Still on Koh Phangan

Still having a great time here on Koh Phangan. 
Lots of swimming in the pool, massages, great Thai food, frisbee on the beach and not that much else.

Yesterday a fun snorkelling trip on the 'No Woman No Cry' boat (?)  Great snorkelling, lunch at the very beautiful Bottle Beach and a very rocky hike to some waterfalls.  Lots of anenomes, multi-coloured fish, hard and soft coral and much more.

One more day at Salad Beach, then we head to Thong Nai Pan for our last couple of days.

Koh Phangan

Today arrived in Koh Phangan via ferry from Koh Samui.  Fairly stress-free logistics, although the trip was (enjoyably) delayed by Songkran (New Year) festivities.  Lots of water being thrown and/or splashed on cars driving past (and from cars driving past onto the many revellers on the street).  Simultaneously, Bangkok is in crisis - the country looks to be in the midst of revolution and/or military coup. 
Luckily we have a TV in our room at Cookies at Salad beach.  Unfortunately, the English-langugage channels consist of an english-langugage German general-interest channel, and an english-language Russian news and sport channel which is headlining its latest bulletin with a story on possible voter fraud in Moldavia (Moldova? who knows and/or cares).  Events in the pacific are a fairly low priority for the Russians and Germans.  We also have HBO - which also gives events in the Pacific a low priority.
Otherwise, all is good.  M is having fun.  Very hot.  Chang is still a good beer.  Thai massages remain great.  Our hammock is comfortable.  View from our deck is incredible.

timing

good timing by M and I - we managed to time our visit to Thailand with the (now cancelled) ASEAN summit, massive protests and the declaration of a state of emergency.  All calm in Koh Samui as far as we can tell...

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/04/12/world/AP-AS-Thailand-Politics.html?_r=1&hp

 

In happier news, just had an amazing massage. 

Having a great time and managing to endure the soothing music which seems to play constantly.

Thailand part 2

Still having a great time - Zazen is fantastic - www.samuizazen.com - and yesterday we watched a buddhist wedding for 2 middle-aged heavily-tattooed Germans with heads shaved at the sides and long on top.  The tattoos on the sides of her shaved scalp were very fetching and spoke of a deep inner serenity.  Otherwise - good food, massages, heat, humidity, backgammon, the Bangkok Post (a really good paper), wandering along the beach.

Singapore

Had a great day in Singapore as day 1 of our Thailand trip.  Enjoyed the qantas Melbourne first class lounge (nice work Marc Newsom) (sp?) and its excellent restaurant, then the upgraded premium economy seats (the benefits of being married to a platinum frequent flyer).  a good flight (loved the Wrestler), then a day in Singapore.  Ate 3 amazing meals at hawker centres.  I'm yet to discover food better than Singaporean hawker centre food.  It's just incredibly good.  Wandered around Singapore.  Sweated.  Some beautiful old buildings and some interesting new ones.  Now at the airport for our flight to Koh Samui.

M.I.A. goes huge at the Grammys

U2 was upstaged by one of the most unusual spectacles in the history of the awards, as M.I.A., the outspoken Sri Lankan-British rapper, performed while nine months pregnant — indeed, she had been due to give birth on Sunday. She joined the rap dream team of Jay-Z, T. I., Kanye West and Lil Wayne, whose song “Swagga Like Us” samples M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” which itself had been up for record of the year.

Gyrating across the stage in a sheer black costume with her protruding belly wrapped in black and white polka dots, she shared the stage with four of the most popular rappers in music, although most eyes in the arena were surely on her for much of the performance.

New Lily Allen

Looking forward to picking up the new Lily Allen album, It’s Not Me, It’s You - she is so good at being a pop star that I really want to like it.


Great article in today's NYT. She really gives great interview:

At the restaurant Ms. Allen rejected the maitre’d’s offer of a discreet corner table; we were seated in the middle of the room, facing the door. She walked in as if she would turn a few heads, and she did.

