So please, enjoy the title link above (the original "Seven Words" routine from his 1972 album Class Clown) and this 1978 update from George Carlin Again. Safe for work? Are you fucking kidding me? Let it all hang out:
As I've saidbefore, I've often traced my yen to write about baseball back to my paternal grandfather, Bernard Jaffe. Last Tuesday, May 20, marked his centennial birthday, and with my various deadlines and other obligations out of the way, I'd like to honor his life and share some fond memories.
Bernard -- "Bernie" or "BJ" to friends, "Poppy" or "Pop" to me -- was a lifelong baseball fan who witnessed a marvelous swath of baseball history over his 92 years of life. When I was a youngster, he regaled me with tales of seeing the "Murderer's Row" Yankees of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, Giants such as Mel Ott and Bill Terry, and the daffy Dodgers, who became his team after he watched star outfielder Babe Herman get hit on the head with a fly ball he was attempting to catch. To him, the underdog and occasionally hapless Bums of Brooklyn offered an appeal that the Giants, class of the National League for so many years, couldn't match. Even after departing Brooklyn to move across the country more than a decade ahead of the Dodgers, he passed on his allegiance to his sons and grandsons.
I was Pop's first grandchild, and I believe he always found something in me that he could connect with. While fully capable of being outgoing, both of us at heart were introverts, and we shared a similar love for reading. In addition to his oral history lessons, Pop encouraged me to read about the game, and not just via the pallid biographies written for kids. I vividly remember the day a box of secondhand paperbacks he'd rescued from the flea market arrived at my Salt Lake City home. At nine years old, I was reading Roger Angell's erudite essays in a dog-eared copy of The Summer Game and parsing the more complicated swear words in a musty edition of Jim Bouton's Ball Four. Those two books in particular introduced a self-awareness which shaped my powers of observation and eventually, my writing while rendering schoolboy fare like All-Pro Baseball Stars 1979 obsolete.
• • •
Born in Brooklyn on May 20, 1908 as the third of four boys, Pop rarely spoke his childhood, which wasn't the happiest. His father was a master tailor and a rabble-rouser who at various times in his career was blacklisted because of his efforts to unionize the garment factories in which he worked. Emotionally, he was a cold man, who didn't provide much overt affection. From what I understand, at some point he walked out on his family, though it wasn't until later that he obtained a divorce and remarried. Though I'm sure the era had something to do with the way he was raised, Pop took the counter-example of his own life to heart; he was a warm, generous, devoted family man and a pillar of his community.
This is him as a young boy, with mother Dora on the left, c. 1915:
Though only a wiry 5-foot-8 1/2, Pop was an excellent athlete. He played baseball at the University of Maryland, and was said to have been offered a professional contract by the Washington Senators, but he had other ideas about what he wanted to do in life. He got a graduate degree as a pharmacist, and worked for six months in Baltimore while hustling pool at night to help save up enough money to attend medical school. Unable to afford the exorbitant cost of attending a stateside medical school, and stymied by the quota system which limited the number of Jews, he managed to start his studies in -- of all places -- Hitler's Germany, at the University of Göttering (sp?). The chutzpah! He didn't know much German when he came over, but he learned the language by reading newspapers and walking the streets. He somehow managed to wrangle a ticket to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where he saw Jesse Owens show up Hitler by winning four gold medals.
Standing to the left of brothers Hank and Matty, this picture shows Pop in a rather streetwise pose, as though waiting for his next mark to show up to the pool hall. It's dated 1936, but I believe it's a bit earlier, from before he went overseas:
After a year at Göttering, he was advised to leave, and he transferred to the University of Vienna, where he met Clara Gottfried (1912-2006), a woman four years his junior but a year ahead of him in medical school ("Nanny" or "Nan" to me). They met one Saturday night while she was studying for an exam in a coffee house; he was playing pool, saw and recognized her, and offered to walk her home. They married in Vienna on March 29, 1938, and with the situation there worsening vis-à-vis the Nazis, began planning their exit. When he finished his studies, Bernard didn't even wait around to receive his diploma; a classmate named Dr. Samuel Schoenberg picked it up along with his own, and escaped by walking over the Alps into Switzerland.
