Workin’ for the Weekend #53: Moynihan Does Sully, Welch Does Ranting, Comedians Do Clips

Also: Second Sunday ... [EDIT] has now been cancelled.

Hullo from the Hudson Valley, where basically every Hey, why don’t we drive down THIS street? leads to a scene like this, or at least seems to. The reddish manse in question is, like so many places around these parts, a place where Franklin Delano Roosevelt probably made some sexytime with a galpal…. Or, in the more decorous words of the brochures, where he enjoyed his “extraordinary friendship” with “confidante” (and distant cousin, natch), Margaret “Daisy” Stuckley. Guess I’ll have to watch this Bill Murray movie after all!

Right! Second Sunday … HE EDITS, AFTER THE FACT … has been cancelled, due to acute lack of Fifdom personnel located in the same country geographically, technically, and mentally. My apologies.

* Speaking of lazy summer days, Moynihan is the latest guest on the podcast of Andrew Sullivan (veteran of Episodes #139 & #200). From the write-up:

Moynihan is one-third of The Fifth Column — the sharp, hilarious podcast he does with Kmele Foster and Matt Welch. He was previously the cultural news editor for The Daily Beast, a senior editor at Reason, and a correspondent and managing editor of Vice.

It’s a fun summer chat with an old friend. We recorded it a few weeks ago, on July 24. Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the conspiracy theories of RFK Jr, and the deepening rift within the Israeli government.

Since the convo also covers Orwell and Hitchens, we reprinted a back-and-forth Hitch did with me and Dish readers on everything Orwell in 2002. 

* To keep some of you (*coughs loudly to self*) from mashing the refresh button on a certain YouTube channel, here’s the latest Kyle Dunnigan episode of “The Fresh Prez of DC”:

* Equal time for this classic from a comic some of you people (wrongly!) think I maligned in Members Only #175, the very funny Ryan Long. (Opinions are like assholes—everyone’s got one, and they shouldn’t be taken too seriously, even or especially when it’s about your favorite live comedian or dead rock star.):

* Speaking of comedy, Sarah Rose Siskind marked the 60^th anniversary of beau Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379) by making this hilarious impersonation vid that I would totally embed if only Elon Musk would re-permit Twitter embeds on Substack!

* Enough frivolity! Last week, James Larkin, longtime former New Times publisher and main co-defendant (along with New Times founder Michael Lacey) in the notorious federal case accusing their (now-defunct) Backpage online classifieds business of facilitating prostitution, killed himself on the eve of re-trial (their first case was declared a mistrial in September 2021 after the judge wearied of prosecutorial malfeasance). I interviewed Larkin and Lacey (the latter of whom I know a bit), plus Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who has done the best work about their repeated railroading, at a Reason event in Phoenix four years ago. And this week I wrote an acidic little reaction, titled: “Why Kamala Harris Won't Be Asked About the Suicide of a Newspaperman She Persecuted: When it comes to conflicts with people engaged in unpopular or disfavored speech, too many journalists side with the feds.” Excerpt from that:

Far too often, journalists reserve their free speech defenses for people they actually like. And man, did they not like Jim Larkin and Mike Lacey.

This antipathy for Larkin/Lacey and the New Times alt-weekly chain the duo launched in Phoenix was obvious long before politicians began moving on from Craigslist to Backpage in their morally panicked crusade against technology companies that allegedly promote "sex trafficking." […]

The New Times honchos—especially Lacey, who was always the more public and pugilistic face of the franchise—were resented because they threw sharp elbows at both the graybeard alternative weeklies to their left and at the big-city dailies that were originally to their right but then tacked over time to the kind of bloodless lefty respectability space inhabited by NPR. The New Times papers hurled buckets of snark onto anyone perceived as Establishment, which pissed off boomer lefty journalists almost as much as elected Republican officials such as Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Arizona Sen. John McCain. […]

Having mocked, then beaten, then eventually subsumed a Village Voice Media chain revered for its foundational role in postwar alternative journalism, Lacey and Larkin and co. found themselves relatively friendless during various scrapes with the legal system. When the independent hippie alt-weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian won a lawsuit in 2008 against the New Times–owned SF Weekly for "predatory pricing" of advertising (yes, one free paper sued another free paper over charging lower ad rates), and when that $21 million settlement (after having been tripled by the presiding judge) was upheld in 2010, I noted that "the journalistic thumbsucker community outside of the Bay Area has been almost completely silent about this potentially momentous precedent."

The Backpage case was also discussed on recent episodes of The Reason Roundtable (featuring Brown as guest star) and Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em, the podcast of our pals Sarah Hepola (#354) and Nancy Rommelmann (#79, Special Dispatch #27, SD #30, #198, #203, SD #34, SD #50, SD #64 & SD #111). Here’s an older Reason TV video about Kamala Harris’s starring role in this fiasco:

* We’re not quite done with me ranting. Here’s a Friday piece about how ganked up New York public schools are. “Down 136,000 Students in Just Four Years, New York City's Public Schools Manage To Spend Billions More: Look for these budgetary swindles at a failing K-12 system near you.”

* Presented without comment, from The New York Times: “How Christian Cooper, the Central Park Birder, Spends His Sundays. The author and host of ‘Extraordinary Birder’ enjoys a meditative moment, complete with lute music, among the native plants in his rooftop garden.”

* Comment of the Week comes from inveterate value-adder L Brown:

Here's the 1984 memo from Sid Sheinberg, the studio executive who wanted the alternative title of Space Man From Pluto instead of Back to the Future; he thought his own title had 'heat, originality and projects fun' whilst Back to the Future made it appear to be a 'genre' film:

https://twitter.com/mccrabb_will/status/967838222179909632?lang=eu

Turns out Sheinberg discovered one Steven Spielberg after seeing his 1968 short film Amblin and put him on contract to direct TV shows for MCA/Universal. Spielberg also made Duel and after that Sheinberg gave him the budget to make Jaws and later oversaw the likes of ET, Jurassic Park and Schindler's List.

But back to the memo. Director Bob Zemekis was apparently mortified when he saw it. So Executive Producer Spielberg wrote back a pretty great response:

"Thanks for your most humorous memo. We all got a big laugh out of it. Keep 'em coming."

And, as they say, the rest is movie history, folks.

Sid Sheinberg obit here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/obituaries/sidney-sheinberg-dead.html

Outro music comes from one of the music industry’s big deaths this past week: