I realize I’m lazy but it’s not like I’ve been doing nothing! check out my piece in the new issue of Anthem Magazine. (because yes, I am too lazy to scan and post it here for the time being.)
This afternoon as I was finishing my coffee and walking toward the Whole Foods in Union Square to purchase as many groceries as would fit in my backpack, I nearly walked right into comedic genius Demetri Martin. For those of you who might not know, I really, really love Demetri Martin (for several pages of reasons, please see Esopus #6).
This is the third in a short series of small-time celebrities I’ve seen in the last two weeks. First was Hal Sparks (of Queer as Folk, thanks to Kristiana for actually knowing his name) at Kate’s, then Jai from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy on the downtown C train to West 4th. (He only went one stop - wtf? But I digress.)
A pattern, perhaps? I sure hope Demetri isn’t into guys (or at least not to the exclusion of females), but I also hope he isn’t dating the unfortunately unattractive horse-faced woman he was walking with. You deserve better, Demetri.
Then again, I have to admit that he was not looking so hot: awkward jeans, strange tiny red backpack, puffy chipmunk cheeks, unfortunate haircut. Maybe Jai could’ve helped him out. Actually, maybe one of the guys from that show who does more than teaches the importance of eye contact. I digress again.
In conclusion: please get it together, Demetri Martin.
So back to that National Cartoonists Society Annual Weekend of Debauchery I mentioned so lovingly a couple posts back. The NCS never fails to let down this Young Cagle, but this year was particularly interesting in its own grown up, fucked up kind of way. Or perhaps this is all normal and I’ve just finally (finally!) been allowed to sit at the adult table this family Christmas (and my parents are just thrilled!).
This was the third anniversary of the Friday late night karaoke debac- er, festivities. This is, of course, the only evening where some might argue I over-imbibed - and, appropriately, the only evening of which I personally have photographic evidence. 
Songs were sung, - or screamed, in the case of Mr. Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Ralph Steadman - drinks were drunk and much fun was had.
Mr. Steadman was the biggest news of said Weekend, pissing off the red-staters with an acceptance speech in which he trashed Bush and “the belly of the beast,” presumably Chicago/middle America. It amazed me that this was not completely expected - the guy was best friends with Hunter Fucking Thompson for christ’s sake. I, of course, gave him a standing ovation, if only for his Thompsonesque walk up to the stage. 
Other details: winners included the prolific and talented Mr. David Silverman and the patient and sensitive Mr. Gary McCoy, who may use his heavy award for effective cock-blocking cum next year. Unfortunately Mr. Lucci/Piraro lost out to this year’s Editorial Cartooning Pulitzer winner Mr. Mike Luckovich for the Big Reuben Statue Of Golden Naked Cartoon Characters, but fortunately we all know he’s going to win soon, because he’s (some clever and insightful comments that boil down to awesome! here).
As for Chicago: overall, I can’t say I’m much of a fan. I greatly enjoyed the Art Institute and of course the Weekend’s events, (and yes, I’m a total fuck-up and didn’t go to Quimby’s, please taunt me forever) but on the whole, I found the city to be too big shouldered, Midwest, meat-and-potatoes for my sophisticated vegetarian coastal sensibility. I’ve been told by several people that I just “didn’t go to the right places,” but I’ve come to the conclusion that these people are crazy, and I reject their opinions outright. So I say: screw Chicago.
Last night I went to a fundraiser for Urban Glass in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Fifteen dollars for glass blowing demonstrations, three musical acts, a glass mug and all-you-can-drink-until-they-kick-you-out keg beer! My lovely friend Jason’s lovely band Pirate Satellite opened, rocking especially hard considering it was their first show ever. Good job, dudes.
Headlining the show were the Harlem Shakes (no, not actually from Harlem; yes, lame), who tapped into the very-popular-with-the-kids-these-days post-electroclash dancey hipster shit that makes these kinds of young people go wild and dance like robots on crack (their only resemblance to Harlem). Kind of reminded me of Clap Your Hands, minus twins who gaze longingly at girls playing Scrabble in Smith Street bars. But now I’ve said too much.
All in all, a good time, and I’d highly suggest you check out the Urban Glass (57 Rockwell Place, 3rd floor) if you have money to burn on fancy hand-crafted things, or if you just want to see people wearing metallic space-age fire-proof suits and helmets do impressive spinny tricks with big metal tools and molten amorphous silicon dioxide - which is, I’m sure, exactly what you were looking for at this point in your life.
I did indeed graduate from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism a little over two weeks ago. The speakers were boring as hell, but there was much fanfare and shredded New York Times/New Yorker throwing (for more info, see the lovely Kristiana Heap’s thoughtful musings on the connections between Columbia J-school and being held hostage.) We really pissed off the B-schoolers when the wind shifted and blew all of our trash into their faces. Well-deserved, I say.
