A TV Show for Chris Crocker?

Variety and DListed are making it sound like Chris Crocker just inked a new deal for a TV show in the wake of his Britney video. That's sort of true, in a limited sense, but they have the chronology wrong and seem to be downplaying the still-nonexistant nature of Crocker's show.

First off, the deal is nothing new. In my Crocker profile back in May, I mentioned the deal:

Over on YouTube, where Chris also posts, the total number of views for his videos long ago passed the one million mark. Among the people far away from Real Bitch Island who are tuning in: Cassie, the R&B star, who has a subscription to the Chris Crocker video stream on her YouTube page; Glenn Meehan, a Los Angeles producer who recently inked a deal with Chris to develop ideas for a TV show; and Matt Sunbulli, MTV's "web correspondent," who has requested a Chris Crocker video for the MTV website.

So there's no new deal since May. Second, there is some distance between having a development deal and actually having a TV show. What Crocker has right now is still only a development deal.

I just spoke to Meehan again, and he confirmed this, saying nothing new had happened. "We've had him under a deal since you were up there with him," Meehan told me. "It's the same one."

But, he added: "There could be news soon."

Welcome, Chris Crocker Fans (and Haters, and Curious Onlookers)

It's been rather amazing to watch the reaction to Chris Crocker's Britney video over the last week—and to watch the hits on this little web site spike as a result of people searching out the profile of Crocker that I wrote back in May.

For me, it's been a lesson in the enduring power of the mainstream media, even in these increasingly web-centric times. Sure, my Crocker profile got some hits in the four months before the Britney video. But that was nothing compared to the traffic the story saw after Crocker's video landed him on CNN, Fox News, Howard Stern, Jimmy Kimmel, VH1, and so on, which led to tons of people outside the already existing universe of Crocker-watchers suddenly going, "What the...?" and typing his name into their search engines. Which, I'm guessing, is how you got here.

In case you missed it, here's Crocker doing his web-cam interview with Kimmel on ABC, being analyzed on VH1's "Best Week Ever," and getting parodied by Seth Green:







Thanks to all of you who have written over the past few days with nice words, criticism, and other feedback about my profile. A couple of questions keep coming up, and I'll try to answer them here:

1) Where does Chris Crocker live? At Crocker's request, I promised not to reveal the exact location of the home where he makes his videos. He told me he's received death threats in the past, so it seemed a reasonable request. Which means, Crocker-stalkers, that I can only tell you what I wrote in the profile: He lives with his grandparents in a conservative town in the South. Sorry.

2) Is Chris Crocker serious about Britney? Crocker has answered this question himself in the comments attached to his video:

Yes, I was "REALLY" crying, you fucking morons. The one time I'm NOT acting- everyone says I am.

And I can assure you that his love for Britney Spears did not begin last week. Back when I spent a few days with Croker in his town, Britney came up repeatedly. He cited her as one of his heroes and major influences. He was extremely proud of having almost as many MySpace friends as her (now he has about 100,000 more than she does). And when we drove to the next town over to go to a gay bar, well, here's what happened:

On my last night in town, I pick Chris up in his grandparents' driveway and we head to the next town over, which has a gay club, one that people come from all around to attend. We pass a giant car racetrack, and miles of signs advertising chicken strips and the price of gas. I told Chris to bring some CDs, and he's brought Britney Spears (the whole discography). We're listening to In the Zone...

So, do I find it believable that Crocker might be outraged over Britney's treatment after her Video Music Awards performance? Yes. He's like that. As for the tears? I'm sorry, but I can't certify whether they were real or not. Like you, I only have his video and his own words to go on.

More questions? Bring 'em on.

Running on Angry

I have a feature out in this week's Stranger about the surprising popularity of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul.



Paul has a large and growing group of supporters here in Washington State, largely because of his antiwar stance. These supporters are trying to get him to come to Hempfest (Paul has been a critic of federal drug laws). They're making calls to Iowa in an effort to boost Paul's chances in this weekend's Iowa Straw Poll (with Rudy Giuliani and John McCain not participating in the poll, some observers have predicted Paul will place second, behind only Mitt Romney). And they're signing on to his local Meetup groups in droves.

One of Paul's local supporters, who's featured in my story, is an employee at the Google office in Kirkland who, like me, flew down to the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California, in early July so that he could see Paul's Candidates@Google appearance. This local Paul supporter dropped $400 on plane fare, donated the maximum $2,300 to Paul while in California, and gushed on camera (gushing begins at around 42:00) about how excited Paul has made him about this presidential race.

