The news that Arthur Lee had died last week was not exactly a shocker. The former Love front man had been cheating death for nearly 40 years it seems, and word last year that he had been diagnosed with leukemia was followed by a number of benefit concerts, including one here headlined by Robert Plant, which were meant to defray the costs of his treatment.

I wrote about Love for Salon back in 1999 and judging by the responses I got at the time, a lot of people already thought he was dead. Since the disintegration of the band in 1968, following the release of Forever Changes, Lee had haunted Sunset Boulevard, hitting up strangers for spare change and then explaining that he was off to jam with Jimi (no one believed him then, though the recordings survive — unlike Arthur and Jimi). As the prototype for the “black hippie,” Lee carried several grudges: he didn’t get enough respect from blacks or hippes, he felt, in part because he and his band were so unmellow. “They should have called themselves Hate,” Peter Albin of Big Brother and the Holding Company said at the time and for years Lee seemed determined to live up to that reputation. His last arrest, in 1996, came after he fired a gun off and kept him off the streets until 2001.

But in the mid-sixties, Love was a sensation, at least in LA. The Doors were seen as but pale imitators of their love-and-death trip music, without all the weird jazz-pop friction. A former colleague of mine wrote to say that as a kid in LA at the time, she made up a song about him to the tune of “Mr. Lee” by the Bobbettes: “One, two, three/Look at Arthur Lee/Three, four, five/Look at that man jive.” He swung when hippies were starting to twirl to endless raga like solos — though at its worst the band could sound lame and defanged (Dave Marsh said Love sounded like the soundtrack to a porn film).

My friend Stephanie Zacharek took me to see Lee and a reconstituted Love at Town Hall in 2003. Though it was billed as the Forever Changes tour, a recreation of the album ala Brian Wilson’s Smile concerts, Lee took the stage (after a long wait, and with his leg in a cast) and began with an obscure number from an earlier album, Da Capo. Steph and I looked at each other with concern, which iturned to alarm when Lee chatted incoherently with the audience. But when the band finally kicked in with the album’s opener, Alone Again Or, Tex-Mex horns colliding with classical guitar and a string quartet and the song’s oddly lovelorn lyrics, we were all transported. The string section looked like it had been pulled from the student body at Juilliard and I recall one long haired cellist, dressed in a formal black dress, rocking out as Lee wheeled about on stage swinging his cane.

“Served my time,” he sang later, his voice sending chills through the crowd, “served it well/I made my world/a cell.” You’re free now, Arthur. God rest you, scary gentleman.

I guess NBC and PBS have been reading my blog. After suggesting below that perhaps the networks were shy of saying “global warming” when talking about the hotter-than-hell week that was in the US, both newscasts came back with the sort of second look stories that aim to expand our understanding of the issue, even if they often yield little more than hot air. Friday night PBS’s News Hour featured a debate of sorts, moderated by Jeffrey Brown, with the New Yorker’s Betsy Kolbert and the Atlantic’s Gregg Easterbrook. Kolbert, who has been sounding the alarm on this issue for some time (and whose reporting on climate change garnered her a National Magazine Award) was less optimistic than Easterbrook who, echoing a commentary in this month’s Atlantic, said we can tackle global warming the same way we whipped smog in cities like Los Angeles, via law and public demand for greater fuel efficiency etc. “I certainly hope he’s right,” said Kolbert, which is about as close to rancor as the “debate” came. (A third participant, Ronald Bailey of the Libertarian magazine Reason, would surely have added a more contrarian POV had he not been muted by technical difficulties — caused no doubt by global warming.)

No credible science writer disagrees with the premise of Al Gore’s book and film, An Inconvenient Truth — that global warming is accelerating at an alarming rate and we have about ten years to fix it — and neither does any credible scientist. I doubt even the addition of Bailey would have turned the decorous News Hour studio into a food fight. But the press seems invested in making it seem like there is some controversy, or at least disagreement, here. Wednesday night, Brian Williams teased a report on the Nightly News by saying, “It’s hotter than ever — but is it global warming?” What followed were sound bites from scientists from Pew Research etc. all basically saying, yes, these sorts of weather events (scorching summers, apocalyptic hurricanes, melting glaciers) are indeed all consistent with a trend toward global warming. So why the note of doubt in the presentation? To keep viewers glued to the screen — or to appease the flat-earth types and energy lobbyists who insist on calling global warming a theory?

