This article first appeared in the Daily Beast today, April 21, 2013.

“I don’t want a biography,’’ Levon Helm told Jacob Hatley in 2007 when the young director came to Helm’s Woodstock home and broached the idea of making a film about the venerable singer and drummer’s life. Helm had no interest in exploring the past, and neither, really, did Hatley, who felt less like investigating than sitting back, fly-style, and creating a portrait of a vibrant, ailing, cranky, authentic rock-and-roll lion in winter. As we see in the resultant film Ain’t in It For My Health, which opened in New York on April 19 (on the first anniversary of Helm’s death) and later throughout the country, Hatley got all that he hoped for, and more.

Unexpected events drift in to fill Helm’s days and Hatley’s picture: the birth of Helm’s first grandchild, the opportunity to complete an unfinished Hank Williams song, a Grammy nomination for the first album he’d recorded in two decades, and a serious health scare. There is a wide array of privileged moments shown in this film: the sheer sweetness of Helm playing “In the Pines’’ for his tiny grandson, tension as Helm waits on a cold steel stool in a hospital examining room, a “who’da thunk it?” teaching moment when Helm holds forth on the venomous spurs on the legs of the duck-billed platypus, and the excruciating scene in which Helm twists in pain as a doctor inserts a tube into his nostril in order to examine his inflamed vocal chords. And there’s sheer awe whenever he sings, and that amazing voice, now banged-up and frayed, connects to the heart of an authentic America that lies buried somewhere under a million tons of junk culture.

But while biography may not have been what Helm wanted, and while biography may not have been what Hatley sought to serve, biography in the end would not be denied, and it’s the way the injured feelings from Helm’s past seep like the goo from a malfunctioning septic tank that gives the film its bite.

For those who don’t know, Helm was the drummer and one of the lead singers of The Band, a popular and influential group of the late sixties and early seventies. They leaped to legendary status when Martin Scorsese decided to tell their nearly unbelievable story (Canadian bar band to Bob Dylan backing band to critically acclaimed innovators and international arena headliners) against the backdrop of their brilliant final concert.

That film, The Last Waltz, is widely considered the best rock-and-roll film ever made. But what that film does not document is Helm’s great anger at the break up of The Band; he didn’t want The Band to end, resented participating in the movie, and hated that lead guitarist Robbie Robertson was pulling out. Over time his feelings intensified, particularly as money became an issue; he felt he didn’t get fair compensation for his participation in The Last Waltz, and he felt that Robertson unfairly took sole songwriting credit, along with the royalties that flowed from those credits, for songs that The Band wrote collaboratively. In the ensuing decades, as money troubles and more tragic events seemed to afflict all the members of the band except Robertson, Helm’s feelings hardened.

Helm, by all accounts, was one of the world’s great spirits. He was a generous, gregarious, upbeat person whose bottomless ability to express congeniality and remember names and share the spotlight earned him affection so warmly expressed that one starts to think people are speaking not of a human but of a beloved and recently deceased family dog. And Hatley’s film captures plenty of moments of Helm’s joie de vivre: gracefully obliging his doctor’s borderline inappropriate request for an autograph, joy-riding on his neighbor’s tractor, and taking the same delight in talking to a bus driver about interstate highway connections as he does in chatting with Billy Bob Thornton about sushi restaurants and Hawaiian pot.

But as the opening line from the Hank Williams song he’s working on says, “I’m living with days that forever are gone.’’ His “unresolved feelings’’ about The Band, as Helm’s longtime friend and collaborator Larry Campbell calls them, manifest in different ways. Sometimes he battles to contain them. Asked by Billy Bob Thornton about what happened to The Band, Helm half groans. “It was a goddam screw job,’’ he says, hoping that the fog of vagueness will discourage Thornton from tapping further against the thin crust covering thirty years of acid.

At other times, they erupt. Told about the Grammy committee’s offer, Helm sneers at “that Lifetime Achievement bullshit’’ with the disdainful eloquence that could only come from one who had studied real bullshit at a tender age. “What good’s it gonna do Rick or Richard?’’ he asks, invoking the names of his late bandmates Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. And sometimes he’s just inscrutable: he displays a moment of excitement when he announces to the friends and employees in his kitchen that his album has just won a Grammy. But as the hugs and back-slaps ripple around the room, a shadow falls across Helm’s face. What’s he thinking about? Absent friends? Missed opportunities? The venomous spurs of the duck-billed platypus? Whatever it is, it isn’t victory.

