NEWSPEAK Blog

America or burst.

Why was ABC so popular in the late '80s and early '90s? It can't be due to the drippy, gooey, family-friendly fare that they produced (exempli grata: Full House), because that shit was awful, and if I see the girl who played Stephanie "How Rude" Tanner, I will punch her in the mouth. I posit this: it was in fact the show's theme songs that made the shows: themes bursting with such sanguinity, such open-eyed plucky charm, that people would tune in just to hear them and then forget to change the channel. Here're two examples:

From Perfect Strangers:

And from its spinoff, Family Matters:

Not only do these songs have absolutely nothing to do with the shows they precede, but they also have little in the way of subject matter altogether. Instead, they're aural Rorshachs, simple tropes to happiness—and yes, all of this is just an excuse to be able to post the theme song from Perfect Strangers.

An open letter.

In response to this article in today's 'Zette, we've received a curious missive. To wit:

Open Letter to Pam Zubek,

For many years, I have been masterminding a plot for a terrorist attack on your quaint city of Colorado Springs. Yet just as this plan was nearing its execution, it came to my attention that your police department had obtained anti-terrorist equipment from the Department of Homeland Security branch of your United States Government. This knowledge brought our conspiracy to a startling halt. In the days that followed, our confusion at this development was only compounded by the silence of your police department regarding exactly what equipment they had obtained. Our plans for attack were placed on indefinite hold as we speculated with frustration what fearsome new capabilities these might be, and how they might surely obstruct our elaborate plans for your destruction.

Thankfully, these days of inaction are now at an end, thanks to your article on the front page of today's Gazette. With one fell stroke, you destroyed their pathetic attempt at security through obscurity, by the clever means of recourse to publicly available information. Our fears of unknown anti-terrorist devices were recast into fears of specific devices and technologies: video surveillance equipment.

You may laugh, but do not underestimate the efficacy of such things. Our brothers faced many difficulties in their valiant attack on your Freedom on September the Eleventh, 2001 -- those of learning to pilot a wide-body, quad-engine jet aircraft, those of holding hundreds of fearless American citizens on their knees at the blunt point of a boxcutter knife -- none were so seemingly indomitable as those presented by airport security cameras. Yet our brothers persevered, recording the greatest victory yet for enemies everywhere of freedom and the American Way. As we shall triumph in our efforts, which are today reinstated in light of the information you were so foolish to let fall in our hands!

Now that we know the video surveillance of which you dispose in opposition to us, I can assure your that your city, or a significant portion thereof, shall soon lay a pile of smoldering ashes! All this thanks to your treachery against the obstinacy of your Chief of Police. I assure you these actions will not go unrewarded upon the event of your impending demise, by the reward of many virgins, such as those being indoctrinated under the sexual education programs of your foolish American educational system. Allahu Ackbar!

Signed,

A. Terrorist

Dear CC Students

Many of you already know this, but the fact that you have the right of way in the crosswalks doesn't mean that people are going to stop for you. Many people in the community ("townies" I believe you call them) don't necessarily drive past the college much or know that it's a tradition to stop for people inside the striped lines. Those who do know may also resent the fact that CC is the only place in the area (aside from Manitou) where people are expected to stop for pedestrians. They may see the fact that many of you barely look up from your cell phones and UGG boots to check for oncoming traffic as an example of how a disconnected community of generally overpriveleged young students who don't generally give a shit about the town they're living in generally expect the world to stop for them at a moment's notice. They may also simply not see you. Every single year, it seems, someone (this year two students have been hit) gets hit in the crosswalk or somewhere else because he/she is accustomed to walking across streets with a false sense of both safety and entitlement. It would behoove you, though you do, as I pointed out, have the right of way, to be, generally, more conscious of your surroundings in the larger and smaller sense, generally. Here's wishing a speedy recovery.

Sincerely, Newspeak.

Happy Ending

Dear Kenny Taylor:

Just wanted to let you know that I found a huge chunk of our stolen CDs that you sold to Independent Records this weekend. The big tipoff was the copy of Spurts that was signed "To Noel ... etc". Perhaps you didn't notice this because you were too busy showing them your driver's licence for them to enter into the computer that linked your name and driver's license number to the sale of our CDs?