For me, all of this support for Paul in liberal/libertarian Washington raises a question: Do Paul's local followers really understand his political philosophy, beyond his unique (for a Republican) opposition to the Iraq war?

In my piece, I suggest that Paul's views, and his political philosophy, really don't mesh with those of a lot of his new followers—especially on issues like global warming (he doesn't believe in it), abortion (not a fan), gun control (he thinks guns in the hands of airline passengers would have prevented 9/11), and how to catch Osama bin Laden (he wants to issue retro "letters of marque and reprisal").

I happen to love Paul's "letters of marque and reprisal" idea, just because it's pure Paul and is so 1800s it makes me smile. But here's something that really caused me to do a double-take: Paul's stance on global warming. From my story:

Perhaps the best [example of] how radical Paul's positions can be relative to the more mainstream people who are now starting to support him: Paul is still a global-warming skeptic, calling fears about the problem "overblown" at a time when even Bush has recognized the reality of climate change.

Paul's solution to all environmental problems is essentially to do nothing and hope the market works everything out. Schrage, the Google executive, sounded skeptical of this approach and pointed out that market forces created the global-warming problem in the first place. "Climate change seems like something that wouldn't, indeed hasn't, been an issue that's been well addressed by market forces today," Schrage told Paul. "Seems like the perfect example of a market failure—that the external costs of pollution don't get absorbed by companies—and thus a natural place where some sort of collective action, government intervention, might be appropriate."

Paul disagreed, and suggested that a greater respect for private property in America, and a greater appreciation for how what one person does on his or her private property affects the environment on another person's private property, could somehow reverse environmental problems. When Schrage pointed out the international nature of the climate-change problem—the fact that factories in America can ultimately affect the weather in India—Paul answered: "If there is manmade pollution..."

Which was one rather big if.

He continued: "If there is man-made pollution, it might be in China and I know I'm not willing to tax you or send troops over there to close down plants."

To read the whole piece, click here.

Chris Crocker: The Stranger Profile

In this week's Stranger I write about Chris Crocker, a 19-year-old gay kid who, using little more than a digital video camera and an internet connection, has managed to channel his small-town frustrations into national online fame.



This was one of the most fun and heartbreaking stories I've ever had the chance to write for The Stranger, and I have a number of "Crocker out-takes" to post on Slog over the next few days—things I couldn't fit in the story, but that shouldn't be kept from the world. Look for them starting tomorrow.

I Loved L.A.

I'd never been to Los Angeles until last week, and when I first found out I would be going down there I didn't expect to like it much.

Growing up in Seattle, almost everything I'd heard about L.A. was negative—especially during the 90s, when this city was gripped by nativist resentment and something close to cultural hysteria about all the L.A. people who were moving up here.

The complaint, at the time, was that L.A. people didn't drive like Seattleites, didn't talk like Seattleites, didn't expect housing to be as cheap as Seattleites, and didn't have the crunchy-earthy-earnest Seattle ethos. Back then, people in Seattle talked about L.A. transplants the way some locals now talk about the condo boom—a sign that Seattle is being transformed, and not for the better, into a place the old-timers and professional gripers don't recognize.

Anyway, I landed in L.A. on Wednesday, ready to hate it, ready to look down, like a good Seattleite, on it's car culture, its fakery, and its self-satisfied sprawl.

It was hot, the light was squint-making, and all that I'd been warned about was there: the cars crawling along the 405, the people always talking like pitchmen, the endless streets, the unapologetic strip malls, the skyline-obscuring haze.

Who knows exactly why one falls in love with a city, but I have a theory about why I proceeded to fall in love with L.A. last week, against all advice and all the long odds of a Seattle native feeling such affection for such a place.

My theory is that L.A. was a huge relief. Maybe I'm more vulnerable to this than most people, because of the nature of my job, but when I landed in L.A. I was completely full up on the hectoring tone of Seattle's gripers, finger-waggers, and utopia-demanders. It's unbelievably grating to live in a city where the dominant civic discourse is one of lament about the absence of the perfect (twined with perpetual disagreement about how to get to the perfect, and achingly slow steps toward that end).

L.A., by contrast, is completely fucked up, completely beyond environmental repair, completely imperfect, and completely designed to give tight-assed Seattle people an aneurysm. Granted, I was only there for three days, but it seemed to me that people in L.A. have a sort of wry satisfaction with their state of affairs. I loved that. I drove 20 minutes to get everywhere. I ate in a strip mall. I had superficial conversations. I drove some more. I stopped worrying about sprawl and sprawled out at the beach. (That's not me below, by the way.)



