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Sam Schwartz
06/01/2007
Interview by Anthony Smyrski
Photography by Elissa Bogos
You probably don’t want to talk about the Philadelphia Independent.
The more time passes, the better I am at—I meet people and they’re like, “I can’t believe you’re the guy that wrote that! That’s so awesome!” I don’t know why that sucks. It shouldn’t. But it does.
How long has it been since [you left] the Independent?
A long time. Almost three years. The last issue came out the very beginning of 2005, February 2005.
Compare what you were doing for the Independent with your experiences working for larger, more established publications.
When I was doing the Independent, whenever I would get close to powerful people, or establishment people, or anybody with a lot of money, power or legitimacy ... I would tighten up and move away. I think I was intimidated. I got this award from Philadelphia Magazine for being on their “People to Watch” list. This was a big deal at the time, like it could really help me materially. I went to the awards party, but I dressed really strangely, in ratty jeans and a military jacket from I. Goldberg. I tried to act like I didn’t care. I wanted everyone to look at me and know immediately that I was separate from this since I thought I was superior.
Do you think that was a mistake?
I don’t really know if it was a mistake. I was probably secretly worried that they would change me if I came close to them because I recognized that they were powerful. If you resist them, you wind up being defined by then, anyway.
Is it more effective to work from the inside, or to be an outsider?
Well, it depends. I’m confused as to what journalism can really accomplish. I used to say that if John Kerry won the election in 2004 instead of George Bush—and it was a very close election—I would probably still be doing the newspaper now. It would have given me a really big burst of energy. I read this book by Ken Kalfus called A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. It’s about a married couple in Manhattan who are in the process of getting a divorce, these really awful people who hate each other and have a child. Then 9/11 happens and, for various reasons, they both think that the other died in the attacks. And they’re both very happy about it. I think people in the United States treat each other worse than they did four years ago. I think the way the president has behaved has created new norms for what people are allowed to get away with.
The election had a direct effect on the paper?
That was a major consideration—do I really want to cover Bush and write these editorials for the next four years condemning this guy? But I have no power—
Do you think journalism can be effective at all? Can’t it be a catalyst?
Journalism that people get paid to do—nowadays, so far as I can tell—is about access and betrayal. You try to get access to people, institutions and situations that the public is interested in, that either have some celebrity value, or some intrigue value. You get really close to your subject, and you sell them out.
Was it different before?
I don’t know if it was different before. It’s a fundamental problem with writing. To go out and tell the truth about a person while they’re still around—that’s a tall order. You’re either not going to tell the whole truth or you’re going to burn them, or you’re going to have to change their name. Journalism is tough to do because there’s always a source—it can be someone who’s giving you the files, someone who’s giving you the interview, it could be the publicist—the source has the control. The story winds up always written from the source’s agenda, always compromised. Without the source there is no story. The supposedly macho, independent thing to do is gain a source’s confidence and then abuse it. You convince Dick Cheney that you’re his buddy, for example, so he lets you into his house, and then you write about his secret pot habit and his dirty underwear. But even in those cases, where you go out and trash the subject, there’s usually another source manipulating things from behind the scenes by feeding you negative information.
I used to have the notion that journalism was a big anti-power force. It was supposed to expose people who had gotten too high on their own prestige and were just greedy, who promote their cronies or engage in nepotism or abuse the public trust. I know for a fact that the people who own, run and operate at the highest levels of most major journalistic institutions—on the business side and the editorial side—have the same failings as the people they criticize. They are secretive and concerned primarily with hanging onto their own power. They like to make lots of money. They promote their cronies. This supposed set of norms that is the core of real, serious, public-interest journalism, the idea that you should be fair and transparent and open and public minded—I don’t think anyone who is close to power actually operates according to those norms. And journalists are very powerful. The people who own the media are even more so.
Do you think journalism can make a change?
I think journalism is this wonderful machine that lets people to talk to each other and also define a consensus. It helps a community take unheard minority views and weigh them against the current majority consensus and try to reach a balance point, an accommodation. In this way it is a positive, democratic institution.
And I may have been too harsh before … as far as my cynicism about the business and power sides go, in this respect journalism is really no better or worse than any other industry. The First Amendment is pretty amazing. The fact that journalists can pick up the phone and call government officials and corporate people, and there is a social assumption that people in power actually have to answer their questions or sit down with them for an interview—that’s amazing. I think that probably keeps a lot of people from doing a lot of terrible things.
Do you think that freedom is under threat right now?
I don’t think our legal freedoms are in much danger. I just think there’s so much chatter now that people can’t think straight. The real threat is that no one is using our freedoms in new or creative ways, and without these examples we might forget about them.
What about fiction? I know you’ve been working on some stories. Is that something you’re pursuing?
