Three days as the buffalo flies

Please, delve into your hearts and muster what little strength is left to forgive me for the brief yet taxing sojourn. I was in woods in New Hampshire, land of snowflakes and pine trees. Please refer to The Little House in the Big Woods for further description of the holidays, for it was rather similar. We had buffalo for supper and in the morning flapjacks with syrup from the local maples. Along with many cookies and delectable sauces and tartlets. On such family occasions the kitchen is humming approximately 16 hours a day and nothing, not even the applesauce for the latkes or the stock for the soup or the peppermint fudge comes from box or jar. The sunsets are pink and prolonged and at night the adventurous wander with flashlight or candle into the meadows for astronomical observation.

Thus it is weary I return, after many hours by car and rail, southward as the snow melted and the strip malls suddenly blossomed as copious as the pine bowers of the land I left behind me. The days are wan and fleeting and darkness descends swiftly. The apartment lies deserted by its inhabitants, those who fled toward kinder vistas of hibiscus and iguana. A crumpled napkin is discarded on the floor in their hurry. The last hours of the year are upon us, and I fear its leaden days suck the very life out of these, the strong, our comrades. It is time to call Yummy Taco, and beckon them hither.

In my thankless quest for enlightenment, I was reading GQ at the office today, and was rather dismayed to see an article on how the popularity of chick lit in America reflected the sad state of the minds of American women.

Besides snottily retorting that most media in America reflects the sad state of the minds of American men (particularly the preceding article in GQ about how to approach the topic of anal sex with your girlfriend) I half wished that the article was in Cosmo instead, where maybe some women would actually read it. I don't have a problem with someone preferring Confessions of a Shopaholic over... ??? Portnoy's Complaint?

That's where the problem is. It's not chick lit. It's the absence of another example with which to define chick lit against, besides boy books. Maybe I just don't know enough, and if I read Nell Freudenbuger I'll feel better about the world.

I've read so many fucking books about boys coming of age, exploring their sexuality, trotting off into the world on some adventure or another, and for girls it's like The Bell Jar, or Anne Frank, choose one. And don't give me any Anne of Green Gables shit because I hated that book.

I've never actually read Bridget Jones's Diary, or the Nanny Diaries, or The Devil Wears Prada. Two years ago The Economist ran an article called "The Bridget Jones Economy" that frightened the shit out of me because it was the first time I saw my future as a well-defined target market. It seems if you combine dating stories, yoga, a love/hate relationship with chocolate, a gay best friend, a dildo, a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes and psychotherapy you basically have a winning piece of media. Bonus points if it is set in Manhattan and one of the protaganists works in the Conde Nast building.

And GQ sucks but they're not the first people to point out how pathetic that is.

Snobercrombie & Bitch + Slavoj Zizek = Theoretically Inflected White People

So much has been made of the fact that Slavoj Zizek wrote "theoretically inflected catalog copy" for the "Back to School 2003" issue of the Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly.
I would cite where I first saw this, but I haven't gotten permission to link to that particular jumble of nonsensical boyish quips (you know who you are, consider yourself cited) so I'll go straight to the NY Times article.

But before you start complaining that "theory is finished", (and who the fuck cares anyway?) look at this.:

"The creative freedom the staff is afforded is startling. Since I began work on the Quarterly, I've worked on features on such atypically "Abercrombiesque" celebrities as Clive Barker, Space Ghost, Crocodile Huntress Terri Irwin, the Dandy Warhols, Chuck Palahniuk, Art Spiegelman, Princess Superstar, Frank Miller, Will Eisner, MC Paul Barman and Bettie Page. (I've also done features on cult movies like Cemetery Man and Velvet Goldmine and books like The Story of O, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Disinformation's own You Are Being Lied To.) Three Pulitzer Prize-winners have been profiled in our last two issues (Spiegelman, Michael Cunningham and Michael Chabon). Bleeding-edge scholars Slavoj Zizek and Jodi Dean have put in appearances, as well as writers like Bret Easton Ellis, Caleb Carr, Tom Perrotta, Camille Paglia, Bruce Jay Friedman, J.T. Leroy and Rick Moody. If we can expose just one member of the baseball-caps-and-lacrosse-sticks set (judging from the warmth of the reception the Quarterly has received from this quarter, they may be a more open-minded bunch than anyone's giving them credit for) to any of these individuals, well, 'tis a consummation to be devoutly wished."

This article is from over two years ago, so Zizek's 2003 appearance may not have even been his first. We all have skeletons in our closet, and such close association to Bret Easton Ellis would be an honor for us all.

Because Ridley Scott Started With Feminine Hygiene Commercials

"This whole house of cards is going to come down, and somebody is going to be posting their résumé on monster.com when the bill comes for that $3 million video shoot with Naomi Campbell and the catamarans. You know, the video you watch in a little 2-by-2 pop-up screen on your computer while you IM your friends with jobs."

The Slate Music Club's Year in Music has been keeping me company at work since Monday, and when I read this quote I cringed. Then my computer froze from all the fucking pop up screens.

The recently released DVD compilations of Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham provide almost a funerary eulogy to the genre of the music video. Imagine the ruckus it would cause to see Sofia Coppola performing gymnastics on MTV these days. But since I work in advertising, I watch a lot of directors' reels, and since most directors who do ads also do music videos I've gotten to see some ridiculously good work that outside of the Internet one could only see as the graphic animation in a Nike ad. I've come to the conclusion that aside from a few feather-wearing botox vials, Nike is actually single-handedly supporting video art in America.

My Favorites:

Hammer and Tongs The best part about these people is they are going to direct the movie version of The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Yet another childhood classic.

Shynola did the art for Kid A and are experts at devising small hopping Princess Mononoke-esque animals of various sorts.

MK12 Hot Hot Heat animated video.

Lobo Brasileiros! Did videos for Gabriel o Pensador and Cidade Negra.

Notorious produced Capturing the Friedmans. I'm annoyed because the video I liked best from this production company doesn't seem to be online. But look anyway.

Nakd Look at Nike ad. Then look at all the other cool shit.

