Why the Rolling Stone Cover is Wrong

People are furious over the cover of Rolling Stone featuring alleged mass murderer/terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.  There are protests, calls for banning, and general upsettedness about the cover.

Rolling Stone's official response is pretty weak - I will instead link to the much stronger piece by Rolling Stone Contributing Editor Matt Taibbi explaining the cover and his reaction to it.  You can read it here.  Please do so. I'll wait.

(Incidentally, if you've never read Taibbi's work before, do so.  And keep doing so.  He's one of the best reporters out there.)

This is the strongest defense of the cover I have seen thus far.  He is articulate, reasoned, and makes many great points about the investigative reporting quality regularly found in Rolling Stone, possibly the best in the country in the mass-media magazine market.

However, in his reasoning about the cover, Taibbi is one thing that he so very rarely manages to be.  He is Wrong.  The cover IS a big deal, because this is not the cover of any other mass media magazine.  It is the Cover of the Rolling Stone.

The site rockpaper.net has an archive of all the Rolling Stone covers ever done, and from this archive list I have chosen to look at the 2000's as an example.  Thirteen and a half years of covers.  For individual cover photographs of people who weren't the current President of the United States or an entertainer (meaning musicians, actors, TV personalities, or Shaun White), we have the following:

http://rollingstoneauthentic.com/files/RS0853-550x660.jpg

http://rollingstoneauthentic.com/files/RS0961-550x660.jpg

http://www.catchandreleasebooks.com/shop_image/product/4aa4e5a0669dd612924042a48d538c1c.jpg

http://hstbooks.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/7092281.jpg

http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/18/1870/8LX8D00Z/posters/stephen-danelian-howard-dean-rolling-stone-no-941-february-2004.jpg

http://cast.thirdage.com/files/originals/steve-jobs-cover.jpg

Thirteen and a half years.  SIX covers.  FIVE people.  Three Presidential candidates, one iconic writer intimately connected to Rolling Stone, and an Industry Legend who fundamentally shifted the way we consume media.  The Jobs and Thompson covers were also in honor of their passing (one Thompson cover for his death, one for reminisces two years later).

It is true that Rolling Stone sometimes does covers for their political reporting, but there is a very noticeable difference in those covers:

http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/18/1870/3VX8D00Z/posters/robert-grossman-george-w-bush-rolling-stone-no-999-may-2006.jpg

http://rollingstoneauthentic.com/files/RS1012-550x660.jpg

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/pictures/2010-rolling-stone-covers-20100302/rolling-stone-covers-1096-you-idiots-planets-worst-enemies-44224048

http://rollingstoneauthentic.com/files/RS1165-550x748.jpg

http://i.ebayimg.com/t/Rolling-Stone-1063-JOHN-McCAIN-Jackson-Browne-Carlos-Santana-Of-Montreal-/00/s/MTYwMFgxMjAw/z/5fEAAMXQM0FRfAzh/$(KGrHqZ,!lQFEH3hWDn)BRf!zhSPFQ~~60_35.JPG

I missed a couple for brevity.  But the point is, they are not photographs.  They are drawings, cartoons, and graphics.

A portrait cover on Rolling Stone is a cultural touchstone that has been with us for most of our lives.  It is a symbol of an entertainment figure having "made it", and truly making a dent in popular culture.  There are even songs about it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ux3-a9RE1Q

(fun fact - written by Shel Silverstein)

Rolling Stone themselves are well aware of their cover's place in popular culture history, as evinced by this book available at Amazon, Rolling Stone 1,000 Covers:

http://www.amazon.com/Rolling-Stone-000-Covers-Influencial/dp/0810958651/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374336640&sr=1-3&keywords=rolling+stone+cover+to+cover

"For the past 39 years, the covers of Rolling Stone have depicted the great icons of popular culture, from John Lennon, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Madonna to Steve Martin, Uma Thurman, and Richard Nixon. Often it was an appearance on the cover that launched a performer’s legendary status in the first place."