Dinner was lavish and fun. Ms. Allen is the right kind of girl to drink wine and talk about boys with. There is, especially in her case, a lot to say. “I don’t really go for hot guys,” she said. “I go for old men, as you may have noticed.” In the car on the way over, she’d devoured a Look magazine her driver bought because she was on the cover. “Agony over married lover!” read the headline, detailing her latest holiday fling, with Jay Jopling, 45, a recently separated gallery owner and buddy of her father’s. (Yes, she acknowledged, she has some daddy issues.) Does she mind that her relationships are so gossiped about?

“It’s ironic because I’m not very good at them,” she said. “I’m good at having sex.”

She had more to say, but nothing that could be printed here. This is the kind of irresistible frankness that has gotten her, time and again, in trouble. But as she grows up and builds her creative niche, Ms. Allen seems unlikely to manage being buttoned up. (At the end of the meal she went over to greet Lucian Freud, the 86-year-old artist, sitting nearby. What did he say? “He said he wants to. ...” Ah, unprintable.)

King Abdullah

Was at the Wye River pub this Australia day long weekend when I was mistaken for King Abdullah of Jordan. Harsh but not totally unfair. M was, however, not mistaken for Queen Rania.

Devastating review of 'The Man Who Owns the News'

Have recently read The Man Who Owns the News, Michael Wolff's new biography of Rupert Murdoch. It is definitely a gripping read, though far from a definitive biography.

As is standard for Wolff, much of the book is a reflection of Wolff and his 'big picture' views rather than a reflection on Murdoch and News Corp.

The New York Times published a fairly devastating review of the book here.
Excerpts below. I agree with many of the criticisms, but the author of the review (David Carr of the NYT) has missed a key point: the book is a triumph in the sense that it is a biography of a business figure which is fun to read and which has a clear and unambigious point of view.

Wolff makes no pretence that his biography is an objective, disinterested piece of writing. His views and prejudices are all over it - which means that it is no Shawcross (the definitive - but very dated Murdoch biography) but it is a fun read with lots of interesting (and presumably mostly accurate) anecdotes and snippets about Rupert and the Murdoch clan.

The book is a strangely alluring artifact, with huge gaps in execution and stylistic tics that border on parody; it will nonetheless provide a deeply satisfying experience for the ­media-interested.

...

They are a pair, these two. Both adore gossip and revel in their unpleasantness, and neither gives a rip what anyone else thinks of him. Murdoch has achieved improbable business success, and Wolff has made no secret that he covets same. In a hybrid career that continues to this day — Wolff is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a founder of a news aggregator called Newser — he has somehow managed to both float above a demimonde of wealthy titans and seek to enter at every opportunity.

...

“The Man Who Owns the News” attacks its subject with casual delight, but contains shockingly few actual quotations from Murdoch himself: a snippet here and there, nothing more. He remains disconcertingly spectral, even though Wolff spoke with him for many hours over many months.

...

But the moment the reader is tempted to leave Wolff to marvel at his own de­vices, the author steps in and reminds us that his primary value is to speak the unspeakable. As he did in his delicious and prescient “Burn Rate,” an early book about the dot-com fantasia, he often just says it: “Every second working for Murdoch is a second spent thinking about what Murdoch wants. He inhabits you.”

...

Much was made of Wolff’s alliance with Murdoch, that it would lead to complicity and sycophancy, but Wolff remains true to his nature, which is joyously nasty. It is a baked-in reflex of a kind that Trollope described: “His satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.”

Wolff takes no specific offense at Murdoch’s willingness to use his media properties to cold business ends, but depicts him as a cranky, monomaniacal newspaper hack, a con man with bad hearing, no interest in new media paradigms and no real friends to speak of. It is also pointed out that he is “a good family man — even if he has three of them.” Like the man he writes about, Wolff is a gossip who is very skilled at extracting information and sensing weakness.

...

Obsessed by newsprint and digitally clueless, Murdoch is depicted as a remarkable modern figure. The issue of succession is dealt with in the book as it is at the company: people either put their fingers in their ears or cross them in hopes that Murdoch, who was born in Australia in 1931, will live forever. His unusual relationship with a crew of very talented, able children — pull them close in business matters and then humiliate them — is artfully described in the book, as is his somewhat henpecked relationship with his third wife, who reads his e-mail messages after business hours because he doesn’t use a computer.

