Among those of us who experienced what might be called a "difficult" relationship with mainstream newspapering, one of the jokes about newspapers' numbing institutional voice was that that voice must never, ever risk offending the kind of fine and decent ladies you find serving meatballs and lefse at a Lutheran church dinner. Such ladies were the acid test for hyper-cautious, risk-averse newspapering, for what flew and what didn't. If you could imagine the meatball ladies being shocked, the story or phrasing got the "delete" button.
Well, here's a dark secret. The average second and third tier daily newspaper newsroom was/is full of incipient Lutheran meatball ladies (and men), people who have assigned themselves the task of rigorously assessing the naughtiness quotient of topics and wording. If you're a reporter, good luck getting every day, garden variety, workplace-tested sexual vernacular past that crowd.
So imagine my amazement, (and sophomoric amusement), when I leafed through the latest edition of Vita.Mn, the Star Tribune's latest weekly vehicle for, like, rollin' with the dudes. There was "Alexis on the Sexes", the freebie's sex columnist, dispensing sage counsel and I dare say, encouragement to couples interested in exploring the exotic delights of anal sex.
Well ... from my experience with daily newspapering, I can assure you that decent women and certainly no men in the newsroom would dare mention such a concept above a furtive whisper, the latter out of fear of a call from HR. (A bit of an exaggeration there. In certain "safe zones", such topics were discussed, sometimes ad nauseam).
Vita.Mn of course isn't a mainstream daily, is it? But unlike the various free weeklies that have come and gone around town this one IS owned and operated and edited by the Star Tribune, where encouraging readers to try anal sex is about as remote a concept as suggesting some Hadassah lady set herself on fire on the Guthrie thrust stage.
I called Tim Campbell, the droll fellow who edits Vita.Mn AND the Strib's A&E section. I asked about the reaction to the column. "About what you'd expect," he said. Not much from the public, really. The target audience of precocious teens, college kids, twenty-somethings and pervy geezers took it all in stride, and in fact, said Campbell, they respond far more to fashion stories than "Alexis on the Sexes". (The presumption being, I guess, that all the aforementioned, with the exception of the pathetic pervy geezers, long ago included anal sex as a regular part of their sexual regimen and therefore are really far more concerned with accessory trends.)
Campbell said the intra-newsroom chatter about the column was also fairly predictable, with the usual guardians of righteous propriety, ("a-choomeatball ..."), expressing horror and declaring ... again ... the great and grand institution of the Star Tribune was poised, verily, on the precipice of a terrible slippery slope. If back door lovin' was now appropriate conversation within their sacred, Big "J" journalistic halls, (and mine you, without a breath of moral condemnation!), why every facet of truth, fairness and accuracy, will soon be dragged into disrepute.
As I say, attempts by mainstream newspapers to reach those much-coveted "younger readers" are often laughable. (I mean look at WHO is pretending to be hip!). Such attempts are doomed until Big "J" papers figure out a way to interact with that crowd on ... the crowd's terms ... not the terms of the paper's risk averse, (and often extraordinarily nerdy), meatball ladies/men-in-training. If that means a sex column, so be it. But don't -- and Campbell has not -- then censor the sex columnist.
Frankly, I suspect today's kids have access to so much sexual information -- and sexual bullshit -- they hardly demand it from an actual paper newspaper. But, if you're the big, lumbering corporate publisher trying to reach kids, talking sex comes with the territory, which means you've got to demonstrate a semblance of crede. As in tossing in a column on tips and tricks for back door lovin' with an attitude of nonchalance.
Somehow that led me to ask Campbell if Claude Peck and Rick Nelson's
very amusing, very gay Sunday "conversation" column, "Withering Glance", might be a good fit for Vita.Mn? You know, maybe in an expanded, unfettered sort of form?
Campbell thought a moment, conceded that when Peck and Nelson get into vivisecting fashion disasters Vita.Mn's audience would probably connect, but then, on second thought, no. "I think they're probably just too old."
