Of course, the “Rear Window” thing was more controversial; lots of people though it was kind of weird, and a bit unsettling, that I spied on neighbors with a telescope, until I sat them down, pointed in a place I thought might interest them, and it then inevitably took me an hour to peel them off the steamy glass.  Soon, my roommate and I were always expected to offer turns at the telescope when we had people over, and as time passed, it was disturbingly often I kept running into people I “knew” on the street.

All well and good so far, but the boring thing about voyeurism, eventually, is that it’s just not interactive, and worse, people tend to turn off the lights just when things get really interesting.  Fortunately, at the time I worked for a theatrical lighting company, and a solution was at hand….  Why not rent a followspot, of the sort that encircles ballerinas and rock stars, and bring it home to put some light on the subject?  Naturally, I wanted one of our Super Troupers, not just since they were the title of an Abba song, but also because they were the biggest followspots on earth, and I had a whole city to cover, after all.  Sadly, even with my employee discount, the rental was a tad prohibitive, and even though I was more than willing to unplug my stove to power it, I wasn’t skilled enough at manipulating a carbon arc to be sure it would work, even if one of the huge things would fit in the elevator…

For my first trial I settled on a “Trouperette,” a relatively small, workhorse favorite of evangelical churches and high schools, whose golf-bag size wouldn’t expose me to undue notoriety on the elevator, and only needed 10 amps, yet worrying all the while it would be too wimpy to make much of a stir.  (It also had the advantage of running on a standard 1000 watt halogen lamp, didn’t need a sober person to operate, and if one was free, I could have it all weekend for twenty bucks.)  We waited, eagerly,  for the dark.  At dusk I fired it up, and danged if it didn’t put a huge disk of light on the side of the Hilton Hotel, across the park and some seven blocks north, and I was delighted to realize I could now put full daylight into any room I wanted to, and in white, lavender, blue, peach, or rose, to boot.

The best thing, though, was the way people reacted to being spotlighted; with a few disappointing exceptions, they all loved it and thought they were, 20 years early, on American Idol.  One girl danced a soft shoe in the park below and bowed afterward, and some hot teenage culinary school students a few blocks away ended up coming over, but the gales of laughter from everyone, coupled with the complete anonymity of it all, led me to look into buying my own Trouperette.  This thing, and the telescope to go with it, was more fun than naked Twister.

Sadly, management had, understandably, been informed of our antics, and mere moments after we fired her up for a last hurrah on Sunday evening, we quickly received a rather unambiguous and discouraging visit from the manager, who seemed to take an ignorantly dim view of the whole thing, and therefore promised increased scrutiny of any large lighting equipment that came in or out.  The jig was, evidently, up.

That was over 20 years ago…  And although I’m back in the same building, I bet they’ve forgotten.  Time to go on Craigslist and look up “Trouperette,” with VISA card at the ready.

I think it’s this drearily familiar combination of abysmal quality control heavily larded with a haughty disdain for backtalk that is much more dangerous to the future of the NYT and print journalism in general than anything Ann Coulter or Craigslist could accomplish, even if they got together.  Disastrous decisions by upper management, like buying out the International Herald Tribune and Boston Globe, then building a splashy new headquarters building, all at the top of the market, show that the Sulzburger blood has thinned out to Kool-Aid consistency from a business standpoint, but cracking open the product shows that selling shit and calling it Shinola, for a higher price every few months, is the real problem here.

The New York Times has become the island of misfit toys; a situation that must be as demoralizing to its rank and file as it is infuriating to its readers.  Back in the day, journalists were forbidden to publicly adopt or advocate for any but the most uncontroversial causes, and any that tried to trade on the prestige of their publication in advancing outside careers quickly found themselves in hot water.  The New York Times, so conservative and hidebound in earlier years that it was called the Grey Lady, now seems to have morphed into an off-night flophouse for a bunch of celebrity nitwits looking to kill some time and make some easy dough, in between television appearances and book tours.  It’s kind of like FOX, only boring.  Good luck with that.

After “economist” Ben Stein joined forces with the mouth-breather set to make and of course star in a “movie” that made the laughably obvious point that people who thought the earth was 6000 years old were treated like some kind of dummies at US universities, a dismal failure of right-wing propaganda which was eventually seen by dozens of Americans only because of a fevered, months-long promotion on hate radio and hate religion all over the country, he was still allowed, even encouraged, to write about economics in the New York Times.  In what, crayon?  I’m no mental giant, but such outlandish cretinism is flatly disqualifying for anyone presuming to write for an educated readership, and if the NYT cared a whit for either its audience or reputation, Stein would have long ago been sent off packing to some nice “Institute,” Discovery, Enterprise, or whatever.

Piling out of the Sunday clown car next comes owly and oily David Brooks, this time with a drippingly disdainful book review (don’t they have qualified, disinterested people for this job?)  of a book he obviously hasn’t read, but nonetheless dislikes and wants to smear, since the author purportedly disagrees with him (wonder how much that set you back, Pinch…), but the piece de resistance, as usual, is the absurd “interview” that Deborah Solomon leaves in the magazine each week like a skid mark.  Her role is as interesting as it is humiliating;  she is able to “get” interviews with the world’s worst and most loathsome, lying, criminal scum, week after week, clearly because of her unique style of inquiry, which resembles that of a five-year-old, grilling her wicked stepmother.  Innocent-seeming questions receive curt, angry, answers like “none of your business,” “jump in a lake,” “because I said so,” and “that’s for me to know and you to find out” which are then deferentially typed up with nary a follow-up, so the flat-out lies scattered between almost begin to look like a scoop.  The only journalistic “value” involved, which I’m sure is an accident, is the full-length picture of the charlatan in question, which takes as much space as the interview yet is dramatically more informative.  This week it was Frank Luntz, Republican snake-oil salesman, looking so gob-smackingly schlumpy and repulsive that the battered and brow-beaten Solomon choked out at the end, “Are you married?”  Go for it, Deborah!  He only turned down Maureen Dowd because of her personality.  And yet another fascist manipulator shows how pathetic, impotent, and utterly unworthy of respect, the “liberal” media is.  Doesn’t that five bucks seem like a good investment now?

To be fair, there are many excellent reporters who are occasionally allowed to do excellent work, and their efforts often carry the paper for the clueless gasbags in the upper tiers.  But these relentless, high-profile insults to the readers’ intelligence, the daily drip, drip of “Enhanced Revulsion Techniques,” that turn the formerly shocking Jayson Blair and Judith Miller scandals into misty, fond memories and cause people to lose whatever respect they had for a newspaper, which is the only value it really has, that has brought the NYT to its current pass, to be delightedly picked over by Bill O’Reilly et al.  What does the soon-to be-former reader see?  Shallow reporting.  Wasted money.  Wasted space.  Arrogant, in-your-face nincompoops spouting pure hogwash.  Pentagon propaganda.  Nuclear propaganda.  At this point, Murdoch need only bide his time, or more likely, not.

The publishers seem to be quite capable of ruining their “Trust” on their own, thank you.