The Pressure Zone

The Mountain Goats: A Decade in Review

2009-12-31T13:16:00.000-08:00

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS:

A DECADE IN REVIEW

TWO LISTS by ABRAHAM "ABE" RIESMAN

This document was born out of unjustified anger. A few months ago, a prominent music-oriented website made a list of what they felt were the 500 best songs recorded and released between January 1st, 2000 and December 31st, 2009. "This is bunk," I said to myself, probably out loud, while alone. "John Darnielle is the best songwriter of the decade. I bet I could make a list of the top 20 Mountain Goats songs, and they'd all be better than most of the crap on this list."

The lion's share of that boast was, of course, a ridicule-worthy product of my inferiority complex about musical expertise. I apologize to any members of Radiohead or OutKast who may be reading this.

But for whatever reason, the first half of the boast weighed on me. Could I make a top 20 list for the Mountain Goats? Should I? Who would read it? Could I whittle it down to 20? Why did I pick the number 20?

I didn't answer any of those questions, but I made the list anyway.

I also threw in a bonus list at the end, ranking this decade's Mountain Goats albums.

(FYI, if you are fuzzy on who the Mountain Goats are, they're a band that's fronted by a man named John Darnielle. He writes and sings all of the songs. For a long time, he was the Mountain Goats—it was a name he used while recording songs in his spare time and occasionally playing concerts. Over the course of this decade, the entity has evolved a bit, with a full studio and touring band [who are amazing]. But for all intents and purposes, it's still mainly an extension of John Darnielle.)

Three rules under which I operated:

*** I only chose songs Darnielle recorded solely under the "Mountain Goats" moniker. No Extra Glenns tracks, nothing from the split 12" with Kaki King.

***No covers. That means no renditions of "The Boys Are Back in Town" or "The Sign."

***Only finished versions. Darnielle often releases demos of his LPs, but I'm not using them here.

And just so you have a sense of the time period here, the decade started with the release of The Coroner's Gambit and concluded with the release of The Life of the World to Come. So that means no "Going to Georgia" or "Golden Boy" or any of the other hundreds of great pre-2000 songs you may or may not have in your iTunes.

Enough blabbing. The top 20 Mountain Goats songs of the decade, with accompanying explanations, in ascending order, according to me, someone who just loves the band a whole goddamn lot, but has no music criticism expertise:

#20: "Autoclave," Heretic Pride, 2008 (Listen / Lyrics)
All neurotics are conquistadors while they’re sleeping. The first two verses are catchy, Jon Wurster’s drums are wildly propulsive, everything’s taut and muscular, but it’s all about that third stanza. “I dreamt that I was perched atop a throne of human skulls / on a cliff above the ocean; howling wind and shrieking seagulls.” Even the last line, with its Cheers reference, somehow makes sense in its emotional free-association. Capturing the logic of dreams: no easy trick for a pop song.

#19: "Your Belgian Things," We Shall All Be Healed, 2004 (Listen / Lyrics)
A lilting meditation on objects, absence, and witness. They say a person isn’t really dead until his mail stops arriving. Our narrator has a corollary: a toxic friendship isn’t really dead until your companion’s spoils of war are gone, leaving only stains on the carpet. Vocals are first beautifully descriptive (“mud caking on their rubber boots”), then chastising (“I guess / I guess / But Jesus, what a mess”), and finally, plain in their longing (“I wish you had a number where you are”). Peter Hughes’s bass notes twist and slide with gentle confusion.

#18: "Color in Your Cheeks," All Hail West Texas, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
It's not too common these days that you get a song narrated by a Greek Chorus— or, for that matter, a West Texan Chorus. A community sings of the times it has taken in lost travelers—be they from Taiwan or down the block. "Some were bright-eyed / some were dead on their feet.” All were embraced. And yet, John sounds vaguely — only vaguely — menacing. A DJ once did a trance remix of this song, but doesn't that just seem redundant?

#17: "Matthew 25:21," The Life of the World to Come, 2009 (Listen / Lyrics)
For a man who is, technically, a singer-songwriter, Darnielle rarely sounds like one. This one’s a rare indulgence into the kind of music your parents might listen to at a folk music concert. But it works because it captures two of the ways the human brain deals with the death of a loved one — obsession over mundane detail (“Find the Harbor Freeway / and head south / real tired / head kind of light”) and grand metaphor (“I am an airplane tumbling wing over wing / Try to listen to my instruments; they don’t say anything”). The only song that ever made me cry on a first listen. Hell, it made me cry twice, first at this beautiful image: “Between the pain and the pills trying to hold it at bay / stands a traveler going somewhere far away,” then at the devastating final lines.

#16: "See America Right," Tallahassee, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
A Via Dolorosa through the Panhandle, sung in angry block letters on a crumpled sheet of notebook paper found in a dry gutter. It hits on two common Darnielle topics: homecomings and drinking. But it doesn’t sound like any other Mountain Goats song—sonically vicious and screamed with scorn. As the title implies, our narrator is too drunk, tired, and pissed off for gray areas—things are either right or wrong, and for Chrissakes, stay the fuck out of his way. All he wants is for you to know how goddamn hard it was to get back to you, the one he loves, you goddamn piece of shit. But hey, who says furious alcoholics can’t write poetry: “Your love is like a cyclone in a swamp / and the weather’s getting warmer.”

#15: "Family Happiness," The Coroner's Gambit, 2000 (Listen / Lyrics)
Hard to remember that this one was written about a year before 9/11. How can you read lines about escaping to Canada and the repeated scream, “You can’t make me go to war” without being anachronistic? Real talk: I have no idea what the story of this song is, but that confusion seems to be written into the lyrics: “I guess I’m supposed to figure these things out / or maybe it’s supposed to be self-evident.” All that’s clear is that (a) there are lines here more chilling than most anything else Darnielle’s written (e.g. “I’ve gone feral / and I don’t speak the language anymore”) and (b) rarely has a solo acoustic guitar sounded this frightening.