Bernie and Clara in Vienna, 1938:
Thanks to the efforts of an American cousin of her father named Marcus Helitzer (who opened an American bank account in her name with $1,000), Clara was granted a visa to travel to the US. The couple booked passage on a ship and arrived in the US on July 15, 1938, but Clara never saw her parents again. Both died in concentration camps, as did nearly all of my grandmother's relatives.
Stateside, my grandparents settled in New York City. Bernard got an internship at Brooklyn Lutheran Hospital, living on hospital grounds while Clara lived out on Long Island with the Helitzer family, and they saw each other on weekends. She got a job working as the physician for a girls' camp in Liberty, New York, and soon earned enough money to get an apartment of her own on 86th Street. He entered the Army Reserves in 1939, and she took over his internship, having passed her medical boards in April.
What's up, Doc? Bernie on the grounds of Brooklyn Lutheran in 1939:
When Clara completed her internship, Bernard asked her to join him down in Asheville, North Carolina, where he was the physician at a Civil Conservation Corps base. In those uncertain times, he wanted her to settle down and to start a family. He got his first position in Hot Springs, outside of Asheville. When the Reserves called him up for active duty, he failed his physical. The story goes that he'd been playing tennis and, not having a car, had run several miles to the offices. When he arrived, he was sweating profusely. The doctor asked if this happened often, and when he said yes, the doctor feared he had a cyst. He was turned down for active duty and sent to Augusta, Georgia to train for the Veterans Administration hospital. There, my father (Richard) was born in 1941.
Bernie and Clara, 1940 in Miami:
With my dad at about one year old, 1942:
They bounced around -- the life of an Army doctor -- finally settling in the farming town of Walla Walla, Washington in 1944; they had another son, Bob, in 1946. While my grandmother adapted to life as a homemaker, my grandfather made his practice as an otolaryngologist (ear, nose and throat doctor), and practiced at the VA hospital there until his retirement in 1973. Upon leaving the VA grounds, they bought a house at 1966 Scarpelli, and he lived out the rest of his life there. When he retired at age 65, Pop didn't think he had many years left to live; the average life expectancy at the time was only about 73 years old. Instead he managed to live another 27 years, long enough to see all four of his grandchildren grow into early adulthood.
With both of his kids, 1949:
• • •
I spent many a wonderful summer day with Nan and Pop. They would drive down to our home in Salt Lake City, and after a visit of about a week, would drive us back to Walla Walla; Pop would his massive gas-guzzler (a Cadillac Seville, I think) drive the entire distance in one 12-hour day, and we'd stop for dinner at Sizzler about an hour or so outside of town. We'd spend as long as three weeks in Walla Walla, then my parents would meet us there or we'd rendezvous at a family reunion on the Oregon coast or at the Black Butte Ranch, near Sisters, Oregon.
With their first-born grandson (me), 1971:
Pop gave me my first ball glove, an occasion that remains etched in my memory, a warm summer evening when I was about seven. Instead of playing whiffle ball in the backyard as we regularly did with my father, my brother and I were instructed to put the mitts on our left hands. We struggled to grasp this fundamental puzzle just as surely as we did the balls Pop and Dad lobbed to us from a few paces away, but gradually we got the hang of it.
Dad usually had time to play catch or Hot Box with my brother and me on a regular basis, but when we stayed with my grandparents, we were in baseball immersion camp. In the morning Pop and I would walk down to the grocery store to get the morning paper, The Oregonian, and we'd read the boxscores and game summaries on the way home. After that we'd collect my brother and go to nearby Howard Tietan Park, where Popwould pitch to us from behind home plate as we'd smack balls, five a turn, into a backstop where one rung meant a single, two a double, three a triple, and over the backstop a home run (just this past winter I discovered that this was actually an old stickball variant). When the balls got too beat up from bashing into the chain links of the backstop, Pop covered them in electrical tape and we'd hammer them until they resembled squeezed grapefruits.
