The NYT loves to pat itself on the back. It does this in their second page, A section feature called: "Inside the Times: The Story Behind the Story." Their self-praise is often justified.
Take yesterday's essay on writing on deadline for obituaries. Obituaries are perhaps my favorite section of the paper, and not driven by any morbid sense, but rather by how informative and often witty they are.
Yesterday's piece pours the praise on Neil Genzlinger and Clay Risen, relatively new bylines to the desk. I find Mr. Risen to be particularly clever on occasions when he slips in the lightning word, or ends with a great kicker. And he did this when we wrote yesterday of Paul Morantz, a California lawyer and investigative journalist who campaigned against cults, who has just passed away at 77.
Mr. Morantz holds the unenviable position of being the target of an assassination attempt by a set of his enemies who placed a rattlesnake in his mail box. Mr. Morantz went to retrieve his mail not noticing the snake that subsequently bit the hand that wasn't there to feed it. Mr. Morantz nearly died from the reaction to the snake's poisonous bite.
The two perpetrators, the dirty tricks muscle for Charles Dederich, leader of a cult-like organization called Synanon, were convicted and served light prison sentences. Charles Dederich, received a suspended sentence for ordering the attempt on Mr. Morantz's life.
Undeterred, Mr. Morantz continued his battle against the cults that were popping up in the '70s in California in an atmosphere that Mr. Risen described as "the post-hippie weirdness that was California in the 1970s."
"Weirdness," the one word that captures the trend of an entire era that probably still exists to this day. The succinctness of the word reminds me of a Margalit Fox obituary on Delbert Mann, a producer of the TV movie Heidi that NBC felt compelled to air at the "ultrapunctual" time of 7:00 P.M. EST rather than the completion of a close scoring, seesaw NY Jets-Oakland Raiders AFL football game in 1968. (I remember the famous preemption. Boy, did NBC take a lot of heat over that one.)
My oldest daughter, who just now turned 44, given the chance to refer to California somehow always works in her definition of the place as "the land of the fruits and nuts."
Mr. Risen is a fairly new addition to the obituaries desk that is no longer the purgatory part of a newspaper where the dinosaurs are sent to get old enough to receive their pensions. His background as a writer on bourbon and Teddy Roosevelt would seem to belie an obit desk assignment. But the quality of the writing puts him there continuing the Gold Standard the NYT has for tribute obituaries.
When possible, a tribute obituary will end with a so-called "kicker," a humorous anecdote about the deceased, or a quote from them. Mr. Risen doesn't disappoint when he ends Mr. Morantz's obituary with his answer to the person who asked him, "how do you know when you're in a cult." Easy, the answer is held in your hands.
Mr. Morantz replied: "Count the number of Hollywood stars in it. If you get past five, you are in one."
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment