Ugh – two birther posts in a day.  Lou Dobbs has a huge profile in GQ where he tries to completely whitewash his image for a possible Presidential run, or whatever.  Don’t believe it.   Alex Pareene at Gawker called it:

Now he even supports amnesty for undocumented immigrants, no longer refers to them as “illegals” or “illegal aliens,” and actually blames the drug war for violence at the borders and corporations for the exploitation of workers. In other words, he is a libertarian-leaning liberal on the issue. Which makes no fucking difference, because he spent literally years telling, again, millions of people that illegal hordes of Mexicans were spreading leprosy and wanted to actually reclaim the southwest and turn it into Aztlan.

[....]

Because if that is what he actually believes, why is he mocking Eliot Spitzer for calling for drivers’ licenses for undocumented workers? Why is he going on the radio to blast “Barack H. Obama” for using the first-person too often in his speeches instead of demanding that Republican senators actually fucking sign on to a comprehensive immigration reform package that actually helps these people he’s gotten rich demonizing? Harry Reid would like to introduce one! This could happen this summer if people like Lou Dobbs actually helped drum up popular support! But no, it’s easier to go on the radio every single goddamn day and say “haw haw haw Al Gore is a fat retard because it’s snowing.”

The only thing people like Lou Dobbs believe in is *power*; that’s why he can give such an interview.  That’s why John McCain gets pissed off now when you call him a “Maverick”.

Andrew Dalby, historian, librarian and the author of The World and Wikipedia (read review here) takes time out of his day to answer five questions…

(post continues below)

Q. What is one thing you think every American should know?

A. Who am I, a mere Englishman, to prescribe what every American should know? Never mind. This will work for Britons as well as Americans. “1. Keep your head down and push.” But push gently. “2. Talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too fucking much.” (John Wayne’s advice to Michael Caine.) Britons and Americans may possibly make a contribution to keeping humanity alive, but we’ll need to keep our heads down, push gently, and not say too much.

Q. If you had the option to have been born another nationality than your current one, which nationality would you choose?

A. I’ve never thought about that one. I don’t feel that nationality matters much to me. Greek, perhaps. I like the way Greeks talk — endlessly, seriously, fiercely. I like the way they eat and entertain.

Q. What is one misconception people have about you?

A. When I was employed (I worked as a librarian) my employers used to believe they knew what I thought. One or two of them used to tell me what I thought. They never got it right; they never even got near.

Q. Is there anyone’s death, either in your life or in popular culture, whose passing you were surprised by how profoundly it affected you?

A. My father. It’s an obvious thing to say. But before I left home to go to university I seemed to spend all my time arguing with him. After that, I don’t believe we quarrelled even once; but after that, as it happened, I never lived at home for very long. It was obvious that the arguing had been a waste of our time, but there were never enough opportunities to share life and talk sensibly.

Q. In life we often have goals that we feel as if would just die if we don’t reach them. Sometimes we reach them, sometimes we don’t. The question is, have you ever worked to fulfill a goal, only to find that once you achieved it, the experience was a let down? It meant something to you when you did not have it. Then you obtained it and, after the initial excitement, you thought to yourself, “Is that all there is?” Have you ever had an experience like that?

A. That’s a difficult one. Plenty of unachieved goals, naturally. And goals not yet achieved — e.g. books still waiting to be written. But you’re asking about goals that, once achieved, didn’t seem so good …

Ah, well, there was that episode two years ago when we decided to make wine. We put a lot of time and effort into it. We did make wine, within the dictionary meaning of the word: it started out as grape juice, it fermented, the sugar turned to alcohol, it was just about possible to drink it. “Is that all there is?” is exactly what we said to ourselves.

FIVE QUESTIONS – A SERIES

• Jeff Kreisler – award-winning comedian, author and sardonic scourge of Wall Street…I have five questions for you.
• Gerald Posner – Bane of Kennedy conspiracy theorists, white shoe lawyer, Chief Investigative Reporter for The Daily Beast…I have five questions for you.
• Bebe Buell – Artist, musician, scenester and lover; mother of Liv Tyler; embodiment of a rock era…I have five questions for you.
• Evan Wolfson – founder of the modern gay marriage movement…I have five questions for you.
• Jimmy Wales – Citizen of the world, sage to millions of editors of Wikipedia, which he founded…I have five questions for you.
• Billy Name – Famous Warhol live-in photographer; silverized the Factory; shot the cover of the Velvet Underground’s eponymous album; iconic portraits of Lou Reed and Edie Sedgwick…I have five questions for you.