There are no answers in Hatley’s film, but why should there be, if Helm himself didn’t want to find them? Instead, he gives us a portrait of a man in full, a great artist and an ordinary person who understands that he is being cornered, and who is still fighting for the best of whatever life still offers him.

Originally published in The Huffington Post on April 9, 2013:

Anyone who spends any time watching cable television is bound to develop a fairly depressed view of the American character. Vain housewives, self-absorbed designers, responsibility-denying restauranteurs, narcissistic chefs, fascistic dance teachers, scheming survivors, snide judges–altogether we see a whining, insecure, blame-shifting, easily-insulted mass of humanity at its shabbiest. Throw in the political channels, where we see one party drowning in denial, and the other a prisoner of its own helplessness. Thank goodness we can still watch sports, where pampered millionaires continue to explore the frontiers of chemistry in an effort to fend off inevitable decrepitude. All in all, it is a sad spectacle.

But then one sees the example of Roger Ebert. With his long and rewarding career as a film critic, Ebert would have had a deserved moment of respect had he died soon after being diagnosed with cancer in 2002. Instead, Ebert survived long enough to enter the most inspirational period of his life. Ebert’s initial surgery proved insufficient; the resilient cancer demanded stronger, more damaging measures, surgeries and radiation blasts that weakened him, cost him part of his jaw, and left him disfigured, and unable to speak, eat or drink.

Many of us would have been demolished by these developments. Not Ebert. Writing “I should be content with the abundance I have,” he threw himself into his work, reviewing films at a prodigious rate (300 last year alone) and embracing new technologies to become a frequent blogger and tweeter. He focused not on what had been denied to him, but what he retained; in his final blog post, written two days before his death, his mind was on gratitude. “Thank you for going on this journey with me,” he told his readers.

A similar tale can be told about Levon Helm, the first anniversary of whose death will fall on April 19th. Helm enjoyed vast success as a member of The Band, the rock group of the late sixties and early seventies. But after the group broke up, his career plateaued, and personal setbacks accumulated. Late in the nineties, Helm, like Ebert, was diagnosed with cancer, and the radiation treatments he underwent put the cancer in remission but robbed him of his distinctive, emotionally rich singing voice. Again, many of us would have been despondent; Helm threw himself into his music, and formed a new band in which focused on his talents as a drummer. Then, facing bankruptcy, he began putting on shows for small audiences at his home in Woodstock NY. Called Midnight Rambles, the shows spotlighted not oldies but an array of American musical genres–blues, country, gospel, New Orleans, rock. Every one was unique. When Helm recovered his singing voice, the Rambles became a must-see–an unpretentious, generous icon, heading a hot band, before a small audience in an intimate space. The Rambles revived Helm’s career and reestablished his stature as an artist, and he kept performing with joy and fortitude through his final illness until less than a month remained. As in Ebert’s case, Helm’s spirit and courage during the decade after his death sentence inspired everyone who knew the story.

The same kind of emotions greeted the film Searching for Sugar Man, which last February won the Oscar for Best Documentary . The film told the story of a couple of South African music fans who undertook a hunt for Rodriquez, an American singer who was wildly popular in South Africa in the seventies, and whose sudden disappearance mid-decade led to rumors of a lurid death. The intrepid fanst racked down every available lead, and eventually discovered that Sixto Rodriguez not only hadn’t died in 1975, but was still living in modest circumstances in his native Detroit.

Through the vagaries of fate, we learn, Rodriguez never achieved a show business breakthrough in America, and through the avarice of others, he was denied the income from his stardom in South Africa. But as the documentary shows, he still had a full life. He did not wallow in self-pity, He did not lose himself in bitterness over the past. Instead, he built a life. He raised a family. He worked at a job where he was valued by his colleagues. He earned a college degree and ran for office. Overall, it’s fair to say that the intrepid fans who found Rodriguez were more absorbed by his past than he was. Nor did he become starry-eyed by the money that now came to him, but gave most of it away. A prisoner neither to his disappointment nor to his success, he remains the captain of his life.

Ebert, Helm, Rodriquez–models of stoicism. They are men who met disappointment and worse, and faced their challenges with determination and courage. We used to have a lot of role models like them, a lot of people who got up before dawn and packed their lunches and went to work in hopes of making the lives of their families a little easier. Somewhere along the line, a brasher, nastier role model took over, people who built monuments to their own success but who were never satisfied with it. But the last five years have not been kind to most of us, and many of us have had to respond by lowering our heads to the wind and pushing on. We work longer, we do with less, and we begin to admire people who, facing even longer odds, embrace life, and the abundance that they have. Maybe the Stoic Hero is back.

Written by Juli Weiner, encouraged by Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair plugged my book this week with an article called “The Book of Levon Celebrates the Man in the Band.” Very nice indeed. Thanks to one and all. Here’s how it reads:

“Nearly a year after the death of Levon Helm, the Band’s twangy and tender-hearted polymath, Spy alumnus Jamie Malanowski has published an e-single about, among other things, Helm’s combative relationship with Band guitarist Robbie Robertson, his dislike of Martin Scorsese’s (otherwise generally beloved) Band documentary The Last Waltz, and the singer and drummer’s magnetic, generous, and unpretentious character.

“The Book of Levon also includes a rather wrenching portrait of Helm’s fearsome, fearless counter-attack against a decade-long sentence of throat cancer. The disease took his singing voice, but Helm took it right back. Malanowski writes:

“[I]ittle by little, Levon Helm’s singing voice returned. Gone was his strong tenor, replaced by something raspy and ornery, different but still authentic, still compelling. At first he sang only a little, harmonizing mostly; “He was thrilled that his voice was coming back,” says [daughter] Amy Helm, “but at the same time, he had doubts. Once you’ve done your time on the oncology floor for head and neck, when you’ve done your radiation, and you’ve walked through those hallways and met other people who’ve gone through the same treatment as you, you don’t take anything for granted. He was happy it was back, but he knew it could be gone again.

“But it is not gone again: in recordings and in books and even in the film he so despised, Helm’s voice will long outlive its malignant adversary.”

Shane Smith is the 42 year-old (b. 1970) co-founder and CEO of Vice, the international media company. In March, he also began serving as one of the three lead correspondents of Vice, the new HBO news magazine series, a show that aims, as he says, “to be more provocative, more aggrressive and more daring than any other news program on TV. ‘’ A native of Ottowa, Smith and partners Suroosh Alvi and Gavin McInnes started Vice in 1994 as a monthly magazine that focused on youth culture, fashion, interests, issues. With a distinct and voice and view that appealed to young people, the magazine rapidly grew and expanded. Eventually the company moved to New York, extended the magazine into 34 countries, built a monthly readership of 900,000, created a huge internet presence, and moved into television; in other words, during a period of traumatic media turmoil and contraction, Vice has enjoyed singular success. At the same time the company expanded its media range, it enlarged its editorial scope, and moved dramatically into the coverage of hard news, presented in a distinctively aggressive, hard-edged perspective. Last November (on election day, actually), I had the opportunity to go to Brooklyn and visit the office of Vice media, and talk to Smith, who has been described by The New York Times as “a cross between a punk rocker and Fortune 500 executive,’’ about his rapidly growing media company he’s running, his new show, and his adventuresome, gonzo, sensationalistic, funny/scary approach to the news. Here is my interview:

HOW DID VICE BEGIN?
We began in Montreal in the mid-nineties, covering youth culture. We were very fortunate, because nobody else was speaking to that group, at least not in the same way, and we caught on quickly. That was very cool–nothing beats being a hit in your on home town, because then when you do a good job, the people who are saying “Wow! Your last issue was amazing!’’ are your peers, and people you actually like, and the girl you want to screw, and you actually feel good and give a shit. After that, all fame is narcissism. Soon we had an international phenomenon on our hands, because kids in Stockholm and Singapore and Shanghai all knew the same thing about news and fashion and culture at the same time, but no one else was the voice of that universality of the youth subculture. So soon we were that voice in 34 countries, and with more than 3000 people around the globe contributing stories and pictures and video to our magazine and websites, we had a newsgathering operation second to none. These people are giving us stories before anyone else is on to them, and the best of these stories are going to be on HBO.