Should I/we/you feel dirty for enjoying a little quality time with a man who believes that giving the impression of morals is better than actually having them and whose atavistic corporate impulses are put to contemporary, acquisitive ends? Probably not. Many before us have covered their eyes and waited for Rupert Murdoch to go away. Rupert Murdoch does not go away.

shaped

Shaped for the first time ever on my home broadband and hating it (thanks Internode!). Much sympathy for Ben Barren, for whom it seems to be a permanent condition.

Internet is still usable - probably still quicker than dial-up - but there won't be any streaming going on in my house until the month ticks over.

Murdoch miscellanea

Cruden Farm last Sunday - looking beautiful in early Summer ... a picnic by the lake was a pretty good way to spend a Sunday lunchtime. And Dame Elisabeth, Australia's only true royalty, was there signing autographs and generally spreading good cheer.

Just picked up a copy of The Man Who Owns the News, the new Michael Wolff biography of Rupert Murdoch. A Rupert biography by the author of Burn Rate - I'm expecting good things - and a very different tone to the 1997 Shawcross biography and to Chenoweth's Virtual Murdoch from early in the millenia.

DFW Rolling Stone article

Excellent (and very sad) article by David Lipsky in Rolling Stone - The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace.

The first few paragraphs are reproduced below - but I encourage you to read the full article.

He was six-feet-two, and on a good day he weighed 200 pounds. He wore granny glasses with a head scarf, points knotted at the back, a look that was both pirate-like and housewife-ish. He always wore his hair long. He had dark eyes, soft voice, caveman chin, a lovely, peak-lipped mouth that was his best feature. He walked with an ex-athlete's saunter, a roll from the heels, as if anything physical was a pleasure. David Foster Wallace worked surprising turns on nearly everything: novels, journalism, vacation. His life was an information hunt, collecting hows and whys. "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," he once said, "of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it." He wanted to write "stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live." Readers curled up in the nooks and clearings of his style: his comedy, his brilliance, his humaneness.

His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Wallace was an A student through high school, he played football, he played tennis, he wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors and writers fall moony-eyed in love with him. He published a thousand-page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive in the contemporary world, accepted a special chair at California's Pomona College to teach writing, married, published another book and, last month, hanged himself at age 46.

"The one thing that really should be said about David Foster Wallace is that this was a once-in-a-century talent," says his friend and former editor Colin Harrison. "We may never see a guy like this again in our lifetimes — that I will shout out. He was like a comet flying by at ground level."

His 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, was Bible-size and spawned books of interpretation and commentary, like Understanding David Foster Wallace — a book his friends might have tried to write and would have lined up to buy. He was clinically depressed for decades, information he limited to family and his closest friends. "I don't think that he ever lost the feeling that there was something shameful about this," his father says. "His instinct was to hide it."

It seems clearer than ever that DFW put a huge amount of himself into Infinite Jest - and completely unsurprising that he did not complete another novel.

Excellent casting

From Variety

Tiffani Thiessen

Tiffani Thiessen ("Beverly Hills, 90210") has been cast as an accountant in USA Network pilot "White Collar." Her recent credits include "What About Brian" and "Good Morning, Miami."

More dfw + death in the kimberley

see BB at tumblr. See some guy. there's so much out there on the web about the sad news.

See below from today's The Age
In July M and I were on a helicopter operated by the same company, in the same location. They seemed very safety conscious. Scary. And sad.

Four die in Kimberley helicopter crash

• September 15, 2008 - 7:04AM

A male pilot and three young women are dead after a helicopter crashed in Western Australia's north yesterday, sparking a one-kilometre-long bushfire.

The tourist flight ended in tragedy when the aircraft, operated by Slingair Heliwork, crashed on level ground just before 1pm (WST) and burst into flames.

The three female passengers, aged between 19 and 20, and the 40-year-old male pilot died when the chopper went down 12 km from the Bellburn air strip in the Purnululu (Bungle Bungle) National Park.

The crash sparked a fire that grew into a blaze with a one-kilometre front, which park rangers have been trying to control into the night.

Police say two other helicopters flying in the area raised the alarm after they saw smoke and were unable to make radio contact with the downed chopper.