This blog has taken part in outing two gay celebrities.  I was not the first, but  the second person to out Fox News anchor Shepard Smith; shortly thereafter, Academy Award-nominated director Kirby Dick became the third.  Dick’s explanation as to why he focused on Smith in his 2009 documentary Outrage! mirrors my own reasoning:

The film does report on one journalist, Shepard Smith, who was first reported on by Kevin Naff of the Washington Blade. Shepard Smith works for Fox News, which has been a major factor in the rise of anti-gay hysteria in this country over the past two decades. As one of the most prominent people in Fox News—according to the New York Times, Smith makes 7 to 8 million dollars per year—his complicity with the network’s homophobic agenda rises to a level of hypocrisy that I felt was worthy of reporting.

Although my stomach turns every time I see a FreeRepublic.com or eNationalist.com referral hit my Shepard Smith post, I still believe in the merits of outing him.

I know of many gay celebrities who are in the closet that I would not out because they are living their lives, harming nobody in the LGBT community.   Longtime blog readers may remember that I had a chance to out Clay Aiken, but refused despite “Claymates” demanding I reveal the gender of a “friend” I mentioned who was dating him about a year ago.

The same can’t be said for Smith, or Florida Governor Charlie Crist.

Word to the conservative closeted gays who make decisions that work against their own people: the LGBT community has no more patience for Roy Cohns.

The problem with my Smith post is that I wrote it out of anger over Fox News and their destructive, debased “news” that seemingly intelligent people actually believe is fair and balanced.  Writing in anger is cathartic, but it detracts from the message.  I was in Tel Aviv photographing for the Creative Commons, and my hotel only carried Fox News (“We see them as the most pro-Israel,” my guide told me).  Every day for a week I had to watch them to find out what was happening in the U.S.

Forced to watch Fox, outing Shep to the legions of fans of their slanted reporting was the only thing I could think to do.  They are being fed their news by a gay guy.  And there are a lot of gays who work at News Corp.

In October 2007, I interviewed one of the most impassioned defenders of outing celebrities, Michael Musto, who writes a popular column for the Village Voice.  In the 1990′s, Musto outed two of the most famous openly-gay celebrities today: Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres.  Here was our exchange over the subject:

DS: What stands out as a story that you did where you were bowled over by the reaction to it.

MM: In the 1990s I was one of the few people outing celebrities—

DS: —You outed Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen Degeneres—

MM: —I outed Rosie and Ellen, and it’s hard to even imagine now that they ever were in the closet. You have to educate the new people and say, ‘Guess what, they were in the closet at one point.’ It’s hard to believe that Rosie was doing this delicate dance on her talk show where she was the ‘Queen of Nice’ and the single mother who had a crush on Tom Cruise and I was pointing out the absurdity of it. I was even more angry at the media than people like Rosie, because the media would play along with it. They would do huge profiles of her without even addressing the fact that she was obviously a lesbian. I just spoke at Yale a couple of weeks ago and talked about outing, and nobody argued. I was like, ‘Come on! Somebody argue!’ I used to get so many arguments over this that I used to have a list printed out with an answer to each argument.

DS: Do you have a theory or philosophy you follow about outing?

MM: My theory is just that public figures sign an implicit deal with the media that their private lives are to be covered, and to leave out gayness because it is distasteful or there might be homophobes out there is homophobic in itself. It’s hypocritical and it makes ‘gay’ the last taboo. But I don’t get arguments anymore. I’m like, ‘Come on people! Yell at me!’

DS: What about the argument that it is more appropriate for people who are working against the gay community, a Larry Craig, if you will?

MM: People like Michaelangelo Signorile started by outing Malcolm Forbes, not anybody anti-gay. He was just saying ‘He’s dead, he’s gay, let’s say so in the obituary.’ I don’t believe in outing only the hypocrites and anti-gay people because then the only people the public is going to know are gay are horrible, hateful people.