HOW DID YOU MOVE INTO TELEVISION?
As our internet presence expanded around the world, we got the idea that all our correspondents should shoot video for the stories they were filing. As a result, we soon had tons of footage, about all sorts of things, which we were able to adapt and repackage in all sorts of ways. But it also created a news organization that was feeding us thousands of stories. Eventually it became clear that the stories we did best, that we liked best, involved this process we call immersionism, a documentary style where we just go in and live with the people, and just watch them as the story unfolds. We get tipped to an idea, and if it seems intriguing, then we just go in and watch it. But we’re not political and we don’t try to shoehorn a story into a preconception of what we thought the story was. For example, we were pitched a story about a group in India called the Naxalites, who were supposedly these Robin Hood types who were saving the rain forests. Once we got there, we learned that they were just as bad as the army, and even worse. So we have to go with the story. We can’t just sit there and say `Well, this is what they told us in New York.’ ‘

HOW DID VICE GET INTO HARD NEWS?
It’s a matter of growing up with our demo. We were originally focused on music, but as we went into different countries, we saw that music meant different things, and a lot of it had to do with political or social issues. One of the first things we did on video was Heavy Metal of Baghdad, in which we followed a heavy metal band around in Baghdad. It began as a music story, but as we followed them for three years, we saw the whole arc of the war in Iraq through the point of view of an Iraqi kid who’s not political but just gets off on Slipknot. We see that the band wants to practice, but it can’t, because their practice space had been hit by a SCUD missile, or can’t play because some mullah wants to chop off their heads for headbanging. We had footage of US officials in the Green Zone saying `The war is over,’ while the band is over in the Red Zone dodging bullets. Everywhere we went we saw things like that, things that just weren’t right, and we were always kind of shocked. We wanted to say “Hold on, this isn’t right.’ We joked about doing a show called Where Are the Adults? Instead, we began to cover these things, and our audience responded.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD STORY FOR VICE?
Three things: It has to be simple, it has to have a hook, and it has to have punch in the face. A perfect example is the story of General Butt Naked and the Tupac Army. General Butt Naked of Liberia is a cannibal and rapist and murderer and a warlord who led an army of naked warriors into battle against the Tupac Army, which was a group of fighters from Sierra Leone who all wore Tupac Shakur T-shirts that they got from a container on a cargo ship they hijacked. Thousands were killed in the fighting. It’s a terrible story, but what makes it right for us is that it starts out as a story about the absurdity of the modern condition, and ends up talking about the role the US government played in creating the conditions over there. That’s a perfect story for us, for us because it’s cultural, it’s got a hook, it’s got a punch in the face, and it forces people to pay attention. It’s true of all our stories. Look at our report on Pakistan’s nuclear missiles, and how much Pakistan hates India over Kashmir. We have video of people training to conduct the next terrorist attack on Mumbai. Now that’s a punch in the face. We ‘reworking on a story where we’re trying to get some old Chicago Bulls to go and play basketball with Kim Jong Un because he’s such a huge fan. Offbeat, but with impact.

WHAT NICHE IS VICE IS TRYING TO FILL?
I like to say that our show is 60 Minutes for young people. That’s not saying there’s anything wrong with 60 Minutes or that you have to talk down to young people. On the contrary. But lots of times, the mainstream media gets numb to a story, and young people are disappointed because they want so much more. If 60 Minutes would do a story about Kashmir, for example, where nuclear war could break out between India and Pakistan at any moment, 60 Minutes will be very staid. They’ll be fair, and balanced, and professional. We’ll have a different approach. We’ll do both sides of the story, too. But when we hear something crazy, we’re not just going to nod. When we hear the ex-head of the Pakistani secret service say “I will strap my body to a warhead if it’s going to be fired at India, ’’ then we’re willing to point a finger at him and say “If he’s allowed to keep doing what he’s doing, then Boom! That’s the end of the world!’’ Or climate change. They’ll debate climate change. We won’t. Or if we will, we’ll have the debate on Long Island after Hurricane Sandy, and everybody will be standing waist-deep in water. We’re not going to be even-handed when the world is sinking. Where are all the adults?

I have no partisan political agenda. The job of the fourth estate is to shine a spotlight. India and Pakistan are so close to going to war and destroying the rest of the world. Shouldn’t everyone pay attention to that? Pakistan has lost control of huge portions of its country to the Taliban. Shouldn’t we be worried about that? You hear so much about the liberal media, but the entirety of the news media is owned by four different companies, and they’re all afraid of Budweiser. So the media is very conservative, and they’re paying a price in credibility. We’re brash, and our audience is growing. Brashness, of course, isn’t enough. If we want to show that we can be a challenger to 60 Minutes, if not beat 60 Minutes, then we’re going to have better stories, better hosts, and high believability. If we’re going to challenge the best out there, we’re going to have to be better than them

WHO IS THE AUDIENCE FOR VICE?
We already own the 17 to 34 demographic. But for many stories, age is irrelevant. I don’t think you have to be Gen Y to be concerned about Pakistan and India, or to worry about the rise of youth-oriented fascist movements in Europe, or to be interested I the story of the Nigerian pirate who uses his gains to finance movies. We are now aiming at audiences a little younger and a little older. We might not be entirely successful. Older people might have a problem because the voice that we use is very street, and can be very ugly, and they may reject that.

