this is what concerns me:

dave eggers, judith crist, over-inflated egos

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.

old gray ladies, media ageism, the youth of america

Judith Crist might actually kill me.
edit, April 26: she tried, but I prevailed. new version below, and hopefully soon in a small, local paper near you…
edit, June 2: I really fucking prevailed. piece was printed in the Salem (Oregon) Statesman Journal on May 2nd, and the Palm Springs (California) Desert Sun on May 16th.

A Youthful Look at the Old Gray Lady

Last month, the New York Times redesigned its website for the first time in five years. The new format clearly reflects some of the most popular design trends in the blogosphere, such as using a wider home page and larger and more attractive color photographs, and giving readers more of a voice in expanded commenting and “most blogged” sections. It’s admirable that the Times, the preeminent American newspaper, is taking its web life seriously. There’s certainly reason to: the paper’s print circulation is only about 1.5 million while its website draws over 12 million visitors each day.
But if the Times wants to keep up with the times, it’ll have to do more than just spice up its website. The Old Gray Lady’s readers are only getting older and grayer – even its average readers on the web, the supposed realm of the young, is 46 years old. And while it prints some well-reported and well-written articles on news, its arts and style coverage of people under 30, who are, for better or worse, some of the most prominent New Yorkers, is condescending and pitiful.
The paper is not only ignoring its younger audience, it’s actually alienating them with its stilted, naive articles on hipster culture. When covering popular indie music, such as in profiles of Deerhoof (November) and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (September and December), the Times consistently compares every group to Radiohead no matter how different they may sound, because it’s the only band that the average affluent, middle-aged, college-educated Times reader might have heard of and associate with “indie.” When covering the “growing popularity” of the “beer pong” drinking game in a feature article in October 2005, the Times consistently referred to “beer pong” when they were actually discussing “Beirut,” an entirely different game. The paper only realized its mistake after Gawker caught on and publicized it.
Perhaps the best example of the paper’s us and them attitude and mishandling of stories about youth culture is their coverage of the social networking website MySpace.com. On August 28, 2005, the Times printed its first full article on the popular site, a 2,100-word feature brimming with patronizing and half-true generalizations. “MySpace is… a place where the walls are papered with posters and photographs, the music is loud, and grownups are an alien species,” wrote Times reporter Alex Williams. “Although many people over 30 have never heard of MySpace, it has about 27 million members… and passed Google in April in hits,” five months before the Times bothered to write about it.
Since this late discovery, the paper has mentioned MySpace more than 60 times in the last six months; it’s become a stand-in for real substantive reporting on young adults and what they’re doing. On February 19, MySpace inspired an 1,800-word feature article about young adults’ digital self-portraiture, as is often displayed on the site. Williams quoted developmental psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, who summed up the “new trend” as reflective of the idea that, “Adolescents think people are more interested in them than they actually are, that people are always looking at them and taking note of what they are doing.”
But this is exactly what the Times does: it’s at once obsessed with youth culture and patronizing and dismissive of it. The paper should be thinking beyond its average middle-aged reader, to the future of newspaper journalism and about their influence over the media as a whole. And why not to this new generation of potential newspaper readers? Their disposable income makes them attractive to advertisers, and they’re intelligent, discerning media consumers, supposedly the Times’ audience. But they don’t respect the Times, and why should they? The Times doesn’t respect them.
If the paper wants to get serious about its future, it should either get qualified reporters who know what they’re talking about – or leave youth culture to the dozens of other periodicals that do it better.

the family subotnick, inertia, meaninglessness

January, 2006. profile.