AV Club It seems you can only access their work through The Directors Bureau, which is the Coppola owned advertising company that has quite a few other notable directors on it's roster. But AV Club did videos for The Strokes and Pete Yorn and more.

I'm Very Sleepy

I joined every 14 year-old boy in Park Slope to watch The Return of the King at the stroke of midnight on the 17th. Embarassingly enough it was my second movie that day, after Master and Commander no less, and 11:45 found me sitting in front of a blank television doubting my ability to make it through the night. "It will be sold out," I thought, but it wasn't, so I had no choice.

I love the movie theater across the street from my house. The audience clapped when the movie started, clapped whenever the good guys won anything, clapped when the movie ended, jeered when they found out it would end three more times before the actual ending and then clapped during the credits. The no smoking/be quiet animation is the best I've ever seen anywhere, a gregorian chant of "Thou shall not smoketh" interspersed with gospel improvisation all in a ye olde english font.

The movie was definitely worth getting only four hours of sleep for. Within the first half hour of I was already weeping just out of the beauty of it. I think I cried at least six times in all during the movie, most of the time not because anything sad had happened, but just because visually it was so breathtaking. I cried a couple of times in Lost in Translation for the same reasons (when Charlotte goes to Kyoto and when Bill Murray was golfing) but this was ridiculous. Every time there were horses sweeping down a hill (and that's a lot) or the camera would linger on a little butterfly or (this is embarassing) someone started to sing I would choke up. Oh to make such pretty things.

"Snowball salesman Gilberto Triplett shows off $1 wares in Times Square Monday.
'I've always wanted a snowball,' said English tourist and happy buyer Christine Rowlatt. "

Read more.

I am ready

My rise to the top as a drug kingpin began, as all good things do, through a literary and filmic exploration. I believe I have now completed nearly all the prequisites. From two books I read in the past couple weeks, combined with a reservoir of easily-accessible pop culture references, I developed a literary curriculum that spans the three teirs you will need to familiarize yourself with before organizing your vertical monopoly:

Colombia: Where it all begins.
Killing Pablo, by Mark Bowden: Let's start at the roots of production. Pablo Escobar has much to teach us on tactics of intimidation, coercion, and establishing an illegal business that can make even you a billionaire. It took millions of dollars, the best in technology and any number of of scary CIA Latin American death squads to kill a fat stoner with an uncomfortable sexual fetish for teenage girls and very strict regulations on the bathroom furnishings in even the most remote fincas. There is hope for all of us.

[Supplemental Materials: Soldier of Fortune Magazine, Traffic (the BBC one), Miami Vice]

The Bronx: A course in middle management.
Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc: Most of my reaction to this book was comprised of the following thought process: "I hope she doesn't get pregnant, I hope she doesn't get pregnant, please use a condom you're only 12 -- Fuck." It's stressful. But there's a really detailed chapter on running a heroin business in the inner city that will give you all the knowledge you may need, and also a lot of what not to do since they all get caught.

[Supplemental Materials: Don Diva Magazine, Scarface, Blow (...me. What a shitty movie.)]

The Nostrils of the Wealthy: Where the magic meets the mucus.
Three words: Bret. Easton. Ellis.

Alexandre and Alexandra?

"Ms. Brooks, née Cutter, was born in Palm Beach (her parents were introduced by legendary WASP designer Lilly Pulitzer, whose splashy prints she credits as a major style inspiration) and raised in Bronxville. She attended Horace Mann, Deerfield and then Brown, where she roomed with designer Carolina Herrera’s daughter Patricia, double-majoring in art history and the visual arts. Young Amanda was ostracized by the collegiate upper-crust after a freshman fling with fellow undergrad Alexandre von Furstenberg; he was dating future ex-wife Alexandra Miller at the time. Ms. Brooks refused to comment on l’affaire Alexandra to The Observer, but last year told W magazine (where her sister Kimberly is West Coast editor): "It’s taken me 10 years to be able to stand in the same room with those girls.""

Those catty bitches. Why don't you ever hear about this sort of social happening at say... Harvard?

I spent quite a while today with the New York Observer's "Power Punks of New York: 50 Baby Bigshots 35 and Under" (arrived at via Gawker.)

Normally this sort of article fills me with venemous hatred, but this particular list was well done. And by that I mean that there are people on it that had insular childhoods in middle class middle America who read A Wrinkle in Time many many times. The above quote is only indicative of about 20% of the people listed.

May they find what they seek

People have made their way here from Google with the following searches:

mel lisboa photos
Pictures of ahmet zappa selma blair
tronic post production
bret easton ellis articles
matthew barney underwear ads

In a weird way this kind of summarizes everything.

Non-Believer. Atheist in fact.

I worked all weekend and felt dull, so I went with a friend to see The Believer's "Nighttime Event" thinking that although it wouldn't be a Gatsby cocktail at least I could sit uncomfortably amongst the litterati.

I'm not sure if I was in a bit of a hostile state because the girls behind me kept talking about summer in the Hamptons or because I hadn't eaten dinner, but something was stretched a little thin inside. I haven't been wholly convinced by the magazine -- I wasn't sure in what way exactly until tonight's baby-faced audience persuaded me that I am resentful of any body of writing heralded as the trumpet call of an invading "new generation of writers." One man behind me, noting the youthful appearance of the audience, remarked with glee and hopefulness how wonderful it was to see so many eager children at a literary event. Perhaps it assuaged his fear that the youth today are spending all their book-consuming hours on the Internet. I don't have anything to say about that.

It was a poignant evening. The first guest was music journalist Toure interviewing Q-Tip. I like Toure a lot (once again, his name has an accent, I don't know what to do about it). I liked that he would write articles in the NY Times on hip hop, and I was led blindly when he claimed Cody Chestnut was the dawn of a new musical era. Tonight he was much more pessimistic. I've been meaning to write about this for a while, and I may have to digress quite a bit, but it's about how very sad it is that hip hop died. Three death knells rang loudly in the past month:

First James Murdoch was named CEO of BSkyB in London. Since his poppy is Rupert, and Rupert owns BSkyB, there were cries of foul play and nepotism that dissipated in the wind like the whisper of dwarves in a clover patch. Why does this matter? As you may have noticed in some newspaper articles, James Murdoch's previous engagement was trying to start a hip-hop label. Does anybody remember what label? That's right, Rawkus Records. It just feels symbolic -- a wealthy white man's rebellion to start an independent label is abandoned, he accepts his post at his father's side, his wand poised to consolidate.