Rolling Stone has also proffered up issues devoted entirely to their photography, the careful construction of it, and the impact on culture:

http://i.ebayimg.com/t/ROLLING-STONE-958-The-50-Photographs-Sep-30-2004-HM-/15/!B81lKL!!Wk~$(KGrHqQOKoYEz!t)jnMpBM4Fselmzg~~0_35.JPG

Carefully crafted, meticulously detailed.  Not found photographs.

And as for the nature of that found photograph, there is an issue of presentation.  Taibbi (and others) point out the photo has been used multiple times in multiple other venues.  Setting aside the argument about the Rolling Stone cover's iconic status, let's look at image presentation.  Here is the image from the Taibbi article from the New York Times:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/files/2013/07/nyttsarnaev.jpg

Note the arm position.  The extension of the right arm clearly indicates this photo as a "selfie", a photo taken by himself, most likely with his phone.  There are thousands of them taken by teens and twenty-somethings everywhere.  It is an unremarkable photo that does not stick in the memory.

Here is the Rolling Stone crop for the cover:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/tsarnaev-rollingstone-290.jpeg

Any remnant of the right arm remaining is removed by cropping and text.  It now looks posed, professional, and striking.  Which is what cropping is supposed to do.  But it is no longer the same picture that Taibbi cited.  It has been altered to be remembered.  And in so altering, it removes the excuse of 'everyone else has used it'.

Add the image alteration to the cultural expectations of what goes into the magic of  Rolling Stone cover, and it makes sense that people thought this was a professional cover shoot done by Rolling Stone.

In Rolling Stone's defense, another controversial cover has also been cited, reaching back to 1970, and the cover article of Charles Manson.

http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/0c9109c71ea0524d9fe840f91fabd67bb94a26a9/r=537&c=0-0-534-712/local/-/media/USATODAY/test/2013/07/17/1374076265000-XXX-manson-1970-rolling-stone-1307171152_3_4.jpg

Setting aside trying to stake precedence on a cover that is 43 years old, the Manson cover makes sense due to the pop culture ties of the time.  His "family" lived together in a commune similar to hundreds of other hippie communes of the time.  He named his "family members" after Beatles songs ('Lovely Rita', 'Sexy Sadie', etc.), and believed a war called "Helter Skelter" needed to be waged.  He was a musician and a songwriter, with one of his songs performed on the Guns 'n Roses 1993 album "The Spaghetti Incident" (to the shock, horror, and outrage of everyone not named W. Axl Rose.).  He was the dark side of the counter-culture of the time, and the main media outlet of that culture was...Rolling Stone.  

I called the cover a violation of trust, and my friend Jeff, a journalist himself, called me on that as a very bold statement.  As shown by the evidence, I stand by it.  Rolling Stone has spent the last 50 years defining their cover as a cultural touchstone, with a very specific set of expectations attached to it.  In an age where the print magazine is running into digital issues, Rolling Stone maintains a presence, allowing for in-depth journalism of the type Taibbi mentions as dying in other outlets.  It is protected by the sanctity of the cover, a cultural icon recognizable to most everyone in the Western World.  To defend it as "just a magazine cover" is at best disingenuous, at worst threatens the iconic status and therefore the survival of the entity itself.  

Works cited:


"Helter Skelter (Manson scenario)", Wikipedia.  Web.  Accessed 7-20-2013

"Look at Your Game, Girl", Wikipedia.  Web.  Accessed 7-20-2013

"Rolling Stone 1,000 Covers", Amazon.  Web.  Accessed 7-2--2013

"Rolling Stone Magazine Database", Rock Paper.  Web.  Accessed 7-20-2013

Dr. Hook, "Cover of the Rolling Stone".  Youtube.  Web.  Accessed 7-20-2013

Taibbi, Matt, "Explaining the Rolling Stone cover, by a Boston native", Rolling Stone. Web.  Accessed 7-20-2013

All photos cited individually.  All rights reserved by the copyright holders.

