Choire

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:33:59 -0500

This thing Emily wrote is the most straightforwardly awesome thing ever! I love it unconditionally. Unrelated? I also enjoy Keith Gessen's post on "the underground." And? I like all this too! God, I left the internet for three hours to drive down Long Island and the internet got AWESOME AGAIN. Now I can have weekend!

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 23:25:16 -0500

1. Never hold your best stuff.
2. Put something shocking at the top of the page.
3. Women are the best reporters.
4. Point of view is everything.
5. Personal is better.
6. Never hold your best stuff.

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:35:53 -0500

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:39:43 -0500

I love it when Jezebellians go into a full-on fury, as they (rightly) did today over LaVena Johnson, who was murdered in Iraq and returned to her parents as a suicide. And I love that they're all sending letters to their Congresscritters and to newspapers and NPR over it. And this: "Ladies, I say it's time we re-claimed our inner huntresses, pool our resources, and hunt these predators down." Word up, Ms. 45!

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:55:37 -0500

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:53:56 -0500

My, let's say, "temporary forced unpaid leave" from the New York Observer is looking more and more permanent! (I assume I'm not supposed to say anything about that. Oh well! One never is—the suggestion of retaliation for lack of silence regarding working conditions is just one of the means by which millionaires and PR men control today's utterly disposable workers. See also: the great silence that greeted Gawker Media's suspension of health insurance reimbursement for all of its non-employee employees. While that suspension brought the company closer to the letter of federal law—their non-employee contractors suspiciously resembled employees!—it also had the downside of, you know, not providing its workers with health insurance anymore. Not a peep about it anywhere. Update: I hear the new Gawker scheme is interesting, and also not entirely what I was told previously: That there is now a cash bonus for some or all staff that they may use to pay all or part of health insurance? Innaresting!) The funny thing is—I'm a loyalist at heart! Treat me right and, like anyone else, I'm your lapdog forever. But come on. The media industry, particularly the "new media industry"—the standards of which are right now, in this age of layoffs, leaching into the "old media" industry—exists in this world as if the age of unionization had never even occurred. For one thing, the owners know that the disposable workforce is too swollen; there's always someone younger and hungrier (and with more student debt) coming down the stairs behind you, to steal the immortal formulation of "Showgirls." Anyway, all this is to say, I'm still hanging out with the delightful folk at Radar this week while I scheme some schemes.

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:01:26 -0500

Here is perhaps my proudest professional moment ever. It occurred while interviewing Matthew Broderick for his film "Finding Amanda."

Brittany Murphy didn't transform you into a club-hopping jerk?
Brittany Snow.

I'm so fired right now.
I thought she was Britney Spears for the first two weeks of shooting.

There's a lot of Brittanys right now.
But she's a particularly lovely one. Not that any of them are less than lovely.

29 Pictures Of My Cat

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:50:33 -0500

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:08:17 -0500

if you ever have a pet-related absence, you can be sure to at the very least to never be invited to the reindeer games, and at worst you will be laughed at and relegated to a long-term, dead-end role in the company.... i love your blogs, web pages, twitter feeds, etc. feel free to do them at work too. the people who i hire to do background checks when you apply give me all that shit. (note to theresa c. who just applied--love the adult yahoo pictures page that was part of your profile listed with the e-mail ON YOUR FUCKING RESUME)

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:48:21 -0500

A bamboo grove flowers extremely irregularly—counted in dozens of years—and often only once. And when a grove flowers, it may die. I'd never actually seen bamboo in flower until this weekend, when we saw this small grove on Fire Island, in the Pines. Extremely exciting and also anticlimactic! Boring and thrilling! As you can see, the flowers are not much—stems, with small seed capsules to be sown by wind.

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:09:18 -0500

For the first time, the feds are arresting gay dudes for having sex al fresco on Fire Island.

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:17:54 -0500

I was in the basement of 666 Fifth Avenue tonight—such a lovely building! Is owned by Jared Kushner!—and I came across this electronic doohickey in the window of a store. It shows a scrolling lower Manhattan skyline—a very dated one!—with many blimps and airplanes floating past. Sometimes the airplanes and the skyline coincide in exciting ways!