Second, Jay-Z retires. When the only good rapper in the game says he's bored because there's no one to battle with you can only hang your head in shame.

Third, and back to this evening, Q-Tip said something that really almost made me cry. He said the spirit of hip hop was that it was pertinent and that, as a co-opted genre, it's simply not pertinent anymore. In high school, where I was, that was exactly what it was, hip hop was the music that said something relevant. And last year, when I quit my radio show, it was because it just didn't feel relevant anymore. I thought that it was just from spending four years in the rather antithetical environment of an Ivy League bastion of whiteness. I started, with a great deal of self-loathing, to like indy rock. I felt like a sell out, but if Q-Tip says it, if Jay-Z says it, I believe it. And it isn't like there still isn't really good hip hop being made, it's just that the context has changed. And my friends making hip hop know they shouldn't stop.

Q-Tip finished up and a literary panel came on. Heidi Julavits, Jennifer Egan, Susan Choi, Stephen Elliot. They sucked.

But then, but then, Milton Glaser: graphic designer, semiotician, genius. He made everything right again. I love him.

In unpeeling the onion of voyeurism provided to us by the internet, I recently found out that you can track how many hits you get and where they are coming from (this was probably obvious to everyone but me, famed as I am for my technical stupidity.) Yesterday the most interesting referrer was a google search for "vending contact solution."

First snow of the year in New York... Judging from the number of e-mails I have gotten regarding this topic, the general public opinion seems to be that if you're from MN this is the holiest of holy days.

They were shooting the Alfie remake outside my building today. Jude Law was sitting on half a motorcycle attached to a truck with the camera on it. It drove down the street over and over followed by a bevy of fake taxi cabs. Jude looked very small and dapper with ample hair gel. As a rule, I hate remakes. Having now seen one shot of Alfie II I can say quite confidently that they've used too much bleach on golden boy's tresses.

Also, in a fit of generosity and goodwill, they are handing out bags of Terra chips at 59th and Lex. Go now!

Demand Equality

"They will come together not as a master-slave relationship, with the human telling the robot what to do," said computer science professor Manuela Veloso. "The human and robot will be part of the same task."
Pentagon Explores Using Segways in Battle


When I first read the headline I mistakenly pictured soldiers riding around the Iraqi desert on Segways and was instantly transported to Fahrenheit 451, where the book burners fly around with little rockets attached to their arms and where Julie Christie has a fabulous kilt.



John Rhys-Davies said in The Lord of The Rings special features disc that Julie Christie was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. Not that I spent an entire weekend watching Lord of the Rings special features or anything.

The bleak and unforgiving food chain, as illustrated by Marcel Dzama:

It's a battle out there.

I go to and fro, and occasionally suffer from bouts of self-consciousness re: robotic tronic. Abandonment, negligence, reckless emoting, I plead guilty on all counts. Going home over the weekend I had to face the reality of a runaway cat. My mom thinks Jaws may have been eaten by an owl. Nature is both bloody and cruel.

Ladies and gentlemen: my life's work, in the NY Times.
Look. So depressing.

"Buying Your Way Into Brown = Out, Unfamiliarity With Household Appliances = In"
Fuck.

Another Serendipitous Occasion

Last week on Friendster, out of simple nostalgia, I put Opus the penguin, Bill the cat and Steve Dallas, attorney at law in the "Who I want to meet" section. I never expected Berkeley Breathed to respond. I figured he was probably liberating chinchillas with PETA. But Opus has indeed returned. Not Bloom County, just Opus, but I can still cross my fingers. I think I read the books about 10 times. Eventually I moved on to young adult fiction (a genre elaborated strictly for the enjoyment of the last three girls in 8th grade to need a bra), but it still comes up in my head all the time. I actually just quoted it in an e-mail last night. Solon, the term "pinko punk" is not my own.

It's like when Richard Dreyfuss started carving Devil's Tower out of his mashed potatoes.

Dead squirrels and homicidal elephants have played prominent roles in some of my playwriting. At work today, one of the designers was shuffling through some photos of pieces by Maurizio Cattelan. I was floored.

Not Afraid of Love

Bidibidobidiboo (it is hard to tell in this image, but the squirrel has commited suicide)

Can't get a job?

Yes. That sucks. I can't either. But now, via Mike-D, we can see how the pros do it.

"Let me introduce myself... My full name is Svetlana A. Goncharova, of course, it sounds rather pompous for a girl of my age, so my friends call me Sveta. I was born on the 22-nd of February, 1980 in Kiev, Ukraine..."

Let Sveta teach you. Let Sveta teach us all.

I love when my friends are famous

Elana once told me she was going to create an 'independent media empire'. Now her article is mentioned on gawker.com, part of what the NY Times recently termed a 'web media empire.' Read Elana's article on cool people here where subjects such as intergenerational mingling and inspirational crayon centers are tackled with glee. Elana's empire vs. Nick Denton's is like Hannibal vs. Scipio. Place your bets. And Elana, if I really did fuck Anna Wintour, would it still be ironic if I wore the t-shirt?

I know I talk about Nathalie all the time, but now I have been legitimized by The Washington Post's Jennifer Howard. I'm not sure when Nathalie got the name Chica, I think it might be a misinterpretation of Chicha but The Washington Post! That means if Katherine Graham weren't dead she might read Nathalie's blog!!

"What, you've never heard of Chica, Terry and Choire? Let me introduce you, in order, to the up-and-coming blogger behind Cup of Chicha (www.nchicha.com/cupofchicha/); Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout, who moonlights as a blogger with his site About Last Night (www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/); and ur-New York media blog Gawker.com and its editor, Choire Sicha, who maintains his own blog at www.choiresicha.com. I only know this because I've been reading these sites long enough to get a feel for the usual suspects. Otherwise I'd have no clue either. And I'm not sure why I should want to."

