Month: December 2018

Sorry to Bother You

I left the theater (Alamo, during wide release but late in the cycle) having successfully avoided my companion’s friends, who had just happened to be in the same screening, talking about needing to pick their jaws off the floor and brains out of the carpet and willing to give the kind of dunderheaded sci-fi farce a pass if only for getting that Chappelle’s Show b-reel fake rap scene to the silver screen and because of the Armie Hammer Renaissance. 

Then I noticed the firebrand director evincing an inability to deal seriously with works of fiction in an attempt to knock his elder down a peg and slag one of the top five best movies of the year. Half-star on Letterboxd removed. 

White people criticizing Kanye West

First Reformed

I left the theater (Metrograph, months after the wide release ended) in thrall of Dynan’s pretty pictures. My companion turned immediately to me and said, “I feel like this is the opposite of Suspiria [2018] and I’m going to think less of this movie the more I think about it.” Reader, she was right. 

The lady from Mama Mia! plays a pregnant lady named … wait for it … Mary. Also, story conventions insist that the protagonist be some kind of Protestant, but he’s so dang Catholic!

What’s (much) worse is how many people seem still to have fallen for it? I agree, that opening tracking shot is intense. Unfortunately the movie kept going. 

This made me realize that, of his classic period, I kind of hate every Scorsese that Schrader wrote. 

Instant pots and sous vide

I was once involved with a woman who would save every chicken bone, every scrap of onion skin in little Ziploc bags in the freezer to, very eventually, make stock. I’m all for being able to cook your own dinner, but you have to have that level of monomania to make any of these gadgets worth it. Get a Crock-Pot and god bless. 

Podcasts

Evergreen entry. 

Principled stands against calling four-door cars “coupes”

Look, we’re less than 30 years out from internal combustion and driver control being outlawed by The Motor Law. If Mercedes wants to call the CLS a “coupe” because it has half the rear headroom of a regular sedan, guten tag to them. Same goes, of course, for the death of the manual transmission, the rise of CVT, the slow decline of the V8 and the inline six, and even RWD’s loss of ground to AWD in luxury and performance models (though the last one is the only one that truly stings, to me). I’m just tired. And the CLA would still suck and the 6 Series is still illegitimate with four doors, no matter what you call them. 

Because I’m nothing if not a hypocrite, Kanye and Nicki thirstily appearing on Tekashi 6ix9ine songs

I get it. Getting old sucks. But this kid makes Eminem sound like Big Daddy Kane and he’s a pedophile? Hello?? He sounds like Andy Samberg doing a digital short making fun of Lil B in 2011??? This is honestly far more embarrassing than going MAGA could ever be. 

Being into Vanderpump Rules

It’s not even the best Housewives or Housewives-adjacent program (New York) nor the best Bravo show in general (Shahs of Sunset). This is a placeholder for extremely online politics personalities crowing about anything cultural and could easily have been replaced by that nascent Prequel defense movement I saw bubbling up a few months back. Thank the maker, that never really caught landspeeder hover traction. [Ed. — Wookieepedia check pls?] This is also a placeholder for every Splinter post about how a professional sports mascot (from the city that bombed MOVE and will still arrest you for ordering coffee while black) is actually a queer socialist super soldier. 

By the same token: Everyone being into Steely Dan all of a sudden

Much like this inexplicable Dead Renaissance, if you weren’t headed to Wolftrap with a copy of Humboldt’s Gift to read (and about which to be ribbed by drunken Boomers who really liked the movie FM) between sets, which is to say, if you never bothered to catch them while Walt was still alive, I don’t want to read your deconstruction of “Gaslighting Abbie.” This isn’t even a tough barrier to cross; he was still alive in the year 2017. 

Principled stands against ride sharing

Good luck with the drunk driving, I guess? To say nothing of its both untold and obvious effect on lesser cities with even worse infrastructure, every story about an Uber driver killing himself in New York is really just an indictment of the Banana Republican medallion system. So, like Donald Trump himself, really just an indictment of New York City. 

