Catch-Up Friday

Okay, it's been a run-run week, so I have lots on which to catch up. Won't get it all in today, but I'll try to get to some of it in weekend entries, which will be a mostly new feature for my hungry readers around the world, who are used to my blue-collar writing habits, working hard from Mon-Fri, and then resting over the weekend. This weekend, there'll be no rest for the weary blogger.

Pekar Watch, Round 18. Three fascinating Pekar developments that you should know about. In ascending order of fascination, they are as follows. This great review of American Splendor in the wonderful webzine Slate proves that being first is less important than being best. After just about every media outlet in the Western world has weighed in on the movie, this piece somehow finds not only something new to say, but something really fresh and insightful. It makes the case that AS is the "grunge Annie Hall," a reference to what I and many other Woodie Allen fans still consider his best movie. On its face, that's a pretty odd notion, but read on, and you'll be hard-pressed to argue the point. Next: I note that Pekar, who's still given to worrying aloud about finding enough freelance writing gigs to make a living, now has a booking agent. And not just any agent: his California-based agency also reps for an eclectic group which includes Walter Cronkite, Black Panther Party founder Bobby Seale, Pulitzer-winning writer Ron Suskind and CNN's Maria Hinojosa. Count on Harv to find an interesting mix. Finally, and by far the most fascinating of all, the Chicago-based libmag (my own contraction, meaning liberal mag) In These Times has just posted an amazing piece which Pekar wrote some years ago, under a pseudonym, about his encounters with Letterman. Why amazing? Try this passage, for instance: "Pekar’s greatest strength is the tension between his ordinariness as a man and his extraordinary skill in chronicling it. He is thoughtful, articulate and, above all, angry, a rare and precious attribute in his age of yappie nihilism. As a television personality, though, Pekar is a disaster. Pudgy, balding and wild-eyed, he comes across on Late Night as the sort of guy you see ranting on street corners." Remember, he said this all about himself! You'd have to give him an A for balance....

At Cleveland Works, Desperate Times Require Desperate Fundraising. Imagine my surprise when I went to the mailbox the day after I posting a piece blasting Cleveland Works for ignoring the credible story seven long years ago about the drug habits of their exec. director, only to find a letter from the group. Could it be that this little local nonprof had somehow taken a page from the first Clinton campaign and set up a war room in which their minions quickly and forcefully responded to every bit of media criticism of their guy? Had former Clevelander George Stephanopolous and the "Rajun Cajun," James Carville, been hired as consultants by Cleveland Works? Naw--as it turned out, they merely found my name and address on an ancient mailing list (which they apparently haven't used in at least a decade) to send a "we need money to stay open" alert. "Because of recent events..." it begins, without mentioning the drug busts. And they've apparently gotten so many outraged calls that they had to change phone numbers, because the request for "at least $100" ends with a note to PLEASE NOTE OUR NEW PHONE NUMBER ABOVE..." Sorry, folks, but that's one funding request that was easily ignored...

Civic Hipsters. This new piece on the very fine Christian Science Monitor site does a good job of describing what some patently unhip towns (like Cincy) are doing to try to hippify. There's even a brief mention of Cleveland's new Civic Innovation Lab, which the Cleveland Foundation, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen to hand over to the collaboratively challenged Jennifer Thomas, for reasons which only they can guess. Well, let's look at the glass half full, shall we: at least a couple of best & brightest guys are helping steer the thing--former McKinseyite Brad Whitehead, who's now at the foundation and who put the whole idea together, and my friend John Polk, who'll be serving as a mentor...

Google IPO? Reports out of Silicon Valley from plugged-in venture capitalists, which ought to soon be showing up in newspapers, are that Google will at long last be going to the capital markets for the long-awaited initial public offering. While the two brilliant young guys who founded it have held off for five long years, in the process refusing repeated offers to become billionaires while they maintained the management autonomy to keep making it better, they have new reason to do so now. Microsoft, bowing to the obvious--that search has become the most important game on the web--has put renewed emphasis on competing in web search. And with a stash of $20-billion plus in liquid cash, the Redmond Warriors can put lots of R&D into it. So Google is going to need its own deeper pockets to mount a defense of its prime position. While the company is said to be zooming in on the $1 billion annual revenue mark (as a private company, it doesn't officially disclose numbers), an IPO could bring way more into the corporate coffers, like $15-20 billion. Let's just hope this seminal event, if and when it happens, might just kick off another rebound in the market and the larger economy, as the '95 Netscape IPO touched off an unprecedented five-year run of good feeling in America. Of course, that was back when we had a bright president who surrounded himself with mostly honest folks who paid attention to little things like national budgets and peacemaking. Oh, well, as things look now, that time might just return in about a year...