WHY IS HBO A GOOD MATCH FOR VICE?
HBO is perfect for us because it’s intelligent, independent, and bold. We won’t want to dumb things down or put them in sound bites, and we won’t have to shy away from topics or modify our approach. They will allow us all the freedom and creativity we need. We don’t want to be derivative. We want to be that new thing that everybody else will copy, and HBO encourages that kind of thinking. HBO is the gold standard of TV, and we want to be the gold standard on HBO.

WHY SHOULD PEOPLE ACCEPT YOU AS A CREDIBLE NEWS SOURCE?
One reason is that we’ve been providing news of one kind or another for fifteen years, and plenty of people find us credible. Gen Y is the most sophisticated audience the world has ever known, because they’ve been bombarded with massive amounts of stuff for as long as they’ve lived, and they can tell what’s good and what isn’t, and we have credibility with them. Beyond that, people should just watch the show and decide for themselves whether or not we’re credible. Most of the time, all we’re doing is pressing the Record button, and let the people in these stories do their own talking. The credibility is theirs. Yes, we edit. But we can’t make stuff up.

YOU’VE BEEN TO SOME OF THE MOST REMOTE AND MOST DANGEROUS PLACES ON THE PLANET. HAVE YOU HAD CLOSE CALLS IN GETTING THESE STORIES?
Our last three shoots were dangerous. In India, we got arrested with the Naxalites. The headlines said that three American terrorists were arrested with the Naxalites, but when they realized we were journalists, they let us go. When we went to Kashmir, our guides gave me a flack jacket and an AK 47 and told me that if I ever felt in danger, I should just go ahead and shoot! Pakistan was also very dangerous, When we got there, the Taliban, which up until then had officially only been attacking police and military, decided to add journalists to their hit list, especially western journalists. The authorities then said that our personal safety, all the news people should go into the Serena hotel in Islamabad, so they could protect us. But then the State Department said that was crazy; it would like painting a big target on the hotel, so we got out. Then we flew up to Bagram province, a province in Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban, and we went Taliban hunting with the military. So yeah, it was dangerous.

Three of the most interesting hours of my life were spent in the company of Henry Bromell, who died the other day at the age of 65. Henry was a writer–of short stories and television scripts mostly, but also of an also of a novel and of screenplays. Ann Kolson had assigned me to write a piece on him for The New York Times; the occasion was his debut as a film director for a film called Panic, about a hitman, for which he had also written the screenplay. We met him at the Algonquin Hotel–the only interview I’ve ever conducted there–and I liked him immediately. Easy-going, friendly, funny, interested, smart–he was anything other than self-absorbed. We talked for literally three hours, which was about three times the amount of time usually required to complete the assignment. Although I was careful to cover the usual bases that needed for my assignment, the encounter wasn’t like an interview at all, but more just a delightful conversation. We talked about film, books, writing, his interesting upbringing, about Homicide: Life on the Streets (where had had performed distinguished work and which was one of my favorite series.) It was just an enormously enjoyable experience, with no sense of the professional wall that typically exists between subject and interviewer. I was thrilled to see that he had achieved recent success with Homeland; that was arena he knew well from his upbringing in the Middle East as the son of a CIA operative. I’m glad that he capped his career with success.

Here are a couple of Henry’s quotes from the piece:

”My editor says I’m the only person she knows who’s written for television that television has made a better writer,” said Mr. Bromell, pointing out that writing for David Chase, who was the executive producer of ”I’ll Fly Away” and is the executive producer of ”The Sopranos,” was the most rigorous experience of his career. ”He thinks in terms of a page and a half or two pages, and within that time, there should be two turns, two times where the scene goes someplace that you didn’t see coming, that’s real and is believable. And he’s a Chekovian, so for him the whole scene has to have a subtext. Even if it’s not mentioned, you’ve got to feel it and understand it. Really tough stuff. But you get excited by what he says, because you see that he’s made it better.”