Because Ms. Howard, they are clever and funny, rather than an annoying player hater like yourself. Read more here.

Humbled, Dismayed

"Nicky Hilton Defends Sister Paris In Haiku

by Nicky Hilton

Um Like Whatever,
People are just like haters-
Totally jealous."

From D-Nasty's blog, whose writing is the best thing that's happened this November. Can anyone tell me this person's real name? Obviously not Moses Herzog. Read everything, but especially read "Eros and Thanatos in L'affair Hilton," by Bergmann Endresson, "Noted Film Critic, Swede." I sort of felt like quitting this game after I read it. Or at least obliterating all first-person references.

Agora meu nome e Ze Pequeno, porra!*

I met this Brazilian photographer who goes by the singular name of Cale at a party a couple of weeks ago. I finally got around to looking at his web site, and his photos of Cidade de Deus (as well as his portraits of soap opera stars) are well done. He also has a little summary of MV Bill's spat with the directors of City of God, one that Katia Lund said was more motivated by Bill being a little cranky that he wasn't cast in the role of Ze Pequeno. It really doesn't matter though because it seems like his publicity brought attention to the real issue at hand, which is that even though the film was so successful worldwide Cidade de Deus is still lacking the infrastructure (plumbing, electricity, clean water) that even a favela like Rocinha has more of. Not to mention that a part of the development was built on a swamp and the foundation is slowly sinking. And that's not even bringing the Comando Vermelho into the picture.
To read more and look at photos of Mel Lisboa go here. There's a nice photo of Bill (who still has my copy of Ready To Die) with Fernanda Abreu who unfortunately isn't wearing the outfit of buckles she had on at her concert.

*I don't know how to type accent marks on Blogger. Apologies to proofreaders.

I've sunk too deeply into the velvet furniture.

I've read The Onion compilation and almost every magazine at the post-production facility. I'm a quarter of the way into David Hockney's "The Way I See It" and I can't concentrate anymore. There are pool and fooseball tables, but no-one to play with. There is a strange robotic coffee machine that's a sleek variation on the old hot chocolate vending machines from the days when I went to ice skating competitions. But even the novelty of pressing a button and witnessing computerized coffee can't last forever.

The world of advertising post-production is one of office waterfalls and overflowing bowls of candy. The i-mac I am using rests on a desk of warm red wood. My chair seems to be made out of a bewildering arrangement of rattan, leather and bamboo. There are q-tips, contact solution and hair spray in the bathroom, along with the any brand of tampon you might possibly wish for. Menus are suddenly placed in front of me with the prices erased, as eager assistants hover around to take my order on notepads. The notes are then handed off to other assistants, whose designated task is to call restaurants. Last night I was suddenly confronted with a large platter of sashimi and quality Dutch beer, bathed in the blue light of monitors. I was handed chopsticks and a fine linen napkin. "Eat," someone whispered soothingly from the sponge-painted walls. The computer that we did the color correct on was like the motherboard of the starship enterprise. Only New York magazine's article on gay couples with children has given me hope, followed by an emotional plummet as I read an article on The Strokes in Rolling Stone. I am considering defecating on the plush oriental rugs, just to assure myself that I am still human. The small statue of a cow resting next to me, its paint strategically weathered and cracked, silently mouths the word "No."

On Martin Amis and Yellow Dog...

"This is millennialism in high ironical style, something that the grave Amis of Einstein’s Monsters might have hated—and it seems to me a symptom of the gated imperialism of the British literary world. The white guys are for high irony—haughty, diagnostic, dismissive, politically indifferent—while the heartfelt stuff is presumed the province of immigrants and minorities. Thus, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is hailed as an emotive epic of immigration and assimilation, despite the stylistic, schematic and substantive debt it owes Amis. Meanwhile, D.B.C. Pierre’s Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little receives praise not for being the violent, ballsy scream of a book it is, but instead as insightful, heady satire, which it isn’t.

Amis once said that his Britain was living through something of an anti-climax: that Britons had their revolution and then they got on with it. Amis, however, has stuck with his eschatology. He is a millennialist who knows the world is ending in the way that only the once-ascoted, rather princely son of a booze-swilling cynic can know the world is ending (that is, with a snarky laugh). With Yellow Dog, his style—gluttonous, didactic—is going out like imperialism. He’s not done, just repeating himself, and rather indecently."

My friend Dave was fated to share two out of three names with David Foster Wallace and two out of two names with baseball player/autobiographer David Wells. He has three names, one hyphen. I leave the rest to your own ingenuity.

Dave made it his task in recent months to read the complete works of Martin Amis. For those of us who have been simultaneously awed and disaffected by Amis, Dave has now compiled a public analysis of this very personal undertaking via the popular medium of a College Hill Independent book review.

For further exposure to excellent descriptives like "once-ascoted" go here.

This is the birthday song; it is not very long.

I've been so shitty on the upkeep around here. I had to work long hours last week and this weekend on a commercial, casting child actors and discussing logistics with pot-bellied pig trainers who fax me pictures of small piglets wearing dresses, lifting one leg in the air or carrying batons in their mouths. ("She's even been on Letterman!") Both the child actors and the piggies elicit a similar response of adoration/guilt for exploiting the helpless. Parents of child actors and piggie trainers are suspiciously similar in behavior. Nellie and Hammy (those are the pigs) will get stubborn if they work more than eight hours. I'm worried most of the children at the audition were actually fat-cheeked robots like Haley Joel Osmond in A.I. which I'm starting to think was really a much better movie than I originally thought, given its value as an expose into the murky underworld of child actor robotics. Probably spelled wrong. Harry Joel Oswald? I get confused with Haley Mills and the Osmonds and Lee Harvey Oswald. I prefer not to discuss it. It's a wicked world.

Also it seems like everybody's birthdays are all at once. So: Martin, Elana and Louis: I got good and drunky at your parties with their cupcakes and sleeping pills and high-heel hazardous balconies. I weep profusely with love for you all. Ted and Nathalie: I'd like to teach the world to sing with you. Rebecca: We're not having a "quiet dinner with close friends."

��The final stand-off in Matrix #3 was suspiciously similar to Ursula the Sea Witch's last writhing confrontation with the Little Mermaid. I think I draw a great deal of my creative inspiration from that film (as was pointed out to me upon the completion of my senior writing thingy-do at Brown.) Why shouldn't the Wachowski brothers? You don't think "Part of That World" didn't influence the sentiment of longing felt by many in Zion?

We're hysterical, Freud says bring on the vibrators

I'm going to complain now, at great length (sorry) and supported through ample quotation, about an annoying tendency in this week's New Yorker.

It first manifests itself in an article by Virginia Heffernan about Tina Fey. The first woman to hold the position of head writer at Saturday night live is first profiled as a critical loner, her humor originating from the observatory powers of the outsider:

"Her [Fey's] sense of humor, however, didn’t make her cool. Instead, she was a straight-A student who packed her schedule with extracurricular activities, including the newspaper and choir. She has a soft but precise singing voice."

And here:
"“She’s pretty monastic at times,” Amy Poehler told me. “She’s not the first girl to belly-flop into the pool at the pool party. She watches everybody else’s flops and then writes a play about it.”"

Then we see Fey as a ball-busting hardliner, as in this quote:
"Nearly all Fey’s colleagues mentioned her ability to be mean and disarming at the same time. I heard her humor variously described as “hard-edged,” “vicious,” and “cruel.”"

And then (oh thank god we thought she was a cold-hearted bitch) we have this:
"While I was sitting with Fey one afternoon in a café on Broadway, she admitted that she chronically prepares for the worst, in part by keeping zingers close at hand. But it’s excessive, she realized: “No one’s really coming at you.” She had been reflecting on current events, and I expected to hear her customary tartness, but her voice faltered, and tears slipped down her cheeks..."

Later on in the same issue, in the story on the Wall Street Journal by Ken Auletta, we are presented with a similar female-in-position-of-power with Karen Elliot House, publisher of the WSJ.

Once again we have someone who was an outsider:
“I was fortunate—though I didn’t think so at the time—to have a father who taught us to go alone because he wouldn’t let us ‘go along.’”

And then, wow surprise, she's tough cookie also, as shown here:
"“She organized her territory and her personnel and got things done, in my mind more effectively and more forcefully than her predecessors,” Phillips said, adding that, under House, the Journal in Asia and Europe became profitable. At the same time, he acknowledged that she could be “brusque”..."

Or here:
"“People tend to describe me as ‘tough,’” House told me. “I don’t think I’m tough. I think I’m demanding.”"

But oh wait, no... is she crying?:
"Then there was the moment when Karen Elliott House cried. At dinner, House spoke, as she had at Boston University, about the importance of independence, of reporters avoiding the press pack. Then she talked about her pride in the newspaper, and her voice broke and tears filled her eyes. “We all looked at her and were befuddled, and silently pleaded, ‘Don’t cry, girl!’” one female editor recalled. Others remembered that she had cried during the newsroom announcement last spring that the Journal had won a Pulitzer. It’s a meaningless tic, Paul Steiger insists. “It’s like she scratched her ear,” he says. “She doesn’t lose focus.” (House cried on nine occasions during our two interviews. Once, she was describing Steiger, and when I asked why she was crying she struggled to regain her composure and said, “Partly it’s because Steiger is a nice guy.” Then she choked up again.)"

As someone who tends to shed tears in times of stress, this makes me a little annoyed, just because both articles follow the exact same narrative trajectory with regard to the female in question: Outsider, Intimidator, and then, as demonstrated by weeping, Human. The crying becomes both Fey's and House's redeeming quality. Now we've all seen someone like Bill Clinton get weepy on us, but for him everybody chuckles, "Oh Bill, he's such a ham." With Fey and House, the mention of their crying forms a turning point in the whole article, ("And then there was the moment when Karen Elliot House cried"). Heffernan and Auletta don't downplay the womens' myriad accomplishments or their intelligence, but in both of these there is an underlying insinuation of I-told-you-so that's rather maddening, like the goal of the article, twice in one issue, was to find some point of weakness and feast vampirically upon it. As if, in finding evidence of a breaking point, the authors reassure us that everything is in order after all. No need to worry.

As Per Request...

It's the Dave Ramsey shout ouuuuut!!

Really?

I read, from a verifiable source, (by "verifiable" I mean an ad for Dunhill Watches in the November issue of British G.Q.) that James Joyce would always carry a pair of lady's bloomers with him, which he "waved in the air to demonstrate approval."

Approval of what exactly remains unclear. A hasty Internet search has turned up nothing. In my head I imagine Joyce in a number of situations, being served a delectable dinner of potatoes or perhaps enjoying a gorgeous sunset or a quality work of cinema, waving his lady's bloomers in approval.

The ad uses it as a measure of eccentricity, as in "You know you're eccentric when..." (this is another one) "... You change your name to Captain Beany, claim to come from the Planet Beanus, and run for Parliament in 2001 wearing a Lycra superhero outfit" This attributed to "Aspiring parliamentarian, Barry Bean."

How about: You know you're eccentric when you spend an entire workday afternoon perusing British GQ and giggling at the titty photos of women playing with stuffed animals.

Pen Pals!!! Oh boy!!!

I found a copy of Don Diva magazine at my work. Intrigued by the cover photo of a woman manufacturing crack, I then read a really good article called "Kings of Crack: Inside a Detroit Empire." Other good articles: "Men Cheat: Deal With It" (this one had a really awesome photo of a woman scorned holding a butcher knife), and "Five Essential Things to Know About a Criminal Case" (including a call to write your congressmen about supporting the Second Chance of Ex-Offenders Act, which I actually plan on doing). Then, I went to their web site, dondivamag.com, and they have at least 20 web pages of profiles of incarcerated people that want pen pals. It's a little nebulous because you don't know whether you would be writing someone who is in for murder or just someone unlucky who is locked up on a bullshit Rockefeller drug law. But still.

