Frequent visitors to this space are well aware that News Hits rarely — like once every Ice Age or so — has a good thing to say about the mainstream press. The big dailies are just too stodgy for our tastes. There is, however, one notable semi-exception to that rule. We’re talking about columnist Mark Morford, who writes for SFGate.com, an on-line offshoot of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Morford writes like a man possessed by demented angels. His twice-weekly column routinely features jaw-dropping, unflinchingly liberal prose so biting and sweet and innovative it amazes us that a mainstream daily would keep this guy on the payroll.
Last week’s piece, written in response to the Republican National Convention, is an example of Morford at his best.
“I am searching for a few good things,” he writes. “Things to counteract, to dissolve the simmering dread, to deflect the waves of nausea and karmic pain induced by the incessantly depressing media maelstrom and the appallingly hateful gloat of the GOP convention and by the most tyrannical administration and least articulate American president in 100 years. You know how it is.”
Yes, Mark, sadly we do.
But Morford doesn’t just slash and burn incandescently. He also offers solutions.
There is plenty of popular culture — from Björk’s latest CD to the new John Sayles flick Silver City — plus venerated traditional practices like yoga and porn that can serve as a soothing balm to our beleaguered souls.
Look around for alternatives, advises Morford, and soon you begin to see that “there are far, far too many people, and events, and movements and divine underground alternative superlative surreptitious energies already out there, right now, combating the rank dank demons of hate and homophobia and homeland security for you to possibly wallow in hopelessness or lame sitcoms or Bush’s vacant, stupefied, sad little eyes.
“You realize that, far from being a threadbare tattered fractured scattershot hodgepodge of diminishing hope and lost possibility, the resistance is actually alive and thriving and pulsing all around you, constantly, all the time, everlasting and unstoppable and eternally refreshed and well lubricated and smiling like the divine trickster. You just gotta know where to look.
“And, perhaps more importantly, where not to.”
We say cast your eyes in the direction of Mark Morford’s brilliant columns. Then go do yoga while watching some really good porn.
Contact News Hits at 313-202-8004 or [email protected]