I wish I did it more. It’s pretty hard. I mean, I have a bunch of stories in my head that would work—things that have really happened—that would probably work better as fiction. Right now it’s just a bunch of files. I don’t really see fiction as being separate from journalistic writing. Non-fiction is just fiction that can pass fact checking, where all the names line up and there’s a phone number attached to quotes. Non-fiction is a little easier because there are more constraints. It’s a formula. It makes it easier to write.
Fiction, because you don’t have these constraints—do you think that expanse of freedom helps you get at the truth of things?
Oh, yeah, definitely. If you want to know what really goes on inside a marriage, if you want to know what really goes on in the CIA—fiction is the best way to answer both those questions. I don’t see that ever changing.
Do you want to talk about cars?
I’m fascinated by how they all look so mean, like they’re growling and snarling. Not just the Hummers, little Honda Accords have these slitted, beady, beast-like eyes. They’re ferocious looking. I feel like this is also true of the mascots of profession sports teams. I think this reflects something larger about historical changes in the spirit of North Americans, how our aggression is getting more open and pronounced.
I was just watching people on the subway the other day ... whenever human beings are still and looking at something, something very important is happening. They’re praying or meditating. They might be looking at their book or a screen or an iPod. There’s some kind of transmission happening. If you really wanted to track media, that’s what you would want to focus on: What do people stop and point their attention at? In New York, I’m amazed by how much value advertisers get from the ads on the subway. There’s a lot of politics on the subway, and the only safe thing to look at is the ads. You’re not allowed to look at other people’s bodies. You’re not allowed to look at other people’s faces. Or, you can carry around something to look at during these dead periods. Like a book or an iPod. The iPod is this amazing tool for totally ignoring your environment, if that’s what you want to do. It turns your surroundings into this solipsistic music video where your errand is the only errand and everything else is just this marvelous montage of color and light passing you by.
What do you think is going to happen to newspapers? What do you think about newspapers like Wall Street Journal or New York Times or Le Monde?
It’s easy to get romantic about newspapers because by the middle of the 20th century, they had reached full institutional maturity, and they stayed at that point, in full creative flower, for at least twenty years. The design was perfect—the way the editors and reporters interacted and collected information—all of these things had been perfected. On the street, the newspaper had been naturalized into the human experience, built into the day like the sunrise and the mail. It was necessary. It was something that everyone wanted and liked. Most mediums tend to have this period where they’re super hot, where all the money is there and all the hot artists are doing it. You have new machines and new capabilities—like in the 1910s and ‘20s when you had these marvelous Sunday color inserts. Cities were growing at the same time so it was this terrific confluence of money, audience, technology, talent, and fresh material to cover. And then, from the ‘20s to the ‘60s or ‘70s, you have this gradual professionalization where newspapers come up with specific procedures and hierarchies. They institutionalize their role in society and their status increases.
Do you think the Internet is going to do that for our generation?
Right now the problem with the Internet is that only rich people in the first world have it. And all they do with it is use it to talk to each other. I don’t think you could ever have a magazine or a newspaper that defines a global consensus or a global community, but I do think you could have a website or message board where that could happen. That’s my favorite thing on the Internet—message boards. If you had people from all over the world debating the news on some message board, just going at it—that’s what I’m hoping for.
The counterculture we have now is very much defined by selling things. I wonder how much the Internet is going to push that on the rest of the world, and what kind of effect that’s going to have on developing countries.
They’re going to see all the images of ridiculous wealth and prosperity. The ghetto, hip-hop, Scarface mentality, that’s what will resonate. We’ve already primed the pump by feeding them all these images of stuff they can’t have. Hip-hop is the worst force in history. I feel like many of Marx’s predictions about capitalism succumbing to its inherent class contradictions might have come true if it weren’t for hip-hop. It blows my mind that the poorest people in America are the ones who most embody the predatory, capitalist, every-person-for-himself, cutthroat, gross celebration of material wealth. It’s like, “I live in a rubble house and have a plastic, fake, gold chain. And I have rims that look like chrome but they’re actually plastic.” Just that little bit of flash, that somehow became the essence of what’s “cool” or what posturing is. I think that’s part of what makes hip-hop so dangerous and interesting—it’s a celebration of these empty, selfish pretension. It creates a value system where you can satisfy potentially revolutionary urges by spending a month’s paycheck on a Gucci jacket.
The amazing thing about hip-hop is that it just solves so many problems for people in power. It has all this appeal. I think it happened organically. At the bottom of it, there’s a violent, frontiersman, gangster, cowboy, mentality, where “I’m going to shoot you, take what’s yours, get what’s mine.” I think long before it became a “black” thing, this was a classic, male, American trope. Henry Kissinger said this in an interview—at the bottom of the American psyche is a cowboy leading the wagon train. I think all the commercial aspects [of hip-hop] are built around that. The gangster is kind of the ultimate capitalist figure who doesn’t follow any rules and pushes all the other people around and takes as much as he can. He escapes punishment and deals with other people violently.
What is your outlook on the next couple of years professionally?