We Can Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge Anytime You Want Sweetheart

Once Adam and I got lost in the jungle on an island off the coast of Brazil. We had no food or water. He wanted to scale the steep cliffs and travel back around the island beachwise. I almost started to cry and wanted to go back and find the trail. We went back, and found the trail, and then arrived at an amazing little isolated beach where I happily paddled around until realizing it was full of sea urchins and potentially stinging jellyfish. I have very pretty photos of this experience.

Now, Adam is in Addis Ababa. First you should look at his Friendster photo because it's the cutest. Ever. Second, since you'll probably never go to Ethiopia, you should read his weblog. The two French girls named Cecile in his dream used to be my roommates.

So sad... Read Elliot Smith's obituary here.

Good Fun

Hee hee, now you can pornolize
my weblog.

P.G.O.A.T.s, etc.

From Filmmaker Magazine, the syllabus for the literature class taught by David Foster Wallace at Pomona College (spring 2003 semester): The Man Who Loved Children, by Christina Stead; Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion; The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy; The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing; Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox; Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin; In Watermelon Sugar, by Richard Brautigan; Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes; and Speedboat, by Renata Adler.

I just read Play It as It Lays, and I'm pleased to report its influence (purely conjectured but undeniable) on another marvelous depiction of Los Angeles vapidity and decadence by a young Bret Easton Ellis. I used to think that Richard Brautigan's writing reflected the inside of my head particularly in A Confederate General from Big Sur. Now I'm not so sure. But the other books I haven't read and many I haven't even heard of. Is this the password into DFW's brain? Is this reading list the key to narrative breaks in Infinite Jest? Will the man behind the ellipses suddenly congeal into a human manifestation through hybridization of James Baldwin and Walker Percy? Please report any insights on the matter.

In other news, everyone who recommended Portnoy's Complaint, I hate you. Really, I'm so tired of reading about balled up kleenex and vaseline. You have no idea.

Okay. My office is next to someone who recruits new clients. He's in his seventies and has retired about three times only to come back because he gets bored. I hear him making phone calls all day. As I write, he is talking to someone with a fake British accent telling them he is calling from his "ship off of the U.S. Virgin Islands." I already heard him yell at a receptionist on speaker phone because she connected him with someone's voicemail. He was like, "I told you this is a ship-to-shore call!!! Don't connect me with anyone's voicemail!!!" (all in a fake British accent.)

?? ?...

I Want to Kill Myself

"He now jokes about the Internet as “the vortex of self-hatred” because of how it can turn mere diversion into a self-destructive act: “I’ll have a ton of papers to grade, but instead I’ll be like, Let’s jerk off to the Internet first. So I go online, but then I despise myself. I look up, and my computer says I’ve been online for 47 minutes and I’m like, What the hell have I been doing?!”

“It was like a drug,” Dan says. “I just started to feel so bad about it. I’d think about how these girls I looked at were being exploited, but then I still couldn’t stop. It was totally screwing with the way I thought I should be seeing women.”

“I was the kind of girlfriend who was up for anything sexually,” says Jill, who is 25, has hazel eyes, and works in PR. “When we were having sex, he’d call me his porn star, and I thought that was hot.” In time, this changed. Kyle would sometimes e-mail her links to sites “he thought were really hot,” which made Jill more than a little uncomfortable. Sometimes, she’d drop by his house for a surprise visit and he’d have already “exhausted himself” with the computer.

All of which raises a question: How much is Internet porn screwing with the way a generation of young men view women?"

[This makes me so depressed, because it's all so true... "exhausted himself" indeed]
Read more...

Last pre-Simpsons public appearance.

Tyrone Slothrup sez...

Go look on Nathalie's web site and read about how Thomas Pynchon's voice is going to be on the Simpsons (his unphotographed face featured under an animated paper bag.) www.nchicha.com/cupofchicha

Last night I got on the wrong train going home from Williamsburg and got sucked in some sort of Brooklyn vortex of blurry men in reflective vests carrying lanterns and rainy empty streets under construction in unknown neighborhoods. All because I got on the W instead of the Q. I ended up taking a cab from DeKalb after riding on like 4 different trains in a variety of directions. As it was very late at night, the entire netherworld experience took 2 hours, which must break some sort of record.

All this after the Cubs game, which should have at least filled some sort of stupid mistake quota for the evening. I heard Billy Crystal say that it's better if the series isn't the Cubs vs. the Red Sox because then nobody would win.

This week:
Kill Bill = Thumbs Up
The Fortress of Solitude = Thumb to the side
Astor Place K-Mart = Thumbs Down

Weblogs are so embarassing.

Oh Yo-ko...

"I have decided to be a cockroach for a day, and see what is happening in this city through its eyes. Since we can easily say that New York City is the cultural center of our society, I have taken various pictures of the city's corners and presented them from a cockroach's point of view. Through the eyes of this other strong race, we may learn the true reality of what our dreams and nightmares have created. I invite you to join me in this odyssey--

Odyssey Of A Cockroach"

Ladies and Gentlemen, Yoko Ono's latest installation. Who is coming with me to see this? On display at 18 Wooster Street until November 1st. I wonder if my kitchen will be heavily featured.

Since this is all I've been doing...

This week I read American Pastoral by Philip Roth and Everything Is Illuminated by J Safran Foer. I just bought Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem in hardcover because I couldn't wait.

American Pastoral was not necessarily predictable (because that would be unfair; the whole plot is laid out on purpose in the first twenty pages) but somehow... expected? Like any novel on the sixties as the decade when American utopianism officially rolled over and died.

Everything Is Illuminated made me cry a couple of times. It was good, but not my new favorite book. But good.

In high school I went through a phase where it seemed like everything I read was about African-American women overcoming sexual trauma (Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat). Now everything I read is about Jewish men interrogating their identities. Are there any books like these but with Jewish women? What genre does a 1/2 wasp, 1/4 catholic and 1/4 jewish female write in? Is that like Joyce Carol Oates? Please say it isn't.

One More Thing

Ahmet Zappa posts bulletins for parties at The Viper room. The password? Gary Coleman.