My last class before this messy sky blue graduation was a final installment of This American Life’s Alex Blumberg’s Radio Documentary course, which took place on a Saturday morning for complicated reasons of Wednesdays, Showtime cable television shows and the laziness of congress. Regardless, bagels were eaten, fun was had, and many documentaries were, um, listened to, not least of which the class’ collaborative effort, Flowers From The Dead Earth, produced and voiced in majority by Lawrence Lanahan and Bruce Wallace. A testimonial from Mr. Ira Glass, addressed to Mr. Alex Blumberg: “I loved this so much. Those kids are so amazingly funny. And you taught them well: it was like a catalog of all the things we hate in public radio stories.”
To listen to that “amazingly funny” piece and all the documentaries from our sweet class, simply click here. It’s so simple, you have absolutely no excuses not to.
-S
P.S. I swear I’ll be updating this more now that I’m underschooled, underemployed and undersocializing. So, like, stay tuned and stuff, for it will be awesome. Or at least more frequently updated. Hopefully both!
another overheard appropriate to my eleventh hour packing:
Female student: Do you guys have any empty boxes that I could possibly have?
Clerk: No, I’m sorry.
Female student: What about all of those empty boxes over there?
Clerk: We sell boxes, so we’re not allowed to give out boxes for free.
Female student: Okay. How much are the boxes you’re selling?
Clerk: Actually, we’re sold out.
Female student: Okay, if you don’t have any more boxes for sale, can I have some of those empty boxes over there?
Clerk: No.
–Columbia University Bookstore, 115th & Broadway
I’ve been a little frantic with packing up all my useless shit for the impending move to Brooklyn, not to mention the quick sojourn to Chicago for the annual National Cartoonists Society Weekend of Debauchery, so I haven’t been keeping up on my responsibility to you, kind public, in providing a blow by blow (ha-ha) of the Semi-Official Annihilation Method Reveal. No cause for concern, kids, I’ll get on that right away — I swear! — but in the mean time, please enjoy the best ‘Overheard in New York’ I’ve seen in a long, long while (and I can guarantee you it’s all true - that’s how we do [did!] it at j-school):
Guy: I said to myself ‘he’s never going to make it’: he’s a drug freak, he has three STDs. But you proved me wrong, my friend.
–Columbia Journalism School Graduation Reception
So being the worldly young master of science that I am, I signed up for Neil Strauss’ (”The Game”) mailing list a few weeks ago to keep updated on the goings-on of the male pick-up artist community. I figured, perhaps naively and perhaps underestimating my own worldliness, that I need to know these things to protect myself on the rare occasions that I might actually leave my apartment. And plus, I find this PUA world quite interesting. I find “The Game” far less hateful than “The Rules,” but it’s still frightening that women (girls, that is) fall for this my-friend’s-wallaby back-handed compliment crap - but I guess that’s why I’m a girl-hating feminist. Then again, their behavior is just a creation of the male hegemony. (Though according to Nick Sylvester’s lies, New York women are too smart for the Game! The Village Voice’s shoddy editing has set us back to the mid ’90s! But I digress.)
And today Neil Strauss chose me. Tomorrow afternoon, he says, he’ll send me an e-mail with a link to a web site that will lay out the Annihilation Method in great detail.
“My assistant is a techno-superman. He has installed some sort of code on my web site that tells exactly how many people are going there. As you know, I’m not inviting everyone to listen in on this. So - if I see that MORE people go to the site than I actually invited, I’ll know that someone leaked it out. And if that happens, I’ll delete the web page.
So please, Susie …don’t share this with anyone.”
I’ll admit, I was pretty excited. But now I feel a little dirty and complicit, being so willfully let in on this gross secret, this plan to dominate my (hotter, stupider) peers. And it seems, to me at least, to beg the question: where are the women who want to play, rather than always getting played? Are they all like those hideous Rules women, hell-bent on getting married and having babies? (Rule #7: “Close the deal - Rules women do not date for more than two years.”) Can men just not stand the idea of getting played, of not having the power in a relationship? Are the Rules women right to always give the man the upper hand, to exert their power only by withholding sex? Do women really only care about goddamn babies?!
Until I complete the spiral downward into the ninth circle of utter despair over this gender inequality, I’ll perhaps propel myself even further by studying the Annihilation Method - while finishing up Are Men Necessary?, of course.
http://www.gawker.com/news/columbia-journalism-school/columbia-jschool-teaches-its-kids-to-drink-172573.php
It’s true, it’s all true. All events “open to the public” on campus have free alcohol. And at the beginning of the schoolyear, in August, they promised us this last party would have free alcohol. Lies and lying liars. I guess that’s what we get from a school that for all intents and purposes is inexplicably run by Newsday.
I said it before and I’ll say it again: new T-shirts.
“no education, no money, no future”
or the other favorite.
“Columbia Graduate School of Journalism: It doesn’t have to be good.” Plus now we could add “Or true.”