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:50:41 -0500

For various extremely complicated reasons that we'll get into in the near future, somehow I'm back at Radar again this week.

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:27:19 -0500

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:09:27 -0500

I talked to Illeana Douglas and we had a long session about how TMZ gives you cancer—she showed up at a premiere not long ago with signs that even said so. A little of this part of the interview made it into print but of course most of it didn't, so here's oh-so-much more on the tabloid media.

Illeana Douglas: When I watch TMZ TV, it's so funny how they're all laughing as if it's exciting. 'Get this! I've got Vince Vaughan! He's at a newsstand! He's reading Playboy!' And then they all laugh, as if it's a story.

I think the thing is is that it's commerce—

They provide the commentary, but it's not real. It's a series of shots of celebrities looking grumpy and hiding their faces. And that guy has a show! You'r'e saying 'Action' got canceled--and this guy's got a whole show! A half hour of people standing at a valet stand. Is that how he pitched it? Lemme tell ya—a big show! Insanely popular! Tons of raw feed of celebrities standing at a valet stand! And they're making millions of dollars. That's the more serious point. And again you've got some of these celebrities, I think if they have causes near and dear to their heart—put up a sign! it's pointless to argue—they're doing their job. Everyone should make a living. However, if the celebrity feels they have something that they're passionate about—animal abuse, or with me, homelessness—that's something I'd rather them film.... I, as a citizen, have questions: why am I more interesting at the airport than feeding the homeless at St. Thomas Church?....I've been with Tom Arnold doing charity events--and it's funny, I didn't see any paparazzi around. I was with Sharon Stone handing out sleeping bags on Christmas Day, and I didn't see TMZ there. Why is that not as compelling as her having lunch at the Ivy?

And as you alluded to earlier, it's pernicious because the regular media knows how much money TMZ is making. And then we go down that rabbithole. The McCain story—

And then it went away! But that was the New York Times! So again, all the news that's fit to print, that's what their banner says. Was that really fit to print? It had unsubstantiated sources and they put it on the cover of the New York Times. And then they didn't follow up with it. They just put it there! CNN does it all the time. Remember with the big meeting, between Obama and Hillary? They had a vigil! There was a CNN reporter saying, 'I've been in the news biz a long time—there's an excitement you feel when you know something big is going on.' Of course later they found out nobody was home! This was like all night long on Anderson Cooper. And then the beauty of the news is like, never any explanation the next day that they were wrong. It's great. it's fantastic. It's as if they don't need us anymore! When you watch the media, it's like this gigantic cancer, where they are just feeding on themselves. Are they even aware that we're watching?

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:12:06 -0500

One afternoon a roving band of 30 teenagers stopped traffic on the Champs-Elysées, marching toward the Arc de Triomphe, followed by a battalion of 60 police officers in riot gear, marching in rows of two. I asked a French co-worker what the kids were celebrating. He squinted, looking into the sun. “That it’s May,” he said. “That they’re French, that they’re young. You will not understand.”

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:45:53 -0500

Hey, Paul Ford put online for free the Renata Adler Harper's piece from 2000 that has been the object of some discussion recently.

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:45:50 -0500

One of the 400 reasons I love fashion publicist Kelly Cutrone: "I would never rep Versace, I can’t stand her, I think she makes disgusting clothes."

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:17:41 -0500

“I don’t have a fundamental fear or anxiety that makes me avoid the mail – it just seems relatively uninteresting, and probably most importantly, doesn’t arrive when it’s relevant. I don’t want a bill to tell me it’s time now to pay by showing up at my door. I just got home from work, asshole!,” said Mark McMaster, a 29-year-old senior account manager at Google. “At Google, we wax philosophical about ‘the cloud,’ a metaphor for all the data that’s kept in a server farm that could be in Oklahoma or Beijing but you can instantly access from any computer or phone or BlackBerry that’s connected to the Internet. I put as much of my life in the cloud as possible.”

But the cloud doesn’t have feelings.

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:41:58 -0500

Hey there is some crazy thing going on on the ACLU's blog about gays all week, with a bunch of people contributing. I wrote something rather undergraduate-level about one of my new obsessions, the Summum. (They're fun!) But go hang out there all week. It's all gay friends and gay enemies alike.