To ask the hot Seattle question of the moment: Is it sustainable? Would it last, my thrill at life in a city that does everything my home city tells me not to?

I don't know. Probably not.

But man, it was nice for a while. On my last day I went up to the Getty, wandered its other-worldly gardens...



...and looked down on the huge, flat metropolis. The sun was warm, as always. The air was striving for opaque, as always. I couldn't quite see downtown Los Angeles to the east and, looking west, I couldn't quite see where the ocean ended and the land began. It was all blurry, messy, resistant to resolution. Everyone I saw seemed happy with this. I didn't want to leave.

(Photos by Corianton Hale, who was also in L.A. recently.)

Offender Outtake: The Women's Movement and Sex Offender Laws

I have a feature in this week's Stranger about the life and crimes of Jefferson County's only Level 3 sex offender. It's a long piece, but that doesn't mean I could fit in everything I found fascinating about the debate over how best to punish and rehabilitate sexual criminals. Here's one thing that didn't make it into my story:

When I asked Alisa Klein, spokeswoman for the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, why punishments for sex offenders have grown increasingly harsh over the last few decades, she pointed to a force that I hadn't considered: The women's movement.

Speaking for herself, and not for her organization, she told me:

We have seen, pretty much consistently since the 60s, a pendulum swing toward a lot of attention to this issue, and increasingly, every decade since the 60s, a lot of punitive and sort of knee-jerk attention to this issue.

This is due in part, she believes, to the women's movement:

What the women's movement did, because they wanted to get people to pay attention, and take this seriously, is, in my opinion, they threw their lot in with the criminal justice system to be the main system for responding to sexual violence.

Klein believes that violent sexual predators, and other sexual criminals, should be punished. But she also believes many of them can be treated, and should received better treatment than they do. Further, she believes that that the current public focus on extending sentences for sex offenders, and on restricting their movements after they are released back into society, can create a false sense of security.

Most rapes of adult women are committed by someone known to the victim. Most sexual assaults committed against children are perpetrated by someone known to the child (in about half the cases, by a family member). But the current push for harsher and harsher sex offender punishments grows out of public concern over "stranger danger," which itself grows out of highly-publicized cases of children being abducted by strangers—a horrifying, but relatively rare, occurrence. (Read more about this phenomenon of televised child abduction stories driving policy in my piece.)

Klein believes that the current focus on "stranger danger" can confuse the public on where the most common danger really lies—with friends, acquaintances, and family members. "It ends up becoming a kind of deterrent to our society's ability to respond before the fact," she told me.

Back to the question of how all of this intersects with the women's movement, here's a letter to the editor of The Stranger about my piece:

I enjoyed Eli Sander's piece on Erik Mart. I'm sorry that the system has so mishandled Mart's case, punishment and treatment. I'm also sorry that he was apparently molested by his father and that society never addressed it.

But I feel even more sorry for the two women he assaulted. I can imagine the absolute terror they must have felt and, later, the furious anger at the audacity of their assailant.

I think this country has severe punishments because we have such severe crimes. But, if we're going to "rate" sexual crimes on a scale, obviously the more violent or repeat offenders should get a higher rating. But how is raping a child more wrong than raping a 30-yr-old woman or a 70-year-old retiree? And this is where the problem of sexual assault runs head long into the issue of feminism and the institutionalized objectification and dehumanizing of females. Until just a few decades ago, sexually assault was considered okay in certain situations.

Today, outside of the U.S. rape is the norm, not the exception, in dozens of countries. Women and children are bought and sold as sex slaves in Russia and other eastern European countries. In South Africa, Egypt and Mexico the incident of sexual assault -- including child molestation and incest -- is calculated in minutes, not annually.

If our judicial system is taking a hamfisted approach to the treatment of sexual predators, it's still better than what most foreign governments do -- which is nothing, partly thanks to misogyny...

-- M. Murphy

Only Five Times a Day?

Maybe I need to go on this media diet...

On Lt. Ehren Watada

My report on the likely outcome of the Lt. Watada court-martial is up this morning on TIME.com.

And here's a longer piece about the Watada case that I wrote for The Stranger back in August. (That piece was later re-published in the Boston Phoenix.)

But Can She Sing?

