Just for fun, let's accept that Andrew Breitbart and friends are exactly right: The mainstream media is in fact a vast and sickly warren of liberally elite left-wing writers, all bent on spending, apologizing and surrendering the American empire's way into oblivion. Done and done. I'm at it basically 24/7, with hammers, tongs and an immorally stable gay marriage on the side.

I would be psyched. Except for a few small details: e.g., my liberal ass is still employed by powerful, largely conservative tycoons whose own financially conservative ways matter so much more than my moist liberal ones, and so much less than their own profit/loss standards, that I can't believe I just spent a minute typing this paragraph. I mean, it's only so obvious.

But even the most absurdist statement can take root in the public consciousness if you say it often enough, and so the liberal bias meme has long since come to dominate the American public's conception of the nation's media. And life goes on nonetheless, albeit with a distinct whiff of Orwell (tea, cigarettes, angst) in the air.

It grows even more distinct the closer you get to Andrew Breitbart's web empire, dominated as it is by A.B.'s sirens-blaring conservativism, which is all well and good right up to the point where advocacy turns to distinctly dishonest propagandizing, as per his blatantly misleading take-down of agriculture dept. exec Shirley Sherrod.

But while it's one thing for Breitbart to torment the truth on his site, it's something else altogether when the liberal media swallows it whole and trumpets the story to high heaven. Leading to Sherrod's public humiliation and defenestration (since rescinded). Due entirely to Breitbart's twisted, innacurate version of what she said.

That's an odd kind of liberalism, isn't it? Largely because it's the sort of liberalism that gets run through large-scale corporate structures, the sort that have been designed to rake in huge piles of cash on a daily basis. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what the MSM has been, and will always be, up to. Not that it's always a right-ward task (consider CBS/Dan Rather's ill-reported attempt to prove the long-since-obvious charge that George W Bush dodged Vietnam through artful, if perfectly legal, avenues open to the crafitly well-to-do).

Also worth noting: That the one high-profile news anchor who stone-cold refused to have anything to do with Breitbart's story was the increasingly heroic Shepard Smith of, yes, that's right, Fox News. "I didn't trust the source," he said.

Now more than ever, the political drift of any story matters far less (not at all?) compared to its potential for snagging eyes, for going viral, for becoming this moment's cause celebre. In the absence of strict (increasingly unenforceable) rules governing balance, equal time and etc., the airwaves and cables pulse with the shiny, the splashy, the shot to the gut. Why dig into the subtleties of, say, health policy and insurance industry standards when you can focus on the fiery ad hominem attacks between legislators charged with protecting Americans' interests in that life-altering debate?

Straight-up information is a nice idea, but everything about it (the expense of thorough reporting; the dry-ness of the resulting stories; the comparative effort-to-buzz when opposed to conflict-of-the-moment stories) makes it a no-brainer.

Thus this charming tale of web news reportage designed entirely to connect the dots leading to hit-friendly, if perfectly nonsensical (how to wear a sweater vest? stress-relieving massage for your Shih-tzu?) stories. Is it truly possible that trained journalists whose jobs have come to include original web content, are instructed by their web editors to ignore tendencies toward thought and creativity, the better to write content designed to maximize browsability, linkage, clickability, and so on? That the needs of mercurial and suspiciously hostile commenters matter more than the pursuit of actually interesting writing? 

I wouldn't know nothing about that. But that's what some of my writer pals have been saying. Though they're clearly all liberals, so take it with a grain of organic sea salt.

I got to thinking about that Barefoot Bandit fellow, and the up-and-coming Beastie Boy kid, and the good ol' DB Cooper bandit, who may be alive and well and reading this right now. Or possibly not. Either way, I've got fresh new journalistic endeavors about all of the above and so, check it out. It's just like beer at the Delta house rush parties: Don't cost nothin'.

And when that was over I went downtown on Saturday to check out the 2nd annual Big Busk festival of movable performance artists. You can find that one, and along with references to pork pie hats and wicked cool Depression-era guitars, in this here story about the Big Busk.

Credit Ross W Hamilton for this cool shot of the Gone Fishin' group. Credit Mr. Randall for that awesome porkpie hat.

The real story in David Lipsky's "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace)" turns out to be the budding/ultimately unrequited love story between the two writers. Throughout the text, which is almost entirely an edited version of Lipsky's interviews with DFW in the course of a days-long roadtrip through the midwest, the author is careful to note the evidence of their growing friendship. DFW's compliments; the many hours they spend smoking, eating, smoking, talking, musing together and smoking some more. "I can't win an argument with you," Lipsky reports DFW telling him. DFW frets that every person who sees them traveling together will assume they're gay. DFW says he's particularly eager to follow Lipsky's career now that he knows the extent of everything his interlocutor knows about literature and life.