Reaction to ”Panic” has been positive; Mr. Bromell seems particularly pleased by friends who’ve told him that he has made a European movie. ”Most of the filmmakers I love are Europeans,” he says, enumerating a catalog of favorites that quickly begins to include directors from Japan, India and America but that leaves out most of today’s Hollywood filmmakers.

”Working on the series, we would get as production assistant these very bright kids from U.S.C. film school and N.Y.U. film school who begin each day asking what would be entertaining for the greatest number of people. Not, ‘What if I take that character and put him in a room with that character?’ Now they think like agents and producers. They’re very comfortable servicing corporate culture. They don’t see as their fundamental role being critical or making people laugh in a way they’re not used to laughing.
They think, ‘All right, we got to bring in 30 million people, how are we going to do this?’ I think, ‘If all we’re going to do is serve corporate culture, where are our ideas going to come from?’ ”

Ezra Klein is a bright young journalist for The Washington Post who is, I suspect, destined for a long and distinguished career. I do not think he will have to approach the end of it to realize that one of the posts he wrote last week for his wonkblog that appears on the paper’s website will rank as one of dimmest things he will ever have written.

Klein stepped into the hubbub that Nate Thayer caused when he reported that an editor at theatlantic.com had asked him to create a 1200 word version of a piece he had written to be published on the site, for which he would be paid. . . nothing. His reward would be exposure. Thayer was naturally upset about it, as I have been when offered similarly impecunious deals. But these are the astonishing times we live in.

Klein decided use this incident to make an observation about journalism: “[B]ehind this debate lurks an uncomfortable fact: The salaries of professional journalists are built upon our success in convincing experts of all kinds working for exposure rather than pay. Now those experts have found a way to work for exposure without going through professional journalists, creating a vast expansion in the quantity and quality of content editors can get for free. Call it the revenge of our sources. For a very long time, we got them to work for nothing more than exposure — and sometimes, we didn’t even give them that. Now they’re getting more and more of us to do it.”

Klein differentiates between reporters, writers and journalists, with journalists atop the pyramid. “The difference between “writer” and “reporter” or “journalist” isn’t that the journalist reports — she develops sources, calls people, takes them out to lunch, and generally acts as an intermediary between her audience and the world of experts. The journalist also writes, of course, but anybody can write. Or, if not anybody, then certainly too many people for comfort. But few can get their calls returned by key congressmen, top academics, important CEOs or even, absent the legitimacy of a media organization people have heard of, a factory worker sitting at home on a Tuesday night. . . ”

This seems to me to a pathetically narrow view of journalism, a case of reductio ad absurdum, perhaps too much influenced by the daily enterprise Klein has spent his brief professional career within. Sources, broadly defined, are quite important at every level of journalism, and a journalist’s ability to cultivate them is a tremendous asset. But in most cases, it is not “Ezra Klein” who gets his call returned; it is The Washington Post‘s reporter who ges called back. It is the paper, or the magazine, and all that it stands for in terms of quality, reliability, seriousness and power, that gets the time and attention of the congressman and the CEO. On the face of it, Bob Woodward may have the best set of sources of any journalist in America, but if he took his act to even a serious smaller paper like The Chicago Tribune, his calls would start to go unanswered.

What the journalist brings, beyond sources, is his or her time-tested and experience-tested ability to reflect the values of the news organization–intelligence, intellectual integrity, an ability to put things in context and to understand wider implications, fearlessness, an ability to identify and tell a story and to spot an angle, a sensitive and accurate bullshit detector, and yes, an ability to write (Of all the things Klein is wrong about, his view that there is a superabundance of people who can write is the most ludicrous. Blogging and tweeting aren’t writing; Steve Brill publishing 20,000 words in Time is writing. Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff, Norman Mailer in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Richard Ben Cramer in What It Takes–that’s writing. Let’s not spend our time devaluing the art of our greatest practitioners.)

Certainly, there are many times when an editor values one of his journalists for the access he or she has to a particular source; getting a quote from the candidate or confirmation from the chief detective is what this business is often about. But what is more usually the case is that the editor values the journalist’s ability to understand the source’s agenda and preconceptions before presenting the source’s information. Some journalists are parrots, but not the best ones.

All of us who have written for any length of time have written for exposure; there is no offense in that. But what is upsetting is that in this time of turmoil in our profession, so many of the best publications, the ones we have long depended on to help define what is valuable in action and thought and policy, want good work, but aren’t willing to pay for it. It’s Gresham’s Law: the cheap writing is driving out the good.