We'd also play catch in his endless backyard; he'd throw long balls and we'd chase after them, laying out for "spectacular catches," the name we gave that particular drill. We'd play in his huge garden; while he would spend endless hours picking enormous raspberries (which Nan would turn into delicious jams), we'd throw the various fallen fruits and vegetables into an oversized barrel of dirt and compost which we called "elephant stew." In the evening we'd watch baseball on his new-fangled cable TV system, which included the fledgling ESPN station. My brother and I would sit on the arms of Pop's big red leather chair. Often he'd turn the volume down and play classical music while talking to us as the game went on, perhaps breaking out a crossword puzzle, a favorite pastime, and pitching us the easy clues while explaining the harder ones in an effort to expand our vocabularies.
Once in awhile, we'd go see the Walla Walla Padres, the Low-A Northwest League affiliate of San Diego, play at Borleske Stadium. I watched a handful of players who would leave their marks in the majors in some way or another come through Walla Walla, including Tony Gwynn, John Kruk, Mitch Williams, Jimmy Jones, Kevin Towers, Greg Booker, and Bob Geren. The league featured opponents like Mark Langston and Phil Bradley of the Mariners' Bellingham squad as well. Even then I kept score at those games, and I still have the those programs. In the summer of 2006, I served as the consultant for a bobblehead commemorating Gwynn's 42-game stay with Walla Walla in 1981, to be issued the following year in celebration of his induction into the Hall of Fame.
As I got older, the visits to Walla Walla inevitably stopped; the last year I recall us staying with them was 1982, which as it turns out was also the last year the Padres were in town. In retrospect, I realize how lucky my brother and I were to share so much time with my grandparents; my cousins, who are five and seven years younger and lived much closer in Seattle, didn't get the same mass quantity of quality time, didn't know them in the same way.
We still saw Nan and Pop a couple times a year in Salt Lake City, and talked on the phone every couple of weeks. Every so often, another box of books would arrive, more baseball to bind us together. The calls grew less frequent as Pop's hearing seriously declined; he never really adjusted to wearing a hearing aid, often turning the accursed thing off and missed out on a lot of the conversation. Nonetheless, he was still pretty sharp into his late 80s; not until various physical maladies, including prostate cancer, began taking their toll did the quality of our conversations really take a downturn.
I last saw my grandfather in 1999, when I visited Walla Walla with my parents. He was frail, stooped, and using a walker, a shadow of the vital man I'd once known. I recall that we watched a few innings of a ballgame together, seeing the Yankees' Orlando Hernandez get knocked out of the box against the Mariners in newly-opened Safeco Field. Later that day, he gave me a prized possession I knew had been coming my way for quite some time, a vintage Rolex watch that he'd owned for 50 years, squirreling away for a day when he cold pass it on. It's a beautiful, timeless timepiece; I still think of him every time I wear it.
Pop passed away quietly on November 24, 2000, the day after Thanksgiving. I flew to Walla Walla and joined my father, uncle and brother in delivering eulogies and serving as a pallbearer. My grandmother would survive until August 2006, sharp into her early 90s; I wrote about her passing here.
• • •
Four and a half months after Pop passed away, one of my baseball favorites, Willie Stargell, died as well, and it brought back a flood of memories of Pop, Bryan and I watching the 1979 "We Are Family" Pirates, who were all over the airwaves that summer on their way to a World Championship (the Dodgers, coming off consecutive pennants, were stuck in sub-.500 oblivion). Moved by Stargell's passing and, in the tradition of my grandfather, struck with a yearning to pass on a generation of baseball wisdom to those whose appreciations didn't go back as far, I wrote an obituary of sorts, and emailed it around to friends. It became the cornerstone of the Futility Infielder website.