I suspect the latter, though I detect a note of panic in the recent outreach efforts of the oil companies. On Thursday the Wall Street Journal broke the story of the origins of an Al Gore parody that appeared on YouTube. “Al Gore’s Penguin Army” portrays the former VP as the Penguin of Batman fame, hypnotizing hapless penguins into thinking climate change is man-made and affecting everything — including Lindsey Lohan’s weight loss. Haha, that silly Gore. Turns out, though, that the parody was created by someone in the employ of the Washington DC media and lobbying firm DCI, whose clients include — Exxon Mobil! What a coinkydink! By trying to harness this most democratic of mediums (which Gore invented, remember?) and portray corporate propaganda as the free speech of the people, energy companies may be admitting that they have lost the fight, that truth has them scared and on the run and even the lame-duck Bush White House can’t save them from a popular uprising over this issue. We won’t be fooled by cheap graphics of the Jib-Jab sort into thinking this is not an issue to get all het up about. We’re not that stupid and easily distracted.

Are we?

Trapped indoors by the heat I had the opportunity to watch the evening news tonight on several networks: The NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams at 6:30 and Jim Lehrer’s News Hour on PBS. It was a busy news day by anyone’s standards — a new build-up of Israeli troops on the Lebanon border; more intense sectarian violence in Iraq; Fidel at death’s door; and the Mel Gibson meltdown (do you think any of those girls he was canoodling with at Moonshadows before the arrest were Jewish?). But it was so hot all across the US that heat was a top story on both broadcasts. And neither Williams nor PBS’s Gwen Ifill mentioned global warming.

This would not have been surprising a year ago when the Greenhouse Effect was deemed too boring for words, even as record heat waves buckled roads and killed old people from France to Phoenix. But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a number of news organizations got religion on the subject. Williams was among the most prominent newscasters who talked about understanding the hurricane in the context of global warning; the Daily Nightly blog he helped launch has given plenty of space to the phenomenon; and NBC News chief science Robert Bazell devoted several special reports to the relationship between global warming and current weather disasters. All of that attention to context, as well as the story on the ground (or in the water) in NO earned NBC several Emmys and Peabody awards.

So what happened? Even as Al Gore’s book and movie An Inconvenient Truth converts new skeptics daily in part by keeping it topical, if not tropical (the current newspaper ad campaign asks “How hot is it in your city?”) the news talks about the heat without even a hint that it may be part of a larger, scarier picture. What happened, Brian? Too hot to talk?

I suspect the silence may owe more to corporate sponsors (even News Hour is funded in part by British Petroleum; reactionary media “watchdogs” like the right-wing front the Media Research Center and its NewsBusters blog; and general public apathy. After all, how can people be expected to remain concerned about global warming when no one has yet laid eyes on Tom Cruise’s baby? The fact that little Suri will live to see the polar ice caps melt and the coasts of our nation submerged is just another fun fact to add to the mix. Talk about a silent scream.

When my wife and I put our daughter on a bus bound for camp last weekend we made an effort not to appear anxious or anything other than thrilled for her, even though she knew no one who was getting on board, and they all seemed to know each other, and hardly any of them were anything but white (Franny was born in Paraguay, and always does a quick tally of white versus non-white in any group situation). We smiled and waved, my wife being much more controlled than she was the first time we did this three years ago and she cried all the way driving back to New York…

But this was a new camp, one our daughter had researched and chosen based on a referral from a classmate. She is good at making friends and the first one to wade into any gang approximately her age (13), not sitting back sulkily as I did when I was that old. We tried to watch her through the darkened glass of the bus windows (“I think she’s talking to the girl in the seat next to her,” my wife said) and kept waving and smiling as they finally pulled out. And once they were gone the parents in the Queens parking lot burst into applause and cheers, anticipating a month’s freedom.