Two women got in a big fight on the subway this morning because one got the other's coat "dirty." Of course it was on the long stretch of no stops between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Of course the train was rush-hour full. Of course it kept having to stop for delays. Tension was so thick other people started reprimanding the upstarts. One woman was yelling, "This is New York! Of course I'm going to kick your face in!" I've never been so happy to see Bowling Green in my whole life.

The company-policy good morning by the building's security guard felt a little more heartfelt today.

This just in

Ahmet has approved your request and is now in your friends list.

You and Ahmet can view each other's pages and each other's friends.

I read shitty magazines at work

US Weekly reported that Ahmet Zappa announced his engagement to Selma Blair via Friendster Bulletin. I'm connected to Ahmet via two degrees of separation and have asked him to be my friend. Thanks to Friendster, Ahmet Zappa will soon be announcing his engagement to me, and all of you will soon know me as Emily Zappa.

Ahmet Zappa has 415 friends.

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I hate to disappoint my faithful readers. And by this I mean Dave.

Boa Viagem

I learned today that Hemingway was once a copywriter. I wonder if he wrote junk mail as well.

Yesterday marked the last departure of friends to another country. Now my nearest and dearest are scattered -- in Addis Ababa, London, Sao Paulo, somewhere in China, Istanbul, Minneapolis, Providence, Buenos Aires, Iowa City, the Bay Area or on various rock and roll tours across America. One can only imagine where they go from there.

Maybe because I left high school for a year in Chile, then left Minneapolis for Providence, then left Providence for Brazil, it seems a little mundane to be in New York now. But I plan on being domestic, and keeping house, and looking off piers for approaching ships. Ex-pats are wierdos, which is precisely why I thought I might someday become one, red-faced in a tropical shirt with a harem of underpaid servants. Or maybe just a resentful cranky foreign correspondent. Neither here nor there.

Le Weekend

On Saturday I ate dim sum for brunch and bone marrow for dinner. Served on toasted brioche with a sauce of oxtail and goodness. I am well-fed, multicultural and altogether virtuous.

Sunday was for lounging, painting new apartments, extended farewells.

Monday is Monday.

Bah

From Homo Zapiens by Victor Pelevin:

"In the West both the client who ordered advertising and the copywriter tried to brainwash the consumer, but in Russia the copywriter's job was to screw with the client's brains."

Judging from the circus that is ocurring at my work today (about ten fake employees, cubicles highly stylized for the event, the floors redone, utilization of recommended low-cut jeans/heels, a projected atomosphere of very fake 'hipness' etc.) Mr. Pelevin is wrong.

Too bad I left White Teeth on a plane last summer and never finished it because I saw Zadie Smith at a reading in Central Park this summer and think she's pretty amazing. Instead of reading from The Autograph Man she opted to read instead the essay she wrote as prologue for the next installment of America's Best Non-Required Reading (whose annoying qualities I won't delve into in detail here.)

She spoke profusely about the immense and scary weight of the Western Literary Canon, for those who prioritize it over new or experimental fiction. She said that indeed, for a long time she would read Daniel DeFoe over Martin Amis just because she thought she should. But she's branched out, and is a happier person in the end. Good for Zadie. I would argue that reading Money or the latest J.T. Leroy may present a different tendency of masochism, but I got what she was saying.

She also spoke about the way writers read, and what she said makes sense for anyone who wants to create anything, that if you are paralyzed by your fear of either a) Not wanting to be as bad as the bad things you read, or b) are so intimidated by the good things that you think you won't ever compete, you'll never get anywhere. I guess these are obvious points, but for me it was comforting that someone who was so successful at such a young age had these anxieties...

Anyway, her new book (as described on The Believer's website) sounds like it will prove highly interesting. I'm curious how aesthetic failures will be presented as ethical failures -- I'm not sure I agree but I'm also not sure I understand. And in spite of her words in Central Park she still seems slightly caught up in the "shoulds" of reading and writing:

"My desk is covered with school work. I'm taking a class on Jane Austen and Henry James, and a class on literary theory. In between I'm writing a book of essays on the novel. The subtitle of the book is "Essays on Fiction and Failure"; the essays are concerned with the ethical impulse in fiction as I find it expressed in the 20th century novel. At the moment I'm working on the introduction and the first chapter. That's about E.M. Forster. Basically, the book is a very gentle exploration of a suggestion of Iris Murdoch's: That the literary impulse and the impulse towards the Good fail and succeed along similar lines. It's an old fashioned book in that way; it suggests that elements of a novel that we would describe as aesthetic failures are actually ethical failures also. Some of the other writers in the collection are Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, Updike, Vonnegut, Salinger, Kingsley Amis, David Foster Wallace. And there's one poet in there as sort of epilogue—Philip Larkin. I made a decision to only work on the writers I love. There comes a point where it becomes exhausting to continue pretending that A Room With a View is not your favorite novel."

I've always found Times Square to be caught in a vicious cycle of people going there because of the ads and the ads being there because of the people, but I just learned Jeremy Blake (of Beck's last album cover and Punch Drunk Love scene transitions) has an installation on the NBC gravitron in Times Square. I'm walking over tonight. Read more.

He's an interesting guy -- grew up in Washington D.C. as a child of hippies. His father was a crazy Studio 54 type who died of AIDS. Sometimes it seems like the most creative people are produced by growing up alienated from their environs... He's doing a gallery show in New York in October inspired by the diaries of Ossie Clark, a British fashion designer who dressed all our favorite rock stars until his boyfriend murdered him. What a world.

I thought I was going to see 13 year-olds doing whippits

Mistaking the time for the movie Thirteen, I said fuck it and went to see Demonlover, the new movie by Olivier Assayas. I thought it was going to be an Irma Vep-ish bore, but I was very wrong.

It's a bizarre combination of Irreversible, Dirty Pretty Things, 8MM and Lost in Translation (except instead of lying around in hotel rooms blankly staring at wierd Japanese talk shows the characters lie around watching wierd Japanese porn with all unmentionables scrambled by the Puritans who founded our fair nation, resulting in even more bizarre visual imagery). For those of you Brown MCMers who read Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" might as well have been the treatment for the script, and trust me she gets punished. Scopophilia is taken to the level of anime porn, except cartoon sex is reduced to a blob of moving squares. Where would America be without the MPAA?