In two weeks time, I'd registered a domain name, opened a Blogger account, and bought a book on web site design. The rest is history, my history. For as much as I was able to glean from my grandfather, there are many times I've found myself wishing he'd kept a memoir of the players and the games he saw. They would have provided me more insight into the man, as well as those times, and his keen eye and dry wit would have been preserved for posterity. So it is that I record my own thoughts and descriptions in the hope of sharing my interest in the Mendoza Line, the 1998 Yankees, and the games of today. The arcane and the amazing as well as the now, a flowing river of baseball history that began with a man born a century ago.
Less than two weeks after the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, the world of letters lost another giant on Monday when David Halberstam was killed in a car accident near San Francisco. Halberstam was 73 years old but had shown no sign of slowing down; the crash occurred as he was on his way to interview the great Y.A. Tittle for a book about the 1958 NFL Championship game. Tellingly, the New York Times did not have an obituary at the ready as it did for Mr. Vonnegut or most other accomplished men his age. With a book on the Korean War in the pipeline, and the football one on the front burner, the man was far from writing his final chapter. Damn.
Halberstam made his mark as a war reporter for the Times, sharing a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his unflinching coverage of the Vietnam War, coverage that called his patriotism into question. From the obit:
His reporting, along with that of several colleagues, left little doubt that a corrupt South Vietnamese government supported by the United States was no match for Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies. His dispatches infuriated American military commanders and policy makers in Washington, but they accurately reflected the realities on the ground.
For that work, Mr. Halberstam shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. Eight years later, after leaving The Times, he chronicled what went wrong in Vietnam — how able and dedicated men propelled the United States into a war later deemed unwinnable — in a book whose title entered the language: “The Best and the Brightest.”
...President John F. Kennedy was so incensed by Mr. Halberstam’s war coverage that he strongly suggested to The Times’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, that the reporter be replaced. Mr. Sulzberger replied that Mr. Halberstam would stay where he was. He even had the reporter cancel a scheduled vacation so that no one would get the wrong idea.
Obviously, Halberstam's story resonates in these times, though it's clear the forces who question the patriotism of the messenger bearing the bad news now have the upper hand. Such bold reportage as Halberstam's is all too lacking today, enabling a submoronic president and his utterly corrupt administration to fight a war on false pretenses while blanketing a complicit and deferential press with lies that go largely unchallenged in the mainstream media. As Salon's Glenn Greenwald put it:
David Halberstam's death yesterday is certain to prompt all sorts of homage from our media stars describing Halberstam as a superior journalist, someone who embodied what journalism ought to be. And it is true that he was exactly that.
But modern American journalists -- as Halberstam himself repeatedly emphasized -- have become the precise antithesis of those values. The functions Halberstam and the best journalists of his generation fulfilled are exactly those that have been so fundamentally abandoned, repudiated and scorned by our nation's most prominent and influential media stars. And most legitimate media criticisms today are grounded in exactly that gaping discrepancy.
Halberstam generally alternated his books on heavy topics like wars, politics and industry with books on sports. While the latter were anything but puff pieces, Halberstam understood the limits of sport's power in the current age.
I read his Breaks of the Game, a book about the Bill Walton-era Portland Trailblazers of the '70s, back when I was in high school; it's been hailed as basketball's answer to The Boys of Summer, and while I wouldn't go that far, I can't list too many basketball books I'd read again if given the chance. Several years later, I devoured both Summer of '49 and October 1964, two of Halberstam's books on baseball. I've since learned that both have their share of minor errors, but the latter, which covers the rise of the Gibson-Brock-Flood Cardinals and the fall of the Yankee dynasty, remains a touchstone for its illuminating narrative of the impact of integration on the two teams and their respective leagues. I touched on a bit of the Red Sox shameful history of racism here last week. The Yankees, who finally integrated in 1955 with Elston Howard, were no saints in that department either; their reward for GM George Weiss' myopic racism and failure to pursue talented black players was a decade of irrelevance. Another of Halberstam's baseball books, The Teammates remains on my shelf, unread, awaiting its turn at bat.