Brutal. And just when you were thinking every gay guy was forever hip. Instead ... Peck and Nelson consigned to a wing of the same musty floor as other geezers and meatball ladies, the hetero ones who woo-hooed and scowled at the mere mention of back door love.
Pritchard, to whom do you mean to address your rambling, incoherent and typically left coast self-satisfied post? Lambert? I believe he was basically praising the Strib for finding a way to run an end around the editorial mandarins and providing a window of voyeurism for us middle-aged douches into the sex habits of Twin Cities 20-somethings. Me, for poking fun at the cheap argot of the Vita.Mn writer dismissing the demographic to which, sadly, Lambert, Campbell and myself are members? Middle-aged old douches who are not welcome in the mise en scene of anal sex and ice bars tended by hotties in fur portrayed in Vita.Mn? As for the MN "heimat", perhaps you've missed its thirty four or so years on the air, but Garrison Keillor's (a better Edgar Reitz) Prairie Home Companion has done rather more to limn the MN "heimat" than home boys brothers Cohen in their over-the-top and very funny caricature of your stereotype of MN, "Fargo." I take it "The Big Lebowski" sums up the entirety of the L.A. "heimat" for you as well.
So if something would be deemed inappropriate for the Star-Tribune, it shouldn't be in their weekly aimed at the younger generation? It's hard to believe this is actually your argument, but you develop it at such length that it seems like you actually believe it. But this would mean you don't really understand the concept of a separate publication for a separate audience. So I don't really get where you're coming from.
I would think people in places like Minneapolis would welcome anything that would free others' expectations from the Oh-Golly-Yeah-Gee stereotype that "Fargo" attached to your land. (In fact, before that movie came along, people didn't even have a mental image of your frozen heimat. Now, at least, we have a stereotype.) But if you're happy with the stereotype, then by all means keep freaking out if someone mentions door number two.
A Lutheran
from San Francisco
Sorry, I meant to write, "we" are not welcome at the ice bar and Vita.mn, not just Brian. We're all douches now (sigh).
Funny bit, but I need to clarify a couple of things that got tangled in translation, lest I get killed by co-workers -- and I'm not talking about the Lutheran ladies.
I'm not the editor of Vita.mn -- Simon Peter Groebner is (though I supervise it and helped develop it); I edit the Friday Scene section, as well as working on Sunday A&E (Claude Peck is the editor of that section)
I don't have any sense that readers are responding more to fashion than Alexis. What I told Brian is that, anecdotally, we seeing that quite a few readers really like our fashion page.
When Brian asked whether "Withering Glance" would work in Vita.mn, my first reaction was indeed no, mainly because the column is so strongly identified with the Star Tribune and also -- yes -- because it often reflects a, uh, more mature point of view. (See: Last Sunday's column on shoveling sidewalks.) But my second thought was actually: Yes, it could fit when it focuses on fashion.
I guess what really underlies my hesitancy is a hope that Vita.mn will contain less, not more, Star Tribune material. Our street-fashion feature and Alexis are both exclusive to the magazine, and maybe that's why people are responding positively to them.
Well, Savage Love has been on the polymorphous perversity beat for some time now. But, granted, his column doesn't run in a daily newspaper run by granny panty-wearing biddies, and pleated Docker's-sportin' Menard's card holders.
But this hipness factor is a double-edged sword for guys our age who still like to get out for a few cocktails at the venue of the moment once in awhile. To wit, this from the previous issue of Vita.mn on the ice bar at Chambers:
"The chilly atmosphere and fashionable (i.e., hot) bartenders make for all sorts of pathetic banter from the middle-aged rich guys who sometimes seem to overpopulate the place. I watched one douche, I mean dude, tell the bartender he wished he could warm up in her hat.
"She struck down his puny line with ease: 'No, you need to bring your own hat.'
"Ouch."
"Douche"? Ah, yes, ouch, indeed. No doubt this represents the quintessence of a dope off da' hizzy riposte in the Vita.mn demo, worthy of the Algonquin Card Table. But it's bad news for our demo, Lambo. You are not welcome at the ice bar, or Vita.mn. Sorry, douche.