Today’s New York Times contains yet the latest piece of speculation on Rupert Murdoch’s offer to buy Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. This story, by Times staffer Richard Siklos, includes actual reporting (including at least one sit-down with RM himself) and declares that Murdoch’s interests are digital even as he makes a play for a piece of old media.

The NY media world has been abuzz since Murdoch made his offer almost a month ago, with opinions falling into two general camps: that which says he will destroy the venerable old WSJ with his meddling and tabloid tendencies, and that which says he will leave well enough alone and that, perhaps, the Journal could use a good swift kick in the pants. (Both camps agree he would probably leave the arch conservative Op-Ed pages alone, since the views expressed within so closely mirror his own: pro-war, anti-regulation and occasionally downright hysterical.)

While there is much more context to be chewed on — the eternal Aussie outsider’s need to buy respectability, his nascent news networks need for credibility — the question of his meddling if often settled by looking to the past: He didn’t muck with the Village Voice nor New York magazine when he owned them in the seventies, figuring if the publications made money, who was he to argue? (Though many Murdoch watchers also say you can read his mind by reading the New York Post — a frightening thought indeed.)

Like many who have worked in NY media for long, I too worked for Mudoch once. In the mid-nineties I was part of a team of writers, editors, producers and designers who labored on the stillborn web baby never to be known as iGuide. It was Murdoch’s first internet venture (in partnership with MCI), launched and folded in those heady days when no one had a business model that made any sense but lots of people were throwing money around. I was no different: my assistant had to show me what a website looked like (I think Word was the first one I saw) and I spent a good deal of my time trying to explain what we were doing to folks in old media.

That iGuide was doomed is apparent in hindsight but we were too busy building a ladder to the sky. Even then the question of Murdoch’s influence was on our minds — even though no one outside of our digital tent could see the content we were creating. Covering the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women, which was being held in human-rights challenged Beijing in the summer of ’95, I was able to finagle a number of comments from interested outsiders such as Susan Faludi and Senator Ted Kennedy .

Kennedy’s quote, while bland and rather predictable, was my big get; though it’s doubtful he came anywhere near it, it represented creds to us. Look, Ted Kennedy on our site! We gave him pride of place, complete with a picture, on the front page of our special women’s conference coverage. So you can imagine my surprise when I came in and discovered that both the picture and Kennedy’s quote had been removed.

“Rupert hates Kennedy,” my boss, a jovial Brit named Jonathan Miller told me. When Murdoch came by the office to see what we were up to my superiors panicked, thinking that the mere sight of Ted’s flushed Irish face would send him into a fit. I can’t help but think they overreacted — we were, after all, gathering news — but iGuide didn’t last long enough for me to find out. After losing MCI as a partner, and $40M of his own money, Murdoch took decisive action. First, he came by the office to tell us there was nothing to worry about. Then, a few days later, he gave us all the sack.

Not that I have any bad feelings about the experience. I went on to several more internet jobs, most for companies that no longer exist. iGuide, of course, is gone — it’s almost as if it was never there — and so is Word and, for that matter, MCI. Only Rupert remains.

A few readers of this space have asked me why I haven’t been blogging of late (thanks, few readers). Yes, I’ve been insanely busy all of a sudden, which is good but I was also overwhelmed by the shootings at Virginia Tech. Once the initial shock had subsided I thought of writing about the elements of the story that were at least within my grasp and experience — I did a story on schoolyard shooters once, and I’ve had writing students who scared people with their prose — but each day’s revelations seemed to render yesterday’s news moot, or at least render me mute. Now it seems some of the students who survived will be writing about it. May they find courage and some meaning in the telling.

It seems that all those April showers brought us a bouquet of death, My last entry was about Vonnegut, but at least he defied the odds and lived to 82. (In a posthumous speech delivered by his son yesterday, the author told us from the grave not to fear death and credited Socrates with the line, “Death is just one more night.”) Far more disturbing was the news that Bay Area writer Chiori Santiago had succumb to cancer two weeks ago.

Chiori was a freelance writer who did some work for me when I was the arts editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian a thousand years ago. She was smart, professional, versed in topics as diverse as salsa and Japanese-American history, beautiful and generous. After I left the Guardian (which remains the worst job I ever had), I hired Chiori to write a column at Parenting magazine called “One Family.” She was a joy to work with and kind enough to ignore my unwanted advances on at least one occasion.

I hadn’t talked to her in over 15 years when I got word of her death. The last time we spoke I was working as the film and music editor at Elle magazine and she was pitching me a piece. What I recall was that I was rude to her; I’m sure there was a deadline involved and I was still drinking then, and full of that selfish behavior that some drunks think passes for honesty. I had always meant to seek her out and apologize for my boorish attitude. Which is why you should be kind to people, or at least try.

As a character in an early Vonnegut novel said, “We are what we pretend to be, so we should be careful about what we pretend to be.”

God bless you, Chiori. Please accept my apology.

News of Kurt Vonnegut’s death reminded me of my encounter with the author in 1990. I had just moved to New York six month before when David Talbot, who was then working at the SF Examiner’s Sunday magazine, Image, asked if I would interview him on the occasion of the publication of his 13th novel, Hocus Pocus.

Like most children of the sixties, I came of age reading Vonnegut. His early books — Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five — were the I-can-read books for the stoned generation, and their simple prose belied a more complicated amalgam of despair and humor. Meeting him would be like meeting Joseph Heller, or Ken Kesey — absurd and wonderful, like his best novels.

As a green kid from California, I was amazed at how easy it was: I called his publisher and they gave me his home number. He answered and in a voice thick with alcohol and Pall Malls invited me over to his house the next morning. He lived in the little neighborhood of Turtle Bay (his neighbors included Katharine Hepburn and William Paley, if I’m not mistaken) and he was sitting on the stoop, nursing a Coke at nine in the morning when I arrived.

I had done my homework, reread most of his canon and some interviews, and he was in fine form for most of our talk. When I asked him what he said to the college kids he was lecturing to he replied, “I’m telling them the human experiment is over and we’re a failed species.” A beat. “Of course, you could always hire a lawyer to argue the other side.”

That kind of gag sums up his outlook: a scientist’s certainty in our unregenerate ways mixed with a cynic’s hard-won knowledge of how the world works for most people. Money and illusion may not set you free but it can keep your mind off the score through much of the game. His mother was a suicide, and think he approached his life — smoking and drinking with no sign of letting up — with a kind of grim determination at times. I heard a clip of him in a more recent interview this morning, imagining Beethoven at the end of his run saying, “Okay, can I quit now?”

My most lasting memory of that morning was how, at the end of an hour, I turned the tape over and all the life seemed to go out of him. My next question concerned the bombings he witnessed at Dresden, the central event of Slaughterhouse Five and some say of his life, and he waved it away. “It’s absurd to say one event is any more important than another,” and then he stood up. “I’ve got to quit,” he said, “I can’t talk anymore.” I later learned he had thrown a reporter from Entertainment Weekly out that same week, saying, “It doesn’t seem to me we’re on the same wavelength.” At least I didn’t get the bum’s rush. I was on his wavelength there, for a moment.

You can quit now, Mr. Vonnegut.

My definition of the optimist is the Mr. Softee man who patrols our neighborhood in his ice cream truck, playing his maddening jingle and hoping for customers at the first sign of spring — despite the snow flakes that have been appearing like radioctive waste in NY the last couple days. (My daughter said they reminded her of the days after 9.11, ashes falling from clear blue sky.) He’s out there now, combing the streets of Brooklyn, blowing on his hands as he tries to move some Sponge Bob-sicles.

Our president coined the new term for an optimist when, speaking to Juan Willliams on NPR, he called Cheney “a person reflecting a half-glass-full mentality” because of his outlook on Iraq. Even long-time Bush watchers, who count on his malapropisms the way Van Halen fans count on Eddie’s trips to rehab, were stunned. An easy lay-up and he blew it!

But listen to the link above: Was he unaware he was getting it wrong, as he did when he tried to define “dissembling” to the press corps, or was he actually, uh, dissembling as when he said, pre-invasion, “there are no war plans on my desk”? I suggest it was neither. Note the way Bush emphasizes the expression, with evident self-satisfaction. I put it to you that he is creating a new paradigm, a new language if you will, and we are all trying to decipher it.

At least I think it’s him doing it. After seeing those pictures of Cheney lurking behind the hedges, watching W at his last Rose Garden press coference, I once again wondered if this was a clear and simple case of mind control, provided that you need two minds to play that game.

Half glass full. Come on, say it with me. It has a certain je ne sais quoi, a kind of rock and roll logic, like “I am just a jeepster for your love,” or “It balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.” Dig the sounds George is laying down. And give that man a Sponge Bob-sicle.

Peggy and I spent a few days in Charleston, South Carolina this week for no particular reason: Our daughter was in Mexico, we had not been anywhere alone in over a year and neither of us had been to Charleston despite its relative proxmity to NY (an hour and change) and some personal connection on her part. Her father had lived there as a boy, and a famous ancestor of hers, Charles Pinckney, had called the city home when our nation was new.

Like a lot of colonial cities, Charleston has gone to great lengths to preserve and restore its historical houses and buildings, catering to the tourist trade. (We stayed, coincidentally, in the Charles Pinckney room at the John Rutledge Inn. Meaning if you do something as significant as represent your state at your nation’s first Constitutional Convention, someone may someday leave little mints on a pillow in a room named in your honor.)

A lot of people told us how much they loved Charleston — great food, they said and we did eat in a few good restaurants — the best of which was the Hominy Grill. It bills itself as beloved by locals and there was a lot of neighborhood trade in evidence, though our cab driver warned us, “Don’t let them stint you on the grits!” He told us of wandering the streets of Harlem, a white man in a suit, in search of grits only to have waitresses ask him to repeat the word, which he stretched in southern fashion into three syllables: “Grr-ee-yits.”

But my friend Jess Greenbaum had offered another opinion. “I hate Charleston,” she told me, with some passion. “Everything is so nice and friendly, as if slavery never happened.” The history of slavery in the south pretty much begins and ends in this city and true, there are monuments to the “flowers of Southern manhood” who died defending, well, people’s right to own other people. But most of the historical tours we took kept the issue front and center. I didn’t hear any of this “War of Northern Aggression” BS I had heard in Savannah, for instance — though I did blanch at the sight of a carriage tour guide in a confederate cap. Would the guides at Auschwitz wear swastikas, smile and say “Do we have any Bavarians here today?”

What creeped me out about Charleston was the vision of American retirement it presented: elderly couples shuffling about in golf clothes, looking at bad art, eating in good restaurants and generally acting as if they were just passing time until they died. I’m sure I’m being unfair (I usually am) but it was a bracing vision for a man in his fifties, a reminder to make a note to myself to find another way to live the rest of my days than wandering the earth as a semi-detached overfed spectator, poking at history until I become part of it myself.