"It is not known at this stage whether there was any mayday call or any reason for the crash," a police spokesman said.

Slingair Heliwork, which operated the helicopter, has not been available for comment.

Its fleet of 50 aircraft are used for transport and scenic flights in the region, famous for its spectacular natural beauty.

Police and air safety investigators were at the scene and were being helped by Purnululu rangers.

Forensic investigators could not reach the area before nightfall, requiring that the bodies remain in the wreckage until daylight.

Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) fire duty officer Murray Carter said firefighters were battling the blaze in 40-degree heat but with little wind.

The department has four ground crews with water tankers on the scene but has had to suspend operations until first light.

"We're still hopeful that as the night cools and if things stay steady there will be no further problems with the fire side of things tomorrow," Mr Carter told AAP.

He said it's a difficult area for ground tankers, which is delaying firefighters getting the upper hand.

"We'll just try to get the fire out as quickly as we can."

Bellburn airstrip, where the helicopter went down, is a bush camp in the park, about 55 km by air from the township of Warnum, also known as Turkey Creek.

dfw RIP

The world is a less interesting place - David Foster Wallace is dead.

He was the author of Infinite Jest, a novel that changed the way I saw the world and that inspired me with its raw creativity.

He was the author of brilliant fictional short (and less short) stories: Philosophy and the mirror of nature, ...

He was a phenomenal essayist: Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley, David Lynch Keeps his Head, Host ...

He was funny: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster, ...

He had greater insight into the male condition than anyone else I've heard or read: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Adult World (I), Adult World (II), A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life, ...

See the LA Times. See Salon. See NYT. See Silicon Alley Insider. See a 1997 interview. See a transcript of his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon.

He can no longer be my favourite living author. I loved his short stories and essays, but was still waiting for the follow up to IJ. It will never come. 46 was far too young.

My words are inadequate.

Blogstats

Blog stats are funny/weird. And very much so at the tail end of the long tail.

Feedburner tells me I've had 1,440 visits in the past 30 days and that I have had 21 subscribers (on average) over that time.
Sitemeter tells me that in August 2008 I had 702 visits, with 81 thus far in September.
Technorati still tells me I'm pretty much irrelevant.

Feedburner also tells me that 758 visitors came via a google search for "Rachael Taylor" (ie the Aussie actress who's girl #2 in Transformers).

Nice to know people appreciate my political insights and miscellaneous rants.

Google just totally dominates. I know that's trite but it is still true. Well over 90% of visits to my blog, it appears, are derived from google searches. Well well over 90%.

From Feedburner site analysis:

Top Search Engines

Search Engine	visits	Trend
Google Image Search	991	+325%
Google Search	84	-43%
AOL Search	5	+67%
Google BlogSearch	3	+200%
Yahoo Search	1	-90%

Cruden Farm

M and I visited the Garden Open Day at Cruden Farm in Langwarrin last weekend.

Cruden Farm was bought in 1928 by Sir Keith Murdoch for his wife, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch. She still lives there and has nurtured a beautiful garden. Much of the garden was still asleep for winter last weekend, but there were beautiful daffodils by the lake. I think M and I single-handedly brought the average age down by decades. But I didn't particularly care.

Given my fascination/obsession with Rupert, it was fascinating to walk the paths trod by the Murdochs over the decades.

The origins of the garden date back to the late 1920’s when Keith Murdoch bought the farm for his new wife, Elisabeth as a wedding present. He suggested that they get the most notable of contemporary garden designers to redesign the garden. It then existed as a cottage with a small suburban garden containing garden beds that surrounded the house. It was Dame Elisabeth’s first garden, which she adored, and from then on they continued to develop it. Elisabeth was only 19, and her husband Keith Murdoch was a perfectionist and thought that they should have the most expert advice, so they called in Edna Walling. She was pioneer of landscape gardening in Australia and very gifted, but was not easy to work with and did not consult Elisabeth, much to her frustration.

...