Sweet.
I edited this in literally ten (10) minutes. It’s not like J.C. knows who Eggers is anyway. And it’s not like I care!
Manic-depressive, narcissistic and messy as hell: Dave Eggers, the author of the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (’01), has used this self-important style consistently throughout his different works, though it appears in varying degrees of intensity, in proportion to the length of his stories; the longer they get, the more he digs in, until he’s burrowing under your skin and scratching his name in the bone.
Eggers is always either soaring or wallowing. It’s exhausting, all this bouncing between extremes with little if anything in between; it’s just like a real life manic-depressive friend off their meds, needy and cloying. Its his own brand of what some critics have coined “hyperactive realism”: He loves and lives life to its fullest, from hunger and desire to glorious athleticism and physical movement to his over-detailed and often beautiful physical descriptions.
He chews over the beauty of life in long passages saturated in color and sensation. Everything is warm or cold, loud or quiet, “sad and sickly or glamorous and new” (AHWOSG). Everything is intense and there is little, if any, middle ground. One moment he’s sure that he and his brother Toph could escape from their car were they to careen off a cliff on Highway 1, and the next he can’t leave Toph home alone without being obsessed with visions of his brother’s death.
Out the door, down the steps and into the car and as I’m backing out of the driveway there is the usual euphoria –
Free!
– which pretty much overtakes me. Often I laugh out loud, giggle, bang the steering wheel a few times, grinning, put the right tape in the stereo – This time lasts for ten, twelve seconds. Then, at the moment that I am turning the corner, I become convinced, in a flash of pure truth-seeing –it happens every time – that Toph will be killed. (AHWOSG)
Eggers starts this scene off proud of himself for getting out of the house, and ends up fantasizing about all the gory details of Toph’s death (“handcuffs, floorboards, clown suits, leather, videotape, duct tape, knives, bathtubs, refrigerators”) and wallowing in his guilt and self-loathing.
Eggers’ protracted thoughts on death and violence are just as obsessive in their language and extremity as his happier visions. In one of the stories from his collection How We Are Hungry (’05), he describes the short life of a somewhat maniacal dog. This is how the fast dog introduces himself to the reader:
Oh I’m a fast dog. I’m fast-fast. It’s true and I love being fast I admit it I love it. You know fast dogs. Dogs that just run by and you say, Damn! That’s a fast dog! Well that’s me. A fast dog. I’m a fast fast dog. Hooooo! Hoooooooo!
This story is titled After I was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned, and in the end, the loveable, arrogant fast fast dog dies in this river, dirty and alone.
Death lurks from the beginning of Eggers’ first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity! (’03): on the very first page, the reader is told that the principal character Will is already dead. In one of Will’s post-mortem flashbacks, he, Hand and Jack, the main Velocity! Characters, are riding high after a successful junior high school dance, complete with making out and light petting. To celebrate, they go to a farm, douse a cow in gasoline and burn it alive “with total detachment.” Fifteen years later, Will is still consumed by his guilt over the dead cow. Sometimes this earnest brooding can be amusing, such as the first couple times Eggers fantasizes about his brother’s death (not the second dozen) but it usually just stumbles along, puffed up and unwieldy.
Eggers and his narrators speak of this desire and depression directly to the reader. “Please look. Can you see us? Can you see us, in our little red car?” he pleads with his reader (AHWOSG). Can you see him? Do you feel sorry for him yet? And do you like the book? He’s writing it for you, you know.
Eggers’ work isn’t intolerable without exception. In his short story The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water, Eggers periodically interrupts the story to humorously deconstruct his work for the reader, in “There is almost no sadness in this story,” “This story is not about Pilar and Hand falling in love,” and “The horses had no symbolic value” – there’s just a few too many of these proclamations. In You Shall Know Our Velocity!, Hand explains to the reader that “on the surface this story is ludicrous and all of its terms are absurd.” And if you were wondering, as Eggers is sure you were, “the pig symbolizes nothing,” just like those horses.
Eggers’ dialogue often feels authentic, and his quirky metaphors and similes can be charming, such as when he and Toph “lose weeks like buttons, like pencils” (AHWOSG). These are diamonds in the very rough, and partly redeem the otherwise rambling, self-important and affected. Most of Eggers’ writing feels like a messy notebook that hasn’t been edited or even proofread. This aesthetic can be great in small doses, but it’s difficult to not get sick of it after a while, the constant ups and downs, the narcissism, the need to be innovative and new, even if it means using cheap and easy gimmicks. These tricks might compelling if they were one in a dozen pages, but Eggers over salts his writing until it’s bloated with tricks – drawings, diagrams (AHWOSG), photographs and scanned notes (Velocity!). They’re not incorporated enough to sustain interest beyond their novelty, but they cloud and distract from Eggers’ good moments. Eggers would be wise to work shorter, and have the guts to edit his stream of self-conscious down to its best.