Complaining about the subway

Of course this entry does not pertain to those in more precarious situations, but if you’re a white person with a job in media, why are you leaving the house in the first place?? Call an Uber. 

Parquet Courts

Like Mellow Gold (or worse, Odelay) Beck fronting Gorillaz but with the Hold Steady or something equally Gen X retirement home shitty as the backing band. 

The Leitch pre-roll ad appended to Leitch’s filler Jamboroo

Evergreen entry, but made worse this year due to Drew’s untimely passing (RIP).

Bernie Sanders

If you lose a presidential primary, you should not be allowed to run for president again. Ironically, Bernie could very well be president right now if this rule had been adopted when it should have, which was sometime in the mid-1980s. ::DNC announces Gary Hart 2020 slogan: “Tanned, Rested, and Ready” but with like randy emphasis on these words::

The 1975

I was thrown for a loop when I discovered what Tekashi 6ix9ine and XXXTentacion actually sounded like. My faith in my ability to clock whatever music Twitter is braying on about this time from nothing more than what’s being bleated was shaken. Then I heard this group’s update of that REM song that sounded like that Billy Joel song, and felt secure in every person with an ilx account’s inability to get over Fallout at the Disco. 

Russia

You know what?

You can have American democracy, comrade.

People saying they’re going to go back to blogging

I’ll bet you’re still gutted every time you think of Gawker, like a real, live being you loved dearly and desperately ate it after a particularly brutal Hulkamania Leg Drop and there’s a physical ache in the heart of you every time a third-tier Trump hanger-on gets a book deal, too. 

So someone who works for a magazine that was profitable for decades solely due to subscription stuffing done by cutout intermediaries noticed that publishers try to game the numbers. I can’t properly qualify that claim — it was told to me at least ten years ago by some publishing industry wonk about a practice ten years older than that; so the surety with which this claim is presented is inherited, but the gist is that in a given year, prior to the Internet and Wasserstein largess, New York Magazine made the bulk of its advertising revenue on the back of the ‘Best Of’ issues, the cornerstone of which was the ‘Best Doctors in New York’, which was as hefty as a small market yellow pages, and the numbers that juiced those page rates was realized by shoveling piles of free issues into every medical office in the five boroughs and then claiming huge pass along rates as a consequence (if you squint closely, that’s curiously circuitous).

https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1078003966863200256

It’s odd to see anyone responding with a canned tres scandale stance to any of this. Wanamaker’s famous (though probably undershot) observation that he didn’t know which half of his spend was futile is now almost a century old, and we are all now thoroughly experts on the process thanks to Mad Men. It’s even more curious to see anyone who makes a living writing for an ad-supported publication (and let’s be clear: 99% of all the people who have ever made it to retirement age toiling under the rubric of journalist did so only because advertising exists and literally no other reason) either wave their hands at the machinations that keep this charade in motion (Wire and Plastic Products billings in 2017: $71 Billion) or start attacking the patent absurdity of the entire endeavor. Because, friends of quality content, that path leads at best to madness, or worst, to vaporous dreams of Bed-Stuy brownstone down payments drifting ever off into the distance as you grit your teeth and file another daily dose of snark hoping for that long-awaited Vice IPO.

The whiff of desperation that isn’t fueled by the growing panic that Jonah Peretti isn’t good at producing value for anything other than his own bank account is maybe driven by the metrics verified truth that if all this useless yammering isn’t going to result in a craven personal windfall, then perhaps the backstop notion of influence is likewise as fleeting.

Because I was a poor growing up, one distraction I undertook while just taking jobs to pay the rent for myself and those depending on me and lamenting that I could never see a path towards an Eyebeam residency (yeah, I know) was to dig as much as I could into the backgrounds of those who just seemed to float along on an inevitable upward trajectory while not seeming to be, you know, much more talented? To basically measure whether or not it made sense to shirk my self-imposed responsibilities for art, or early stage options.

