Choire Sicha

(via alexbalk)

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:36:12 -0500

This is totally fascinating to me! Anyway, once I found the Internet, I could finally (and...

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:01:15 -0500

Anyway, once I found the Internet, I could finally (and sometimes anonymously!) say all the nasty shit I wanted about the people and institutions at whom I was so angry. I thought that was really subversive and edgy for awhile, then I pretty much realized that I was just being an asshole, that the web as a medium (and my own abilities, whatever those might be) are worthy of a bit more respect, and that I should probably aim a bit higher than pointlessly antagonizing those with whom I could not identify.

AwlCaseygate: the smoking gun!

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:29:10 -0500

brianvan:

peterfeld:

choire:

I don’t know anything about Casey Johnson. I don’t care about Casey Johnson. I did not think about her one single time ever while she was alive!

cough cough

Choire, you gonna take that from someone who voted Dukakis? THROW DOWN!

HA IT TURNS OUT I TYPED THE NAME CASEY JOHNSON BACK IN THE SUMMER OF 2004! (By the way, my typing is not terribly correlated to my “thinking” or “knowing” about anything, as ANYONE can tell you.) Still, I’m going to have to rethink my entire existence. (Some announcements regarding my entire existence forthcoming in two weeks, give or take two additional weeks.)

ninety9: The Awl’s ass-ault on good taste (also known as ‘Big, Remaindered Asses in Lace’)...

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 12:49:42 -0500

ninety9:

The Awl’s ass-ault on good taste (also known as ‘Big, Remaindered Asses in Lace’) continues unabated for a second day! Tres scandale!

HOW FUCKING DARE YOU CRITICIZE THESE VITAL, LIFE-GIVING, ALLEGEDLY INCOME-PRODUCING—OMG, what is the cat eating? Ew! Gross! Oh God, somehow I ran out of cigarettes, again. Sometimes I worry about the long-term effects of smoking. For instance, will it make my face really hard, like a pile of sharp angled planes? I should find out about that. Maybe I’ll Google it later.

A Blog Post Has Always Just Been The Answer To A Question Nobody Had The Opportunity (Or Interest) To Ask

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:21:54 -0500

I was walking down 9th Street just now, coming back from lunch (I know, and: waffle, two eggs over medium, matzoh ball soup, mint tea, because I’m getting a cold), and I realized that I automatically do this thing when I want to avoid people that I learned to do when I was young and spent lots of time in iffy neighborhoods. (In this case, there were a bunch of drunk guys who were bugging girls walking by and I totally knew they were going to ask me for a cigarette or something and I’d be totally annoyed.) This is: when you don’t want people to pay attention to you, you do this sort of junkie thing where you keep rubbing your nose? Nobody wants to talk to people who are touching their noses. The nose is basically just one step up from the butt, in terms of things people don’t want to think about you touching. This is surprising since we look at noses all day and don’t find them terribly objectionable visually. So if you get a little hunched over, and particularly if you are smoking, and you sort of rub your nose and you shake your head a little bit like you are in your own private world or you are a bit doped up, no one will even look at you directly, or speak to you.

This tactic actually even works when you are holding a cigarette, which is counterintuitive, because cigarettes are always an invitation to an interaction. Yes: no one has ever, ever asked me for a cigarette while I am touching my nose.

There is also the other tactic, utilized by my friend Tracy when she was a waitress in Oakland and she’d come home at 2 a.m. with lots of tips: she’d put her purse under her sweater to pretend she was pregnant and then she’d walk down the middle of the street singing really loudly. That works too, on similar/differing principles, just not as well for men.

Outrage? And/or Disgust?

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:22:48 -0500

Outrage? And/or Disgust?

TEMPTING.

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:54:52 -0500

TEMPTING.

The Smarmy?

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:57:56 -0500

ninety9:

So I get that The Awl doesn’t want to cover Tiger Woods. But not writing about Casey Johnson at the expense of this (I know there’s not a one-to-one correspondence) doesn’t seem like the goal posts have been moved very far.

The Casey Johnson story is frightening is myriad ways, and gross of course to no end (not the actual story, but the social/media circle that may well have facilitated it), but treating these awful “trend” pieces as noteworthy (even if only to ridicule) is just drive by journalism that went to prep school, right?

I am not trying to move any “goal posts,” as that sounds terribly arduous? What goal posts are there? Where are they? I don’t know what this means. And I don’t agree that either of those pieces are awful! As I already said. But since you asked: I don’t know anything about Casey Johnson. I don’t care about Casey Johnson. I did not think about her one single time ever while she was alive! I have not thought about her since she was dead. I have no idea what’s “frightening” about the story because I am not even not reading the story, I haven’t even seen the story, much less any “frightening” aspects of the story. Also: “story”? Woman dies; autopsy results forthcoming? Is there something else? BEATS ME. Also, as you point out, there’s no such thing as covering something at the “expense” of something else. When you run a “blog,” even a dumbass one like ours, full time, one stretches one’s actual interests to the limit. In the three hour nightmare that was yesterday afternoon, if I had a shred of interest in Casey Johnson I would have put up 6 or 7 posts about her. (And also? Actually? With regard to what we did cover? Journalists’ sexism, coverage of the allegedly problematic lady-boy relationships in New York and the work of newly-installed editors at local newspapers have always been of major interest to me.) I’m actually sorry that you wrote this post at the expense of writing a post that would make me interested in Casey Johnson. P.S. I reserve the right to write future posts on Casey Johnson should she somehow become interesting from BEYOND THE GRAVE.

(Sorry, Brad Graham’s untimely death has taken me on some...