On the wall to the left of Jacob Subotnick’s bedroom door are three-foot letters spelling out “BEER” in green spray paint. Red plastic cups and Stella Artois bottles are strewn about the living room on the coffee table and folding TV trays in front of a television blaring an old episode of Law and Order. There are bits of toilet paper on the floor. Jacob shares the Bushwick loft with three other NYU students, one of whom asks if Jacob would like him to turn off the TV. Jacob says it doesn’t matter.
He moved out to Bushwick because it’s cheaper, and because he put off finding an apartment until the last minute, when no more East Village leases were to be had. “I certainly like it more out here. To me it somehow fees like the country, even though I live amidst a bunch of warehouses and factories,” he says over the melodic clink-clunk-clunk-clink of the metal factory across the street. He takes a green disposable lighter and a pack of Lucky Strikes out of his pocket and places them on the table next to a Stella bottle containing a couple inches of cigarette butts and ash. Jacob is scruffy and barefoot, wearing a black T-shirt and dark jeans, looking rumpled and tired as if he just rolled out of bed at two in the afternoon, which doesn’t seem entirely unlikely. His speech is measured and he yawns frequently, sometimes taking off his glasses off to rub his eyes.
Jacob is a senior at NYU where he studies music production. “He has a definite talent in the medium,” says his friend Jesse Malmed. “I wonder sometimes if he will live up to his potential.” But Jacob sees music less as his calling and more as a last resort. “It was the only logical way to go,” he says between drags from his cigarette. “The way that I got started was we just had all this extra equipment in our house so I could record all these bands in high school.”
Jacob was born in Santa Monica on September 2, 1984 to Joan La Barbara, a renowned singer, and Morton Subotnick, one of the premier composers of electronic music in the U.S. and a celebrated professor. When Jacob was six months old, the family moved to Pecos, a small town in New Mexico. As an only child, he accompanied his parents on their near-constant travels. “I would always go with them to all these bizarre places.” He pauses. “Well, not that bizarre, like Western Europe. But their music was certainly bizarre.” Morton Subotnick’s compositions are more soundscapes than traditional songs, and Joan La Barbara has worked with everyone from John Cage to Steve Reich.
They’re both bold-faced names in the New York City music world that Jacob is trying to maneuver through relatively unnoticed, which is nearly impossible when your dad teaches at your college, in your department. “The first like couple semesters, every music class I was in, they’d do the roll and be like, Oh, are you Mort’s kid?” He sighs. “But it doesn’t, like, bother me necessarily.” During the final for his ear training class, Jacob was singing off-key when the professor stopped him. “He was like, well, I trust that you actually can do this based on your parents. And I think I probably passed specifically because the guy had faith that I was actually capable of doing it even though I didn’t try.” I ask if he thinks he could’ve passed on his own merits if he had tried. He shrugs and lights another cigarette.
In recent years, the electronica movement in contemporary music has introduced Morton Subotnick to younger fans. He’s influenced popular bands from Radiohead to Animal Collective to Caribou, whose most recent album includes a track entitled “Subotnick.” “When I first moved out here one of the people who worked at the store across the street looked at my credit card and was like, Subotnick? Are you related to the one?” He laughs and shakes his head. “The majority of people who live in this area are like into that avant garde kind of stuff,” he says. There have been a few “bizarre” low-fi electronica concerts in Bushwick that Jacob’s friends and neighbors went to, but he doesn’t like the music.
Jacob’s friend Ari Phillips realized just what kind of music Jacob prefers when they were driving from New York to New Mexico two summers ago along the southern route. “I had brought my entire CD collection for the road trip and all Jacob wanted to listen to was pop-country radio stations,” Ari says. “I memorized ‘Live Like You Were Dying’ by Tim McGraw.”
When I ask Jacob if he likes his father’s music, he says, “No,” then quickly backpedals, laughing. “I mean, I don’t dislike it, but I’m certainly not actively interested in it.” Nor is he interested in composing music at all, preferring to collaborate with others as a musician or producer. Like most of his friends in New Mexico, Jacob learned guitar and played in indie rock bands on and off throughout high school and college. His high school band was called “Jacob’s Room,” inspired by their choice of practice space – and the poster in the room for the avant garde opera of the same name that Jacob’s parents premiered in 1985.
So what does his father think about his son doing music? “He’s never really said much about it,” Jacob says, flipping the lighter between his fingers. “He does keep saying it would be neat if there was a lawyer in the family.”
In September, Jacob had his first experience being paid to record and produce in a professional studio when a musician friend flew him out to San Francisco. “The final day we decided to try to do like a rough mix of everything. We went from noon ‘til eight in the morning the next day. From what I hear from my parents you just have days that are like 24 hours straight. Which is somehow appealing to me,” he says. “I just enjoy recording. But as far as like a job it’s pretty sweet. Like, everything is so laid back.” At that, he drops the lighter under the table and groans, and, with what seems an infinite amount of energy, leans down, grabs it and places it on the far corner of the table.
Aside from recording marathons, Jacob’s life is relatively laid back and sweet itself. When I ask what a typical day is like for him, his eyes glaze over and he taps his cheek with his finger. “I don’t know if there is a typical day…” he trails off. “I just sort of do whatever seems to happen.”

dan piraro, clinton hill, chocolate

November, 2005. profile.