Hillary Clinton, on the trail in Iowa, tries her hand at the Star Spangled Banner:

With God on Their Side

Today the Seattle Times has a front-page story about how local anti-gay crusader Ken Hutcherson has found a new ally in Russian-speaking Evangelicals from the former Soviet Union.

Janet I. Tu begins the story with this scene:

On a recent Sunday morning, at a strip mall in Kent, a few hundred people gathered to worship, rocking out to a band playing contemporary worship songs and cheering on the fiery pastor -- all in Russian.

This might seem an unlikely place for Ken Hutcherson -- Redmond's Antioch Bible Church senior pastor, who is known for outspoken views against homosexuality -- to look for allies in his effort to overturn a state law banning discrimination against gays and lesbians.

But then Pastor Andrey Shapovalov asked the children to come forward. Bless them, he said. "Pray that none of them become homosexuals or lesbians or have abortions or live a life of crime."

Of course, drilling homophobia into young people's heads can help set them up for committing crimes later in life, as I pointed out in this Stranger story about a gay-bashing conducted in 2004, in Seattle, on Gay Pride weekend, by three Russian-speaking Evangelicals from Bellingham.

The gay-bashers attended churches that preached against homosexuality, and were later convicted of assault and a hate crime for beating and stabbing former Seattle resident Micah Painter. Why did they attack Painter? Because, as a female companion who was with the attackers that night told police, Painter looked gay and being gay is "against our religion."

This incident, which was covered by the Times, is curiously absent from Tu's report on Russian-speaking Evangelicals teaming up with Ken Hutcherson to fight gay rights. The Times wrote about the gay bashing, it wrote about the trial of the attackers, it editorialized that "the best defense against hate crimes is a strong offense," and after my story came out, it picked up on what I identified as the central irony in the case: That a group of Evangelical Christians who had themselves fled religious persecution in the former Soviet Union were now using their newfound religious freedom to persecute gay Americans.

As the Times wrote in 2005:

[The attackers] came to the United States from Russia, in part, to escape persecution. So it was ironic, a King County Superior Court judge said yesterday, that they were awaiting sentencing for persecuting someone else.

Why is it so important that this three-year-old incident, and the ironies involved, be included in a story about Russian-speaking Evangelicals now teaming up with Ken Hutcherson?

Because, as is often said, and as my colleague Josh Feit said recently in another context, root causes are important. Preaching homophobia as religion can be a root cause of anti-gay violence, and in fact, here in Seattle, we had, in 2004, a gay bashing whose roots traced directly back to the homophobia preached in Russian-speaking Evangelical churches. That's worth noting in a story about Ken Hutcherson now stoking the anti-gay passions in these churches as part of a campaign to repeal the state's new gay civil rights law.

But while we're on the subject of root causes, here's something else that jumped out at me from Janet I. Tu's story. The whole alliance between Russian-speaking Evangelicals and Ken Hutcherson traces back to an event organized by Josh Feit — a Stranger-sponsored debate between Hutcherson and King County Executive Ron Sims.

The unusual alliance began last spring, after a debate on gay rights between Hutcherson and King County Executive Ron Sims. A local man saw it and approached Hutcherson to arrange a meeting with his uncle, an evangelical pastor in Latvia who heads a network of churches in 14 countries, including the U.S.

At the time of the Hutcherson-Sims debate, some people were uneasy about the event for exactly this reason.

Re: Hillary's "Conversation"

As predicted, Hillary's first webchat didn't produce any astonishing new positions from the Senator or any uncomfortable questions from out of the wild web yonder.

What it did produce is a ton of email addresses for the Hillary Clinton campaign (you had to give an email address in order to watch the chat), more grist for the continuing mainstream media coverage of Hillary's newly-launched presidential bid, a bunch of well-screened questions from the public, and a study in Clinton's on-camera demeanor.

Clinton was, as even her detractors have taken to noting, extremely competent. She was obviously in command of all the issues that came up (health care, terrorism, energy independence, etc.) and in her instinct toward intelligent inquiry and perpetual dialogue she provided a stark contrast to the man she wants to replace. But I don't know if she passed the likability test, the test of whether the average American wants to watch her on television (or on some computer's media player) for four years starting in 2008.

Perhaps it's unfair, but the inevitable comparison one ends up reaching for, when watching Hillary speak, is with her husband. And she is not as smooth or emotive as Bill Clinton, nor is she as warm. The question is whether, after eight years of Bush, Americans will settle for cold and competent. Andrew Sullivan frames it this way:

Hillary is essentially saying that we should trust her. She is giving us a clear signal of what a second Clinton administration would be like: all the centrism and responsibility of her husband’s eight years but without any of the charm.

