About

If drafted, I will run.

Hold it, what?

Run for what? Or from what?

This is to announce the commencement of a newsletter.  And of course, “if drafted” is a phrase used by politicians to mask the vanity and ambition of their quest. 

And yet…for a couple of years now, any number of friends who have spoken with me about my chosen trade, have heard the tales —some solicited, some that simply burbled out of me--from my decades in journalism.

It’s an ongoing process. One I intend to put forward on this site.

Possibly these loyal friends want to see them delivered on this platform--rather than say, a dinner party or chairlift.  (As in, hearing them once was plenty.)

I’ll confess to a certain sense of mission. Journalism, as I grew up and prospered in it, is under siege. The picture above was taken at the height of the pandemic that undid much of the apparatus in which we journos (and the people we cover) functioned.  The craft is largely part of the gig economy now. 

It’s little use to blame the pandemic or even the coming AI tsunami that promises to wash up mostly debris. Mainstream media is widely mistrusted and wildly unprofitable. Layoffs and failed enterprises abound. That’s how newsletters sprang up—offering curated information in an atomized media world. 

Perhaps you, my hoped-for readership, understand the urge to communicate: let’s keep the humans involved in chronicling our times. Yes, a certain kind of storytelling has been pushed to the periphery--some believe our robot overlords have already won. 

“I am trying to break your heart,” sang Wilco, “I’m hiding out in the big city blinking/What was I thinking when I let go of you?

This newsletter is not trying to break your heart. I’d like to think I can touch it sometimes. First of all, I’d like to stir your interest.

Humblebrags will strut and fret their way through these postings. Name drops too, but always with a kernel of insight, a nod to –let’s just name it—pop culture and its history. So indeed, why not recall how Keith Richards served me a snort of Rebel Yell at Belushi’s Phantom Rhino Bar? Playing bartender in a noisy downtown pop-up for a Saturday Night Live after-party, he took my order faced away but engaging me in the mirror with one gimlet eye. And that event reminds me how Pete Rose shot a similar look in a Shea Stadium  mirror while describing how he hit that double off some Mets pitcher who hung a curve. Or there’s the time Bob Marley passed me a joint across the aisle of a small turboprop plane in a thunderstorm between Barcelona and Paris. Much  of the bucket list has been checked off. I’ve been in the back seat of an F-14, the belly of a nuclear sub, tagged along on Navy SEALs training ops. The cast has included film stars, rock stars, and the odd lawyer, detective, financier, demolisher, producer or poet, and much more.

These are things AI has never properly characterized, is what I mean to say.  What was the rich, embedded access of the decades I  spent on assignment for Rolling Stone and Premiere magazines, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times,  and several now-buried websites, is generally a quaint memory. 

Modernism savant Ted Gioia, in his popular website The Honest Broker, is given to pondering  the “creative economy”,  and has  convincingly pointed out with scientific back-up that we habitual doom-scrollers are hostages of a “dopamine loop”. Our interests are dictated not by aesthetics or a search for deeper knowledge, but by sensation-hungry body chemistry as master-minded by Big Tech.

My aspiration is to short circuit that loop, to offer insights—some simply common-sensical, some reaching deeper--into that ever-morphing terrain we call popular culture. 

I’ve been thinking of Charles Dickens lately. He began by reporting as a free-lancer on court cases. I ponder that without for a second comparing my own early and later efforts to the master, who birthed his own career by catching on with a monthly journal run by his uncle. (Not so differently, I got my first real job in the trade thanks to a college friend whose cousin owned the Boston Phoenix.  My day job was driving a small truck loaded with weekly papers. And then they let me write.)

Dickens’ dispatches were written in haste, in bucking carriages on rutted roads, and the scribbled pages handed off to fleet post riders to meet a deadline. But he aspired to more. He wrote a satirical sketch for a struggling monthly and stuffed it in their editors’ Fleet Street letter-box at twilight. When that first inspired  piece hit the street, he grabbed and read it all but overcome, ducking into Westminster Hall  “Because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there.”

His witty columns soon blossomed into “Sketches by Boz”,  and Dickens remained steadfast in the credo that served him so well, as observed by his David Copperfield: “Whatever I have tried to do in life I have tried with all my heart to do well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.”

This newsletter will seek to illuminate our vivifying enthusiasms past and present, and albeit in a world that offers scant optimism, peer at the future. Expect fresh postings twice a week (sometimes more) and a knowledgeable spotlighting of topics in music, film, streaming fare, books and the occasional report on the military and law enforcement. 

This newsletter’s rubric of Dogtown pays fealty to the Venice (and Santa Monica) that’s been home to me and my family for a quarter century, and to the late, loved family dog Lucille, whose picture can be seen above.

I’d be honored to have and hold your attention.

Fred