You mention one of the magical saints of print. O yes, we must remember the great Frazier and his many definitions of duende, the Spanish notion beloved of Garcia Lorca, the almost divine element that lifts a dancer or singer or a moment or a painting into transcendence. The Frazierism that comes to mind was a distinction between class or style, and duende, and his example was Joe DiMaggio. When the great DiMag turned his back to the plate and raced to catch a deep fly at the centerfield wall in the Stadium — that was indeed the nth degree of style. But when he threw Peter Lawford out of Marilyn Monroe’s funeral… that was duende! I was addicted to George in the days when he wrote six long columns a week in the Boston Herald. When that gig came to grief, I was proud to play a hand in restoring him to his native Boston readership in his great late efflorenscence in the Globe of the early Seventies. Yes, there were astonishing newspaper writers once upon a time. George was as good as the best of them — to wit, Murray Kempton, Jimmy Breslin, Russell Baker.

Now if you look on the web you can hardly find a thing that Frazier wrote. For that matter there is not much about him with the exception of his article about the art of wearing clothes which was his greatest hit I guess.

This memory had me on a hunt that turned up these couple of links:

The Art of Wearing Clothes (Frazier’s articles)

Jazz, George Frazier, and late-Night Boston Richard Vacca on the character he was and his short jazz writing career (before my time).

“So we have a situation, we’re entering now a world where we’re going to have cascades and cascades and cascades of information, like rain, and none of it will reach the flower of truth.”

Regards

——-
Andy

There is so much I want to say, but it would be difficult to say it without making it anything but a messy list of ideas and observations. The problem is, I don’t think there really is not “a” solution, that all we can hope to do is improve various parts of the news media process (process is such a strange word to use, but it’s the most appropriate that I can think of). And solutions are going to be disparate.

I will submit this observation though: In the show, it’s said one of the most important things is to get people to care. One of the mixed blessings of the fall of the authoritative voice of credible major newspapers is that more and more the voice considered the most authoritative is that of a person one feels a personal connection with. A friend! I think for people here, the problems will be clear (the echo chamber effect, 15-hour-a-week talk radio show hosts filling the friend role), but this is also a great way to get people to care, to get people involved. This might be used for more good than ill someday.

Actually, one more: I recall hearing once (maybe on Open Source) that young people often attempt to do charity work on their own, instead of joining an established organization or even working together. I feel there are probably similar problems in the blogging community.