#14: "Mole," We Shall All Be Healed, 2004 (Listen / Lyrics)
First and foremost, notice the central guitar phrase: a tender, deceptively simple lick that tiptoes, crouches, and tiptoes again. Every time it’s overcome by John Vanderslice’s wall of pianos, it gains new urgency upon its return. The narrator came to see his pal in the ICU, like any good friend, but then the second line drops in: “They had handcuffed you to your bed.” This is not a visit between guiltless men. It’s hard to write a song that so evenly balances sympathy (“Out in the desert, we’ll have no worries”) and frustration (“I know what you want and you know what I want: / Information”). The last couplet of the third verse is no simple pun, either: intensive care is enforced wellness; living care-free is a pretty dangerous opposite.

#13: "Song for Dennis Brown," The Sunset Tree, 2005 (Listen / Lyrics)
Perhaps the most terrifying part of death is that you never live to see whether anyone noticed that you died. We get verses about the day a famous reggae singer croaked, but the big news in Kingston was a drug bust. The narrator predicts his own nameless death will mean even less: just some guy “jumping into dumpsters." The melody and chords are as simple and compelling as a campfire sing-along. When I die, how will I go? Will it be like deaths I’ve heard about in the news or history books? Will anyone care? Will I care? The certainty about mortality in the refrains is something we all hope for, and think we have—that is, until, like Dennis Brown, our organs fail, and we’re not around to know for sure.

#12: "Broom People," The Sunset Tree, 2005 (Listen / Lyrics)
The most prevalent motif in the Mountain Goats catalog is the act of taking inventory. Here, the list of objects and characters serves as a mnemonic device. In order to remember the ecstasy of teenage passion, John first has to recall everything he saw — both horrifying and mundane — during the daylight hours before a make-out. The garage had a 1936 Hudson. The carpet was disgusting with pet hair. “Half-eaten gallons of ice cream in the freezer!” is the cry, as though the confection was a sign of the apocalypse, because maybe it was. One girl’s body is the earthly reward at the end of each verse. When he finally reaches euphoria — “But in the long tresses of your hair / I am a babbling brook!” — John literally gains the power of two voices. All instruments telling the universal story: teenaged hell and the things we carried.

#11: "Jaipur," The Coroner's Gambit, 2000 (Listen / Lyrics)
In a haze of exhaustion and righteous determination, our narrator is returning home. He has seen things we would never believe: “I came to the gates of the fabled pink city / Hungry and tired and mad as all hell.” He is simultaneously a common man of the modern world (“I am coming to Atlanta again”) and the embodied force of Biblical (and pre-Biblical) destruction (“I am the killer dressed in pilgrim’s clothing… I am the white sky high over Tripoli / I am the land-mine hidden in the sand”). All that can save him is the sweet chariot sung of by the enslaved, be it “jewel-encrusted” or something with a “chrome tail pipe shining bright as spun gold.” All the while, three spectacularly enormous chords give the song a cinematic scope seldom heard in the sound of a lone man with a guitar. Who the hell writes songs about this stuff?

#10: "Oceanographer's Choice," Tallahassee, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
The curious opening lines are a play-within-a-play. "Well / guy in a skeleton costume / comes up to the guy in the Superman suit / runs through him with a broadsword." It’s what’s on TV when the narrator’s lover bursts in with murderous intent, but it also reminds us of the filter through which we see what happens next: Domestic violence as action movie. “Stubbed my cigarette out against the west wall / quickly lit another”—wasn’t that a stage direction in Shaft? The guitars wail, John’s voice rattles, gets lost, stands alone for half a second, and as two people finally consummate their failed marriage in an orgy of violence, there’s the question every hero asks just before he kills his supervillain: “What will I do when I don’t have you?” The coda goes on a bit too long, but then again, isn't that true of all fights?

#9: "This Year," The Sunset Tree, 2005 (Listen / Lyrics)
Repetitive. Unsubtle. No change in dynamics. Wholly linear story. The chorus just keeps saying the thesis over and over. The best line is a crib from an old Jewish blessing. Simple to learn; even simpler to understand. Oh, wait. Whoops. I just listed all the things that make this song great. (Plus, isn’t simplicity and repetition the whole point, when you need to wake up from despair?)

#8: "Palmcorder Yajna," We Shall All Be Healed, 2004 (Listen / Lyrics)
A yajna is a category of Hindu ritual, usually associated with sacrifices to the gods. Weddings are yajnas. According to our narrator, so are group drug trips. Guitar, piano, and bass charge in lockstep, and John speaks of the holy temple — a Travelodge™, of course. The meth worshippers follow the prescribed steps ("Send somebody out for soda," "Every couple minutes, someone says he can't stand it anymore") and wear the ceremonial garments ("Reflective tape on our sweatpants / big holes in our shoes"). The priest sees visions (a house full of speedfreak ghosts, a factory giving him his earthly delights). And hey, yajnas usually involve a purifying flame, so our narrator's only being reverent in the bridge: "If anybody comes into our room while we're asleep / I hope they incinerate everybody in it." Funny how rituals make pain endurable largely by inducing it regularly.

#7: "Love Love Love," The Sunset Tree, 2005 (Listen / Lyrics)
I would add one more parable to the list given in this song. In Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker goes to Yoda because he has a recurring premonition that his wife is going to die. Speaketh Yoda: "Fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side." Anakin ignores him and does everything he can to gain power over life and death, in order to save her. And we all know how that turned out. "Now we see things as in a mirror dimly / but then we shall see each other face to face," John sings, quoting 1 Corinthians. All the men in this song met their doom trying to see the biggest Love there is: oneness with the Infinite. There is no cause more honorable, more understandable, and more dangerous than that of true Love. Kinda sucks to be human, don’t it?

#6: "Woke Up New," Get Lonely, 2006 (Listen / Lyrics)
It’s so perfectly realized that it renders the album surrounding it almost unnecessary. Very little to say about "Woke Up New" that it doesn't say for itself. But one thing must be pointed out: while being a gaspingly beautiful song about a break-up, it endures because its imagery transcends its stated topic. "And I stood there like a businessman waiting for a train / and I got ready for the future to arrive": a mantra for all seasons of change. The world is coming, always coming; the best you can do is blow your nose and stand up straight.