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:10:00 -0500

(Sorry, Brad Graham’s untimely death has taken me on some time machine tour of the Internet. I did not know there was a 2003-era record of me and Spiers SMOKING INDOORS AT A NEW YORK CITY BAR. Suck it, new New York. Also: Jesus, no wonder everyone assumed I was a horrible person if my face was stuck like that. Spiers, on the other hand, looks as fabulous as ever. The demon-eye thing is just a party trick she does.)

Gahd.

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:14:44 -0500

Gahd.

Sarcasm v. Sexism

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:02:46 -0500

hman:

Sometimes when I read Metropolitan Diary items on Mondays, I don’t necessarily ‘get it’ because they involve people I don’t have anything in common with and don’t feel like understanding.

But this - this is just dumb, right? I’ve read it six times now and can’t make any sense of it. And I love sarcasm!

“DEAR DIARY:

Recently on a beautiful day, I was walking south on Fifth Avenue. The street was very crowded, and while we were waiting for the light to change at 49th Street, the woman behind me said in a distinctly British accent, “I wonder where the diamond district is.”

I thought I would be helpful, and turned around and said, “Oh, that’s on 47th Street.”

Her male companion replied in an equally distinctive British accent, dripping with sarcasm, “Well, thanks a lot.”

J. J. Levine”

(NYT Metropolitan Diary)

Consider the mystery explained!

The Morning Before, or, Take Back the Afternoon

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 12:26:00 -0500

Going back to work tomorrow fills me with that kind of sleepy anxiety, in part because I feel as if each month is like trying to fill a giant pond by sitting on the shore and spitting into it. Ptooey! But also I actually like my bizarre job! I also would like to crawl into a dark cave for a million years. Anyway, I have been doing something called “reading” during the mornings on my few days off this last week. And speaking of reading, my biggest hope regarding going back to work tomorrow is that everyone will have finished having an opinion regarding Katie Roiphe by midnight tonight so that I do not have to thoroughly read her latest piece. You can understand why I presume it consists of just more of her insane and systematically incorrect ramblings. (I was living in New York City and working already while she was getting her doctorate at Princeton and publishing her first book about all those menacing ideas that confronted her there and at Harvard, and so, as a reading person, was subject regularly to her published half-thoughts, though I was also present to have enjoyed her mother’s weekly columns in the Observer.) I do not understand why a person who has been as wrong as she has been is currently employed.

For instance, in the introduction to her piece in the NYTBR, the editors note that:

Roiphe also noted that the muted sex scenes in the work of the young novelists she discusses [these are Eggers, Kunkel (who has published one book, five years ago, and, last I heard, intends to never write another, finding the experience objectionable) Wallace (dead), Chabon (46), and then Foer and Franzen in passing] form an interesting contrast to that of younger women writers and gay writers, too.

Of course, the piece itself does not touch on this idea, nor is this an area of coverage in which the NYTBR is particularly interested, but in this introduction, she cites as these “younger women writers and gay writers, too” just these: Mary Gaitskill, 55. Susan Minot, who is, I believe, 53. And, good grief, Alan Hollinghurst, also 55. What is one supposed to even make of this pile-up of non-ideas?

How to scare birds, c. 1550.

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:40:37 -0500

How to scare birds, c. 1550.

Photo

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 12:50:42 -0500

formspring.me (Spiers Edition)

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 23:50:26 -0500

matthewgallaway:

I was actually just planning my inevitable “formspring is the end of the Internet” post (LOL me, eye roll) until I saw this Spiers action and now I have changed my mind also!

I’ve never understood the appeal of formspring (even hypothetically) until I read this series.

spiers:

Why am I such an idiot? I fucked everything up last night and ended up walking twenty miles home—in the snow and without my glasses, ie blind. I can’t even enjoy watching Sunny in Philadelphia because I’m so blind. =/ And I lost her.

According to my limited data set, it’s a statistical fact that nothing good ever happens on New Year’s Eve. If we were all thinking rationally, we’d stay home with the doors barricaded shut, the phone off and Ambien ourselves to sleep before 10PM. But no one ever does that because we all think This Year Will Be Different. It’s the irritating triumph of optimism over experience.

Along those lines, things that are lost can often be recovered with some effort.

And for what it’s worth, Danny DeVito looks better blurry.

Ask me anything

Photo

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 14:40:17 -0500

Photo

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 10:17:19 -0500

dope things said in a sherman oaks coffee shop at 3am

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:47:50 -0500

natashavc:

slurry persian girl: What are you doing?? Homework?

me: I’m writing a book.

slurry persian girl: about what?

me: Mad Men.

slurry persian girl: BITCH, I GOT THREE MEN!!!! HAAAAY

meltzer: “Both films are about film-making with, seemingly, women at the center. But this is just...

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:39:59 -0500

meltzer:

“Both films are about film-making with, seemingly, women at the center. But this is just a red herring, because they are really about the primacy of males.”

Joon on the “softcore misogyny” (love it) of Broken Embraces and Nine.

Whoa. Yowza! I’m not sure I entirely agree with this but I’ll sure be thinking about it for a long time. (Also, Nine was GARBAGE! Politically, aesthetically, intellectually and just in terms of a plain old piece of pop culture: awful.)

Two facts and a question

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:38:45 -0500

magicmolly:

Fact #1: I remember being deeply moved at age fourteen by a Sex and the City episode called “Games People Play”.

Original air date: August 29, 1999. AND THAT’S WHEN I SLAMMED THE COMPUTER SHUT AND WENT OUTSIDE.