The New York Times has the curious habit of publishing meta-articles, or news about itself. Like this past Monday, I read an article in the Business section entitled “The Times to Sell Display Ads on the Front Page”. That’s when I flipped my newspaper back to the Front Page to see the advertisement for CBS television across the bottom, which I would not have noticed otherwise. The meta-article slyly throws in justifications like “most major American papers sell front-page display ads, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The Los Angeles Times” while alluding to The Times’ dire financial situation, “the worst revenue slide since the Depression.” This softened my hardness about reading news alongside crude commerce (Israel bombs Gaza! Watch CSI!) but I still thought publishing an article about its own Front Page was somewhat bizarre.
ANYWAY, speaking of bizarreness in the New York Times, today was Bono’s first column in the Op-Ed section. Several months ago, another meta-article in the New York Times reported that, starting in 2009, Bono from U2 would become a contributing columnist, presumably to attract elusive young subscribers so it can avoid, say, running ads on the Front Page. Now, I’m a current young subscriber, and I can honestly say that none of the current opinion columnists thrill me. I mostly agree with the left-leaning politics (except for warmonging David Brooks) but sometimes my brain outright refuses to actually read an editorial by Paul Krugman entitled “Let’s Get Fiscal” or a Thomas L. Friedman rant about using taxes to mold the perfect society. And Maureen Dowd? Don’t get me started. Bitch is nuts.
Bono is really good at being a rock star, activist, and philanthropist, but is he any good at writing columns? His first effort, entitled “Notes from the Chairman”, is a rambling tribute to Frank Sinatra that reads like a string of words that occurred to Bono while he was drinking. It’s no surprise that the prose of a musician is littered with alliteration, but Bono’s is downright cacophonous: Glass clinking clicking, clashing crashing in Gaelic revelry: swinging doors, sweethearts falling in and out of the season’s blessing, family feuds subsumed or resumed. Malt joy and ginger despair are all in the queue to be served on this, the quarter-of-a-millennium mark since Arthur Guinness first put velvety blackness in a pint glass.
Woah. And Bono continues in this wordy manner, throwing in a bit of philosophy in order to lose me completely: Singers, more than other musicians, depend on what they know — as opposed to what they don’t want to know about the world. While there is a danger in this — the loss of naivete, for instance, which holds its own certain power — interpretive skills generally gain in the course of a life well abused. Bono, let me tell you want writers depend on: what their readers want to know. Where are you going with this? Did the Times really hire you so you could write about how Frank Sinatra’s voice aged like “years spent fermenting in cracked and whiskeyed oak barrels”? Isn’t Maureen Dowd pissed off?