Last week was San Francisco, next is Los Angeles, but today, Sunday, syndicated cartoonist Dan Piraro is at home in Brooklyn, and that means football: the Dallas Cowboys versus the New York Giants.
“I’m watching this in hopes that the Dallas Cowboys lose,” he says with a wry smile. “I always root against any Texas team for any reason.”
Dan’s deadline is Monday, so he spends Sunday watching the game while drawing all of the week’s Bizarro cartoons, sitting on the couch with his stocking feet on the wood coffee table, gaze alternating between the television and the cardboard and cartoon balanced on a pillow in his lap. He has short, dark hair, with sideburns that flare out below his earlobes and tiny silver hoop earrings. Black Clark Kent glasses balance on a large nose. A tiny burst of facial hair about an inch long sprouts out from under his bottom lip, and he twirls it and narrows his eyes when he’s anxious or concentrating or both.
“I get done a lot faster if I just listen to music and don’t watch TV. But…” he looks back at the television. When he misses a good play, there’s a minor battle with the remote control before he finagles the TiVo into replaying the segment. The TiVo console stands on its side next to the television and the hundreds of compact discs set in tall, precarious towers. The living room is bright and overwhelming, with lime green walls and chairs carved from hunks of wood, throw pillows shaped like pigeons and gorillas, and nearly every useable surface occupied by a mess of papers, a little sculpture or a stack of hardcover comic books.
“How cool would it be to send all those rednecks home angry.” It’s not a question. Dan’s bitterness toward Texas is born from a combination of liberal politics and personal experience: he lived in Dallas for 22 years, pining for a move but feeling obligated to stay and support his family, until he discovered that his wife was cheating on him. After they divorced, he moved to New York, a city he’d often fantasized about since childhood.
When he’s drawing, Dan keeps the sound down on the TV to avoid the commentators. He mimics their accents and mocks the players’ names, often laughing at these imitations, a high-pitched giggle that makes him seem much younger than 47. He pencils each panel on letter-sized paper, then inks over the lines, finishing the bulk of the week’s work in a few hours, mostly while watching football. Drawing has always been Dan’s favorite thing to do, but he credits his sense of humor for getting him out of commercial illustration and into cartooning. “I was always class clown. Occasionally I would get in trouble for it, but I usually knew when to stop, where to draw the line.”
Nearly twenty years after it first appeared in print, Bizarro is syndicated by King Features and is printed in over 250 newspapers, and Dan has published ten different collections of the cartoon. Despite his success, or perhaps because of it, he is acutely aware of how he measures up to other cartoonists, many of whom outsource some work to save time. Dan, however, likes to maintain complete creative control. “Reason #423 of why I am not rich and probably never will be. Reason #422 is I’m a lousy businessman and I hate marketing. #421, I can’t keep my mouth shut about the things I believe.” Dan, an animal-rights activist and vegan, started criticizing animal cruelty in Bizarro only a few years ago, but most of his more partisan political commentaries didn’t appear until before the election last fall. Those cartoons are often the targets of fiery hate mail, some of which he uses in his stand-up comedy routines. He reads them aloud in an impassioned performance for me and the television. The first letter rambles about Dan’s liberal leanings and atheist tendencies before a warning: when Jesus returns for the last judgment, “you will be sorry.” Dan’s response: “When Santa Claus returns and feeds conservatives to his magic reindeer, you’ll be sorry.” Another letter tells him that Bizarro is not his political pulpit.
“There’s always the people who say I am not Doonesbury,’” he says, and launches into a sneering imitation of his critics. “‘Does the first amendment give you the right to desecrate other people’s beliefs? Yes, yes it does. That’s exactly what it means!” He sighs. “This country’s so screwed up.”
Dan muses about finishing his Bizarro run and devoting more time to “other projects,” presumably more cross-country jaunts and oil painting. “I’ve always planned to retire and produce paintings and drawings and have gallery representation and sell some work,” he says. “I think I’ll be remembered as one of the better gag cartoonists of the late 20th century.” He giggles, then spins around and opens a drawer on a brushed metal cabinet, takes out a dark chocolate candy bar and breaks off a small chunk. “I eat tiny amounts all day. It’s good for you.” He pops the piece in his mouth. I mention the mood-enhancing qualities of chocolate and he laughs. “I need all the mood-enhancing I can get.”