Anyway, until the last five minutes I liked it a lot, and I hadn't heard anything about it. The clothes in the film are gorgeous, Sonic Youth does the soundtrack and it's really good, and the characters speak French, Japanese, Spanish and English. The scenes in Tokyo make me suspect Sophia Coppola saw something of this film before she started shooting Lost In Translation, which in comparison feels silly. Not that I don't prefer that sometimes. This movie made me scared and depressed. Because in the beginning I kind of related to the main character and then she gets fucked up in a gender-specific way, a narrative trope that always makes me upset. I think in the future I'll avoid movies about smut porn.

In preparation to pitch for a client at the end of the week, I was told I should wear "low cut jeans and heels" to work on Friday. Is this legal? I was also told to bring along two or three "hip" friends.

I wish I was independently wealthy. Although I may just quit anyway. This is miserable.

I haven't felt like writing much and there isn't much to offer up. I've been housesitting a luxurious brownstone for the summer, feeling rather entitiled because I occupy three stories and walk around in my underwear and pay no rent, and not only that but the place is meticulously swept and disinfected by a housekeeper once a week (who thinks I'm a slob and probably would like to disinfect me if she had half a chance).

Because the house is so clean I feel a certain satisfaction when the inevitable dirty spot is discovered. Under the television in a room of hospital-cornered beds and bauhaus sterility there are dust bunnies that tend toward a species of carnivorous jackrabbit. In the bathroom there is a small cork keeping the drain open whose backside has a small patch of mold. When it rains there is serious cockroach movement, particularly in the kitchen, such that I'm wary of turning on the light after a certain hour in the evening in fear of the ensuing scurry.

All of this will shortly be exchanged for a single room the size of a split atom, deep in the cancerous bowels of Brooklyn.

Just Because

The family across the street from me holds a really nice-looking shabbat dinner every week where the whole family is gathered around the table in their nicest starched and ironed and eat what looks like a very nice dinner off of very nice china. I was reheating some old lasagna and identifying with the Little Match Girl.

I've decided to tally the results of my summer reading now that summer's over into four categories. For some of you this may seem like a remedial high school summer reading list, but that's because you attended fancy private school and not Minneapolis South High:

1) Very Good
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, DF Wallace
Personal History, Katharine Graham
The Death of Ivan Ilych, Tolstoy
Ada, or Ardor, Nabakov
The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway
Heart of Darkness, Conrad
Paradise Lost, Milton
American Psycho, Brett Easton Ellis

2)Sort of Good But Not So Much
The Rachel Papers, Amis
Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters, Salinger
Ways of Seeing, John Berger

3)Pretty Bad But Strong Effort
House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski

4)Wish I Had Finished to Assess Accurately
Mason & Dixon, Pynchon

Nathalie is the greatest because she finds things like this:

Finally

Lost In Translation is very good, made me very sad, very nostalgic, and did nothing for current moodiness but reflect it back to me. I'm so happy this movie exists, and that it simply couldn't be made by a man. Thank you Sofia.

She was there afterwords for a QandA -- she is very small and calm, and obviously had much better things to do than reflect in front of an audience consisting mostly of Conde Nast n'er do wells (including one fabulous woman in stripes who executed a fashion hybrid of Willy Wonka, Nefertiti and The Cat and the Hat with grave abandon). My take is that the film is autobiographical, I had a sinking feeling that Giovanni Ribisi was a stand in for her husband (Spike Jonze) but perhaps I'm reading too deeply.

Regardless, the mood of the film was almost destroyed by a cocktail party of well-heeled litterati (seriously -- my Asics were rather gauche at this affair) consuming noveau asian tidbits over wasabi peas, but the bar was open, so my senses were shut. Lovely.

A Mystery Revealed

In Japanimation movies, the shapeless, dumpling-like food that characters are inevitably pulling out of knapsacks, unwrapping and chewing accompanied by a satisfying sound effect of unknown origin has always perplexed and disturbed me. However, such foodstuffs have now been located in mid-town Manhattan.

Finally I've found a place in the neighborhood where there's no mention of quesadillas, baked manicotti or croutons rotting in large stainless steel basins. I prance over on my lunch break, dazed from too much time on the internet, and gleefully devour little rice balls stuffed with seaweed or pickles and an assortment of turnip-like tubers and tofu things in comforting broth. And they have ramen with pork a la Tampopo where you simultaneously utilize ladel and chopsticks to acheive a holistic consumption experience. The ladels are bamboo, of ingenious design.

Now, on the very same block, it looks like they are opening a take-out place that specializes in rice balls. This is very exciting, certainly the greatest incentive yet to not throw myself out the window of my workplace, falling a triumphant six inches to to the roof of the structure next door.

Harumph

Today I went to a lecture where one hipster asked Matthew Barney if he agreed with the assessment of his work as "sacred" and "profane." Barney answered profane, yes; sacred, no. There were some interesting haircuts there, whose extemporaneous peices of odd lengths screamed "pull me" but I was following advice to be more adult, mature-like, and I refrained.

On the subject of envy... Who knew that Zelda Fitzgerald wrote? I just thought she was a magnificent socialite who tried her hand at ballet dancing and had affairs with parisian sailors. But she was a writer too, a jealous one at that. And she perished in a fire at an insane asylum. And I dressed up as her for halloween last year.

I started work three days ago in a building that doubles as a tunnel. The thought of cars passing through the arches underneath me is the only affirmation that the minutes are, indeed, ticking by.

The building also serves as a vanishing point, such that if you were trying to draw a perspectival picture of Park Avenue looking downtown from, say, 90th street, it is from here that all lines emanate.

The current task at hand is to connect the negation of aphorisms to a certain brand of fast-food sandwich. The inspiration I've been told to be inspired by are two radiohead videos, that have apparently nothing to do with either sandwich or aphorism. In response, I have elaborated a scheme of laboratory testing, where the aphorisms serve as mere hypotheses to be proven wrong by various scenarios involving sandwich consumption.

But now I'm being told to come up with something more abstract.

Tippy. Tip-py.