Author: 99

Guys! Guys! I’ve got obvious news! Navel-gazing media profiles happen all the time time in New York. There is literally nothing else to talk about! Sometimes it’s about putzes with wifi; sometimes it’s about Tumblrinas; sometimes it’s about Ivy dudes posing as leftists; sometimes it’s about rando bloggers on the LES; sometimes it’s dudes who pretend to not be jealous of their friends getting six figure book contracts; sometimes the Ivy dudes posing as leftists attack twee dudes who act like outsiders after they get seven figure book contracts; so yeah, your wave has crested and all that is left is sneering at expensive Brooklyn real estate that you pretend isn’t worth trading your dignity, or something, for. But chin up, in a couple years if you either keep plugging away at that respected but not very lucrative literary something or other — or just keep up a solid workout schedule — you can probably score a decent gig being a side piece for some mid-life crisis memoirist wanna-be.

I wonder if there is a way measure how Extremely Online has changed, if at all, since the early days. Certainly the markers have shifted: what qualified you, what your public socio-political disposition reflected, and how you funded it. Because it’s always been at least a part time job. From hasty, typo-ridden screeds dispatched to your music LISTSERV or USENET group to hasty, typo-ridden tweets fired off minute by minute, the defining characteristic of EO is that you cannot be asleep at the switch.

Online has always felt like a space, and that is likely the notion that sustains the most deluded, which is not an attempt at diminishing the experiences of those in thrall. I am most definitely one of those people whose life has like been denuded or otherwise constrained because I have actively sought to be Online for the better part of the past twenty years.

One of the earliest instances of seeing someone report about online behavior through the lens of cyberspace not only being a proxy for IRL, but that we should engage and judge behavior using the same frame we use in meatspace dates from 1993. So none of these concepts or issues or referents are new. And when you consider the relative weight of expended intellectual effort to parse them relative to what my generation normally consumed while struggling with Big Issues of the Day, it’s basically terrifying.

My Extremely Online experience is grounded in the notion that all of Online was manageable and comestible, in the same way that if you made sure to look at the TriQuarterly, Granta, NYRB & Paris Review regularly (with drive by glances at titles in Salmagundi and the Critical Quarterly) you were On It in certain circles, back when I was an MLA striver. And make no mistake, that was a shit ton of work, because there’s dozens of other offshoots and minor players that might flare up and you had to be ready and knowledgeable if they did. The tail end of my academic posturing came at the last seminar I sat in on of the PhD program I bailed on (to be clear, I never enrolled, this was just an abortive campus visit), where the professor sat his MFA students down and explained that you read essays in all the credentialed journals thusly: read the first three paragraphs and the last three paragraphs closely and skim the rest. And move on. There was too much noise in the market of tenure track chasers and you would never be able to keep up. This was 1995.

The idea that you could be apprised of Online was exceedingly blinkered at pretty much every stage after 1976. I think of the communities that I either sniffed at, or just missed entirely back when people believed you could actually catalog all of the shit that was out there.

But the weird thing is, even though I was ignorant of huge swaths of Online at every stage, they actually existed and thrived. Now it feels like everything circles the drain towards the inexorable suck that is Twitter. Facebook is a whole ‘nother thing, sure, but for the Online crowd, there is Twitter, Slack channels (deserving of their own rant) and… dust.

There isn’t any cool site no one is reading yet. It’s just what ever amount of the firehose you wish to direct into your face at a given moment. And perhaps it was always leading inexorably to this. No one seems capable of resisting, and for the EO segment, why would they? Everything that is ill advised about such a lifestyle seems optimized for this very moment. Ev, who, if there is any justice, will be as reviled as Leni Riefenstahl at some later date, took a couple bites at the apple before he perfected the tool that both exposed the futility of the notion of a polity while sharpening the means to further erode the efforts to establish one, had given a dying planet a tool that exemplifies why we can’t save ourselves.

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.  

I found the work agreement from my first post-college job yesterday. A full-time professional position, $6/hr. That works out to roughly $1K a month. My first post-college apartment was $365/mo IIRC. Education debt was about four bills. I’m an old, sure, but this was during the Clinton administration. The more things change, etc. I used to have a physical ledger I used to track expenses (look the 90s weren’t a Dickens novel – there was some affect to the decision). I’ve discarded it, but last I saw it, several years ago, I stared uncomprehendingly at entries detailing weekends at the bar where somehow I got stupendously drunk off a $20 ATM withdrawal. 

I wasn’t looking for it – I was looking for a recipe I had picked up at an awards dinner attended at said job (lest you think I have some bizarrely precise filing system, it was pure coincidence I located it, inside a plain white catalog envelope with the entirely anodyne descriptor ‘PERSONAL AFFAIRS’ inked on the upper right corner, sharing space with a 1994 tax return and the cover of a New York Post edition that covered the night police invaded my block — and apartment building — in the process of evicting squatters), one I used to make every year for Thanksgiving. 

I remember the first time I celebrated Thanksgiving out of school. I was likely lamenting to friends about the unpleasant Hobbesian options of increasing already untenable credit card debt (see job, first post-college) or driving 800 miles twice in five days when they looked at me with the full force of adults in the world for the unimaginable period of three or four years and declared that Thanksgiving was not a family holiday anymore. 