DS: There are a lot of gay people who aren’t talked about in Hollywood now. Merv Griffin was an example. Do you not feel the need to spell it out for some people who lead very openly gay lives but that nobody talks about?

MM: Yeah, that was a big uproar after Merv died. Merv almost came out himself; was it Vanity Fair where he said ‘I’m quarter sexual, I’ll sleep with anybody for a quarter?’ or something? 99% of the obits didn’t even address it the fact that even Merv had almost coyly come out. So yeah, I wrote something to try and rectify that.

DS: But why not write something before he died?

MM: Please! I totally did. In the 90′s there was a group that put up those ‘Absolutely Queer: Jodi Foster’ and Merv Griffin posters? I ran the Jodi and Merv posters in my column. It was huge. I was really going places nobody was going; nobody was running pictures of those posters because everybody was so terrified of lawsuits.

DS: Did you ever come under editorial pressure over those?

MM: No, and the Voice staff at the time was very anti-outing, but nobody told me not to go there, and I’ve never been sued in my life and I’ve been here for 22 years.

Click on the image to visit Buell's Wikipedia article, the source for much of this information.

On Wednesday the 24th a piece of rock history will take the stage: Bebe Buell at the Hiro Ballroom.

Some people focus on the giant-sized names I have shot for the Creative Commons, but the people that linger in my mind are the hundreds of others who are not household names but who have successfully created full, interesting lives. The lawyers, academics, economists and artists who shape our world without our ever realizing it.

Bebe Buell is one of those artists.

She is famous in New York City for her ability to throw together–to embody–a scene, and as an accomplished musician in her own right.

In 1981, she recorded an EP with  Rick Derringer and Ric Ocasek, and The Cars served as her band on two tracks.  The rock band Power Station formed around her in 1984 when then-boyfriend John Taylor (of Duran Duran) pulled some famous friends together to provide backing for Buell.

Her music career is underscored by Buell’s presence for many of the Twentieth Century’s huge musical moments. In Almost Famous, director Cameron Crowe partly based the film’s “Penny Lane” character–played by Kate Hudson–on Buell.  Hudson was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and won a Golden Globe for the role.

In 1972, Buell began dating rock star Todd Rundgren, which lasted for several years. During and after their sometimes open relationship, she was associated with Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, and Steven Tyler.   In 1977, Buell and Tyler had a daughter together, the actress Liv Tyler.  After her relationship with Steven ended, Buell began dating Rod Stewart.  In the summer of 1978, she began an affair with the recently-separated Elvis Costello that continued on and off until 1984.

All of this shaped Bebe Buell into a piece of living rock history, and as you can see from my 2009 Wikipedia portrait of her above, one of the best-looking.  She clearly kept a good head on her shoulders and took care of herself during what must have been some very debauched moments that she witnessed.

On top of it all, she raised an amazing daughter in Liv Tyler, who my friends in Hollywood tell me is one of the nicest, most down-to-Earth actors working today.  That’s Bebe’s parenting; she spared Liv from many of the problems that afflicted her contemporaries.

Go to Amazon to hear the Bebe Buell Band’s latest single, Air Kisses for the Masses and find out what all of this influence wrought.

Five Questions for Bebe Buell

Q. What is one thing you think every American should know?

A. That marriage is between two PEOPLE who love each other- a personal vow and contract. God does not care who loves or married whom- only how we treat our fellow man. Love is free- it should not have a gender. Only a purpose- to love.

Q. If you had the option to have been born another nationality than your current one, which nationality would you choose?

A. Alien. Oh wait- I AM an alien!! I believe we are born who we are meant to be so it is hard to imagine. But I have always been fascinated with nomads- people who wander and roam with no real anchor. Kind of like the TV show Kung Fu. So probably Tibetan.

Q. What is one misconception people have about you?

A. That I am sexual or good in bed. I’m really just a “love bug”- not armed with much sexual skill or sexual perfection. It is my heart that boils over with loving energy.

Q. Is there anyone’s death, either in your life or in popular culture, whose passing you were surprised by how profoundly it affected you?