Until recent years, Dame Elisabeth was intimately involved in the garden doing practical tasks like the planting, but perhaps her greatest achievement has been the creation of a beautiful lake in a parkland setting, which has become a habitat for the local wildlife, where willows grow and bulbs have naturalised to give a strong visual impact to the area. She had always wanted to have a body of water in the garden because she felt that water was an element that the garden needed to complete the landscape design. Observing water runoff coming into the property and flowing out of the paddocks again, confirmed her idea that it could be captured and saved and used to great effect to make the garden so much more beautiful. She confirmed this by getting an overview of the property from a helicopter, where she could see that this element was lacking in the landscape and that a lake would complete the circle of the garden.

Tim Moore

Looking forward to the new Tim Moore exhibition at Helen Gory Gallerie - opening next Thursday 11 September. Tim, who is a friend of a friend, does awesome hand-embroiderery of naked, middle-aged people. His first two exhibitions of embroidery (in Melbourne and Sydney) have been instant sell-outs - and the new one is heading rapidly in the same directions before it even opens.

Tricky - The Prince, 31 July 2008

Saw Tricky last night at The Prince Bandroom in St Kilda. I last saw him about 10 years ago - also at The Prince - and it was great to see him again. He opened with Love Cats (the Cure) and mixed up material from his latest album and earlier releases. Costanza Frankavilla, the singer - and it being a Tricky gig, the person who did most of the actual vocalising - was fantastic and suited the material perfectly.

Tricky spent at least a third of the night facing away from the audience, either smoking joints or just swaying gently - but when he was facing the crowd he had huge charisma, looked amazing and had great energy. His less accessible material made much more sense live than it does when recorded and overall it was a great show. Although missing many of his crowd-pleasing tracks.


I have a few terrible photos from my Blackberry Curve. It's a great phone, but not perfectly designed for gig photos.

I'm ok but my watch sick

The new Lil Wayne album - The Carter III - is awesome.
Funny, catchy, clever, poppy and innovative.
Reminiscent at times of Kool Keith and/or Busta Rhymes, but with a twist.

I'm ok but my watch sick.

We are not the same I am a martian.

Flows so sick I make you want to throw your food up.

They don't make 'em like me no more. Matter of fact never made 'em like me before.

eBay (temporarily) admits defeat

Extract from an email today sent to me as an eBay Australia member:

Changes to eBay.com.au scheduled for 15 July are being postponed until the review process with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) regarding its recent draft notice is complete. As previously announced, eBay.com.au is continuing to work with the ACCC to achieve an outcome that benefits buyers and sellers.

the worst review I've read in some time

From the New York Times' review of The Love Guru:

To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word “unfunny” surely applies to Mr. Myers’s obnoxious attempts to find mirth in physical and cultural differences but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, “The Love Guru” is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again. And this is, come to think of it, something of an achievement.
What is the opposite of a belly laugh? An interesting question, in a way, and to hear lines like “I think I just made a happy wee-wee” or “I’m making diarrhea noises in my cup” or to watch apprentice gurus attack one another with urine-soaked mops is to grasp the answer.

Allegations against Keddies

The Sydney Morning Herald today publishes serious allegations against Keddies, the big NSW personal injury law-firm. Obviously these allegations are untested - and they are denied by Keddies - but if true they are very disturbing.

Extracts below

THE state's largest specialised personal injury law firm is battling allegations of professional misconduct, including gross overcharging and falsifying documents as well as defamation, during an ongoing and bitter dispute with some former staff.

Former clients have claimed Keddies Lawyers has retained hundreds of thousands of dollars of settlement money from compensation cases without their knowledge.

Crippled and injured car accident clients of the firm maintain they were never sent bills, which in one case would have revealed a businessman had more than 80 per cent of his payout taken in legal fees and expenses.

Another woman, catastrophically injured in an outback vehicle accident six years ago, discovered well after her claim was settled without any court hearing that she had paid about $800,000 in legal fees from her $3.5 million payout.

And the father of a girl killed in a Sydney car accident was compensated $300,000 for psychological injury but received only $85,000 net initially after almost $215,000 in legal fees and expenses were charged.

Keddies says all the complaints against the firm are "totally without substance" and were orchestrated primarily by three "former disgruntled staff members" who were sacked in late 2006 and now "control" the unhappy clients.