Finding "North"

About 31 pages into Roads, by Larry McMurtry, I hated the book, for reasons of a difference in preferential geography.  He is a man of the Texas plains, and a need for big sky. On page 31, he begins very simply with “I don’t generally like northern places”(31) and continues for much of the book to intermittently bash my beloved New England. 

To his credit, he does later on state that we all have our own particular geography we are attached to – his own preference for plains, or Hemingway’s attraction to northern Michigan, generally an attraction formed in our youth and stays as a certain vantage point.  I’ll give it to him.

The other difficulty I had was his intention of just looking at roads.  He specifically cited William Least Heat Moon’s books as the antithesis of what he wanted to do.  He didn’t want to meet people at all, and prided himself on saying a grand total of 14 words to three other people during an entire day trip.  His aim was to travel only interstates – end to end of the big roads that exist primarily to get people from point A to point B.  Charles Kurault once said the unfortunateness of the interstate system is the ability to drive from coast to coast and not see a damn thing.  McMurtry’s intention, at first, seems to be a book-long treatise on proving not only that Kurault was right, but that it wasn’t in fact a bad thing.

“I want to drive them…just to see what I see.”(23)

My own favorite road trips don’t involve the road itself, but involve the stops along the way, and it is the same with my favorite travel books as well.  So having this as a central premise was a bit off-putting.  However, I kept at it, and I’m glad that I did.

First, McMurtry is a rare-book dealer, and going through his narrative I came across titles I had never heard of, and would have unlikely cause to ever hear of.  Some I may never be able to put my hands on, but some of his journeys and rare sales make for some interesting combinations of thought that I never would have put together.  West Virginia and Milton, for example.  (He knows of someone who has a rare first edition of Paradise Lost with an intact title page out on one of his trips.)

He has a few choice words for Hemingway, travelling to northern Michigan to specifically view the geography of Hemingway’s early Nick Adams stories.  Travelling to Hemingway’s house in Key West, he is horrified by the furniture, notes that the Key West house was purchased after he did his best work, and wants to know which of his later wives was responsible for the furniture.  Best not to know too much about our favorite writers, so as not to have issues between personality and art.

The purpose for the travels doesn’t really come into play until the later part of the book, as he is travelling west from Washington, D.C., where he lived for 20 years as a rare-book dealer.  Following heart surgery, he suffered a profound depression that took years to return to a functional state of mind. 

“I don’t really expect my old personality to be waiting for me at a rest stop in Tennessee, or a Waffle House in Arkansas, but I am still listening for chords I haven’t heard in a while, wondering if a passage in a book or a place I once liked along the road will cause them to sound again.” (164)

He goes back to Proust over and over, “looking not for lost time, but lost feelings”.  It’s a taking stock book in a lot of ways. He spends a lot of time on growing up on the plains, looking at Highway 281, which he claims as “his river”, not having the mighty Mississippi of Twain and so many others.

The book comes to an end when McMurtry reaches the T of Route 2 and 281 in North Dakota, the northernmost point of 281.  He always wondered, as a boy, where 281 went as it went north.  (He knew the southern tip – no mystery there.)  His grandfather told him “Oklahoma”, not having been much of a traveler himself.

And it is at the top of 281 that he reaches an epiphany, and ceases his desire to wander, at least for a time.  He remembers a book by the cowboy Teddy Blue called We Pointed Them North, where a young and less-than worldly cowpoke thought that North was an actual place, a real destination or town.  And at the head of 281, McMurtry found his “North” – a mystical place along the lines of Shangri-La, Xanadu, and Home, that place one can never return to.

McMurtry laments that the problem with roads is one he realized several years ago with women – there are too many nice ones, and that means you are going to miss some.  It’s a simple fact of life.  “One of the saddening facts of life is that there is always going to be a delightful woman somewhere who, for whatever accident of timing or attraction, simply slips by and recedes, to return only in a dream.” (204)

He ends with summation of fiction primarily asking the questions of “Where does the road go?  And how is one to marry?”(206)  Possibly too simplistic, but essential questions of Life, to be sure.