It’d be fun to start something again. It’d probably be fun to start a business. The Independent was like a business and it paid taxes and it didn’t break the law or anything, but it followed its own logic. It’d be fun to start another institution like that.
You talk about the bank a lot.
Starting a bank seems very hard. You need about $50 million to do it legitimately. But then again, starting a newspaper seemed really hard. If I had enough energy, got excited enough, and there were people around me excited about it—then I could see doing it. The reason I started the paper was... I was in college and reading alt-weeklies [and thought] “Whoa, I could do this better. This paper really fucking sucks. I hate it. I’m going to do my own.” That’s how I feel about banks now. They’re done badly, but they’re necessary. People don’t feel any kind of connection with their bank. So, that is a kind of opportunity.
I guess I’ve lost a lot of confidence in my own abilities. I’m not as excited as I used to be. After I stopped doing the paper, I was broke. I became very interested in saving up a lot of money. I did a lot of work that I didn’t like, to save up the money. I didn’t hate the work I did—it just didn’t do anything for me. But that’s all right. When I started the paper I worked in a restaurant. That was healthy because it created a lot of negative energy that I put in the paper. Lately I’ve been accumulating negative energy but I haven’t turned around and done anything with it. You have to use the urge or you lose it.
There is a certain level of satisfaction that you get just from reaching a certain degree of status in society. It’s mostly in your head. Say I moved to Philadelphia and I’m broke and I’m just getting started. I have no money so I need to do something crazy to get some recognition. But once I get the recognition—I’m making money, doing work and I can buy some nice things, I can order a fancy drink at a fancy restaurant. I can drop the names of a fancy client and go to fancy parties and obtain recognition as an equal or a superior. As soon as I have that, I’ve lost a lot of the impetus to do something interesting.
I’m a pretty lazy person. I need mediating motives or circumstances to break out. Also, I’m not good at working by myself. I like working with other people. I get worked up, then I get these big bursts of energy that I can transmit to people I’m working with. That’s why this bank idea might be good. You need an idea that’s going to work not just for you, but for the set of people around you.
Most people I know seem to be stagnating in a similar to the way I am—just interested in advancing professionally and accumulating money and accumulating credentials and having a better story to tell the guy at the party. Some of this is just getting older, but I think there are major generational and historical forces at play as well.
What do you think those forces are?
People want to get married and reproduce. They start to worry about security and the welfare of their offspring. They lose faith in their own ability to gain recognition for their own work and they seek out recognition that’s institutional. It’s a shortcut. You do something that’s already perceived to be worthwhile and legitimate, and then you don’t have to ask yourself the hard questions every day. I’ve definitely fallen into that trap.
Want to talk about gambling? I know you like gambling.
I think I’m potentially a compulsive gambler and I’ve known myself long enough to be moderate about it. I do it for kicks. It’s a very vivid experience. And, it’s also really competitive [and] interesting because in most games you’re actually performing experiments on live human subjects under stress who are all trying to perform experiments on you. And there’s money on the line and it’s pretty intense.
How did the gambling start?
I was getting into it with the newspaper, I wasn’t getting along very well with my girlfriend, I was fairly broke. Doing the paper, I’d been pushed around by all these guys with money—all these landlords and tough old men and bitter Philadelphia types who pushed me around like a piece of meat. At least that’s how I saw it. I wasn’t sure if I could hack it with real business-type guys. So, it was a way to deal with that. It solved a bunch of problems at once: get away from the girlfriend, figure out stuff about businessmen, masculine competition.
At the same time I was doing a lot of freelance work, where I was doing a lot of intense negotiations. Poker definitely helped with that, with seeing money not as something absolute but as a bargaining medium. There are a lot of good things, a lot of bad things about poker. I wasn’t very good at it for a while, but then I figured it out to some extent. But you never really figure it out.
Talk about how the game has helped you mature into an adult.
Making decisions under—
Stress.
Not stress, but uncertainty. Like, different ways that things could go: “Oh, that’s pretty good, I’ll just do that. That’s probably good enough. If it doesn’t work out, who cares, ‘cause it’s not always gonna work out.” It’s good practice for that. There’s also this concept of “game selection” that’s very important. Basically the question of who you decide to play with, when you start, and when you leave, are as important as any decision you might make inside the game.
A reflection of how reality works. It sounds like it’s just a distilled version of reality.
It’s a very zero sum type, cannibalistic, capitalist reality. It’s a pretty good model, but poker is a lot fairer than real life.
Why?
Because in poker, everyone’s playing by the same rules. You’ve got your money and you got your decisions. In real life, on Wall Street or in business, someone would have access to special sets of premium opportunities—to special sets of premium information. They’re given these tremendous advantages.
That doesn’t exist in poker.
No, assuming nobody’s cheating. It is just a game, though. Games are interesting. Any game, if you played enough, will start to—
Reflect life?
Yeah.
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