#5: "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod," The Sunset Tree, 2005 (Listen / Lyrics)
What is religion, if not a statement of certainty? There is right, and there is wrong. There is truth, and there is lies. There is good, and there is evil. And as long as you remember which is which, you will endure. The boy singing this song, feeling his stepfather's fists, knows that. "I vanish into the dark / and rise above my station." But more importantly, as long as we're talking about absolutes: "And then I'm awake and I'm guarding my face / hoping you don't break my stereo / because it's the one thing that I couldn't live without / and so I think about that, and then I sorta black out." The best song John Darnielle ever wrote about faith, and that's saying something.

#4: "Against Pollution," We Shall All Be Healed, 2004 (Listen / Lyrics)
In which a great storyteller wonders whether any story is ever true. “When the Last Days come / we shall see visions,” our narrator predicts. “We will recognize each other / and see ourselves for the first time / the way we really are.” Now that’s scary. What if we’re just a pile of vulgar synapses? “Apocalypse” is just Greek for “lifting the veil,” after all. What if the narrator’s windows keep rusting for dull, moisture-based reasons? What if the most adrenaline-pumping moment of his life, when he pulled the trigger on a guy in a liquor-store robbery, was just boring old instinct? Not much of a tall tale, if that’s the “truth” of the matter. The only way to stay sane is to string it all together with mystery, destiny, and other things that probably don’t exist. Isn’t that the reason people write songs? Or listen to them?

#3: "The Mess Inside," All Hail West Texas, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
In July of 2005, I fell in love on a long plane ride. While she was asleep, I tried to write out what I was feeling in the pages of my diary. I scribbled a phrase from this song, because it fit perfectly: “When I felt such love for you I thought my heart was gonna pop.” Of course, this is a song of utter misery and love that ran dry a long time ago, but you can’t lose something you never had. Our narrator beats out painfully straightforward chords and speaks with the grave plainness of a scientist who has proven mankind’s imminent destruction: “Tried to fight the creeping sense of dread with temporal things / Most of the time I guess I felt alright.” But the worst part is that the opposite of love’s fullness isn’t emptiness. It’s debris.

#2: "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton," All Hail West Texas, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
By saying anything, I'm insulting the song. I'm pretty sure the point is to make sure nothing gets in the way of Cyrus and Jeff having their story heard.

#1: "No Children," Tallahassee, 2002 (Listen / Lyrics)
“The thing about me is, I’m not even in the slightest bit afraid of dying,” John Darnielle told the audience at a Manhattan concert this past December. “What I’m afraid of is living with infirmity for ever and ever and ever.” That’s the key to “No Children,” a 2-minute, 46-second waltz that has arguably become the Mountain Goats’ signature song. Is it any coincidence that John traditionally changes the last line whenever he leads it as a live sing-along? “I hope we both die” becomes “I hope we all die.” It’s the secret of this song. It’s the secret of what makes John Darnielle different from all the other guys with guitars. Some problems can’t be solved. Some marriages will never stop disintegrating. Some pains end only with death. But here, too, is beauty! This is not a song of suicide. There’s a reason the sentences all begin with “I hope.” There are things we can only do in living despair; visions we can only see in total darkness; songs we can only write by examining what we’re most afraid of. “You are coming down with me / hand in unlovable hand.” You are never alone.

Honorable Mentions (aka Great Songs That I Feel Really Guilty For Leaving Off This List And Also You Probably Think They Should Have Been On There So I'm Sorry For That Too): “Jenny,” “Fault Lines,” “Source Decay,” “Home Again Garden Grove,” “New Monster Avenue,” “Sax Rohmer #1,” "Michael Myers Resplendent," “Lovecraft in Brooklyn,” “Genesis 30:3,” “Psalms 40:2,” “Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace,” “Pale Green Things,” “Tallahassee,” “International Small Arms Traffic Blues,” “Alpha Rats Nest,” “Game Shows Touch Our Lives,” “The Young Thousands,” “Quito,” “Cotton,” “Pigs That Ran Straightaway Into the Water, Triumph of,” “Ox Baker Triumphant,” “Shadow Song”

BONUS LIST: THE 8 MOUNTAIN GOATS ALBUMS OF THIS DECADE, RANKED BY ME:

#8: Get Lonely, 2006
Underrated, but still the least-best. Maybe you can only really understand it if you’ve had your heart shattered as hard as the protagonist had his shattered. If that’s true, then thank God I can’t get into this album just yet.

#7: The Coroner's Gambit, 2000
The last of the original Mountain Goats breed. Songs in exotic locales, no unifying thread, occasional tracks that are non-metaphorical examinations of stuff like onions, and so on. A bunch of standout tracks, and still more creative than most things people record, but it’s dwarfed by what came after.

#6: Heretic Pride, 2008
Probably the most conventional album Darnielle has made, and that’s not an insult. Plus, the production has never been better. A collection of wonderful little pop songs. And yet, it doesn’t age into a fine wine; it’s more like some comfort food you keep refrigerated and dip into now and then.

#5: The Life of the World to Come, 2009
I’m probably being unfair to this one, what with it being so recent and all. Such is the curse of retrospective lists. The evil twin of Heretic Pride, in a way, what with its vignettes about faith, devotion, and rare creatures—except this one’s scary and sparse. The main thing keeping it out of the top tier is that it mostly covers thematic ground better explored in Darnielle’s other LPs. Nevertheless, a damn fine album.

#4: All Hail West Texas, 2002
The top 4 are essentially tied, so I don’t really have anything bad to say about any of them. This record has the best of both Darnielle worlds: his old-school, lo-fi, lyrically experimental obscurantism of the 1990s stirred in with the maturing pop songcraft that came to define his work in the 2000s. His best album, if it weren’t for the other ones that are his best albums.

#3: We Shall All Be Healed, 2004
A profound LP with an unusual perspective: that of a man who is equal parts condescending and worshipful toward the awful times and hard-up people he saw. If it ultimately fails to tell a coherent narrative, well, maybe that’s the point, what with all the meth. Don’t let the title of the last song fool you: nobody wins in this one.

