Comfort Food

A few days ago I had a curious and intense craving for liver and onions. On the first day I ignored it, but when it proved not to be a passing hunger, I gave in and went to the market to purchase calf liver and one large onion.

I eat liver approximately once every 2 years and have not ingested it steadily since childhood, when my grandfather would prepare it once or twice each month at the family home. It was always a curiosity, never something I especially liked or disliked.

As I prepared the odorous meal, I joked with my roommate and his girlfriend; was liver popular in Japan, where she is from? Perhaps I’m iron deficient, and my body is seeking to restore its balance, I told them. Perhaps I’m just getting old. After all, liver and onions is old man food, popularized during America’s Great Depression, when it was just about the cheapest cut of meat one could get.

I continued to talk as the liver sizzled in the pan, telling my roommate and his girlfriend all about the many portions of liver and onions shared with my grandfather, and how yes, I did indeed have odd tastes as a child.

The meal was delicious and comforting in a way that sometimes only food can manage, but the next day I continued to wonder at why this craving had emerged, seemingly from nowhere, after years of dormancy. The answer, it turned out, had been elusive only because it was so utterly obvious. Less than a week before my craving for liver and onions, in the midst of very stressful final exams, my grandfather had been diagnosed with cancer. I received updates from my family throughout the week, but because of final exams, work and a profound lack of sleep, I hadn’t really been able to process most of it.

Unable to process the feelings I had about my grandfather’s illness, it appears that I chose to digest them instead.

Media Responsibility in Framing Gender, Race & Difference

Three Men Walk Into a Chat Room

Three white males have just finished a discussion about professional sports, past experience, technology and what it means to build an audience. Two of these men are hosts of a talk show, one is their guest. As the first guest signs off, the next arrives, to much fanfare; he is an enigma, a black man celebrated for his status in a field dominated by white men. He is treated as somewhat of a curiosity, but is shown every hospitality and the respect due to his stature.

Before the conclusion of the segment, however, a second black man is paraded in. He is also a curiosity in the field, and is verbally poked and prodded in much the same fashion as the first, though now with less sensitivity, perhaps.

This talk show segment has gone from what may reasonably be perceived as an interview to a spectacle of difference. The subjects are celebrated for their novelty value; the hosts clearly do not know how to approach them in an adult manner, so they don’t.

Tour Chats

A scenario similar to this played out on Neil Browne’s Tour Chats, when an interview that was clearly intended to celebrate the internet character that is @mmmakio devolved into a panel that could rightly have been called “Asian Girls of Cycling” after @mplsminx showed up. The hosts seemed excited to have her, but once they did, they clearly had no idea what to do or say. Predictably, the hosts and the participating audience fell back on cherished cliche’s and double entendres.

All in Good Fun

So what is the problem with this if it’s all in good fun? The problem is that professional cycling, like much of the media landscape, is dominated by white males. It is a problem if the same people who openly criticize promoters for unequal pay in women’s racing use their privileged place in the media to unknowingly frame something that they are uncomfortable with (gender, race, difference) as a curiosity.

Karl Marx defined ideology with his famous quote “they don’t know it, but they are doing it,” and that is precisely what is happening here. No one is trying to marginalize women or asians as being different, but we are. When we ask women stupid, shallow questions and fall back on sexual innuendo when we don’t know what else to say, we reinforce that hegemony.

Something to Gain, Something to Lose

I’ve noticed a marked change in the electronically connected cycling fans that show up in my twitter feed. So-called “Snark” is all the rage, perhaps understandably so, since a sincere approach to cycling commentary or fandom will almost certainly end in failure. Relentless irony combined with the desire to promote one’s point of view, one’s blog, one’s self, have left a once contentious community hobbled and reluctant to say anything approaching the level of honesty that was present when the anti-doping movement was at its peak.

The pro cycling peanut gallery now suffers from the same condition as those in the professional peloton; they have a stake. It shows in everything, even that familiar point of view. They don’t know they’re doing it, but I can see it.

Dumb & Dumber

According to Outside Magazine, Tyler Hamilton was confronted by Lance Armstrong this past weekend at an Aspen restaurant. This is significant as Tyler Hamilton has recently testified against his former US Postal Service team leader in a federal criminal proceeding.

It appears that Armstrong has yet to learn his lesson, but while he was able to bully rivals in the peloton with impunity, the real world is quite a different place. More importantly, the world is an increasingly different place for Armstrong, whose problems are no longer measured solely in the metrics of public opinion, but also in legal statutes.

While it is unlikely that Armstrong will be prosecuted for the confrontation anywhere other than the court of public opinion, one wonders if the cyclist’s lawyers are concerned about the following section of the federal code:

United States Code: Title 18, Part I, Chapter 73, Section 1512: Tampering with a victim, witness or informant.