This probably started around the time I read an interview with Victor Nunez in the Voice (max circulation: 250,000 – when it was free, the only legit source for apartments in NYC, and widely available to a population of probably 5,000,000) about how and why he made Ruby in Paradise. The upshot (as best I can recall) is that he was mired in debt and teaching film in Florida after his generally well received debut A Flash of Green was snookered at Sundance by Blood Simple (back when film only had room for one or two independent films at most) and came into an unexpected windfall in the form of an inheritance of about $120K. His wife asked him what he intended to do — the sum was enough to retire his earlier debt — and his stance was basically ‘I would not consider myself a self-respecting filmmaker if I didn’t plow the money back into my career’ and made his second film to decent acclaim, and, uh, modest box office success.

I never plied my trade as a ‘pro blogger’ (aside from the fact that I probably couldn’t hack it) because I never met anyone making better money than me being a hack designer. And I kept watching those numbers. It’s amazing when you see the reality facing people you admire so dramatically. I’ve been a fan of John Banville since I read an excerpt of The Book of Evidence in the Paris Review (which also contained an short story from Padgett Powell, another fave — it’s convenient when our personal cultural history is so neatly encapsulated innit?), and I remember seeing a note about how his Booker win didn’t provide the expected bounce; something to the effect that he had sold maybe 3,000 copies hardback before and about three times that after. I was aghast (and it turns out, wrongly so). This was after I had sustained a minor, irrelevant blog that after I had given up on the raw log data showing 40K hits in an given week for some ostensible real metrics (shout out to 2004 era MT installs!) that proved that on a good day I got 2,000 readers. I was bigger than my hero!

These are real numbers, unlike what you will read in the New York piece, or in any of the follow-on takes and counter-takes. People will talk about comScore and Chartbeat and Google Analytics — and here is the rub — while never telling you what their audience is (either assumed or proved). This is significant. Sure, programmatic ad networks being gamed is interesting, but the numbers behind the down round at Mashable, Mic being sold for spare change, hairshirting for the shuttering of The Awl (who had a business plan that comprised mainly of bragging that their launch would be covered extensively in the New York Times, which: true, but also: so?), none of these were ever accompanied by any real facts, aside from the open joking about the fact that The Awl used to auto-reload their page to juice the numbers.

McSweeney’s turned the twee lit mag world upside when they were publishing 20,000 copies. Surely hipster endorsed media the next level up commands more eyeballs? Maybe. The last episode of the amazing (a claim offered with zero irony) Party Down had a 0.0 share — that’s 74,000 viewers if we are to trust the decades-old scam courtesy the Neilsen organization. They were so desperate they sent Lizzy Caplan to Jimmy Kimmel and told her to flat out admit this by sharing: “If you had actually seen it, the number of people in this room would actually double our ratings.”

‘Art’ or any ‘art that matters’ has always had a tiny, tiny audience. If you can get 150 people to show up to your thing, no matter what it is, or where you stage it, you should go home and fall asleep thrilled. And you have good cause to, because it’s a hard fucking thing to do. What it won’t do is pay your bills. I don’t know that it should? But the panic that seeps in around the edge of the fake metrics conversation isn’t relevant to you: the charlatans who preen about ad/editorial firewalls are just hucksters in the most classic sense, hoping to scrabble far enough along to grasp their ill gotten (and likewise unprofitable) book or production deals (please god, cast upon us an arid and unending drought in the form of Netflix cash so that I can be spared Tinyletter musings about Westside traffic) before fleeing the ever sinking ship of ad-supported content.

Featured image via the inimitable Art F City

One of the odder maxims of old YM was to never ‘report on’ conversations that happened during casual gatherings. I believe I was the progenitor and the logic was something on the order of extending a courtesy of privacy so  that people need not be guarded for fear of some lazy gotcha down the road. As much as we insisted it was a valid moral stance, it was conveniently and often ignored. And the almost galling naivete it contains was supposed to be leavened by the belief that social norms would be upheld to the degree that bad actors ‘in the scene’ would be exiled absent any requirement that wider exposure of misdeeds be broadcast. But there’s something a little more sinister at work — self censoring perhaps in deference to the reality that any exile would ultimately come at the behest those with greater social capital. No amount of hectoring about someone you felt was legitimately a dick would bring about any reckoning if people just tacitly picked someone because they felt they were better friends. Or, crucially, they had a clear path to professional advancement by way of that choice.  