#2: The Sunset Tree, 2005
Plays like a greatest-hits record. With the exception of a few duds (“Magpie,” “Dinu Lipatti’s Bones,” “Lion’s Teeth”), every song has the weight and force of an epic. Because, well, that’s what the album is. One man’s childhood and adolescence writ large, as though he were Aeneas. Dreams are private myths, and myths are public dreams. The only reason the last track didn’t make my top 20 list is that its devastating power can only be realized as an epilogue. The dedication in the liner notes says it all: “You are going to make it out of there alive. You will live to tell your story. Never lose hope.”

#1: Tallahassee, 2002
Greater than the sum of its parts, intricately conceived, endlessly open to autopsies, never indulgent, and hell, you can even dance to a bunch of the tracks. A great novel in album format, but it grips you like a potboiler. Plus, it’s the best kind of farewell: the central couple had been the stars of dozens of his previous songs, but he doesn’t kill them off. The final track is like the end of The House at Pooh Corner: even if you never see these guys again, you can rest assured that they’re out there somewhere, causing all hell to break loose. When you make characters with that kind of life, you’ve made something wonderful.

(Top photo credit: flickr/sovay.sovay)

THIS DAY IN HISTORY

2009-08-24T18:47:00.000-07:00

[Editor's note: What follows is a selection of writings by Abraham "Abe" Riesman. What they share in common (other than authorship) is that they were all written on the same day: August 24th. However, each was written in a different year. For the first time, Mr. Riesman has written documentation of his thoughts from seven consecutive years: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009. The only exception is the 2003 entry, which was written on August 25th. Enh, and I guess the 2007 entry is fudging the date a bit, in that it was written on August 25th, but that was on Korean Standard Time—it was still August 24th in the USA at the time of writing. The entries come from different sources—written diaries, blogs, microblogs, et cetera. Some have titles, some do not. Nevertheless, they all are relatively frank representations of what was going through Mr. Riesman's mind on those particular days. All names have been redacted and replaced with "_____" demarcations, to protect the innocent. In instances where scribbles or drawings were used in the original written works, your Editor has placed bracketed descriptions of what was scrawled. Please also note the existence of an Editor's Note prefacing the 2006 entry. Enjoy?]

*******************

8/25/03:
Why does this always happen? These two things I'm feeling right now?
(1) D-Plan -- why do I choose to beat myself up for not liking them? Why is there so much bitterness within me when I think of them and ____ and ____ and ____ and indie rock and rock criticism etc.? I just Fuhhhhhhhh [scribbles] fucking hate it all. Hate myself, hate them -- but why? Wmmmmwmwmwmmwmy?
(2) ____ -- so fuckin' awkward with her. I feel so immature now with her. Hate it hate it hate it. But I don't know how to stop. And on phone just now, I felt so pissed that she knew the oral surgery thing wouldn't work. Made me feel SO DUMMB useless faggot child girl need help mommy not a man. FUCK! So irritating when I feel like that. So I [scribbles] goddman did what I always do: for whatever reason, said I was glad about something I hated. Said "so glad you know these things." WHY??? Fuck™© ®
"Alter Ego" by Adrian Tomine -- hard to read
(C)~~```[light scribbles and marks]
went for big run yesterday.
WHAT should I be doing right now?

8/24/04:
subject: "fucknnga"
mood: anxious
music: gbv - everybody thinks i'm a raincloud

i guess i'm manifesting my anxiety at leaving all my friends and entering into a baffling new world by worrying excessively about not having seen enough movies this summer/in high school. which is a rather silly trouble, dontcha think? i mean, when i found out that the dvd of mean girls hadn't come out yet last night, i nearly had a panic attack. sure, i'm a little bit culturally illiterate for not having seen it, but it's not exactly like i've got ebola.

i feel sort of paralyzed now, not really knowing what to do with the time i have left. i haven't even started shopping yet for school.

whirlwind tour of the last few days:

friday--horrifyingly bizarre experience had while getting lost driving in the western suburbs, turning what should've been a half-hour errand to the store into a four-hour odyssey that took me to barrington, wheaton, the glenbard area, and hanover park, among other places, all the while listening to "blueberry boat" by the fiery furnaces, which drove me to madness (if you want full details of the story just ask me sometime); came home and had little going-away get-together with ____ and some others, and this ended with masculinely-veiled man-tears on my part and an act of cosmic significance whereby the last face-to-face conversation we had dealt with "get what you give" by new radicals, and as i drove away from his house, that song began to play on the radio. tough times, but beautiful also.

saturday--went to a piano recital, sat around, labored over not knowing who to hang out with in the evening, ended up seeing "dead man" at ____'s house, but not before spending a few hours hanging out at my dad's block party, in which i got a kiss from my HOT russian housewife neighbor, who was hella drunk, and i also met my italian exchange student neighbor, who just moved in. the fucker's awesome--his knowledge of america is dominated by the fact that he watches the simpsons an astonishing five times a day back in italy. very sarcastic and cynical. going to oprf this year.

sunday--helped set up a booth at the "taste of oak park," then went downtown for a harvard class of '08 meetup. some of the people were pretty cool, but there was this one girl who i had known from before and was starting to really irritate me. she was one of those people who totally abuses self-deprecation. you know, the kind who shows off their intelligence and then says "sorry i'm such a dork" when they're obviously not a dork, and who loves being the center of conversation but occasionally throws in "sorry i talk so much." anyway, i then went back to oak park to get driven to the b96 summer bash with ____, ____, and ____ from ______. it was a good time. i dunno, i'm still a bit out of the loop on hiphop, but it was enjoyable. the crowd was hella tame, except for when a riot broke out during jo jo's set. afterwards we came back to tha o.p. and hung out at some houses before i called it a night. both the b-bash and the harvard thing were good reminders to me that sometimes i feel really excluded with people, but that that's a usually silly thing to think and that i shouldn't just clam up and disappear.

monday--big, full day spent in ______, shooting ____'s music video with ____, ____, ____, and ____ himself. another good lesson, in that i felt really unnecessary and boring and irritating for much of the day, but by the end, it felt wonderful to have spent the time with all those good people, who, it turns out, didn't loathe me.

now i sit at home after a nightmare about forgetting a chemistry class and the holocaust, and i'm anxious about what to do today. damn. i have about a week and a half left.

i don't suppose this post was terribly poetic or entertaining, but i was really mainly going for a document to record these past few days.