A. John Lennon. I cried for days and days. My 14 year old Chihuahua Chiquita- I was consumed with grief. But she was reincarnated almost immediately and my new “mutt” Chickenburger has a home.

Q. In life we often have goals that we feel as if would just die if we don’t reach them. Sometimes we reach them, sometimes we don’t. The question is, have you ever worked to fulfill a goal, only to find that once you achieved it, the experience was a let down? It meant something to you when you did not have it. Then you obtained it and, after the initial excitement, you thought to yourself, “Is that all there is?” Have you ever had an experience like that?

A. I treat my goals as a desire- a passion. If I am meant to have it, earn it, own it… then I consider it a “gift”, a blessing. A gift from the karma police.

I never take anything for granted.

Especially love.  My daughter.  My family.  My art. My music… my muse…

FIVE QUESTIONS – A SERIES

• EVAN WOLFSON – founder of the modern gay marriage movement…I have five questions for you.
• JIMMY WALES – Citizen of the world, sage to millions of editors of Wikipedia, which he founded…I have five questions for you.
• BILLY NAME – Famous Warhol live-in photographer; silverized the Factory; shot the cover of the Velvet Underground’s eponymous album; iconic portraits of Lou Reed and Edie Sedgwick…I have five questions for you.

Hillel Mintz posted a quick interview with me about my perspective on Israel after having traveled there twice for the creative commons and Wikimedia projects.  Go here to read it.

Speaking of Israel, tonight I will be photographing Israeli rock star Ivri Lider at Webster Hall.

Earlier today I met with a couple of local New York literary scenesters to discuss the formation of a new website.  We began its design.

Somebody has to clean it...

The folks in Ludington, Michigan like to turn lemons into lemonade.  According to local ABC television affiliate WZZM, over a year ago the SS Badger, the Lake Michigan car ferry that shuttles between Ludington and Manitowoc, Wisconsin, wanted the Discovery Channel‘s “Dirty Jobs” program to spotlight this floating historic site.  But the producers said they would only come to Ludington if there was more than one dirty job.  Now Ludington is tap-dancing in front of the Dirty Jobs producers again, hoping to score some national exposure with local businesses involved in “removing skunks, packing meat, getting rid of sea lamprey, cleaning heat ducts or making pesticides .

Ludington may want to be careful what it wishes for, because it just might get a flood of immigrants desperate for any job that skunk removal might not be so bad.  According to NPR, the unemployment in the country has made dirty jobs (the ones that used to be described as ones only immigrants would do) are back en vogue.

That was NPR’s point, focusing on the Cascade Humane Society in Jackson, also in Michigan.  According to the non-profit’s executive director, Debra Carmody, they have been inundated with over-qualified people for a few recent jobs:

Jobs are scarce in Michigan and the state’s unemployment rate of 10.6 percent is the highest in the nation.

“They almost all had college degrees, many of them had master’s degrees,” Carmody says of those applying for jobs at her animal shelter. “There were two or three former executive directors of nonprofits.

“The one that really blew me away was we had one attorney.”

Go here to listen to the full story about the return of dirty work.

A sign of the times is the stories about people dumbing-down their resumes to get lower jobs.  Adweek warns that people who might be willing to a take a huge pay cut and a lower status “may not get the job because they’re overqualified“. As if picking up that bugle, McClatchy Newspapers sent out local reporters in its empire to write these stories.  The Cleveland Plain-Dealer ran McClatchy story that told us, “Adapting to lean times, résumés also get leaner”.  The Akron Beacon Journal ran a McClatchy story “Job seekers tone down resumes – Professionals leave out titles, degrees so they don’t seem overqualified”.   The Dallas Morning News re-ran McClatchy’s Charlotte Observer story, “Interview Seekers Omit Details on Resumes”.  The Seattle Times ran a McClatchy story that intoned “Overqualified applicants flooding the job market”.

What’s all this mean?  Probably that people are dumbing down resumes, but only one news company is the main source behind all the headlines.

When Time Magazine named Evan Wolfson as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, it was for making an impossible idea—marriage for gay people—conceivable.  Wolfson is the Martin Luther King Jr. of the modern fight for the marriage right.  There is no state or legal battle that does not involve Wolfson’s work, either directly or through his unavoidable precedents.