But the first Halberstam book I pulled off my shelf when I heard the sad news was one he edited, The Best American Sports Writing of the Century. Back in 1999, when it came out, I went to the Union Square Barnes and Noble for a signing featuring him and four of writers represented in the book, Ira Berkow, George Plimpton, Dick Schaap, and Gay Talese. Schaap died in 2001, Plimpton in 2003, and now Halberstam -- perhaps they're all somewhere in the afterlife, talking about ballgames past, telling stories as only they could. So it goes.
Moving right along, the first Hit List of the regular season is up over at Baseball Prospectus. It's a new time slot, chosen to maintain some domestic harmony (my wife puts up with a lot of writing-induced tunnel vision over the winter, and clearing my schedule for her days off was overdue) and to prevent me having to punt so many of these puppies due to summer weekend travels. Hopefully, it's not quite so counterintuitive as it appears at first glance. Thursday is often an off day for many teams, which helps with turnaround times as far as keeping the list's stats fresh, and Friday marks the end of the work week for most readers, plus it's traditionally a day when BP has been somewhat light in the content department.
The Mets top the list this week, followed by the Indians, Padres, Angels and Brewers -- a nice mix of teams thanks to the early date. The Yanks are eighth, the Dodgers are 14th, and the 30th-ranked Nationals look like they may give the '62 Mets a run for their money. No Simpsons reference in this week's list (d'oh!), but I did get to call upon Sesame Street, Samuel Beckett, Sam Horn, the Sausage Race, and Slaughterhouse-Five.
The last was intentionally topical, since Kurt Vonnegut passed away on Wednesday, and discussions of his demise dotted my conversations and my web reading as I prepared this week's list. The first Vonnegut novel I ever read was as an assignment, but it wasn't for an English class; Galapagos' take on the future of human evolution was required reading for my introductory biology class at Brown (and I note with pride that my professor for that class, Dr. Kenneth Miller, has become a high-profile opponent of creationism who maintains that evolution doesn't contradict religious faith). That Vonnegut would wind up on the Bio 20 syllabus wasn't all that surprising; the brother of a prominent scientist, Vonnegut's commitment to science was a key tenet of his worldview. Such were his politics that he noted just prior to the 2004 election, "No matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones."
I didn't really get hip to Vonnegut until a friend slid me a musty, dog-eared copy of Breakfast of Champions about a decade ago. How I missed Slaughterhouse when I was such a fan of Catch-22 I'll never know. Vonnegut quickly became one of my favorite novelists and cultural presences. His anti-authoritarian stance, economical style, black humor and ultimately his humanity made for an unmistakable voice that elevated even his most minor works, while placing his major ones among the greatest novels ever written, period. I don't recall him ever writing about baseball, but I've appropriated the title of alter ego Kilgore Trout's novel, Now It Can Be Told, morethana fewtimes here and in the Hit List.
If you're ever stuck in an airport bookstore without reading material for a flight ahead, grab a Vonnegut novel; it's the surest bet there is for a few laughs and some deep thought at 30,000 feet. His is a voice that will be truly missed. As the man liked to say, "So it goes."
• As announced last week, Baseball Prospectus 2007 is on the New York Times Bestseller List for the first time in its 12-year history. The March 18 list had BP07 at #15 on the Paperback Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous list, while on the March 25 one, we're up to #9. Look out, What to Expect When You're Expecting bitchez (ironically, published by BP's former publisher).