The Herald has learnt that Keddies has refunded more than $500,000 to a group of at least seven former clients who complained to the Office of the Legal Services Commissioner about overcharging.

One of them was Mr Gu, who was repaid $100,000. His reimbursement cheques, dated two months apart and for separate amounts of $40,000 and $60,000, were made out to his daughter, who has never been a Keddies client.

Some of the clients received refunds, signed confidentiality agreements and agreed to withdraw complaints.

The managing partner, Russell Keddie, said the refunds - even one as large as Mr Gu's - were not in any way an admission of overcharging.

"Paying them this money, it was more to say, 'We're sorry they were so unhappy'," he said.

Most of the official complaints about Keddies that followed were from Chinese citizens injured in Australia during holidays or while on work visas, and who later returned to China.

Mr Keddie said that without arranging for the cases to be heard overseas, the plaintiffs would have been unlikely to have been compensated for their injuries because visa or medical reasons prevented their return to Australia.

Mr Keddie said there would not have been any complaints except "the horrible renegade employees got into their ears" and encouraged Chinese clients to make them. "How would someone in Beijing or Shanghai, like Mr Gu, for example, understand about the Office of the Legal Services Commissioner?"

"We do have happy clients," Mr Keddie said, as a pile of testimonials and pictures of smiling, well-compensated claimants in their journal to clients attests.

The partners also denied the firm had a reputation for overcharging.

"Keddies is a conservative firm," Mr Keddie said. "We are not as aggressive as some of our rivals."

A time ledger of the Keddies solicitor David Marocchi's work for one client, seen by the Herald, shows that on one day in November 2005, he recorded 22 hours of his time and charged $2175 "to review" a file transferred from a colleague, a further $2610 "to peruse" it, $1740 "to consider" it, $1087.50 for "drafting" and another $1087.50 for further "considering". That day's work appeared to total $9500. Mr Marocchi has denied inflating fees or recording excessive hours.

Ebay paypal exclusivity shot down

According to The Age, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (the ACCC to us Aussies) is planning to disallow the trial of eBay's new business plan - the compulsory use of PayPal.

[by way of background, eBay has been proposing ceasing allowing the use of any payment mechanism in Australia other than PayPal or cash on delivery... its corporate filings indicate that if successful it intends to roll this out worldwide].

The competition watchdog has flagged its intention to scuttle a plan by online auctioneer eBay to force its Australian users on to a PayPal-only payments system.

Citing concerns about the "anti-competitive effect" of the proposal, the chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Graeme Samuel, has issued a statement calling on eBay to delay implementation of the plan, which was supposed to take effect from next Tuesday.

eBay's proposal would have required items bought and sold on the site to be paid for using PayPal, which eBay owns.

...

"The ACCC is concerned that the [PayPal proposal] will allow eBay to use its market power in the supply of online market places to substantially lessen competition in the market in which PayPal operates," Mr Samuel said in the statement.

"Given eBay's position as Australia's leading online market place, the [PayPal proposal] will substantially reduce competition to supply online payment services to users of online market places more generally."

The ACCC has issued a draft notice proposing to revoke eBay's request for immunity from prosecution, which the company lodged in April.

Fantastic Rupert Murdoch article

From The Atlantic - focusing on Murdoch's acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, but also some cheap shots (especially about Murdoch's Australian-ness), genuine insights and reasonably good anecdotes.

Some selected quotes:

With his thin hair dyed rusty brown and brushed straight back off the wide dome of his forehead, and modish wire-framed glasses over small, heavy-lidded eyes, his face was all too familiar, its deeply creased cheeks sagging in a fine cascade of syncline folds to the crisp knot of his blue silk tie.

We’ve come here to expand, he said. He has announced his intention for the remade Journal not just to supplant The New York Times as the nation’s preeminent daily newspaper but to become the first truly global daily. This would be music to the ears of any newsroom, so hope mingled with the professional dread in Murdoch’s audience that afternoon. He may be awful, but he is rich and awful, smart and awful, powerful and awful, and while he may well be crazy to still believe in the future of print, he is determined and crazy. Murdoch might be the last person The Journal would have chosen as its savior, but newspapers may well be down to last hopes.