For those of you who may have lain awake at night wondering “Geez, were there six men who could have prevented the Civil war from becoming a murderous army vs. army conflagration, please avail yourself of the opportunity to pick up the April issue of The Civil War Times, and read my article “Six Men Who Could Have Stopped the Civil War.” Yes, I’m talking about John Floyd, John McGowan and Isiah Greene, among others. This grew out of a talk I gave two years ago at Civil War Forum of Metropolitan New York, and I’m pretty pleased with the results. Thanks to Dana Shoaf for a nice edit.

This year that is fast disappearing will not be remembered in these quarters with very much warmth. It was a fairly hideous, sickening year, the year that I felt I got old. But like all good things, the bad ones come to an end as well, and thanks to some much appreciated end of the year action by Richard Plepler, Steve Koepp, David McCormick and others, we begin 2013 on an upswing, and with hopes for better times to come. In the meanwhile, here are some jewels, personally chosen and wholly idiosyncratic, recovered from 2012:
1.) Love for Levon. Without a doubt, everything about the tribute concert to Levon Helm–reporting the story, meeting the people involved, attending the event, the reception to the article, what may happen yet–turned this into the best thing that I was involved with this year.
2.) Searching for Sugarman. This modest documentary about a real-life Cinderella made my heart leap with joy. A very inspirational story.
3.) Call Me Maybe. Carly Rae Jepson‘s unassuming, sweet, girlish, flirty hit was attractive enough, but the way it went viral and enveloped everyone from the US Olympic Swim Team to Colin Powell was delightful. The song never failed to bring a smile to my lips, especially in Jepson’s collaboration with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots.
4.) The dauntless, rain-drenched performance of the young people of Royal College of Music Chamber Choir during the flotilla of the Queen’s Jubilee was simply stirring, especially when they sang “Land of Hope and Glory.”
5.) The presidential campaign as a whole this year was a fairly tedious affair, but the rousing Democratic convention, driven by one splendid speech after another culminating in Bill Clinton‘s masterful dissection/deconstruction/destruction of the GOP position was fairly brilliant, just as the Republicans’ ceaseless rhetorical self-destruction–“Oops”, “Nine, nine, nine”, “I like to fire people”, “legitimate rape”, “the 47 percent”–was the best long-running comedy series on TV.
6.) The Giants Win the Super Bowl. Just as in 2009, the inconsistent Giants managed to win four–or in this case, six–games that they could win but were not likely to, and managed, one play at a time, to walk off with the hardware.
7.) The Hour. A splendid, sophisticated, intelligent BBC series about a ground-breaking TV news magazine being produced in the early fifties. I love the way they can combine news judgment, inside baseball, and messy personal situations. Dominic West, Ben Whislaw and Romola Garai are just terrific. We also liked the posh Downton Abbey and the relentlessly vulgar The In-Betweeners. (I must say, I haven’t seen Homeland yet.
8.) Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel. Having loved Wolf Hall, I feared its sequel would suffer by comparison. I shouldn’t have worried. Other enjoyable books this year: Watergate, by Thomas Mallon; Passage of Power, by Robert Caro; The Long Road to Antietam, by Richard Slotkin.
9.) I went to Lincoln fearing a Spielbergian historical romance, full of longing gazes and quivering lips and swirling strings. But while there was some of that, it wasn’t enough to sicken the whole deal. I give total credit to screenwriter Tony Kushner for his decision to hang this pageant on a moment that has been largely overlooked by historians, the passage by the House of Representatives of a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery. Historians undercut the importance of that moment because there were other ways to accomplish Lincoln’s end, but that’s not the point: whether or not the vote had significant is irrelevant, it is a perfectly splendid motor for an historical drama.
10. Superstorm Sandy. “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result,” Winston Churchill once said. I have no reason to dispute him, but I can tell you this: it’s a humbling thing to realize that the killer hurricane has come and gone and that you’ve been missed.

. . .and a big meal! Here I am enjoying a celebratory dinner at McCormick & Schmick’s last Wednesday with Hugh Cook, the editor of Illinois Alumni magazine. We’re bodyguarding the coveted Eddie Award for Editorial Excellence, presented by Folio, which the magazine won for a profile I wrote last summer of the sportswriter Will Leitch. Thank you. Thank you. First, I’d like to extend my gratitude to all the little people who made this possible. . .