(d) Whoever intentionally harasses another person and thereby hinders, delays, prevents, or dissuades any person from—

(1) attending or testifying in an official proceeding;

(2) reporting to a law enforcement officer or judge of the United States the commission or possible commission of a Federal offense or a violation of conditions of probation ^[1] supervised release,,^[1] parole, or release pending judicial proceedings;

(3) arresting or seeking the arrest of another person in connection with a Federal offense; or

(4) causing a criminal prosecution, or a parole or probation revocation proceeding, to be sought or instituted, or assisting in such prosecution or proceeding;

or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 3 years, or both.

The Problem Professional Cycling Does Not Have

The one problem that sponsors, team owners, managers & riders all agree exists in professional cycling is a fallacy: The sport does not suffer from an image problem, it suffers from a drug problem.

Team managers, in particular, seem overly fond of referring to the sport’s image problem when speaking to the media about doping issues. Europcar Team Director Jean Rene Bernaudeau recently told Velonation.com that he hopes the Court of Arbitration for Sport find in favor of Alberto Contador in his clenbuterol case, otherwise the “image of cycling is going to suffer.”

Clearly something is amiss when the owner of a reputedly clean team is concerned with the image of the sport rather than the facts of a doping case against a former Tour de France winner. Where then does this imagined image problem come from?

The Parallax View

A parallax describes the condition of an object that appears to change in manifest shape or direction, when in reality it is the position of the observer that has changed. The same is true of ontological concepts, as explored by philosophers such as Hegel and Slavoj Zizek, who used the concept of a parallax view to explain the difference between the symbolic & the real.

Zizek suggests that the symbolic & the real are mutually exclusive, that a person can either be an ethical being (the symbolic) or the result of determined biology (the real), but never both. The space between these two possibilities represent an ontological blind spot, a parallax of sorts.

Far outside of such abstract notions, I would suggest that professional cycling has experienced a very real parallax of it’s own.

The Symbolic Bicycle Racer

Roland Barthes once proposed his sense of the myth of the Tour de France, and the importance of the symbolic nature of the bicycle racer:

“The stake of the combat,” Barthes wrote. “is not to know who will defeat the other, who will destroy the other, but who will best subjugate that third common enemy: nature…The severest ordeal that nature imposes on the racer is the mountain. The mountain: weight. Now to conquer the slopes and the weight of things is to allow that man can possess the entire physical universe. But this conquest is so arduous that moral man must commit himself to it altogether; that is why the mountain stages are the key to the Tour: not only because they determine the winner, but because they openly manifest the nature of the stake, the meaning of the combat, the virtues of the combatant…It is not muscle that wins. What wins is a certain idea of man and of the world, of man in the world. This idea is that man is fully defined by his action, and man’s action is not to dominate other men, it is to dominate things.”

The Real Bicycle Racer

While doping has always been a part of the Tour de France, two factors have forever changed the sport from being largely symbolic to all too real: The rise of global capitalism and the advance of medical technology.

The former has created the need for a more reliable means of winning, while the latter has provided teams with the means of providing sponsors with the financial security they demand. Champion cyclists can now be created by committee, medical technology providing the means to biologically perfect ‘the real.’

Turmoil Within, Turmoil Without

For the public, this battle has become internalized. One no longer sees the symbolic battle between the Tour de France racer and the world around him, but instead wonders at the battle within him; Has this man given in to the world of drugs, or does he race on bread & water alone?

In terms of the real, fans no longer look to a champion’s teammates in assessing his chances, but rather to his staff. Who is his doctor? What is the ethical record of his team manager? Where does he train, and with whom has he been training?

The space between the symbolic and the real, what Zizek would call the parallax view of professional cycling, contains the ontological area that should be of grave concern for anyone who cares deeply about the soul of the sport. It is this philosophical blind spot that contains the truth.

As for the present reality of the sport of professional cycling, there has been a very identifiable shift, and I am no longer speaking of the symbolic and the real. Factually speaking, the sport’s so called image problem represents a shift, not in reality, but in perspective.

The reality of professional cycling has remained constant since the introduction of EPO into the peloton, for whether 95% or 5% of the peloton are doped is inconsequential when the perception of the common fan is that there is no material truth to be known, but rather a subjective notion of faith in some small corner of the cycling world. If the reality of professional cycling has remained unchanged since the 1990′s we must, therefore, assume that it is merely our perspective that has changed.

The symbolic vantage point that we could never fully comprehend has given way to a reality that we can but barely endure. The world has seen behind the curtain, and there is no going back. Our fiction so completely informs the reality of daily life that no amount of science or testing can ever return cycling to what it once was. A new path must be forged, for while the truth may have saved professional cycling in 1999, the present situation requires something more.

There is a great change coming, and as with all change, times of great turmoil and uncertainty.

“Betrayed! Betrayed!” Kafka wrote in The Country Doctor. “A false alarm on the night bell once answered-it cannot be made good, not ever.”