It's not like Lipsky doesn't know what's going on. DFW is flirting with him, subject-to-journalist. DFW is extremely flattered by the attention -- despite all of his better intentions -- and is extremely, almost dysfunctionally, eager to see himself look cool in the pages of Rolling Stone. Lipsky offers these observations in brackets, along with his own self-lacerating notes about his own behavior and motivations. He's got a tremendous writer crush on this guy, who is almost exactly his age, has almost all of the same experiences but is just. . . better, in nearly every way.

I ploughed through the book over the weekend, reveling in the scattering of DFW gems among the pages. For instance, here, on p. 198, is DFW on lovelorn country music: 

 "What if you just imagined that this absent lover they're singing to is just a metaphor? And what they're really singing is to themselves, or to God, you know? 'Since you've left I'm so empty I can't live, my life has no meaning.' That in a weird way, I mean they're incredibly existentialist songs. That have the patina of the absent, of the romantic shit on it just to make it salable. . .(but) they're singing about something much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it. Than just, you know, some girl in tight jeans or something."

That's exactly what we're talking about when we talk about DFW, isn't it? And God love Lipsky for dusting it off and putting it out there where we can find it and realize again how close cultural revelation is, if you know where to look. I look at crappy country music and see a bunch of suburban cowboys in acid washed jeans. DWF looks and sees. . . magic.

The scariest, yet most lovely moments in those great Wilco albums come when the band goes head to head with the electronic noise. The weird "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" blasts of feedback, looped sounds, colliding gears, exploding boilers, seething flames and billowing smoke. Awful and terrifying and hypnotic and, when you least expect it, beautiful. 

On the verge of complete chaos, transcendence. The ideal pulls you out of bed in the morning and drags you through empty space, past the frigid planets and the endless pattern of aimless, world-destroying meteors, It's the secret heart of everything, from "Louie, Louie" to Beethoven's 9th to last-second 3-pointers, to "Friday Night Lights" to the tabloid narratives bonding the NY Times to the Nat'l Enquirer, and beyond.

Reading David Lipsky's "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" just now, and with 80 pages down I'm still not sure if this is really a crystal portrait of the big brain (and wonderful spirit) on David Foster Wallace, or about the author's possibly subconscious desire to insert himself into the tragic narrative of the brilliant artist who sees too clearly. Or maybe I just need to insert my interpretive, order-starved self into Lipsky's journalistic narrative. Whatever, the main thing is hearing DFW's voice again, and seeing exactly how he had structured his own internal battle between appetite and discipline, self and other, chaos and order. In a sense Lipsky serves as a walking projection of the darker impulses: striving, moving, needing, smoking, wanting more and more. DFW was determined to move somewhere beyond all of that. And he nearly made it. Or so it seemed, until he killed himself.

Peter Doggett's new book about the end of the Beatles, "You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup," is out now, and while I haven't read it yet, let's just assume it's truly interesting and cool and extremely well done, if only because it's truly unfair to assume anything else.

But then I read this review in Businessweek, and bristled at the critics' analysis/deconstruction of the book/story, in which the entire gothic tale gets reduced to a series of personality flaws and corporate mismanagement, as if the artistic/personal/passionate bonds between Lennon, McCartney & friends were more or less akin to, say, the Time, Inc/AOL disaster.

"Imagine what the Fab Four could have raked in over the years if they had behaved more like their rivals, the Rolling Stones, and not let their personal indulgences and adolescent resentments drive them apart," critic Hugo Lindgren harumphs.

Well, sure. But there are so many things wrong with that sentence (e.g., the Stones as "rivals," e.g. Apple to the Fabs' Microsoft) you want to toss the whole thing against the wall, hard, and turn on the TV.

Again, I'm not going to offer a word on Doggett's actual book/thinking/argument, but Lindgren's boil-down version (proposing variations of the Evil Yoko theory; the evil Linda theory; the evil Klein theory; the crazy John theory; the power-hungry Paul theory) presents a corporate-friendly reductionism that offers basically no insight into the reality of the situation.

Former VP Al Gore seen in actual simulated photograph just moments before his moral lockbox exploded in the Hotel Lucia 

In case you've avoided it so far, see also this Oregonian story about Al Gore's alleged antics here in beautiful Portland, Ore. 

This is very weird, and not a little bit unsettling. Not just because it's the vice presidentially-elected (2x), presidentially elected-but-for-Republican-scheming, Oscar-winning, Nobel-winning environmental activist fella. But mostly because this alleged event took place, allegedly, in sweet, rain-washed Portland.

It's not the first time Portland and major sex scandals have intersected.