A reminder that I'll be on the promo trail for BP this week and next:
Thursday, March 22, 6:00 PM with Christina Kahrl, Steven Goldman, Neil DeMause, Derek Jacques, and Will Weiss
Columbia University Lerner Hall 2920 Broadway (@ 114th Street) New York, NY
Saturday, March 24, 2:00 PM with Christina Kahrl, Steven Goldman, Ben Murphy, John Erhardt, Neil DeMause, Jim Baker, Derek Jacques, Will Weiss, Clay Davenport, Will Carroll, Kevin Goldstein, and Marc Normandin
Yogi Berra Musuem Monclair State University 8 Quarry Road Little Falls, NJ 07424 973-655-2378
Monday, March 26, 6:00 pm with Steven Goldman and Neil DeMause
Barnes & Noble Yale University 77 Broadway New Haven, CT 06511 203-777-8440
If you're not in the area, see the BP events page for local listings in your market (not that all are as well-served as the Tri-State area).
• Last weekend, I got my copy of Bombers Broadside, which is now shipping from Amazon.
It's a nice piece of work, 112 pages of glossy, full color, pinstripe-flavored content about the current team as well as its illustrious history -- including features about the 1977 champions, and Babe Ruth's (in)famous "Called Shot" -- sure to appeal to Yankee fans, and featuring a roster that includes myself, editor Cecilia Tan, Alex Belth, Mike Carminati, Vince Genarro, Gary Gillette, Mark Healey, Derek Jacques, Tara Krieger, David Laurila, Dan McCourt, and Pete Palmer. I'll wager a guess that more than one of those names means something to those of you reading this, so cut yourself a slice. Belth's bittersweet piece on his childhood memories of Reggie Jackson and his recently deceased father is worth the price of admission alone.
I spoke to Alex briefly upon reading his piece, conveying my condolences. Typical Belth, he sounds remarkably upbeat and coherent under the circumstances; I was the one getting choked up during our conversation. Over the years that we've known each other, my chats with Alex about baseball have often centered around family and the way we became fans. One thing we hold in common is that both of us had special links to our fathers via Reggie Jackson and the game itself.
My relationship with my dad has always been a smooth one, and for that I'm incredibly, eternally grateful. Alex's relationship with his father was a bit rockier, but they'd long since found their peace, discovering the rewards in their hard-won understanding. At a time like this, that's as comforting a thought as there is. My deepest condolences to Alex, Emily and their family and friends.
• The results for the 2006 Hall of Fame voting have been announced. Not surprisingly, Cal Ripken Jr. (98.53 percent of the 545 votes) and Tony Gwynn (97.6 percent) were elected. Ripken appeared on the most ballots ever, but had "only" the third highest percentage behind Tom Seaver (98.83) and Nolan Ryan (98.79).
• Rich Gossage just missed being elected by 21 votes; his percentage has risen from 55.2 percent in 2005 to 64.6 percent last year to 71.2 percent this year. I think it's a pretty solid bet he gets in next year, with the writers' desires to keep the podium clear for Ripken and Gwynn the main reason he didn't get in this year.
• Other than Gossage and Dave Concepcion, every other repeat candidate on the ballot saw his percentage decrease. Bert Blyleven dropped below 50 percent, just a year after climbing above that level. That's significant because every candidate who's crossed the 50 percent threshold has gotten in with the exception of Gil Hodges and three men on the current ballot: Blyleven, Gossage, Jim Rice, and Andre Dawson.
• Mark McGwire wasn't even close, at 23.5 percent, but he stays on the ballot, which may allow cooler heads to prevail.
• The dream is over for Steve Garvey (whose eligibility expired aftter 15 years). Dropping off the ballot by receiving less than five percent of the vote: Orel Hershiser, Albert Belle, Paul O'Neill, Bret Saberhagen, Jose Canseco (bye, schmuck), Tony Fernandez, Dante Bichette, Eric Davis, Bobby Bonilla, Ken Caminiti, Jay Buhner, Scott Brosius, Wally Joyner, Devon White, and Bobby Witt. All but the latter four received at least one vote, which is kind of scary when you think about somebody seriously considering Bichette.
• My JAWS article on pitchers went up earlier today, as did an expanded ranking of the Reliever Adjusted JAWS rankings at Unfiltered. Yesterday's Unfiltered featured a look at the JAWS rankings of every #1 draft pick; Harold Baines (1977 #1 who narrowly managed to stay on the ballot at 5.3 percent) is third all-time behind Ken Griffey Jr. (who will be the first HOFer from among those ranks) and Alex Rodriguez (who's already #1).
• Joe Sheehan uses JAWS to look at some of the ballot's perennial bridesmaids, including his personal favorite, Don Mattingly. I think he sums the JAWS mission up nicely: "JAWS shouldn't be the be-all and end-all of a Hall of Fame discussion. Players should receive markers for postseason performance, for awards, for contributions to championships, for elements not captured in the statistical record. However, an objective standard is necessary, or the argument becomes bogged down in preferences and fandom."
Speaking of BP, I'll be doing my best to beat the Hall of Fame's Tuesday announcement of the 2007 voting results by running JAWS articles on Monday and Tuesday, and hosting a chat at 4 PM Eastern after the results are annnounced. Until then, it's back to the salt mines...
I've oftentraced my yen to write about baseball back to a pair of dog-eared secondhand books -- Roger Angell's The Summer Game and Jim Bouton's Ball Four -- rescued from a flea market by my grandfather, and by the marvelous yet unrecorded swath of the game's history he himself witnessed in his 91 years of life. I've paid homage to the rants of Hunter S. Thompson. I've tipped my cap to the discussions at Baseball Primer, and the small handful of blogs that were online when I began publishing mine four years ago.
But never have I written about a more contemporary influence, one which showed the world the vast possibilities of a new type of writing for the new medium of the World Wide Web. One which combined bleeding-edge savvy with a jaded ennui, all shot through with a snarky punk attitude and a laugh-out-loud sense of humor. One which delivered the goods on a daily basis, making itself a mandatory lunchtime read for anybody with an Internet connection. One which dead-perfectly illustrated the zeitgeist. Suck.com.
An outgrowth of Wired magazine's online offering, HotWired, Suck was the brainchild of Carl Steadman and Joey Anuff. It debuted on August 28, 1995, just over 10 years ago, with the following manifesto of sorts:
Shit makes great fertilizer, but it takes a farmer to turn it into a meal. With that thought in mind, we present Suck, an experiment in provocation, mordant deconstructionism, and buzz-saw journalism. Cathode-addled netsurfers flock to shallow waters—Suck is the dirty syringe, hidden in the sand. You wanted feedback? Cover your ears and watch your back … it wants you too. But Suck is more than a media prank. Much more. At Suck, we abide by the principle which dictates that somebody will always position himself or herself to systematically harvest anything of value in this world for the sake of money, power and/or ego-fulfillment. We aim to be that somebody.
Its first column, about the Courtney Love Murder Conspiracy Theory captured the thrill of the Web's capacity for breaking news:
There's something exciting about the breaking of news on the Web that can make an otherwise bullshit-quality story smell sweeter than Glade Potpourri-in-a-Spray. Whether it's two zillion critiques of a handicapped Time cover feature or early scene reports following an aging hippie's demise, I tend to find myself lapping it right up, like a thirsty dog at an open toilet.