Is that what Americans want? It seems that what they want is a form of escapism (in the form of Edwards), charisma (in the shape of Barack Obama), or integrity (in the guise of John McCain). But when the decision nears and the stakes, especially abroad, begin to seep in, might Hillary be right? Might they actually be yearning for dullness, competence and responsibility?

Hillary's "Conversation"

I'm going to be watching Hillary Clinton's live webcast at 4 p.m. (PST), not because I think there are going to be any earthshaking exchanges between her and the online public, but because I'm interested in how someone with as much campaign cash as Hillary uses the web, and because I'm particularly interested in how Hillary deals with the liberal netroots as she tries to secure the Democratic nomination.

From where I sit, the liberal netroots seem to be far more predisposed to "underdog" candidates like Obama and Edwards, and distrustful of (if not downright hostile toward) establishment Democrats like Hillary. It's about Hillary's slowness to repudiate her vote in favor of the Iraq War, sure, but it's also an insider-outsider thing. The Clintons, and their advisers, are the consummate Democratic insiders, the people behind those proverbial gates that Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the founder of DailyKos, wants to be crashing.

It's worth noting, then, that today DailyKos, along with just about every major liberal political blog in the country (as well as the local blog Horsesass) is boasting an ad, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, promoting her series of webcasts. This shows two things. One, that Hillary's campaign knows how to get the attention of a sprawling medium with a still-uncertain business model: by using cash. And two, that Hillary's campaign is wary enough about the likelihood of either buying off, or winning over, the netroots that it's willing to go around them — is willing to pay for ads that drive the considerable traffic of the liberal blogosphere over to her web site, where she can speak directly, unfiltered, to the netroots (and collect email addresses that will allow her to continue speaking directly to these people throughout her campaign).

It'll be interesting to see how this strategy plays out.

On Being a Journalist With A Blog

David Carr has a great piece in the New York Times about the the way blogs are changing the life of the newspaper writer. Also discussed: the crack-like addictiveness of blog comments, the intimacy of electrons, and the harsh judgment of web analytics.

There has always been a feedback loop in journalism — letters to the editor, the phone and more recently e-mail messages. But a blog provides feedback through a fire hose. The nice thing about putting out a newspaper was that, at some point, the story was set and the writer got to go home. Now I have become a day trader, jacked in to my computer and trading by the second in my most precious commodity: me. How do they like me now? What about ... now? Hmmmm ... Now?

Um... How Did This Happen?

I came home last night, emptied my pockets, and found this. I swear I wasn't drunk. I swear I didn't pick this flyer up on my own, fold it three times, and then stash it away for future reference. Should I be flattered? Did someone slip this into the back pocket of my pants when I wasn't looking? Is reverse-pick-pocketing the new help wanted ad?

Totally Toklas

One of the coolest e-mails I received about my story on Seattle's Jewish Problem came from Gary Clark, a retired city worker and avid "metal detectorist."

A couple years ago, Gary, a member of the Cascade Treasure Club, was out hunting for treasure with his metal detector, waving it around a construction site on East Denny Way, between Broadway and Harvard, on Capitol Hill. Off went the metal detector and in the dirt Gary found this:



He knew he had something cool. It appeared to be a watch fob, it had a picture of George Washington on it, and it was inscribed: "Compliments of Toklas Simgerman & Co * Seattle, W.T."

The date stamped on the fob was 1888.

Wondering what exactly he had, and how much it was worth, Gary sent a query and a picture of his find to Western & Eastern Treasures, which describes itself as "the world's leading magazine for metal detectorists since 1966." In the September issue he received his answer:



Gary thought that was cool. He had a remnant from a Seattle clothing store that came into existence when Washington was still a territory. And it was potentially worth a whopping $200 (way better than the dropped pennies one assumes are constantly setting off his metal detector).

Then Gary read my story and learned that Ferdinand Toklas, the "Toklas" in Toklas Singerman & Co., was one of Seattle's early Jewish merchants, and also the father of Alice B. Toklas, the writer and partner of Gertrude Stein. He thought that was even cooler. Yesterday Gary brought the fob by The Stranger offices and my ace intern Sage Van Wing snapped the above photograph. I held the fob for a moment. It was light and nice to look at, and I couldn't imagine why anyone would have ever dropped it in the dirt.