I would hazard much of the above covers my reasoning for never really saying anything overt about John Carney in any social media context. That and the only real thing I had to call out was his seedy, drunken tendency to grope at most women within his reach. He was not unique, and perhaps not even the worst of the lot, but no one else seemed to be terribly exercised about it (I had heard worse things, but secondhand facts for a second rate blog does not make for exceptional journalism). In duly reporting my tepid policing, I’ll offer that mostly my efforts were limited to not introducing him to any female friends of acquaintances if at all possible. 

I can’t say there was any conspiracy to protect him — I’m going to assume the logic for most was probably on the order of not wanting to have a light shined too brightly on our own worst moments, even as we probably all felt pretty smugly that they weren’t as bad.

This isn’t some hand-wringy attempt to paper over the failures of my generation; the loutish behavior John was known for (at least in my closer friend circle) wasn’t what made him stand out — it was his nearly comical embrace of neo-reactionary politics. It was far easier to find people willing to observe that perhaps his inclusion should be more tenuous because he was so willing to espouse fairly gross social and political beliefs.

He staked out a fairly predictable territory — it was just the 2007 version of Jordan Peterson. Back then it meant romanticizing of Hitchens, boarding school intellectualism, and an extreme excess of alcohol. I looked at him the way he mostly likely did so in return: a posturing intellectual lightweight who had glommed onto a misguided ideology for mostly personal and emotional reasons, yet to realize that being an adult meant you could just grow up and let go of childish misapprehensions cast as ironclad ideals. 

So which one of us is right? Well, I’m doing this blog and John is doing this: 

This followed stints at nominally more professional outlets: CNBC and the WSJ. For most of that time, it seems that whatever personal or professional bonds people had with him persisted, perhaps just inertia and the winnowing of that particular scene meant no one really had to call anyone out. Mostly out of sight and mind.

I wouldn’t say I enjoyed arguing politics with him (or economics). I found it helpful – I do think being able to make your ideology comestible regardless of context is a good and necessary social ideal (as someone who was more than likely to offer “Well if you haven’t read Bourdieu, then I’m not talking to you” in a bar only a couple years prior, this was something I did have to work at), and perhaps it’s less evident to a stranger watching the clip above, but he isn’t completely bloodless. If anything he exudes a little of what people like Peterson or Milo lack – the sense that he should know better. 

Once he took the Breitbart position, there was, to my eye, a brief “this is the last straw” moment (and perhaps he had been socially and professionally exiled already – again, I don’t have the direct knowledge to say either way), which was manifest in a couple Twitter threads, but that’s about it. 

https://twitter.com/pareene/status/1046968823755300870

The context for all this is course the Great God of Both Sides, the New York Times, did what it loves most: trolling the hell out of people who fancy themselves arbiters of conventional wisdom. That they continue to do so even in the freighted stakes of a Trump presidency and impending global destruction perhaps illuminates why they can green light something like this so glibly. I intended to spend a little more time on this section, but Twitter proved why it’s so deleterious to long form taking.

https://twitter.com/jiatolentino/status/1069653439427289089

Maybe this is a subtweet directed at our (well, your) generation’s Buchanan/Kinsley, maybe not. It will work for the purposes of this screed. There’s a longer and more nuanced take from Wallace Shawn in the postscript of Aunt Dan and Lemon, and I’d encourage anyone to read it. I did, but that didn’t really equip me any better to act on principle with John. Look, if you want to be friends with someone who gets their political philosophy from a gum wrapper, have at it. But don’t pretend that bond mitigates in any way either the repugnant ideas they are promoting or your responsibility to hold them accountable.