Look forward to meeting you at the next MENSA meeting!

Cheers, Noel

Yet another unprinted letter to the Independent

To the Editor:

This is in response to Mr. Routon's scathing column on Dr. Michael
DeMarsche in the August 16, 2007 issue.  Aside from sounding like a

jilted lover when talking about De Marsche's imminent departure, Mr.

Routon also seems to have no confidence in the city of Colorado Springs

to be self-sufficient.  We should be grateful for the new ideas

DeMarsche introduced to this sleepy community - Chihuly, John Waters,

and Thomas Hoving, among others - plus a set of exemplary artistic
standards.  We should also thank him for doubling the presence of the

Fine Arts Center, giving us a second gallery downtown to show the work
of Colorado artists, and accompanying it with a delicious, innovative
restaurant. Finally, instead of whining that he has gone on to another

interesting project, we should congratulate him on tripling the Fine
Arts Center membership and finding over $28 million in this community
and creating a world-class museum for all citizens to enjoy. He has also
put into place a plan for the future and hired an excellent staff to
carry it out. The hard work is done; the man on the white horse has
moved on. Now it is our job as citizens of this beautiful city to insure
that De Marsche's legacy, however short his tenure, is continued with

the same enthusiasm, dedication and flair that he put into it.  We do
not have time to form any "scars", much less heal them.  We have a new
museum to celebrate and a truly visionary Fine Arts Center board of
trustees to support, and they are not going anywhere.

Sincerely,

Eve Tilley
President, Pikes Peak Arts Council

Dear Pete Freedman

You did a really good job with the local hip-hop story in today's Indy! A great counterbalance to the police department's fairly racist response to recent events. It's a well-reported and balanced, if not necessarily skeptical, look the very real subtext of violence that's part of the local hip-hop culture. Also much more comprehensive than the Gazette's shallow coverage of the matter a couple Sundays ago.

Sorry this has to be a back-handed compliment, but it seems like you're best suited to reporting these kinds of longer stories. Why not suggest to your boss that Matthew Schniper, who has much longer and deeper ties to the community, be named Arts & Entertainment Editor while you handle more stories like today's and focus on writing? I can't imagine they're paying you enough to bear the title and responsibilities anyway. (Maybe you should also suggest to your superiors that they join you at the Labor Unity Picnic at Turkey Creek Recreation Area at Ft. Carson that's advertised in the centerfold!)

Sincerely,

Noel Black

An Open Letter to the Indy: "Calling For Ethics One Final Time"

I'm posting this open letter to the Independent below, which also appears in the August print edition of Newspeak (on stands now), because Indy Publisher John Weiss has insinuated to us in an email that we publish subjournalistic falsehoods without giving people an opportunity to respond. Let me make this clear first: we've never claimed to be journalists or a "newspaper" per se in the traditional sense (we prefer "trashy entertainment tabloid") But unlike the Indy, we have, and have had since our inception, a blog with an open comments section where anyone can respond or write comments uncensored except in cases of defamation or libel. We've also never received a single phone call or letter from anyone at the Indy (or anywhere else, for that matter) seeking correction to these supposed falsehoods. However, we HAVE contacted the Indy directly via email several times in regards to the subject in the open letters below to no avail. We find this ironic considering John Weiss's comments and Ralph Routon's Side Dish, "The Last Bite" in which he complains about the Gazette refusing to answer his "legitimate questions." I mean, shit, we could be wrong. But if we are, then why won't they respond? Perhaps some of you, dear readers, will be inspired to ask the Indy yourselves: please send them a letter at letters@csindy.com and ask them!