2012: Symbolism & Irony in the End Times

Armageddon as a Team Sport

Marxist-Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has written extensively on the ways in which cinema expresses our deepest ideologies, those which otherwise lay buried in our collective subconscious. One hallmark of this behavior, he argues, is the function of the disaster film as our unconscious recognition of the impending collapse of global capitalism. Of the Roland Emmerich disaster film 2012, Zizek said the following:

“It perfectly embodies the typical liberal hypocrisy. It’s really a movie about how 99% of the people should die so that a stupid American family gets together. The lesson of catastrophe movies is usually to create, through this external threat, a big human solidarity. The lesson is very sad: That in order to reach solidarity today, we must, almost all of us, perish.”

This examination lends a useful model through which to appreciate the vast destruction that professional cycling has suffered toward the goal of solidarity in the anti-doping movement. Many have perished, many more will & still we are divided.

The Transfiguration of Bernie & Lance

Capitalism has fallen on hard times, but Zizek is quick to point out that it is due a flaw in the system, rather than individual failures in morality. While making it clear that he finds Bernie Madoff to be a “disgusting creep”, the Slovenian philosopher finds him to be guilty only of mastering the capitalist system too well.

“This cheap moralization of the (global financial) crisis,” Zizek has said. “as though it’s not the system, but (Bernie) Madoff. I almost felt a certain sympathy for him, he was for me, the ideal postmodern capitalist. At the same time you ruthlessly speculate to the limit, half of your profits you give to different foundations…starving children in Africa, whatever. He, for me, is not a freak: He is, for me, just a little bit too pure an embodiment of what the system pushes you to be.”

In the world of professional cycling, no height is greater than victory in the Tour de France. In repeatedly conquering the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong seemed to become the ideal professional cyclist. In relentlessly profiting from this ideal, he came to represent global capitalism in its most pure form. From illness to wellness, failure to victory & poverty to wealth: Lance Armstrong transformed himself from a man to a brand, and like Madoff, his transfiguration ends as a cultural symbol of purist ideology driven to the brink.

The Semiotics of Downfall

The irony of the cinematic portrait of 2012 as a metaphor for the impending collapse of global capitalism may become doubled if Lance Armstrong’s trial commences in the coming year. Semiotics use the structure of Signifier, Signified & Sign to interpret myth & meaning in media texts.

If Lance Armstrong is the signifier, and his corruption & downfall are the signification, how will the world come to interpret the sign?

@autofact @ DJPDX#

The University of Oregon hosted a one day digital journalism camp in downtown Portland last week. It provided an interesting venue for professional and student journalists, bloggers, media & tech workers to come together and discuss their thoughts on the past, present & future of media.

My initial reaction was dread at the preponderance of men dressed in jeans & sport coats patrolling the room, looking as self-conscious of their tightly gripped iPad’s as they did their newly pierced ears.

Still, I persevered, and I’m glad for it. While the moderators were often terrible, panel members offered their own experiences on what has worked for them, what has not and how they are working to keep up with the rapidly changing digital environment.

The panel on media ethics in a digital world lacked a broad approach, but made up for it with a very in-depth examination of what the presenter offered as the number one concern for digital journalists: Transparency.

Staff members from Oregon Business Journal, Portland Mercury and other publications spoke at length about how they use daily online content, such as blogs and news briefs, to break news that compliments their weekly, bi-weekly and monthly print publications. This was particularly helpful for me, as it reinforced a lot of ideas that I have about how we can better integrate new media into our print operation at the Daily Vanguard.

Journalist Courtney Sherwood spoke about web databases that can help in backgrounding sources, which provided a largely blog-centric audience with skills that are more common to traditional journalism.

Keynote speaker Mark S. Luckie, of the Washington Post, provided an interesting and inspiring lecture on innovation in the field of journalism. He provided helpful examples of practical innovations in using technology to get the most out of journalistic content, while also addressing the need for constant innovation.

Once Upon A Time in the West

Once Upon A Time in the West is a 1969 Italian spaghetti western epic, directed by Sergio Leone. It features widescreen cinematography, a lush score by longtime Leone collaborator Ennio Morricone and a cast that includes western film legends Jack Elam, Jason Robards, Henry Fonda & Charles Bronson.

While it encapsulates many of the themes present in the classic westerns of John Ford, Leone’s magnum opus can be called the first classic of post-modern western films.

A man without a name searches the western plains for a black-hearted villain whose name rings far & wide, encountering along the way men with good hearts and bad habits, and women who do the best that they can to maintain their virtue in the harsh landscape of the old west.

The film addresses the classic themes of western expansion & manifest destiny, the struggle to maintain innocence and identity on the frontier, as well as the adversarial relationship between commerce and masculinity at the turning of the century.

The film has enjoyed massive commercial and critical success since its release, and is an important document of the critical role that history plays in shaping the myths that help to define our culture.

Once Upon A Time in the West is not only a visual masterpiece, and a landmark of cinema, but also a strong reminder of how we imbue our history with thoughts on masculinity, identity and commerce.