Where's Kimmie's Missile?

Today came news that North Korea's insatiably cukoo regime might be in the final stages of planning a test of a long-range missile that could reach the U.S.--assuming, that is, that our nation's always-reliable, top-of-the-line missle defense system doesn't blow it out of the air first. That's alarming enough, and yet, given the vagaries of Kim Jong-Il, not too surprising either.

What's more interesting here is not so much that North Korea's leader is more batshit than Britney on a bad day, but what North Korea's missile program says about the posturing that constitutes the nation's--and by extension, Kim's--notion of its power. In reality, it appears that North Korea, despite its ambitions, is playing with a very weak hand to a table of international players who long ago called its bluff. It's clear in almost all the evidence gathered so far about the North Korean program that it lacks so much in technology and scale as to pose nary a threat to anyone--at least not anyone in the U.S. For Japan and China the threat is considerably greater, of course; even a missle made of toothpicks and powered by an onboard coal furnace could get that far in the hands of a few adequately-trained physicists. This site paints a decent picture of how ramshackle the North Korean missile project is, though the dossier is admittedly a bit dated.

Whatever its technical flaws, though, North Korea's missile is an interesting story. Which begs the question: Why didn't the New York Times article tell us where, exactly, the missile test site is? All we get is that it's "a site in North Korea's remote east coast." Given the geopolitical significance of the test site, I think most readers would want to know as much as possible about this place--where it is, what it looks like, who's there, how shipments are made. I may be mistaken, but I think most readers favor concrete details on the geographical origins of a missile threat over abstractions like "North Korea's remote east coast," a hackneyed bit of journalese that does as much to place the site and describe it as saying New York City is somewhere in the densely-populated northeast.

I did some looking around and I think I've come up with a satellite image from Google maps of the launchpad in question (tell me if this is the wrong one). The shadow of a launch tower is clearly visible pointing north. I can't quite figure out what the source of the shadow that criss-crosses the tower is. It may be merely a depression in the earth. If anyone has any more details, please comment.

A Theory of Edge

When people—media nerds like me especially—want to describe what they like about a publication, be it a magazine, newspaper, website or blog, one adjective likely to appear among the vague musings is “edgy” or a variant thereon: “edge,” “edginess,” “edgier” and so on. If it has “edge,” it’s good. If not, not so much. Rarely, though, is it clear exactly what edge means, or what articles or feats of editorial direction might support an argument for a publication’s edginess. But while it might often be a way of avoiding the oh-so-bland pronouncement that “this magazine’s good,” edge does mean something more than mere endorsement. Hence this attempt at what I’m pretentiously calling a “theory of edge.”

Taking a cue from B-minus high school essays, I’ll start with definitions. The OED defines as “edgy” anything “that challenges received ideas or prevailing aesthetic sensibilities; at the forefront of a trend.” The American Heritage Dictionary, meanwhile, yields these meanings: “Having a sharp or biting edge: an edgy wit” and “Daring, provocative, or trend-setting: an exhibition of edgy photographs; an edgy menu.” While I’m not sure I’d ever call a menu “edgy,” this sums up, on the surface, what the term means. It’s trend-setting, provocative, sharp; it challenges the status quo.

Etymologically, “edge” derives from the expression “cutting edge,” a fact to which the OED’s definition alludes. The word authority traces the expression—sans “cutting”—to a New York Times Book Review piece by Peter Schjeldahl from 1976 about modern art: “The [essays about] Warhol … and Grosman …, like the edgier Paik and Mekas (which, I must allow, I might like better if I felt more warmly toward the art of their subjects), are in Tomkins's standard genre.” “Edgy” was then in use mainly as a synonym for “on edge,” and it remained that way until about the early 1990s, when the “provocative” usage took over.

So there we have it: the definition and history of edge. Satisfied? I’m not. Edge is a willingness to take swings at the establishment and say something new. More crucially, though, edge is exposing the dirty underside of an institution, person, place or thing generally agreed to be taintless. Revealing a posh suburb as a prostitution-addled gangland, for example, would be edgy, as would discovering that the man who dresses up as Barney for the eponymous kids’ show dreams of having sex with chimps in a space capsule as Tinkerbell looks on and sings “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

All of this may fit the foregoing definitions of edge as “provocative” and “trend-setting,” but in this latter sense we have something much less vague. Under this definition, it’s easy to see why some mags that lay claim to edginess—I’m thinking design-heavy hipster rags like Paper and SOMA, for example—aren’t edgy. Rather than undermining an established zeitgeist, they’re merely singing hymns to the new status quo, no matter how edgy they might like to think they are. All we see here are fashion spreads mixed with articles on the bands- and movies- and people-of-the-moment. It’s news, but it lacks the against-the-grain-ness that’s the hallmark of edge. There’s a place for magazines like these (obviously, if they can sell copies, there’s a place for them), but they’re far from doing anything surprising or lasting largely because their editorial direction lacks any sense of edge. Other magazines, websites, TV shows and blogs, on the other hand, understand what edge is and how to get it. Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The New York Post, Gawker: they all, to varying degrees, exploit edge for profit. The Walrus—the Canadian Harper’s, essentially—recently published an article on an old man living a humdrum life in France who, it turns out, was responsible for operating the guillotine in Algeria during the colonial days and beheaded about 200 men. That’s edge. It’s not simply exposé—it’s not necessarily scandalous—but it reveals something unexpected.

Of course, edge isn’t the universal standard of editorial success. Many edge-less articles rightly seek to inform or explain by divulging new information and aligning disparate facts. Nor is edge a necessary component of every media-industry enterprise. In fact, a lot of the best journalism out there just isn’t edgy. But the masses like edge. The National Enquirer is edgy, even if its stories are about as credible as the Onion’s.

Edge sells, which is something PR flacks realized long ago. Press releases abound with claims of edginess. A release for the latest issue of Cowboys & Indians says the magazine “contains a dozen edgy and provocative stories of McGuane's New West.” In another recent example, “Visual Entertainment releases the wickedly funny, twisted, and edgy film, Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic on DVD June 6, 2006.” The list goes on. Even Matt Drudge was once labeled “edgy” (oh, but you’re still so edgy, Mattie) when he signed a deal with AOL in 1997. AOL Networks President and CEO Bob Pittman was quoted saying, “Matt Drudge and AOL share the same ingredients—instant, edgy information—that enable them to be among the very few standouts in cyberspace.”

Nowadays, given its overuse, edge is a term probably best left to the PR department. It’s useful in some contexts, but ultimately its meanings are too multifarious for it to be of much use. At least now we know something more about what it does mean. Well, sort of. Hey, it’s just a theory.