Dear John Weiss (Publisher) Fran Zankowski (CEO). Ralph Routon (Editor), and Pete Freedman (A&E Editor),

We're sure you think you're quite clever—snagging Adam Leech from us after only a few installments of his column had run in Newspeak. As a matter of fact, we were excited about the possibility of you getting the column: Adam is a good friend of ours, has supported us since the Toilet Paper days and knows the music scene well, which is why we originally asked him to write the column after much bellyaching from him about the pathetic state of the music writing in the Indy and lack of any coverage in the Newspeak. We were excited when he graciously contacted us about his column running in the Indy because wider readership for his column might, after all, mean good things for all of us: good for Adam (more money and publicity than we can afford), good for the Indy (let's face it, your music section sucks—see our open letter to Pete Freedman below), good for the music scene (wider distribution), and good for Newspeak (some acknowledgment for us and the fact that we originally had the foresight to solicit the column and helped Adam shape it into something you wanted). We thought it might actually have the potentional to create some positive energy between our two publications. Unfortunately, you decided it was simply going to be a good thing for you—the Indy.

John, you all but ignored our emails for weeks and none of the rest of you even bothered to respond. When you did finally respond days before the column went to print, you claimed that we had no right to even ask for acknowledgement because Adam Leech wasn't an employee of Newspeak, but a freelancer and free agent. Fair enough. You got Adam, and in the process you not only eliminated any potential good will from us, you also butchered Adam's column, making him sound like a feckless dolt and a sellout, thus immediately discrediting his column in the Indy as a voice for the scene.

We're sure you saw it, on some level, as payback for all the nasty things we've said about you, but have you really forgotten all the years you spent nastily nipping at the heels of the Gazette with no acknowledgement? It's funny because you, Ralph Routon (former Gazette columnist, lest we forget), just this past week, were chastising GO! Editor Warren Epstein for refusing to reply to your repeated requests for comment about the ethics of having an anonymous food critic. You wrote:

"… the Gazette has never addressed our legitimate questions about the ethics of having a much publicized 'public' contest to find a new reviewer, encouraging readers to enter, printing stories about the 'competition' process—then selecting a staff writer under a fake name."

Here are a couple of legitimate questions for you, then, John, Fran, Ralph and Pete:

- First, how do you justify hiring a columnist away from a tiny locally-owned paper that doesn't even have the resources to hire employees and that you, John, accused of having no journalistic ethics?

- Second, how do you justify hiring a local music store owner to write a column about local music when you purport to uphold the highest standards of journalistic ethics yourselves?

Here's what Bob Steele, Senior Ethics Faculty the Poynter Institute (the organization you also cite in your ethics inquiries, as it were) had to say about that very scenario when we called him last week:

"I would say that the individual may have competing loyalties. And competing loyalties can create conflicts of interest. If he is writing about issues or events that have any direct connection to his business or competitor's businesses, then there could easily be a perception that there is a conflict of interest. There could be a perception that this individual would not be fair in how he covers the local music scene because some may believe that his primary loyalty is to himself and his own business if he's mentioning his own business in the column, and how he treats other businesses, which are his competitors"

We already emailed you the questions, but since you haven't "addressed our legitimate questions" yet, we thought we'd ask them again in print (and here on the blog) just like you did! Please do let us know how journalistically ethical individuals you truly are! Newspeak, of course, has never aspired to such standards, but we love to learn from those of you rabblerousing alternative types who do pretend to such high-minded endeavors.

Sincerely, Newspeak (Noel Black and Aaron Retka)

p.s., When you do respond, please let us know what it is exactly that makes you an "alternative" weekly. As John Weiss might've pharsed it: You may call what you write alternative, but we do not.

p.p.s. We're also deeply impressed with your vast knowledge about blog ethics since you, y'know, don't have one!

p.p.p.p.p.s, the same Robert Steele that we spoke to at Poynter is quoted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story about restaurant critics using pseudonyms as saying this: "If you know the colonel's coming to the barracks, you're going to spiff it up," he said. "Journalistic honesty is always important, but it's a common-sense agreement that to do a genuine, independent review, it needs to be done without the knowledge of the restaurant." Now what!?

Not saying that someone stole it, but ...

If anyone happened to have grabbed our NEWSPEAK address stamp from the pie party the other night, we can't find it anywhere and it's rather expensive to replace. We'd love to have it back no questions asked!

thx, N.