It was simple: no one foresaw the likelihood of escaping a family trip at Christmas until at least having their own kids (an option that seemed even more alien that not going home for Christmas), and the commitment meant one could take a hard line and make Thanksgiving about what, honestly, was more your family now anyway. 

The scales, reader, they fell far and fast. It’s secretly brilliant. Thanksgiving is a much better holiday all around – the scheduling is always good, the weather better, and politics with be a drunken orgy of preaching to the converted like it should be. 

I won’t pretend to have disrupted holidays or innovated in any way. For all I know, I was simply gifted knowledge that any decent adult would present to their newish peers. The point being: we figured this shit out. There is no need to go and complicate it. Save yourself the airfare, the TSA drams, and the racist uncle tropes. Don’t get all wound up and make a slightly less satisfying version of something that is already there and good. That’s what Netflix is for.  

One could argue that Bill Clinton’s preferred method for mitigating exposure of his philandering, rapey tendencies was harming black people. Recognizing that using the implacable power of the state to further hundreds of years of violence against our most vulnerable was good optics, before he even ascended to the most lusted after seat of power, he took time out of his busy schedule of dodging accusations of infidelity and sexual assault to pull the lever on Ricky Ray Rector, a man so impaired that he declined to finish his final meal, uttering the infamous phrase that is the genesis for this post title. 

Emboldened by the popular response to this act of callous cruelty, we were treated to a decade of truly abhorrent, finely tuned racist proclamations from our ‘first black preznit’ and his lovely wife, the highlights of which included demonizing black children as ‘superpredators’, ignoring the ravages of the crack epidemic (regardless of how you feel about the CIA on this point), a crime bill that will take literally decades to undo the damage of provided we get our shit together enough to acknowledge how awful it was, destroying welfare and unfairly castigating a whole generation of working single mothers as reprobates, and possibly causing the death of thousands of Sudanese children by an eminently preventable disease. 

We aren’t talking about feverish Gingrichian Vince Foster fantasies here. We are talking about acts of the United States codified by law, all i’s dotted and tees crossed. Bill Clinton banged an intern, and then bombed a factory making malaria pills to distract the country and he still won’t apologize for either. So next time you feel the need to climb on your high horse about how Bernie Sanders doesn’t deliver the perfect soundbite for your Twitter consumption, maybe take a longer look at how two shitty, opportunistic Yale graduates have spent their entire adult lives shredding whatever institutionalized progressive values we’ve managed to establish so they could fucking look good at a state dinner. 

The raison detra of this brand has always been discussing things in too much detail that not even all the people reading cared that much about. If we give the keys to Foster at any point, he would probably breathlessly describe this mode of writing as some variant of a ‘high wire act’ because bloggers love nothing more than investing unearned drama into literally the most insipid and lazy form of journalism ever invented. Anyhoo, this is has been a pretty stock opening (give us some slack, it’s been years) so let’s get to the thing: earlier this week, we were graced with a deep dive on the D.

[We also specialized in the parenthetical aside – I’m pleased to know that even though Ozone Park probably has an axe throwing goat’s milk chocolatier, somehow Avenue D still hasn’t come up enough in the world to be worthy of a pithy Lockhart Steele web presence noted gastropub. For years, I had been yammering on about how I wanted to open the first hipster bar on Ave D — back when the idea of going to Williamsburg was still acceptably absurd — and name it ‘D-List’. One night I mentioned this to John Carney, who literally took out his phone and called Sasha Petraske to share this clearly brilliant idea. Note that very little of this aside has aged well, but you can’t really ask drinking acquaintances if they intend to turn out to be fascists or gropers now can you?]

The dive is fine for what it is, aside from the horror of realizing that so much of it is devoted to explaining, you know, 2008. And it contained this observation: “This was the late 2000s, remember, not a time of deep self-reflection in which we were collectively interrogating a historically patriarchal discourse. Most of us just kind of went along with it; Perez Hilton was our pop cultural id.” For the life of me I cannot tell if this is ironic or not.

I’m sure there is some kind of yells at cloud sort of scale I am placing myself on by both: 1. being honestly confused, and 2. investing energy in trying to determine what the various poles represent, yells at cloud wise. I mean, I was out of short pants in 2008 and I don’t remember that much ‘boys will be boys’ shrugging at Perez Hilton (though any survey of the YM archives pretty much indicts us as swimming in the sea of arch, snarky detachment that excused a lot of tendentious stylings). 

I do profess ignorance to the gradations in gossip blogging. I readily admit to dismissing the whole enterprise as grubby — or more finely, not of my particulars, since I think the overall project of gossip blogging creates a pretty big venn overlaps with haus style — and that pretty much is because of the sploogy diccs Perez was so fond of. That’s an underbaked justification for a wholesale GIGO stance, but whatever complex or interesting sociological arguments you can make for gossip, I’m just going to be honest and say I personally discount most of them filtered through the lens of celebrity journalism.

As this not take wends inevitably to a mushy big picture conclusion (and some struggling yells at clouds wise trying to sort out if glib iconoclasm is still a viable sosh medians stance), I’m mostly mulling over things like generational rifts at appearing at ever tightening intervals, and the kids doing their own thing is just fine, but along with every other ignominy that mortality visits upon us, trying to re-calibrate the intervals at which I need to adjust my sight lines is another invitation to crawl deeper into a shell girded by a collection of 70s vinyl. Man, this just really limped home.