Wolfson’s organization, Freedom to Marry, is completely geared up to fight the bigots who are trying to overturn California’s marriage law.  They need your donations.  Now.

So Mr. Wolfson, one of the most influential people in the world, I have five questions for you:

A. Israeli — though it would be wonderful to have European citizenship, too

A. Yes, in college I worked to become Speaker of the Political Union.  I was proud to be elected, did some great projects with close friends (who remain friends to this day), and enjoyed serving.  But I remember the feeling of discovery that far from being the pinnacle I had imagined, the actual office meant less to me than the experience and friendships themselves.

FIVE QUESTIONS FOR PEOPLE – A SERIES

• JIMMY WALES – Citizen of the world, sage to millions of editors of Wikipedia, which he founded…I have five questions for you.
• BILLY NAME – Famous Warhol live-in photographer; silverized the Factory; shot the cover of the Velvet Underground’s eponymous album; iconic portraits of Lou Reed and Edie Sedgwick…I have five questions for you.

As an interview technique I would ask substantive questions and then abruptly take the interview into absurd directions.  This would take the interviewee out of his or her “I’ve done a million of these interviews” headspace, and lead to more interesting answers.  They were also a lot of fun.  I typically did them with musicians.

One of the more fun of these was with Alex Necochea, of the Boston band Bang Camaro (on left in the photo with Bryn Bennett).  Below is a snippet of my wild Wikinews interview with Alex last October:

DS: Does the war in Iraq affect you artistically at all?

AN: [Laughs] No, not at all. No, you could say I’m just like everybody else. I read the paper and blogs, and I’m just as horrified as everybody else. I’m definitely not a fan of this war.

DS: If you had to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan, where would you fight?

AN: Oh, the fight was definitely in Afghanistan. Iraq was a much different animal.

DS: Are you more inspired by things in nature or things that are man made?

AN: I would probably have to go with nature. I’m a student of science. I have a degree in environmental geology. When I was 19/20 years old I went through all the regular existential questions people that age go through: why am I here and my place in the universe, that sort of thing.

DS: Did you answer any of them?

AN: Oh, God! I play rock guitar in a twenty man band!

DS: What’s your favorite curse word?

AN: Fuck.

DS: What’s your favorite euphemism for breasts?

AN: Big guns.

DS: Have you used that recently?

AN: Actually, I think I did use that in the last week, and no comment.

DS: I read that you named the band after fast women and fast cars.

AN: [Laughs] Who told you that? No, Bang Camaro were two words out of the English language that were the two sexiest words we could think of. We put them together and they roll off the tongue. Bang Camaro. It says a lot more than it means.

DS: What possession do you treasure most?

AN: That’s a good question. Probably my cat. I love my cat more than anything.

DS: What’s your cat’s name?

AN: Sadie.

DS: Like Sexy Sadie?

AN: Yeah, like Sexy Sadie. That’s exactly what I named her after. Big John Lennon fan, so I couldn’t resist.

DS: What do you think are the greatest threats to humanity?

AN: Humanity itself. You can typically read anywhere that humanity is a virus, a plague, on Mother Earth. I really think the greatest threat to humanity is not a meteor or comet hurtling toward the planet, it’s us. We’ll be our own undoing. Bad politics, the spread of…oh, man, I could get in trouble…

DS: Who would you get in trouble with?

AN: No, I don’t know who I could get in trouble with. But I definitely think that capitalism is something that having gone unchecked for so long isn’t doing right in delivering civil freedom. It’s not delivering on its promises. Then again, I play in a rock band and people come pay to see me. I understand it works on both levels.

At the New York City meet-up picnic yesterday the subject of Wikinews came up, along with the perennial topic of “What’s wrong with it?”  Absolutely nothing A lot.  One thing that holds that project back is the lack of vision many Wikipedia editors have with their sister project, and that even some Wikinewsies suffer from.

Jon Harald Søby wrote about how great Wikinews is, and I agree.  But there’s a problem:  “Nobody reads Wikinews” said Newyorkbrad at the picnic. I propose the problem is not in lack of readership, but in how the project’s potential has been limited.

