The New Nots... Not

Long ago, in a previous life, Mr. Irresponsible was a feature writer for one of the big newsweeklies. (Note: When I say "a previous life" I'm talking about an earlier time in my actual current life. It's not a reference to some patchouli-soaked hallucination of a long-past existence in which I was a woman named Shahara or a small sunburned boy tilling the fields of Mesopotamia. I feel the need to clarify this because the mail this weblog gets is already quite weird enough, thank you.) In that capacity I learned to fear Tuesday mornings, for the following reasons: Monday was the day when sleepy, hacky wire-service reporters would rouse themselves from the torpor of the weekend to file their second-laziest stories of the week (the laziest appearing late on Friday or over the weekend). And Tuesday was the day when feature editors would wake up realizing they had two hours to cook up a slate of suggestions for that morning's editorial meetings, and would in a panic comb the wires looking for trends. A word about trends: As defined by the mainstream press, a trend is any set of two or more vaguely similar stories moving on the AP or Reuters wire in one 24-hour period, regardless of whether they are moored in observable reality or, much more likely, filed offhand as a sort of limbering-up for the actual work to come, the way ballplayers play pepper in the infield before the game. (See above.) So as a magazine writer on a Tuesday morning your job is clear: Sink the trend story you are inevitably about to be assigned. Bad-mouth it, start a whispering campaign against it, undermine it in ways both big and small. Then go out to lunch. Then spend the rest of the week avoiding your editor's eye.

All this is by way of saying: Man, am I glad I'm not a newsweekly feature writer today, because if I were, I'd be hunkered down trying to avoid writing a three-column meditation on what somebody up the food chain would probably have dubbed "The New Nots." The second I saw these three non-starters lined up on the AP entertainment wire like Manny, Moe and Jack, grinning their idiot grins and beckoning with their empty eyes, I knew some editor somewhere was ginning up a trend story:

Klein Doesn't Blame Cruise For Breakup
Chesney Doesn't Regret Zellwegger Marriage
Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson Not Dating

Stories like these raise questions in the normal mind, chief among them: Hey, who cares? But in the mind of the magazine editor, trained to troll for thready connections in the vastness of the Zeitgeist the way a Great White circles lazily, patiently, waiting for the tip of a flipper in the waters above, the mere fact of proximity renders these three dumbass non-stories something somehow larger than themselves: A trend. If I were still working those fields (and had been unable to plant the requisite seeds of doubt in my editor's mind) I'd be drafting something like this right about now:

Across Hollywood last week, from The Ivy to The Grill, the cream of young show business was exhibiting the latest in PR fashion: The artfully-crafted denial, the story that says "No" and yet "Yes" at the same time. Call them "The New Nots"...

I could go on. Once upon a time, I did. But I've been lifted up and borne away from all that, and you can be too. The next time you open a magazine and spot a story that you know in your heart has been cobbled together from the odd breakaway pieces of a pop culture that's ever more disposable, the next time you see in the opening paragraph the words Call it...  or Observers have dubbed it... or They are not alone... -- Do yourself a favor. Do as Mr. Irresponsible did all those years ago. Say to yourself, as I did to my editors on so many Tuesday mornings like this one: "You don't really want to do that, do you?" Then take yourself to lunch.