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April 5, 2013
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How a weirdo turned pro, and sabotaged his job

As published by Strike! magazine

On sale now at all good stockists of explosives, yours for £1.

*****

OCCUPYING THE MEDIA

By Daniel Simpson

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro…”

- Hunter S. Thompson

Strike-Sedition

Life’s too short to waste in a dead-end job. When that dawned on me this time last decade, I was working for The New York Times as a foreign correspondent, and my colleagues were enabling the invasion of Iraq. I was naive enough to be shocked by their propaganda, and too ambitious and too junior to challenge it. The only way ahead was to resign, and try to start a revolution.

The form this took was determined by my circumstances. Since I’d been hired to report on the Balkans, I was stationed in Serbia, which ignited the wars that had killed off Yugoslavia. My brief was to ask if “The Serbs” had accepted guilt. This got me ridiculed as a hypocrite: young Serbs were resisting their leaders all along, whereas I was employed by a paper that whitewashed warmongers.

I didn’t have an answer to that, except to get stoned. My editors showed minimal interest in Balkan news, so I had plenty of time to dream up other plans. I’d met a man who suggested we organise a music festival, on an island in the Danube in Belgrade. We convinced ourselves we’d start a Summer of Love, drawing crowds from the neighbouring countries Serbs attacked. We could also revive a dormant student protest movement, which helped topple a Serbian president two years earlier. We’d even lure some tourists from afar, by promoting ourselves as Ibiza crossed with Glastonbury. All told, it was “constructive ethnic cleansing”, a way of reclaiming Serbia from its past. Hell, The New York Times might even cover it.

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April 2, 2013
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On screwing the Stars and Stripes, live onstage

As published by Perfect Sound Forever

An excerpted passage from my memoir; a series of extracts is posted here.

*****

SONIC YOUTH & SERBIAN MAYHEM

By Daniel Simpson

roughguidedarkside-sonicyouthPutting on a festival was alchemy. If we hadn’t transcended our limits, it couldn’t have happened. G’s magic had simple principles at heart: [my mysterious partner had] clarified intentions at the outset, and detached himself completely from the outcome. While he hoped to see his vision fully realized, everyone was left to do as they pleased, and this free-for-all was ECHO’s fatal flaw. But it also proved a vital source of strength.

By Monday night, there wasn’t a puddle in sight. Countless feet had trudged them into sludge. The atmosphere backstage was reverential. Higher powers blessed us in the end; the heavens above were fair, and the field was full. I was dumbstruck by the vista from the stage. Rippling away in the moonlight, the crowd was pulsing like a human graphic equalizer. It roared in a wave of souls merged as one. There must have been eighty thousand, at least. The police locked thousands more outside the gates. They feared stampedes. To a fanfare of cymbals and chords, Sonic Youth took the stage.

‘Thank you for inviting us here to beautiful Belgrade,’ drawled Thurston Moore. His hair alone was a time warp to 1990, a Ride on Inspiral Carpets to happier Mondays.

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January 15, 2013
|

On standing up and selling my book onstage

As performed at Hackney Attic

A rendition of the story behind A Rough Guide to the Dark Side, live at Spark.

Spark Open-Mic

The theme of the evening’s event was “Open Heart”, as in:

Hearts are funny things. They break; they stop; they beat faster; they burn. We can give them to someone else. They allow us to live. Are you open hearted? Do you give your heart freely? Is your heart reliable? Do you have heart problems? We want stories about our most essential organ and the love that it symbolises.

I took this as a cue to relive my twisted Balkan Summer of Love… also known as the ECHO Festival.



December 11, 2012
|

Review: a “rollicking” Balkan moral crash course

As published in The Brooklyn Rail

The author has written a memoir; see here for a taste of his reflections.

*****

Pain on Both Sides

By Kenan Trebincevic

Daniel Simpson

A Rough Guide to the Dark Side 
(Zero Books, 2012)

Julia Lieblich and Esad Boskailo

Wounded I Am More Awake: Finding Meaning After Terror 
(Vanderbilt University Press, 2012)

On the 20th anniversary of the brutal Balkan war’s ethnic cleansing crusade, two fascinating memoirs out by small presses try to reconcile the past and provide a message for healing. A Rough Guide to the Dark Side by Daniel Simpson, and Wounded I Am More Awake: Finding Meaning After Terror by Julia Lieblich and Esad Boskailo, visit my still-conflicted homeland and try to make sense out of the political insanity of the former Yugoslavia.



Thirty-eight-year-old British journalist Simpson’s humorous, rollicking first-person story follows the young, principled, and ambitious New York Times foreign correspondent as he travels to the post-conflict Balkans in 2003, believing he can stop the next conflict. He tries to help Serbia recover its reputation and economic prosperity through a “Serbian Woodstock.” Simpson becomes Belgradian and learns nothing is ever simple in the Balkans. 



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November 16, 2012
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Light on darkness, from Seattle to New Zealand

As sent to my mailing list; sign up here

NEWSLETTER » A ROUGH GUIDE TO THE DARK SIDE

I spent the early part of autumn on a Greyhound, touring around the U.S. to promote my memoir. People said the trip would make a book. Others thought the first should be a film. Either way on either, it was fun.

I spoke in 18 cities in roughly 30 days, which meant I spent more time stuck on buses than elsewhere. The story I told evolved along the way. What began as a talk about “Why I Quit The New York Times To Join Balkan Gangsters” wound up as “Careers Advice I Wish I’d Got At School” (delivered to journalism students).

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November 4, 2012
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A modern Kerouac with “page-turner brilliance”

As published in Alive, a Californian magazine

The author of this profile has also just written a novel, as summarised here.

*****

Interview with Daniel Simpson

By Anita Venezia

I was more interested in Daniel Simpson the journalist, than Daniel Simpson the concert-promoting drug-dealing addict. I told him that drugs did not define him, his brilliance as a writer is what defines him.

I interviewed Daniel Simpson at Danville’s READ Booksellers, promoting his memoir, A Rough Guide to the Dark Side. Had I not sat down with the author and heard his story first-hand, I may have imagined his memoir was fantasy. It was not.

As an ex-New York Times foreign correspondent, he is shrewdly well-seasoned and knows how to hit a nerve. The memoir is a journey to the dark side of reporting – and tweaking stories to fit NYT paradigms of Iraq war-time sensationalism, and smorgasbords of drugs.

The book’s theme is an acutely biting and critical indictment of modern media practices, and how Simpson got mixed up with Serbian underworld thugs. His adroit use of language, peppered with politics, moves through a mazelike exposé of journalistic practices that he deems to be, not only untrue at times, but often having objectives to purposely mislead. He states, in keeping with media convention, some facts are more factual than others, contending that the NYT is a blatant propaganda megaphone.

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