[Edits 4/15/13.]
There are a few items in the works:
There are a few items in the works:
1. Movie reviews. There
are more movie reviews, some of which have been contemplated or in process for
some time.
2. Last Skoder entry. The
set of things I did on pseudonymous Skoder in the fall seemed potentiated or
stimulated by Hurricane Sandy and the havoc it caused, though in principle I’d
wanted to do something on Skoder for some time beforehand. Also, Eugene
Mulvihill’s unexpected death provided an obvious occasion for delivering some
of the Skoder stuff, along with the fact that I thought local news coverage on
his passing was inadequate (almost patronizing) and some politicians’ comments
on him were myopic at best. Anyway, there’s only
one more entry on Skoder—and I think I owe this to some readers, since my November 6 entry on Gene Mulvihill has come to have one of the
biggest numbers of links (by far) of my whole set of entries (and I heralded
this Part 2 anyway, here).
This coming entry will be “Fraud in the Caymans (1970s), News-Editor Bias
(1989), Part 2 of 2,” following an entry I did in December. It will focus on some very interesting stuff that happened in summer
1989, when I did stringer reporting in Vernon Township
for a few weeks. I have been holding off on writing it for a number of reasons;
why I would pursue it is largely to give
some interesting insight on Mr. Mulvihill, because it will show how, in all
fairness to him, he was hounded by people who were skeptical (in an especially
strong way at the time) of what he was doing on a mountaintop with his company Great American
Recreation and what his motives were. I was assigned a story by who was the
editor of The Vernon News at the time, Skoder, and this project turned out to
be complicated, not least due to the weird way in which it was assigned (i.e.,
in its original conception). [Update: Due to a change in priorities, the final set of entries will tend to focus more on Skoder than on how Mulvihill was hounded.] The actual 1989 story that I drafted (it is in
typescript form) is worth a look in its own right, though it is written in a somewhat
crude way (in terms of journalistic technique, not tone; it reflected that my
experience at the time did not feature much journalism, nor has traditional
journalism ever been an aim of mine); it also is unedited. But it isn’t
unreadable for all that.
The article includes snippets
from an interview I had with Mr. Mulvihill. In working on the Part 2 blog entry
“Fraud…,” I will also look anew at my notes from the 1989 interview with Mr. M.—I
will decide what items I will use (if any) and why—but he made one very earthy
comment (not included in my 1989 story draft) that showed how frank he could be
about, from his perspective as a real estate developer, a local environment that
he probably regarded, understandably enough, as a vast pain in the ass (and
with his frank comment, he knew that in me he was talking to a stringer
reporter). This worst part of the Part 2 blog story concerns Skoder herself,
who showed herself in 1989 to be starkly unprofessional, and this to other
people, not just me. It will be necessary to recount some of this to show what
a bearish situation this 1989 reporting assignment was. (Partly as a result of
this, I have generally never counted my paid editorial work to have started
with my brief tenure at The Vernon News
in 1989.) So be patient—this very interesting story will come, but I won’t rush
into it. [Update: It appears as a set of entries, one entry on my other blog and the rest on this blog.]
3. “Marvin Center
Days.” One short series I have started producing concerns my years of
working at my university’s (George Washington University’s) Cloyd Heck Marvin Center, the large student union building, in
Washington, D.C. This won’t just be a reminiscence, but it will partly reflect
my, so to speak, developing a case for a future career, or at least show how my
career aims have developed within the contexts of very different industries
over 30+ years. There are a lot of colorful stories from this time (1980-85),
and it has the benefit of being pretty free from the pettiness and pointless
competitiveness and infringements that have plagued my work in publishing in
New Jersey over the past two decades.
4. “Radium Days.” Another
item I’ve been warming up to doing is an account of a famous set of events in
1986-87, tied to the State of New Jersey’s plan to dump radium-contaminated
soil—actually, mix it in with soil already here, and laying it down on the
ground—in a portion of Wawayanda State Park, in Vernon Township (in Sussex
County). The contaminated soil had come largely or entirely from Essex County.
A series of public protests—some quite creative—erupted in Vernon Township
(there was also activism in the nearby village of Warwick,
N.Y.), with the eventual result that the New Jersey state plan was reversed
(the contaminated soil was eventually shipped out of state). I had written an
outline and narrative things on this business (one done about 25 years ago,
maybe), and I have considered doing a non-online “package” of material on it
for distribution via mail. The big sticking point is that I have photographs I
took of some of the public activism, and so far, I can’t find them. (And even
if I did, I would have to transform them into Internet-usable photos.) So this
interesting feature will come together somehow; just don’t hold your breath.
5. “Pentimento pause.”
Another feature I have considered, which will be very sporadic and at my
discretion, will be future entries that will assess, or update, things I said
in my blog entries from 2012. A pentimento,
you might know, is a painting or otherwise pictorial artist’s redoing a section
of a work, such as painting over something with something else. I believe
Lillian Hellman wrote a book titled Pentimento,
but I don’t know much about it at all.