8/24/2005
"12:40 am / Bed"

I will leave here soon.
I do not know what awaits me at Harvard. There is nothing about which I am certain, save that there will be chaos and anxiety and a thrilling mess of choices. Certain of nothing.
Is that why this city was right for me?
Is that why Israel was so important?
"The Sweet Hereafter"
Sweet Jane. The seaport in July.
The seaport in July.
Over and over again.
I'll be your bird.
A broken phonebooth.
A home on ice.
My old man.

I'll take the rain
Famous Grouse
So happy in and of myself now
So sad in future
need therapy, need change

8/24/2006

[Editor's Note: Mr. Riesman is not referring to himself when he writes of self-mutilation in this entry. He is referring to a friend. He inflicted no bodily harm on himself whatsoever during the incident in question.]

in regards to last night's "desperate plea for someone to chat with" post, don't worry, things are quiet and fine now.

i doubt i'll explain what happened to most of you, because it was rather compromising for the people who were involved, but suffice it to say the following:

in all honesty, all sarcasm aside—if you are feeling so depressed that cutting your own skin or taking your own life seems like a good idea, DON'T GET ALL PURITAN-COWBOY-SELF-RELIANT AND SAY THAT MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONALS ARE ALL QUACKS AND SCAM ARTISTS.

if you're at the end of the rope, you have absolutely nothing to lose by talking to someone who knows ways to help ease your pain. and nine times out of ten, professionals are better at easing it than your twentysomething college friends.

basically, just please don't give in to that weird scientology-style strain in american culture that says there's never a reason to seek medical help in a mental health situation. that's a bullshit hypothesis, and you should ALWAYS remember that there's a difference between (a) regularly shooting the shit with an earth-mother therapist even when you're feeling good, and (b) getting concrete advice on whether you need to be briefly hospitalized, medicated, and/or given a break from your fears when you're showing physical signs of possibly ending your own life or at least severely altering it.

and for all of you cutters out there, remember—you may think you're "good at it" or "know what you're doing" or that you "have no intention of actually killing yourself"...but once you are holding a blade and digging it into your skin, you're putting yourself in a situation where AN ACCIDENT CAN KILL. you may not "intend" to kill yourself, but you run the risk of hitting a vein or getting infected or something else that could be fatal. it's not fucking worth it.

if any of these things are happening to you, DON'T BE A FUCKING COWBOY. talk to a friend, and let them help you get to a professional. it doesn't mean you're a phoney, or a sissy, or a sell-out to a system that's corrupt, or any of that bullshit.

OH. and also, all of you cosmopolitan types, don't you EVER pull the whole "oh, so-and-so is just going through a talking-about-suicide phase...everyone has those, these days. just give her some time, and she'll get over it and develop an eating disorder like all the other college girls" routine on me. don't you EVER FUCKING DO THAT.

i don't care what rich-bitch school you went to, or how many times you've snorted coke (because, as we all know, doing drugs immediately makes you an expert on how to "take them safely," and doesn't alter your judgment of what "safety" is at ALL, right?)...if you are my friend, i will fucking intervene if i find out that you have an eating disorder, a drug habit, a cutting habit, or thoughts of suicide.

i don't mean i'm gonna pull some dr. phil "tough love" bullshit. i'm gonna talk to you calmly and compassionately, because you're my friend. but don't expect me to stay out of it because "boys will be boys" or some other bullshit justification like that.

as you can tell, i'm angry.

8/24/2007 / 8/25/2007 (Korean time difference)
subject: "on stake-out"

haha so me and ____ are in a weird situation.

we had to "check out" from the ewha dorm at 10am. we thought this meant we'd have to literally lug everything out, since they'd told us we couldn't keep our bags in the building. but we seem to have found some kind of loophole.

we did the whole "checking out" process, what with getting our deposits back and returning our keys and having them do a checklist of all the items in the room to make sure we didn't steal anything... but then they just sort of left us on our own, in our rooms. they didn't change the passcode for our room's digital door-lock, so we can go in and out of our room. we can hang out here, just as long as we don't leave the building—we don't have key-cards.

so we're just sitting here, kind of like we're on some kind of stake-out, or like tony soprano in the penultimate episode of the sopranos. just sitting in the room. we watched the daily show and the colbert report, we watched "the lady bunch" on jezebel.com, we ate the last of his ready-to-microwave packaged meals as our lunch... and now we're just sitting here.

eventually, i have to get the gumption to lug my bags out and get a cab to the hotel, then go back to the general ewha area for _______. but that's not until 7:30. enh, i should give myself some leeway time before that. so i'll probably leave here by 4 or so.

last night was anticlimactic. it was supposed to be ____'s big blow-out final night, but there weren't that many friends of ours still in the country. what few who did show up had to leave by midnight, mostly, because the seoul subway stops running around 12:30. by midnight, it was just me, ____, and two koreans we know, sitting in this bar and trying to finish off the alcohol we had left. i had lost in many of the drinking games from the previous rounds with more people, so i was the only drunk one. it was frustrating. being the only drunk person in a setting where nothing is happening is hellllllla boring.

anyway, we gave up and went home. that's pretty much the whole story.

i talked to ____ yesterday about the language class issue. we agreed that the korean department really needs to get its shit together—it shouldn't be teaching one semester of korean on a summer program and then not allowing them to take the second semester until 6 months later, thus forcing them to jump ahead into second year if they want to keep it continuous.

i've been thinking (which is always a bad thing, and shouldn't be trusted when i'm thinking about one of these issues), and i'm getting closer and closer to just letting go of this language, and of the idea that i can overcome my language envy this year. it'll have to wait. i honestly won't get over it by taking korean, because i have no desire to take korean, and it would just make me more exhausted with the idea of learning a language. however, if i do give up, all is not lost—i learned an important lesson this summer.