Bill Clinton's in-house paramour, Ms. Monica Lewinsky, was educated at Portland's Lewis & Clark College, a/k/a my own personal alma mater.

This one is more of a stretch, but bear with me, because when John Edwards got busted at the Beverly Hilton hotel while meeting with his paramour-slash-mother-of-his-out-of-wedlock-baby, an actual Portland, Ore journalist was there, too. Okay, six floors above him. Sound asleep. With no idea what was going on, because he was too busy resting up from another day's worth of covering the TCA press tour. But had I been awake and using the men's room outside the bar I would have been right in the middle of it, man. 

And now Al Gore may or may not have been creating a very unhappy ending to an in-room massage appointment in an elegant downtown hotel here in Portland.

None of which should (as alert reader Mara Nesbitt-Aldrich points out) make us forget the majestic leadership of former U.S. Sen Bob Packwood (bring your running shoes) and former Portland mayor/Oregon governor Neil Goldschmidt (don't even ask).

Is it us? Is it them? What the hell is flowing down that river of ours? And please, please, please don't get me started on Portland mayor Sam Adams. 

Where does this leave us? In an awkward place. We feel tarnished. And yet also vaguely guilty. Time for a little soul-searching? I think so. Definitely. 

More later. But for now: prayer. Or meditation. Or a few microbrews. Consult your own chosen God for an appropriate response. 

Oh, the Twitter. So many eyes, so much buzz, but most days the whole point (much like the revenue stream) seems elusive. Surely there's more to life than self-promotion, air-kissy public exchanges with friends, reaming of one's enemies/exes and high-pitched kvetches about this guy at the checkstand (fat, slow, disconnected from temporal requirements of time-pressed customers) and mean-spirited critics? Possibly not, but an firehose gusher of 140-character reminders gets so dispiriting after a while.

Same deal with the increasingly silly Huffington Post, which between cute-pet stories, latest Lady Gaga scandals, political screeds and shrieky, politically calculated headlines (Someone Slams Someone Else! etc) it's like the left-leaning online NY Post, only minus the wicked charm and awe-inspiring headline writers. (Keep reading, they's more....)

The road and sky collide, with drums

A songwriter comes up with a brilliant idea, comes up with half a dozen striking new ways to capture the sounds. And yet the most haunting parts of "Running on Empty" turn out to be the ones that contain no music at all.

I keep thinking about the first 30 seconds before the start of the opening (title) track. Bear in mind that "Running" is a fantastic song, certainly the best rocker JB ever wrote, both thoughtful and fiery, captured in a performance that is both stripped down and simply blazing. Holy shit. But it's that silence that sticks with me.

Actually, it's not silent at all. The band is onstage, gearing up to play a new tune. You can sense that the lights are low, you can hear the crowd get restless. Voices bellow song titles. "The Road and the Sky!" a woman shouts. "Ready or Not!" a guy honks. Other voices form a kind of wordless chorus - the sound of expectancy, of demand. Finally another guy finds the bridge between impatience and resignation. "Play what you want!" It's like a signal. A foot stomps, a hand chunks a rhythm on tamped guitar strings.  Then.......Boom.

A two-chord riff for piano and guitars, a simple bass line, David Lindley's jet-engine slide guitar. The drums pounding a hard stutter rhythm. Blazing and roaring.

"Lookin'' out at the road rushing under my wheels. . . .I don't know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels..."

Remember the place where the road and the sky collide? This is it. And the point of "Running on Empty," the album, is to find a way to tell everyone else how it feels to be the man on the road. The poet as object of desire. The troubadour on the run. JB came up with a brillliant way to do just that: by recording an entire album of new songs on the road - onstage; offstage; in the hotel; on the bus. The whole experience, from the good (the glow of the stage) to the bad (cooped in the bus on an all-night ride) to the hideous (wired so tight on coke that even the stupidest ideas seem brilliant).

Brilliant in concept, less so in execution, "Running on Empty" is both a huge step forward and a lurch toward self-destruction. Funny how those two things can happen at the same time.

 Remember last week when I said that I'd be gone for a week and would post more Jackson Browne retrofit pieces when I returned? Turned out to be all true, except for the part where I get back to posting the second I got back. . . Give me a day or so, and we'll have "Running on Empty" re-digested, de-constructed and posted for your blog-reading pleasure. In the meantime. . . a series of fun facts:

1. Jackson Browne's real first name? Clyde. Which makes me wonder: If he'd stuck with that (which is in some ways far cooler and rock-y than the archaic/literary/formal Jackson) would he have turned into a different kind of writer/musician? I'm thinking a heavier backbeat and grungier guitars and far fewer acoustic musings on sleep's dark and silent whatever. Clyde Browne rocks.