Rupert Murdoch is, by most accounts, a delightful man. Born to wealth that he has manifestly multiplied, he is a man who lives a globe-trotting lifestyle, a man who need never carry his own bags or stand in line at a security checkpoint at an airport, a man who moves through a string of fabulous residences; it would be easy to assume that he is a coddled, petulant creature of privilege. Yet Murdoch often flies commercial, carries his own bags, prefers a regular hotel room to a suite, uses taxis, and shops everywhere for bargains.

He is a bare-knuckled, union-crushing capitalist who has had more success than anyone wooing the ruling Communists in China. He is a Thatcherite conservative whose New York tabloid has endorsed Barack Obama. He is a 77-year-old who lives the life of a young man, with a Chinese-born wife (his third) who is almost four decades his junior and two small daughters to complement his four middle-aged children. He is a global-media baron, a titan in his field, whose empire now includes 20th Century Fox, Fox TV, Fox News, Fox Business Network, HarperCollins, The Times and Sunday Times of London, The Sun, the New York Post, The Weekly Standard, Dow Jones, BSkyB television, National Geographic Channel, MySpace, etc., etc. But Murdoch still sees himself as a stubborn outsider, a freethinking cultural marauder come to rattle the halls of power—a kind of Aussie Bart Simpson writ large. And nothing gets his juices flowing faster than a chance to disturb any establishment, be it Britain’s labor unions (he broke their stranglehold on London newspapers), the BBC (which he has successfully challenged with BSkyB), the dominant American TV networks (which he has taken on with his Fox channels), or CNN (which his Fox News Channel surpassed as the leading all-news cable channel, after CNN’s Ted Turner famously promised to squish Murdoch “like a bug”).

Murdoch is given credit for great business acumen, but he is less a pioneer and visionary than a wealthy and aggressive collector. He has vast resources and is constantly adding and subtracting companies to and from his empire. He identifies potential markets, and then, like a rich art buyer writing big checks for the work of artists who have already achieved critical recognition, he buys into companies that have demonstrated promise in reaching those markets. He doesn’t have a record of consistent success; some of his biggest newspapers lose money, including the New York Post and The Times of London. What he has are the resources to absorb failure.

at a time when every big newspaper is tinkering with futuristic business models, Murdoch is doing so with both feet planted firmly in the past. His strategy for success in 2008 is to behave as though the year is 1908. So while his competitors retrench, Murdoch is going to war—by challenging The New York Times, in particular, to an old-fashioned newspaper battle. Except this time the stakes aren’t nickels in Times Square, but dominance in America, and the world.

It’s a war he could well lose. For print journalists, the good news about Murdoch is that he believes the old Gutenberg technology still has legs, and that he is willing to back that belief with capital. But any 21st-century newspaper war is going to be fought in large part on the Web, and when it comes to new media, Murdoch’s record is mixed at best. From the 1990s on, he has repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempted to establish a foothold on the Internet. There was Delphi, an early player in the online industry, which he abandoned a few years after purchasing it. There was PointCast, a venture featuring something called “push” technology that Murdoch flirted with before it sank as quickly as it surfaced. Today he has staked his claim with MySpace, and he is actively seeking to broaden that beachhead by shopping around for a proven performer he can buy. He has flirted both with keeping The Journal’s content behind a firewall (where it remains at the moment) and with offering it for free, which indicates that he hasn’t cracked the central problem of Internet publication: How do you make it pay?

It’s also a war he could abandon if it doesn’t seem to be going his way. As his Internet ventures suggest, Murdoch has a history of moving aggressively into new territory, only to retreat just as quickly. He has built his media empire not only by identifying proven properties and investing in them, but also by ruthlessly discarding those that fail to measure up to his expectations. He can be a fickle patron, because his enthusiasm for a project is grounded not in a deeply held belief or commitment, but in the bottom line. And some speculate that he may ultimately value Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal less for their own sakes than for what their brand names bring to his other properties, particularly his just-launched Fox Business Network, although Dow Jones has a contract with CNBC that will not expire until 2012.