i can do it.

no, i didn't come anywhere near fluency, but that's because the program was only 5 weeks long and we only had 20 days of language class within that time. but i aced the class and squeezed an enormous amount out of what little i was given. if i were in another intensive language environment again, i could handle it. i learned that i could handle it. i could learn. of course, this was only a taste. but i did it. it was a small chunk, but i did that chunk without freaking out. i overcame the curse of russian class, in that respect. hell, if i take korean 120a, i might end up with another russian-class-style freakout. which would be a bit of a regression.

the point is that when i do pick the language i want to learn, the language whose culture interests me enough to give me the passion necessary for really learning a language... when that time comes (and it may well be soon), i'll have this experience in my memory banks, telling me it's possible. that i took a first step and didn't fumble.

anyway, this is all mish-mash. this is all somewhat important, but just part of this trip and my mindset about it.

i don't really know what to do tomorrow. i had an interview scheduled, but the person just canceled. maybe tomorrow is the day for that bukhansan hike? nah, the weather's supposed to be shitty tomorrow. ugh, i should figure out SOMETHING to do. i don't want to be a shut-in at the new hotel.

maybe i'll start making that checklist of things i need to obtain and ask about while i'm at KMLA. and i guess i'll do that language homework that my teacher has been sending—i owe it to her, since she's putting forth the effort, even if i don't continue with the language.

i've said it many times before, and i'll say it many times again, but i just want to go home at this point. oh! and i don't know what i'm gonna do—the colbert report and the daily show are both on vacation until i get home! they were my lifeline to america!

Posted by Abraham "Abe" Riesman at 1:51 PM 0 comments
Labels: departures, drinking, hiking, homesickness, language, language envy, packing, russian reversal, the future, tv

8/24/2008
"6:11pm / 2 train"

Harlem/Morningside was a waste, but who cares.
Listening to old New York music. Complained to the ____ and ____ guys about the ____. Because fuck this ____. I don't care right now.
Fuck it.
But like Isaac said, as life gets longer, awful feels softer, and it feels pretty soft to me. I really could be so, so much worse. But then again, I really don't know what I'm doing. I can't remember what my dreams were, anymore.
All I really wanted was to either be a star actor, or to be Leonard.
And now I've abandoned both, for the time being, at least. What's a boy to do? I suppose it's off to ____ after a week's break. But to what end? Or perhaps ____ will arrive. Lord only knows.
I hope I get back and I just get my ____ and get to go home. Fuck it. I'll jog and eat and read, maybe.
What's a boy to do?

8/24/2009
-Dammit, I typed "she" in reference to a male celebrity within an email to a publicist. MONDAYS, AM I RIGHT??
-hey, am i the only one who remembers being comforted by the first season of "smallville" in the wake of 9/11? #adolescence
-for 15-year-old abe, it was just what the doctor ordered. unlike the ill-advised relationship i jumped into out of fear right after 9/11.
-and now that girl has been married for like two years!! is that some kind of milestone, when an ex is happily married?
-@_______ Hey, it changed everything.
-hoooooooly shit. huge icon/artist is potentially gonna do the show. can't tell you any more than that, twitter!
-@_______No! I was referring to _____. Plus, read the following tweets-- you're not married, are you?

wtf

2009-03-31T21:20:00.000-07:00

OMEGLE.COM IS MAD CRAZY

it mixes the giddy uncertainty of the unknown with the mundane banality of trying ot make conversation with a total stranger!! who knows how long it'll last!!

HERE IS INFORMATION ABOUT RENTING MY APARTMENT

2009-03-29T13:41:00.000-07:00

hey y'allz—i'm now very much in the game to find new roommates. i posted an ad on craigslist and am putting out notices everywhere, including here! here's some info about the apartment (i admit that i cross-posted it to craigslist):

$980 / 4br — Beautiful Lower Manhattan loft, 2 Living Rooms, 2 Bath, Washer/Dryer, WiFi

Beautiful, spacious, 1,300 square-foot, 4-bedroom loft apartment in the heart of Lower Manhattan.

NO FEE! 3 of the 4 rooms are available, and depending on the size of the room you choose, rent will be between $980/mo. and $1180/mo. Given the features of the apartment, it's hard to argue with those prices.

Features:
*2 full bathrooms with granite countertops
*2 living rooms
*Washer/dryer in apartment
*Central heat & air conditioning
*Dishwasher
*High ceilings
*Recessed lighting
*Full kitchen with granite countertops
*Exceptionally large closet space
*Hardwood floors

Perks:
*Free high-speed Wi-Fi internet access
*Free cable
*Large TV
*In a landmarked building

Location:
*In beautiful, safe Chinatown, right near the Manhattan Bridge
*Walking distance to N, Q, R, W, J, M, Z, 6, B, D, and F trains, as well as M103 bus
*Walking distance to the Financial District
*Walking distance to Duane Reade & Chinatown markets; easy access to Whole Foods
*Bank of America banking center one block away

Check out the photos above, and see more here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23239606@N00/sets/72157615951867552/

i got some rooms to rent

2009-03-08T18:19:00.000-07:00

hey y'all! so some of my roommates in my sweet-ass chinatown apartment are moving out, and i need people to move in to replace them. if you're reading this blog, you are probably a friend of mine, so i'm letting y'all know first.

if you're interested in moving into my aaaaawesome apartment with me this june, write me. abraham.riesman at gmail dot com.

HEY EVERYONE HELP ME FIND GOOD NEW YORKERS.

2009-02-05T07:43:00.000-08:00

so, i am now the producer for this show.

it's a profile/interview show about important and/or influential new yorkers. they can be natives, transplants, people who have left, celebrities, unsung heroes... as long as they're new yorkers in some way, and they've left their mark on the city, we want to profile them.

the show's won a bunch of awards and we've profiled about 180 people at this point.

ANYWAY, HERE'S WHERE YOU COME IN.

i need to come up with people to profile.

so, if you ever have an idea of someone to profile, email me at abrahamjosephross at gmail dot com or abraham.riesman at ny1news dot com.

i need your ideas. especially with slightly obscure new yorkers.

help a friend out.