Open Letter to Bicycle Riding Youth of the Westside

Dear Bicycle Riding Youth of the West Side,

Derek's crash makes me think about the many horrible bike wrecks I've known and heard about in my life that involve cars. Leslie Wishert got run over by Kevin Tebedo and almost died. My step-dad got creamed and got permanent ringing in his ears (tinitis) when he was 36. My wife's brother almost got killed while stopped at a stop-light in Connecticut when he got hit from behind by a guy they think may have been the rapper Fabolos. Those are just a few.

It sucks that cars are so oblivious or obviously hostile to cyclists, but it does make me think that I wish Derek had either been riding home on the bike path or on Pikes Peak instead of on Colorado Avenue. While I think cyclists SHOULD be respected on any street, a little defensive route selection would seem to, at the very least, decrease the odds of getting accidentally or deliberately mutliated by autos.

The bike path that runs between Confluence park and 21st St. (spitting you out into a limbo between Cimarron and Colorado) is awesome for the most part. The fact that it exists (and it's eventually supposed to continue on to Manitou) also probably means the city will never create a bike lane on Colorado. Granted, it's dark as fuck at night. Lights help. Pikes Peak's not bad and, though a bit more bumpy, far friendlier a bike route at any hour.

Also, Uintah is a horrible bike street.

Point being: Please be safe and don't die! Sincerely,

Noel Black/Newspeak

An Open Letter to the "Liberal" in Manitou

Dear "Liberal" in Manitou,

You work somewhere that's been a distribution location for the Newspeak since our second issue. Your brother even requested the rack! Admittedly, I was surprised when he requested it because it never would've occurred to me that a business like yours would want to distribute a paper with family-unfriendly content like ours. Nevertheless, he requested it and we obliged. I even recall a conversation with your parents, the owners, who said that there were things in the Newspeak that they found unsavory, but that they supported free speech. We appreciated a healthy disagreement and were honored they were willing to have the paper there. We do not distribute our paper anywhere that isn't a). a public institution of higher learning where most people are adults and/or our first amendment rights are guaranteed, or b). a private business/institution where we have either asked permission or someone has requested it. I was also surprised that someone at your place of business decided to place the rack outside the store. Again, wouldn't have been my choice, but it's your business.

And so the months passed. We did a story on local porn producers. We did the Ted Haggard issue, which included a comic that featured a gladiator (Mike Jones) having sex with unicorn (Ted Haggard) and another comic that talked about Manitou-based preacher Billy James Hargis having sex with his students! Of course, from the beginning we've featured Dan Savage's explicit sex column Savage Love, which is also incredibly well-written, well-informed and frank. But yes, it's often graphic. Then there are the intentionally offensive comics Klassic Komix Klub and Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles. Again: Not for children and full of adult language, images and the like. Did you not know this? Did you and your family not bother to read the paper that you so boldly placed in front of your own store!? Did you not think to tell your niece/cousin NOT to read our paper because it's NOT for kids? Did you NOT think you could turn the cover over so she wouldn't see it? Just wondering.

Fast forward to Saturday. I got a call from you and, in an incredibly indignant tone, you asked me to come and remove this month's issue of the paper from your store because, you said, your 8-year-old cousin/niece (??) had picked up the paper and had read the word "cock" in our sex stories section. Because I conduct my business in a professional manner, I gladly came to your business as quickly as I could to remove the papers because, as I've stated, distribution is entirely voluntary when it comes to private businesses and I have no interest in forcing our paper on anyone.

However, when I got to your shop, you insisted on telling me that you're a liberal and how concerned you were for our business because, you asserted, the issue is pornographic. Yoou even suggested that another "liberal" member of your family (who will also remain nameless out of courtesy) might file charges against us. You said how mortified you were to have to explain to your 8-year-old relative what the word "cock" meant. I explained to you that I was sorry and that, however, I had never asked you to distribute the Newspeak, nor did I, or anyone who works for us, place our rack outside your store. I did confess that I didn't think that having to explain a vulgar sexual term to a child was much in comparison to having to explain the endless litany of violent images that appear on the front pages of newspapers and on TV every day, but that unfortunately children can't be shielded from everything. You seemed, however, to be particularly bothered by the fact that the word in question was not only rooster, by a synonym for penis. The tragedy, you explained, is that you hadn't learned anything like that until you were 18-years-old and went a porn store (???? Sorry if I didn't get that quite right, but it was truly shocking to hear such an odd account of sexual awakening from a liberal such as yourself that I had to struggle to understand what I heard you say). Personally, I have a harder time explaining things like death to my 6-year-old son. Yesterday, for example, he found a baby woodpecker in the road that had fallen out of its nest. It died in his hands about half-an-hour later. Thank God I didn't have to explain to him what "pecker" also means as he cried about the bird dying!!!!