Freedom to miss their kids, that is. We had dinner with some friends last night (great time for restaurant reservations in NY). They are in the same boat; their son Jack is gone to a camp in Maine for a month, and we spent the majority of our time talking about them, how they were doing, what we imagined the experience was like etc. We had just received our first note from Franny at camp, written on the second day, and it was tinged with a little homesickness — and perhaps some buyer’s remorse. Yes, she had made friends but she was one of the few first-timers, I gathered, and in a PS she wrote, “I’m the only non-white person here, I swear.” (Good thing she’s not prejudiced.)

Where once NY dads sent away kids AND wife for the summer to get into mischief on their own (remember The Seven Year Itch?), now single-child-centric families experience a different kind of comedy with their kids away. My friend Paul told me that with his son gone, he had no excuse to go see a matinee of Miami Vice (I volunteered). And I’m sure my wife, curling up to watch Project Runway, longs for our daughter’s company. We need them both to remind us we’re parents and to help us be children again.

Which is more surprising: that Robert DeNiro and his partners at Tribeca films wanted to buy the New York Observer or that owner Arthur Carter got cold feet at the last minute? The Observer, the salmon-colored, slightly skewed weekly celebration of NY’s political-society-media world and its fascination with itself, has been an anomaly forever. A perpetual money-loser, the paper is still considered essential reading to a small yet powerful audience who long to see themselves caricatured on the front page. It would have been a vanity move for DeNiro & co, akin to Harvey Weinstein’s commitment to launch Tina Brown’s Talk magazine with Hearst. Though it presumably would have cost far less.

I have no insider knowledge of Carter and what did or did not go down at the eleventh hour; I certainly have no idea why a movie star would want to own a paper, unless it’s to make sure he gets the kid-glove treatment the next time he gets divorced. But I have to admit, I would have enjoyed a slight replay of the Talk fiasco if for nothing but schadenfreude. Like many writers in New York, I have my own personal ax to grind with the Observer and like to send occasional bits of bad juju its way.

In 2000, basking in the publicity that came from having been laid off from my job as a media columnist at Salon, I heard from a former Observer reporter that editor Peter Kaplan was looking for a writer to do something media related in the paper and that I should go see him. Getting into his inner sanctum proved more difficult than getting an audience with the Wizard of Oz and it was ultimately about as enlightening. Famously forgetful and more disorganized than your average college professor, Kaplan is protected by a more professional staff and has helped the careers of many NYO editors and reporters. Despite several blown appointments and at least one missed lunch date, I persevered. When I finally found my way into his lair — a veritable rag-and-bone shop of toppling piles of books and manuscripts — he told me excitedly about a new column he wanted me to write, a compliment to their weekly media column Off the Record.

I had what I thought was a great idea for the first one: a “magazine ICU,” rounding up some publications that were on their last legs. For starters I suggested Brill’s Content, George and Talk (all now defunct) and proceded with Kaplan’s blessing. The people at the publications themselves were surprisingly eager to talk, painting a rosy picture of their prospects even as they bailed water. I turned the piece in and after some back and forth with the editor (he thought I had been too nice to Talk, which was desperately trying to get its act together before Harvey pulled the plug) he agreed it would run…soon.

Time passed, things changed. My son was suddenly having serious emotional issues and I was flying to SF every other week, trying to sort him out. I remember standing outside of a clinic that Thanksgiving weekend, where a therapist had just suggested my son be hospitalized, trying to reach Kaplan on the phone and find out what the hell had happened to my column. At that point I was concerned that the magazines in question would go out of business before the column ran. What I got from Kaplan’s assistant was the runaround. I later learned that the then Off the Record reporter had screamed loudly when he learned I would be sharing his beat, and perhaps Kaplan got cold feet himself. Maybe he just didn’t like my column. But rather than tell me or even make up some convenient lie about what might be wrong, he whiffled and waffled and avoided me until I went away, sending me smarmy a thank you email before I put in for the kill fee.

What I remember thinking that day was that I wanted to get on plane, go back to NY and break his glasses while they were still on his face, though I’m sure my frustration over my son had something to do with my reaction. Such violence certainly wouldn’t have done much for my career here, such as it is. Though it might have got me caricatured in the Observer.