white and was inspired by the place in the last 10 years that he’d been visiting the area. There has been some criticism against him based on the assumption that a white man cannot tell the story of some black people living in the Delta. I totally disagree and the truth is that watching the movie you do not know if it was shot by a white or a black filmmaker. And it does not matter.  

Ballast was one of the standout films in the Sundance last year and it was later picked up by IFC, but Hammer decided to self-distribute it. The movie is currently out in limited release. Generally I read movie reviews, but when a movie sounds interesting to me, I discard them, watch the film, and have my own opinion. One of the rare bad reviews the movie received comes from Richard Brody in the New Yorker who writes “The writer-director Lance Hammer’s cannily calculated independent début feature packs the melodramatic wallop of Hollywood storytelling in its low-key on-location naturalism”.  And later “Though working outside the studio system and seeming to offer an alternative aesthetic, Hammer pushes every button as knowingly as a Hollywood player: each piece of his script fits as if in a mosaic; the portentous, artificially moody images serve as mere illustrations;(…)” And finally “Only a stone-hearted viewer could fail to root for the central trio in their struggles against poverty and pain, but, when the lights go up, it’s hard to avoid the feeling of having been taken in by formulas packaged as homemade.” Ouch… He makes it sound like the movie was cheesy, but it wasn’t.

Oh, yes, there is also this almost opposite review from Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe “The movie is a beacon of independent filmmaking, not simply because Hammer opted more or less to self-distribute it, but because it’s evident that we’re a million miles away from Hollywood. (…)”Ballast” is like a realist melodrama. That sounds paradoxical, like saying a freshly painted wall looks matte and glossy. Melodrama manipulates situations to wring emotion. Sometimes realism just hides the strings. In “Ballast,” the goal of the form is to become so transparent that all we notice are bodies and faces. It’s an illusion, of course. But, boy, does it work.” I usually do not agree with Morris’ reviews, as he tends to like 90% of the movies he reviews, but in this case I’m with him.

I think the Kendall Square Cinema is the only moviehouse that plays the film in our area. I would absolutely recommend this movie, just don’t expect explosions in the sky and high speed chases; the movie is slow and it builds up. But the performances from the non-actors are beautiful and the film is visually poetic.