Anyhow, it came to my attention this morning that, rather than take responsibility for the fact that someone in your family requested that our paper--full of child-unfriendly content as it always has been--be on your premises, you have not only decided to blame Newspeak for your discomfort, but have also taken it upon yourself to visit all our advertisers and distributors in Manitou and ask them to remove our paper. While it's certainly your prerogative to do so, it doesn't really seem in keeping with your so-called liberal values.

One of the liberal values that I hold most dear is personal responsibility. In the same way you wouldn't let your 8-year-old relative go wandering around in traffic, you might want to keep an eye on what she's picking up for casual reading material, particularly if it's something in your own store! Should we ask all the tourists in Manitou to stop driving there to shop at your store because more people die in car accidents every year than by any other cause and that your niece/cousin might happen to be wandering around in the middle of the street?

Another advertiser and distributor who contacted us with concerns about the cover was understanding when I suggested that they take it off the rack for a month and only hand it out to sympathetic customers. They were surprised that I wouldn't be offended by that. Why would I be? I believe in personal freedoms as much as I believe in personal responsibilities.

That said, I think it's sad and a shame that so many people, liberals like you in particular, in this community share the patriarchal, Puritanical values of sexual repression that can result in unhealthy sexual desires, homophobia, the repression of women and the glorification of violence. We believe that honesty and openness about sexuality are a way to undermine poor and inadequate sexual education, shitty self-image that results from seeing too many fake and oversexualized images in the mass media meant to sell products, unhealthy sexual repression and the kind hypocrisy expressed by people like Ted Haggard who preach repression and then go get their cocks sucked by male prostitutes. This is not to say that I think your 8-year-old relative should be reading our paper. It's to say that a community that represses and censors itself will, in the long run, be a far greater problem to the well-being of our children than the word "cock," or any other word for that matter, which is what we're talking about. (You claimed the cover with picture of a woman with breasts smaller than most adult men's pectoral muscles lying in the bathtub wasn't the issue, though you said she was "committing suicide," which I didn't quite understand. I'm not saying the image isn't provocative, but there's no blood and no wounds!)

We know we push the boundaries of what is acceptable. We do so for many reasons, one of which is that believe we believe it's necessary in order to "right" this community from the right that has, for so long, dominated its culture and poitics. We believe people like you, Mantiou liberal, have been fed repression for so long that you now take it as a given. And you're welcome to bang on the door of our distributors and advertisers to let them know that you take it as a given. But you're also free to ask questions, to think about what "pornography" really is and to, yes, help your niece/cousin think about and understand the world around her, which is a troubling place for far more reasons than the word "cock" could ever begin to describe.

Sex, in my opinion, is one of the reasons the world is so great. We all got here because our parents fucked and, hopefully, enjoyed it! Children come out of their mother's vaginas and then, for the most part, spend the first years of their lives staring at their mother's breasts as they suckle them! I know my son did. When he asks me questions about his penis or hears so-called vulgar words we talk about them and talk about where it's appropriate and not appropriate to use them. He knows what sex is, but I can assure you he's not interested in it. Not yet! But when he is, which won't be long, I'll be glad to know that he'll know enough about it to make some informed decisions. You can't protect children from the world. And they'll resent you (if not hate you) if, in your zeal to do so, you keep them from the truth.

As the cliche goes, if you don't like the Newspeak, then don't distribute it and don't read it. You've already excercised your rights in this regard, so why not let it drop at that and take some responsiblity for choices and decisions you and your family made?

Most Sincerely,

Noel Black, Publisher