Even literary ambition began to creep into the pages of the great newspapers. At the best ones, when the material justified it, reporters were encouraged to write creatively and at length. A certain kind of reporter—and I was one—competed against others not so much for scoops, but for recognition, prizes, and tenured positions at papers where the rarefied work of “serious” journalism was underwritten. Mine was The Philadelphia Inquirer, where my byline read not “staff reporter” or “staff correspondent” but “staff writer,” and which we writers called, in its heyday, “the greatest care-and-feeding system for journalism ever invented.”

while the Web is rapidly destroying the business model that sustained all of the above, it has yet to develop institutions capable of replacing print newspapers as vehicles for great in-depth journalism, or conscious of themselves as upholding a public trust. Instead, the Web gives voice to opinionated, unedited millions. In the digital world, ignorance and crudity share the platform with rigor and taste; the independent journalist shares the platform with spinmeisters and con artists. Cable television and satellite radio have taken broadcast journalism in the same direction, crowding out the once-dominant networks, which strove for the ideal of objectivity, with new channels that all but advertise their politics. When all news is spun, we live in a world of propaganda.

The worst part of this is, the public doesn’t seem to care.

and he doesn’t buy the ideal of objectivity. He sees it as pretense—or hypocrisy—because he perceives a distinct liberal skew to the established journalistic powers. In Murdoch’s view, the public is best served not by objectivity, which he regards as impossible, but by “balance.”

He rejects the idea that the media should be dominated by a few respected, independent voices; he embraces instead a din of competing voices and interests. He is a Jeffersonian, a believer in a lively free market of ideas (except, of course, where it doesn’t suit his interests—notably in China, where he’s willing to make nice with the oppressive regime), and he scoffs at those who see danger in his acquisitiveness, at those who worry about the ever-widening reach of his media empire.

What is the Murdochian point of view? It is not so easy to predict. His interests are dizzyingly diverse and famously open to change. He is a social liberal and a strong advocate of unfettered international trade. Other than that, he tends to be conservative, but he is also influenced by personalities, and has reportedly cozied up to the Clintons and warmed to Barack Obama. His various newspapers have staked a variety of public positions that are at least occasionally at odds with Murdoch’s own—TheTimes of London, for instance, has been consistently critical of the repressive Communist regime in China, despite its owner’s blatant and well-documented kowtowing.

Murdoch is a panderer. Like most businessmen, he wants to figure out what his customers want and then deliver it. The salvation of The Wall Street Journal may well be that its highly educated readership wants precisely what the paper has been offering for more than a half century. But at the very least, it’s clear that Murdoch intends to give that tradition a good working over.

Beating other papers at their own game is exactly what the new ownership seems to prize. In a conference call to the paper’s Washington bureau in April, Thomson pointed enthusiastically to a page-one political story by the reporter Monica Langley. Headlined “He’s Back,” the article detailed the increasing influence of Bill Clinton on the presidential campaign of his wife, Hillary. The new publisher-editor described it as “perfect in every way.” But Thomson’s Washington-bureau audience was merely whelmed. True, the Langley piece was timely, it came on the heels of a resurgence in Hillary’s campaign, and what it lacked in access it made up for in provocative analysis. In other words, it was the kind of story The New York Times would have loved to have. But the old Journal would not have cared, or at least not that much.

It does, however, reflect classic Murdochian principles, and Murdoch does seem to have a sense for what sells. He apparently intends to expand the Journal staff to add meat to that broadened coverage, which would mean more stories like those found everywhere else. But even if aping the competition increased the newspaper’s readership—and it is hard to see how it would—it would also destroy what made TheJournal great. In addition to stressing more breaking, general-news stories, Thomson has made clear that he intends to “clarify reporting lines,” which is taken to mean that he plans to thin the ranks of the mid-level editors who were the newspaper’s line of defense against sloppiness and error. It is worth noting that the number of corrections in the first quarter of this year, under Murdoch’s reign, has risen by more than 25 percent compared with the first quarter of 2007, an increase that the company says reflects an increase in the number of stories the new Journal is running.

“People are running around frightened and confused,” said one longtime Journal reporter. “The push is toward news, news, news. It feels like Murdoch wants to make us more like every other newspaper in the country.”