2. When hiking through a dense Hawaiian jungle everything seems slightly surreal and full of meaning: Thank you, "Lost"!

Editor's note: Despite promises to the contrary, this week-long special will take the rest of the week off, then resume on Monday. Also, the spelt bag described in the review of "Jackson Browne" is almost certainly some kind of water bag, as per the sharp eyes of California outdoorsman Michael "Dusty" Mooers, who provided something like half a dozen pieces of photographic evidence to prove his point. Way to fact-check, Dusty!

“THE PRETENDER” (1976): Produced by Jon Landau, fresh from co-producing “Born to Run” and already girding the for legal battle that would make him manager/producer/comptroller of the Bruce Springsteen empire, this album was designed and executed to catapult JB’s gold-tinted success to something closer to solid platinum. Now the spelt-flecked raw edges were smoothed down, stacked neatly into shimmery, airy mixes with far more sonic depth and clarity. This could have been disastrous (and indeed, the impulse toward shiny surfaces would eventually render JB’s albums all but hollow). But given the terrible straits the man fallen into (his wife Phyllis, also the mother of his young son, committed suicide during the early weeks of 1976) the neat production only clarifies the confusion and angst roiling inside.

Whether Phyllis’s suicide was a function of their relationship or in spite of it is not the stuff of public discussion. It took him nearly a decade to approach the subject in anything close to literal terms (1986’s “In the Shape of a Heart”). But the shock of the tragedy -- the grief, the guilt, the emotional numbness finding form in reportorial observations and/or assertions of whattk and/or existential gloom -- shadows the entire album. What results still seems striking, if not exactly the instant classic it seemed when it was new.

“The Fuse” leads off, taking us back to the empty highways that so often set the stage for JB’s albums. A technicolor re-envisioning of “Colors of the Sun” (check the similar chord progression in the verses), this time the sun-baked invocations of eternity take flight into affirmations: Whatever it is you might think you have/You have nothing to lose;  then layered voices describing a post-mortal world where “...there’s a part of me (that speaks to the heart of me)/that’s never far from me (though sometimes it’s hard to see)/ Alive in eternity/That nothing will kill.” The words of bereaved widower, you might say, and being Jackson Browne he projects his own resilience (real or imagined) to the world around him: Look out beyond the walls of Babylon, he shouts. I’m gonna be around/When the walls come tumbling down!

You can look at this in a variety of ways: JB is either veering toward easy affirmations, or else the narrator he’s created is still stumbling through the Kubler-Ross steps of grief.  Is the heart of the world empty (“long distance loneliness”) or buzzing with promise (“you are what you choose to be”)? Ultimately he leans toward the tumbling walls and immortal souls, swept into being with a neatly reversed chord pattern that trades a minor progression for a stirring major ascent and a chorus of background vocals.

“Your Bright Baby Blues” stays on the road, this time in the company of Lowell George, whose own distinctive slide guitar (like a truck shrieking down a steep, curvy road, according to one indelible description) and background harmony give the trip a cosmic cowboy shimmer. Fellow Little Feater Bill Payne provides the churchly organ, and the song floats above the road enroute to a realization that all these highway stories maybe promise more than they can ever deliver. “No matter where I am, I can’t help thinking I’m just a day away/From where I want to be,” JB admits, which anyone’s therapist would confirm in a heartbeat. The anti-drug appeals (“...when I looked down I was standing on my knees”) probably come a decade or so too early (just wait for “Running On Empty”), but realization is out there somewhere, and with Lowell pitching in with a high harmony the white boy highway blues feels as grounded in down-home smarts as it is in hopes and dreams.

The mariachi ballad “Linda Paloma” strikes me as musico-tourism, a tequila-laced trifle whose elegant arrangement (exotic instruments set into place by impish musical genius Van Dyke Parks) can’t quite hide the emptiness at its core. It mostly serves as a diversion enroute to the side-closing “Here Come Those Tears Again,” a kind of will-to-power breakup tune  whose bereft title and opening verse (“...just when I was gonna make it through another night/Without missing you...”) explode into powder via a sleek, white-boy gospel arrangement that (again) takes flight thanks to Craig Doerge’s surprisingly funky piano. You might expect a bleaker take from the recently widowed, but this is straight-up romantic busines: the singer is making a stand, casting his faithless, yet ambivalent ex from his life. “Some other time, baby,” he snaps, “When I’m strong and I’m feelin’ fine, maybe. . .” Be gone, woman. And don’t let the backbeat hit you on the ass.

So ends the album’s first side, and also the mood of stubborn resilience (or escapism, as per “Linda Paloma”) together. From here “The Pretender” stops denying its own dark heart, finally confronting the grief and confusion at its core. No wonder, then, that the next four songs answer life’s thorniest riddles and sorrows with the same not always beleaguered response: surrender.