I am glad McMurtry found his “North”, though it seems to be more of an internal sense rather than an actual place.  On reflection, “North” is always that – be it Shangri-La, Xanadu, or Home – an idea, a state of resting the wandering mind, drinking from Frost’s grail in “Directive”. 

“Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” (Frost, Directive)

  Drink deep, my friends.  In this summer of my 40^th year, I aim to spend a lot of time drinking to resolve my confusion.  (Metaphorically, of course – it’s been my experience that literal tends to add to the confusion rather than resolve it.)  With any luck, I’ve got a few years on this road, and I aim to make them count.  J

Town changes - originally from May 6, 2013

This is something I wrote back on May 6th, but have just now gotten around to posting.  Hope you enjoy.

Le Roy has a history of tearing down its historical landmarks.  Many cities, big and small, had a brief period of time in the 60’s where “urban renewal” caused them to tear down a great many irreplaceable buildings in the name of Progress, but Le Roy has not been limited in scope to modern urban renewal.  This is a practice that has been under way pretty much since Le Roy was incorporated.

The first accredited Women’s College, Ingham University, was located right along the banks of the Oatka Creek, starting in the 1850’s.  It had a music conservatory, art program, and an academic program as rigorous as any men’s college at the time.  Today, no buildings remain, all of them torn down around the turn of the century.  The stones from the conservatory were used to build the town library, but that was decades later.  The rest was used for fill for the bridge.  There’s a plaque, but that’s it.

A striking round building housed the Unitarian Universalist church at the corner of Main and Lake until 1854, when it was torn down and the Masons built a temple there.  It was in turn torn down in 2008 for a Walgreens.  A fantastic mansion was torn down in a row of mansions for an Acme Supermarket, now a Sav-A-Lot.  (The mansion next door is for sale, and I have to imagine the property value suffers due to the supermarket.  It is going for less than a ranch house in the swankier Rochester suburbs.)

Factories that produced patent medicine, a real Dining-car diner built in Silver Springs, various other historic dwellings, the first church – all have been razed.  The Jello Factory has been spared the wrecking ball, but I think that was only due to timing (Jello left town in 1964), and now with Jello being a point of pride of the town it will never be torn down.  It is commercial space in an odd section of town, with a small plaque.  The LeRoy House, containing the Jello Museum and Historical Society, is the last building left of the LeRoy Institute, which was also torn down and used for backfill.

The Walgreens incident was a particular sore point with the town preservationists, mostly due to the land in question being private and in a commercial corridor, so the tearing down of a 19^th century Masonic Hall and putting up a distinctly modern drug store needed no public comment whatsoever.  And it was with this backdrop that the battle over the Wiss Hotel began.

The Wiss Hotel was not a beautiful building – a squat, three story brick structure on the corner of Main and Lake, right across from the Walgreens.  It was empty and abandoned when I moved here in 2010, home only to hundreds of cats that would stare out at you if you walked down Main Street late at night.  A few of my neighbors have memories of the Wiss as a flophouse with a bar in the first floor, the flophouse duties being taken over by the old hotel by the train tracks at 66 Lake Ave.  (An address that shows up in the police report at least once a month – last time for a guy who tried to hit a friend with a bottle of vodka while an underage girl was simultaneously giving him head.) 

The town quietly took possession of the Wiss during a nationally-covered outbreak of Mass Hysteria/Tourette’s of a number of high school girls, burying a story of the owners of the Wiss and connections to the sale of land for the high school built only ten years ago instead of on land freely available by previous educational deed.  Taxes hadn’t been paid for years, and the county passed on collecting the property and let the town take it.

Noise was made about tearing down the structure and replacing it with either a Dunkin Donuts or a Taco Bell, and with that, the preservationists swung into action.  There was no specific love for the Wiss as a building, but the idea of the town gateway from the Thruway being a Walgreens and a Taco Bell was too much. 

An LLC was formed, and an architect was hired to determine the structural soundness of the Wiss Hotel.  He determined it to be salvageable, and the LLC spoke of plans to turn the Wiss into luxury apartments and storefront space.

It wasn’t a love for the Wiss itself, but the viewing of it as an anchor of the downtown row on the east run of Main Street.  The edges have been chipped away for years on the south side of the street, while the north side was a strong, old-fashioned row making a quaint downtown district.  The district ends at the creek – an abandoned restaurant on the south side, and the post office on the north side (built in 1936, after the village had torn down a storefront block rumored to have been a hiding spot for Fredrick Douglass as he fled north to freedom).  The concern was maintaining the character of downtown LeRoy.

Town meetings were contentious.  The LLC wished to purchase the building, and also put forward concerns about the asbestos content of the building and the abatement as the building came down.  The LLC was willing to pay the town 10,000 dollars, while the tearing down would cost 155K. 

The town supervisors were dead set against it.  There were serious leakage issues, they said, and there had been for years.  They disputed the cursory structural assessment of the architect, saying a full assessment was needed. 

Full frustration and anger swung into action.  Articles about the town history pointed out that the Wiss was possibly the oldest standing commercial structure in the village.  Visions of the Wiss as a cornerstone of the revitalization of LeRoy with luxury apartments (never mind the glut of rental units on the market already), and support from the owner of the McDonalds (which tore down the Dining Car on Main St) and the owner of the Creekside Inn (still vacant years later with no sign of opening anytime soon). 

My own opinion was toward preservation after I bought the book on the History of LeRoy at Walgreens (all irony intended), and looked at the range of buildings that used to stand in LeRoy.  I didn’t know how a Taco Bell could possibly exist on that corner, as part of it was listed as a DOT right-of-way if the Wiss were ever torn down.

In the end, the board voted quickly to not sell to the LLC, and to authorize the funds to tear down the building.  The LLC was bitter, vowed to continue the fight in the months that it took for the Wiss to be torn down.

Months, as it turned out, was weeks.  A company was given the contract, it was announced that the building would come down “hot” – no abatement.  All materials would be trucked out, and the lot leveled and seeded for grass.

It came down in the space of a week, and in defense of the board, it was apparent in the tear-down that the structure was in terrible shape.  The third floor had simply been put on the flat roof of the original building, causing runoff to rot the sides of the structure, which was causing the cave-in from the back that was apparent from the street.  At a bare minimum, the third floor would have needed to come down, and it was questionable if any of the structure would have been salvageable.  Years ago, possibly, (maybe when it was owned by the family of one of the board members), but now there was no saving it.

Rumors of a Dunkin Donuts or Taco Bell swirled, but the mayor announced that the lot would remain vacant for at least six months while the village decided what to do with the parcel.  “This will possibly be the first time anyone who has known me has heard me say this, but money is not the most important thing in this matter.”  One of the board members mentioned he liked the new view of the town coming in from 490/Thruway, and that would definitely be a major consideration.

The protective fences came down today, and I got the first full effect of the new view coming in to the main intersection of Routes 5 and 19.  The dominating structure now is the Presbyterian church on the corner, a classic white clap-board spired church.  “A New-England Village Feel” is what one of the selectmen said, and I have to agree with him.  It does feel like entering a small town like the ones I grew up with, and I rather like that. 

Reflecting on the changes of the town, with a few notable exceptions (would happily trade back the Sav-A-Lot for the mansion), a village is in constant flux for populations and needs.  It stands right now as a pretty strong place, with cleanup needs of multiple small towns facing declining fortunes.  And in this delicate balance, aesthetically, it works.

But if the village considers selling the parcel to Taco Bell, I will be at the meetings.  With torch and pitchfork if necessary.