The short, haiku-like lines centered on the page made for an easy read. The cleanliness of the design ensured quick load times in an age when a palpable tension existed between the content providers who pushed bandwith-hogging bells and whistles and the readers who connected to that content via turtle-like 28K or 56K dial-up modems. But even more revolutionary and influential was the style of hyperlinking to make references that were often obscure. As this lengthy history of Suck.com at Keepgoing.org recounts:
In the absence of HotWired strictures, they turned "tertiary links" into signature stylistic components. "It’s important to understand that up until then, to the best of my knowledge, people had just used hyperlinks in a strictly informational sense, simply as online footnotes," says Mark Dery, author of Escape Velocity. "With Suck, you wouldn’t get the joke until you punched through on the link. Then you found out that it set the keyword to which this new source was linked in an ironic light." Writing for Suck, Steadman and Anuff were free to link "suffocating infants" to Dave Winer’s column, or "wet dream" or "negative energy". "Whereas every other Web site conceived hypertext as a way of augmenting the reading experience," wrote Steven Johnson in Interface Culture, "Suck saw it as an opportunity to withhold information, to keep the reader at bay."
Similarly revolutionary was Suck's commitment to daily content, its use of pseudonyms (Steadman was Webster, Anuff the Duke of URL) and its underdog viewpoint of the still-nascent dot-com industry.
While the trade magazines flattered executives with softball portraits and blind utopianism, Suck spoke to the grunts on the front lines, those like Steadman and Anuff, who saw the mistakes being made at the top but lacked the power to do anything about it. It was snarky and sarcastic about topics that were too square to be snarky and sarcastic about anywhere else. For the ground-level tech drone stuck at a computer, it provided the perfect daily respite. It was quickly located, easily digestible, and if you could suppress your laughter, it looked just like working.
In essence, Suck was the first important blog, as Mena Trott, co-founder of the company which makes the Movable Type blogware, recounts:
"It’s everything that blogs are right now: the chronology, frequently updated, simple, easy to read, linking playing a huge role in playing the story. This is what exposed us to what had the potential to become what we’re doing today. It was hugely influential in the format. I don’t think you can even talk about weblogs now without talking about that. I think that was the big exposure for so many people. That played a great deal in what we did."
The site took off and was soon sold -- to Wired; the irony was that its founder and publisher, a regular reader of the site, didn't even realize it was being produced right under his nose by a pair of employees in their (cough) after-hours. Soon, staff was added, including Heather Havrilesky (a.k.a Polly Esther), Ana Marie Cox (Ann O'Tate), and illustrator Terry Colon, who gave Suck 2.0 (as it was called) its distinctive visual identity.
This blog's first entry was published exactly one day earlier. Freaky, that.
Anyway, I could go on for days about the impact of Suck. During its heyday, I worked for Wolff New Media, the brainchildfart of author Michael Wolff, a company which haphazardly published guides to the Internet at a breakneck pace that nonetheless turned them into better doorstops than directories by the time they hit the shelves, and one which turned into a cautionary tale of dot-com greed in Wolff's own Burn Rate. Via a website called Your Personal Net, our publishing pace was so frantic I coined a slogan, "We shit live copy in our sleep."
Like every other underling in the dot-com industry, we were exploited to the hilt, a concept the Sucksters understood completely:
Never before in history have nerds, as a class, become economically viable. It was never worthwhile to exploit astronomers. But computer programmers can actually make something people want, something people will pay for. And they over-focus anyway! Convince them that The Product is somehow important to their lives, more important than their lives, and hang a turd from a stick and call it a carrot.
Suck was the envy of our website and everyone else's, its hipness and street cred unrivaled, its slogans ("A fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun." "Now more than ever.") legendary. It was, as Keepgoing claims, the First Great Website.
Cox has gone onto greater fame as Wonkette, a political blog. Havrilesky writes for Salon among others. Anuff co-authored Dumb Money, a book about day trading. Steadman runs the website Plastic.com, which maintains the Suck archive, the site's oeuvre. It's well worth your time to check out if you've never seen it (a fistful of favorites: one, two, three, four), or even if you have. Ten years after its founding, its history is worth celebrating, its demise worth lamenting, and its genius worth revisiting. Spend an hour or two of company time screwing off as you read it. Happy birthday, Suck, and rest in peace.