When I spoke at the picnic about what I write below, it was met with a favorable response.  In some ways, I think it is the key to the constraints many active content producers feel working on subjects in-depth.

An example of the problem

I think Wikinews has a huge gaping role to fill on Wikipedia, and the projects are more related than people might think. There is a dire need for people to conduct original research with Wikipedia specifically in mind.  I raised at the picnic the case of porn king Michael Lucas’ last name on his article.  There are multiple media sources that say he was given ‘Bregman’ at birth, which was his father’s name.  Lucas disputes this, and furnished his Soviet birth certificate, Soviet passport, and expired American passport to show that he was given his mother’s maiden name, Treivas, at birth.  Lucas wrote and worked with Wikipedia to correct the inaccuracy, which caused an issue on a court case when he was sued as “Bregman”

“They found the name on Wikipedia, so they used it,” Lucas told me about the Plaintiff.

Would you believe that after he supplied three pieces of government-issued identification, good faith editors continued to say we could not use them because they constitute “original research”, which is verboten on Wikipedia?

Logic on Wikipedia does not always run with reason.  Clearly, that shows a problem in how we think on the site in relying too heavily on the letter, and not the spirit, of the policies.

A solution to the problem

But there must be a place in the Wikimedia media world where people can do original research.  Where guidelines are set about what constitutes a “Wikipedia-grade article” so that it can be used on Wikipedia as a source.  There is no reason why the scores of people who have built one of the most influential websites in the world can’t write an article like, “Michael Lucas clears up last name issue”.  I just linked to three pieces of evidence; why should sloppy reporting by the mainstream media take precedence over fact, when our goal is reliability?

Yes, this will expand the Wikinews directive, and there is no time like the present.  It needs it.

Wikipedia editors need a place where they can go and write stories or store information that can be used to clear up problems for which there is a lack of available sources.

Wikinews:  The place for Original Research on Wikipedia

It’s also the place where you can hang out at film festivals (photo, above); have dinner with Augusten Burroughs; discuss life with your favorite band; talk to a sitting head of state like Shimon Peres; discuss the future of drag queens with RuPaul; or mull race relations with Al Sharpton.

It’s also a place where you can follow your local sports team, interview the coaches about plays over which you had a question, take photographs of the players, and probably get to sit with press photographers at games.

Call up your governor, congressmen, mayor or whatever and do an interview about the pressing issues in your community, the ones the press is ignoring.

The undiscovered potential of Wikinews needs to be discovered.  One of its roles should be as a place where Wikipedia goes to conduct research, under guidelines, and voted upon by the community for its acceptability as a source.

Last November I interviewed the President of the news satire empire The Onion, Sean Mills, and Chet Clem, the editorial manager for the print tabloid.  One of The Onion‘s long-running series is “American Voices“, a parody of Word on the Street-style news segments where a person comments with his opinion.  The Onion has six photos of different people, whose names and occupations change each week.  I asked about the people behind the portraits, all of whom were chosen by graphics editor Mike Loew in 1998.

DS: Who are the people on the street, the “American Voices”?

Sean: Each one of them has their own magnificent story, but they are mainly people from back in the early days of Madison where The Onion started.  One guy’s a UPS driver who came by the office; another one was someone they randomly pulled off the street.  But they go way back in The Onion.  Chet might know more.

Chet: Way back to the Madison days and they were literally six people on the street that one day, and we have used them ever since.

DS: They are such a perfect representation of a broad spectrum of people, that it’s funny that you found them all randomly in just one day.

Chet: I wasn’t there at the time, but they were people around the office or around downtown Madison.  The UPS driver, for instance, was a guy who always made deliveries to the office, and he happened to come by right when they were shooting and agreed to do the photo.  He still works for UPS and still lives in Madison and was the subject of a feature in the UPS Teamsters magazine about that face in The Onion…our UPS guy, still at UPS and still in Madison.

DS: Have you heard if it has affected their lives?

Sean: There have been a few pieces that I’ve read that people have done research and talked to a lot of them, and most of them are pretty delighted about it and they hear about it all the time.  There are six takes on it, but most of it is pretty positive.

Further information at The A.V. Club.
Read the full interview here.