HAHAHAH IF YOU ONLY EVER WATCH ONE YOUTUBE VIDEO

2009-01-31T15:07:00.001-08:00

MAKE IT THIS ONE

KITTENS ON ROOMBAS

2009-01-29T21:08:00.001-08:00

KITTENS ON ROOMBAS

KITTENS ON ROOMBAS

just a reminder

2009-01-20T08:22:00.000-08:00

from: http://unpretentiouslitcrit.blogspot.com/2009/01/january-20th-2009-redux.html

what today feels like:

zoinks.

2009-01-16T23:58:00.000-08:00

how embarrassed is this guy these days?

stephen outdoes jon

2009-01-16T21:22:00.000-08:00

the colbert report out-dailyshow's the daily show with this hilarious/fascinating retrospective of bush and the press. i didn't even KNOW about most of these clips! what a personality this president has!

ruth wisse: the conservative noam chomsky.

2009-01-15T10:59:00.000-08:00

you heard me.

ruth "the hebrew hammer" wisse wrote a stupid column for the WSJ today. luckily, no one cares. but i have a couple things to say, anyway.

i'm not going to debate middle east policy, because i'm not smart enough to beat out every foreign policy expert ever, who all still debate what hapened at oslo.

all i can say are two things:

(1) the title ("Bush Installed a Dictator. Clinton Installed One. Which of Our Last Two Presidents Made the World Safer?") and the arguments it represents are a tad ridiculous.

"Mr. Bush removed the most ruthless dictator of his day, Saddam Hussein, thereby offering Iraqi citizens the possibility of self-rule. Bill Clinton's analogous achievement in the Middle East was to help install Yasser Arafat, the greatest terrorist of his day, as head of a proto-Palestinian state."

yeah okay, if you only look at the middle east, you can make that argument. but uh... did we just forget about the balkans and milosevic?

whatever; i'm more concerned with my second point...

(2) ruth wisse is the conservative noam chomsky.

ooh, i'm being provocative! look, here's what i'm saying: both ruth and noam became famous for their academic work. noam is the greatest linguist of his generation. ruth is one of the greatest literature scholars of hers.

but then they completely abused the fame they received for that legitimate work.

both of them said "hey, now that everyone is paying attention to me, i might as well spout off my fucking crackpot ideas about foreign policy! and since i'm a famous academic, then everyone will have to take me seriously! because they'll think i'm an academic in foreign policy! brilliant!"

seriously ruth. you may talk all the time about israel, but let's leave this to the professionals, okay? shut up.

and i should shut up, too. rant over.

hey

2008-12-25T19:30:00.000-08:00

i hope you all had a nice christmas. but let's remember the less fortunate.

you know what, fuck y'all if you hate on this

2008-12-24T21:48:00.001-08:00

for just a few minutes, two of the great men of english-language popular music met and sang a song together. one was a legend who would die in a few weeks; the other had just recorded "heroes." the latter didn't want to sing "the little drummer boy," so he wrote his own counterpoint to be sung in tandem with the former. and for a few short minutes in 1977, that crazy little thing we call divinity smiled on a tv studio.

happy christmas, one and all.

cnn presents: the goatee-ation room

2008-12-23T23:57:00.001-08:00

seen tuesday afternoon:

in case you can't see it from my iphone photo, rick has one too. that's not just his jowls.

so wait

2008-12-23T23:07:00.000-08:00

i just thought of this, but does the election of barack obama mean we'll never see a vietnam veteran in the white house? if so, hella weird, right? that was the war that defined 40 years of american history and, more importantly, much of american presidential politics—but no one who served in it has been elected, and now they're all too old anyway.

never forget this fucking song

2008-12-22T21:49:00.001-08:00

seriously, it's fucking great. "pale september" is a close second for that album. and yes, i was borderline gay in 7th grade when i played this album all the time. WHAT THE FUCK OF IT

Title of Graph: "I Have Lost Touch With Current Music"

2008-12-17T22:22:00.000-08:00

this will only get worse by friday

2008-12-16T09:05:00.000-08:00

"I used to be with it, but then they changed what 'it' was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's 'it' seems weird and scary to me."

—Abraham Simpson, 1996

kate beaton makes my favorite thing

2008-11-30T19:10:00.001-08:00

katebeaton.com

and of course, h/t to the lovely jen for finding this lollercoaster.

and that's how they became the brady bunch

2008-11-30T17:56:00.000-08:00

surely the best youtube i've seen in months:

stick around for the whole thing, plz.

my new post story: small but significant!

2008-11-24T08:47:00.000-08:00

"Silver Slaps FDIC"

haha, it was originally a good deal longer, but they only had room for the first two paragraphs. but hey—the point was that i now have my first SOLO byline in an ACTUAL major metropolitan newspaper! and the editors said they really liked it and want me to write more, as opposed to just getting information and phoning it into someone back at the offices! huzzah!

TUSK!

2008-11-23T22:17:00.000-08:00

best daily show bit in a while

2008-11-19T08:54:00.000-08:00

john oliver takes on CNN's magic election screen.

blunder-scale

2008-11-18T22:48:00.000-08:00

thank god for jason sudeikis—he's all SNL's really got, now that mccain and palin are out of the picture. i mean i love fred armisen with all my heart, but even he knows that he can't do a good obama.

i look forward to bits like this, and to actual real-life joe biden mistakes!

if you watch one youtube video all year

2008-11-18T22:01:00.000-08:00

make it this one:

sweet jesus this is statistically impossible.

in case you wanna watch it

2008-11-18T10:41:00.001-08:00

paramount just released the official, high-res versions of the new star trek trailer: http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/startrek/

abortion contest

2008-11-17T21:01:00.001-08:00

TAKE SIDES.

battle of the late-90s alterna-rock songs about regretting an abortion:

-"the freshmen" by the verve pipe

-"brick" by ben folds five

personally, my vote goes to "the freshmen," but it's close.

thoughts?

and so it's come to this

2008-11-16T22:48:00.000-08:00

timeline:

-10:37pm: i am opening wikipedia to read about the star trek reboot
-10:38pm - 1:45am: i am reading lots of other articles on wikipedia, each leading to another.
-1:46am: i somehow am reading about budd dwyer.
-1:47am: i watch a video of budd dwyer killing himself at a televised press conference.

good night, internet!

rise above my station

2008-11-11T08:08:00.000-08:00

i have no history of child abuse, and yet, as of late, i can think of few songs better than "hast thou considered the tetrapod."

the only other song i can listen to these days is "love and affection."

oh, and also this wonderful and forgotten gem: a live medley/mashup of "love and affection" with "sweet jane," all performed by a largely forgotten group called two nice girls.

i guess this is a music blog sometimes?

also: found on the internet

2008-11-04T23:01:00.000-08:00

not made by me. but appreciated by me.

seriously, a guy named barack hussein obama II.

did anyone else choke up at...

2008-11-04T22:53:00.001-08:00

...the sight of jesse jackson with tears streaming down his face and his fingers in his mouth, like a child?

not to mention the scene at NBC election central afterward, when tom brokaw, ann curry, AND chuck todd all had to fight back tears of emotion. only brian williams stayed calm, but that's because he's brian fucking williams.

seriously—tom brokaw.

basically.

2008-10-31T17:32:00.000-07:00

"I live in New York. Everyone around me agrees with me."

—J. Stewart, 2008

post story: cops shoot two; mysteries remain

2008-10-27T05:00:00.001-07:00

"Cops Kill Gun Sibs"

the answers are not all there, just yet. stay tuned.

another post story

2008-10-20T06:20:00.000-07:00

i know it's not my regular job anymore (i start at NY1 on friday), but i might still do the occasional new york post story. here's one i did yesterday!

"Mike and Chris Made Threats Over Term Limits: Foes"

enjoy!

employment update

2008-10-16T09:24:00.000-07:00

i am now a writer for NY1. i am very happy.

for those of you who care

2008-10-15T10:21:00.000-07:00

stay tuned for an announcement from me in the next 48 hours about my new job. i'm deciding between two offers, and was leaning toward one, and am now leaning toward the other, so just stay tuned.

the point is that, barring some crazy happenstance, i will be an employed, working journalist in new york city within the next few days. i might be one of the few people in america to be actually getting a job this week.

improbably, i return to journalism

2008-10-13T07:55:00.000-07:00

i had a freelance day with the post yesterday.

here's the story i reported and then co-wrote: "Paralyzed Rev. Thanks God"

i also wrote another story that will come out tomorrow, probably.

origin of the market crisis.

2008-10-10T10:20:00.001-07:00

hahaha i can NOT make this stuff up

2008-10-07T20:49:00.001-07:00

front page of the drudge report as of 11:49pm EDT, october 7, 2008:

also, did anyone else notice that obama was the one who (a) used 9/11 as a talking point, (b) quoted the bible, and (c) said "holocaust" before his opponent did? are we in the bizarro universe??

here, at the end of all things

2008-09-25T21:31:00.001-07:00

this blog is essentially defunct (i'll post up my last couple stories from the dying sun someday, but not tonight), but i needed to share with someone.

i don't even really like this movie. but, uh, well, everything's kind of, uh, well...

good night.

i came here too late.

2008-09-11T22:12:00.001-07:00

the first time i came to new york city, it was march of 2002. i never saw this place before the towers fell. i am of a generation of new york arrivals that will never know what this city was, before that day. i feel impoverished. i'm sorry.

hard times in new york town

2008-09-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

so, in case you hadn't already heard, the new york sun, where i was working up until this week, is in dire financial straits and may well close before the month is out.

i don't have anything to say here, so i'll just let you see what's out there for yourself:

the editor's open letter announcing the problems.

the new york observer's story on it.

gawker's analysis of it.

the wall street journal's article on it.

romenesko's brief on it.

i hope the paper pulls through.

stories 39 - 44: corruption, tragedy, torture, and abu dhabi

2008-09-01T21:39:00.000-07:00

sorry that these posts are getting so infrequent. circumstances make it difficult to make regular posts.

okay, first the big stories:

"New Yorkers Claim Mistreatment at Hands of Chinese" (the pic above is from that story)

"Police Department Will Send Liaison Officer to Abu Dhabi"

"Judge Rejects Dismissing Indictment Against Senator" (a poorly-written headline, not my fault; should read something like "Judge Rejects Effort to Dismiss Indictment Against Senator")

"Pace Student's Death Being Probed as a Homicide" (really tragic; hard to write as a result)

and now, the briefs:

"Window Contractor Falls 12 Stories, Dies"

"Man Arrested in Cab Drivers Robberies"

and that's it for now.

sort of speaks for itself, doesn't it?

2008-08-30T09:51:00.000-07:00

politico.com's top 5 stories as of 12:51 p.m. EDT:

story 38: a bigger chinatown story, this time with sheldon silver!

2008-08-25T11:41:00.000-07:00

"Chinatown's 'Glorious Flute' Facing an Unusual Primary Challenge"

new york magazine picked it up, too!

spent a lot of time on this one, and they let it run at a big word-count, which is nice. probably my last long-form feature at the sun (i finish up my gig there on thursday). sad!

stories 31 - 37: chokeholds, old ladies, car crashes, and big rigs

2008-08-23T11:06:00.000-07:00

lots of stuff this week. first the full stories, then the briefs:

"Man is Wanted for 12 Brooklyn Robberies" (featuring horrifying video!)

"Fire at Homeless Center Injures Two Firefighters"

"Court Date Set for Officers Charged in Bronx Beating" (can't wait to hear their side...)

"Business Owners Send Strong Message on Willets Point" (they gave me a break from the crime / emergency beat for the evening)

"Arrest Made in Robberies of Elderly" (echoes of d'angelo barksdale in the last few paragraphs)

THE BRIEFS:

"Politicians Demand More Protection for Seniors" (related to the elderly robberies...)

"Woman Who Crashed Police Van Faces 7 Charges" (crazy!)

stories 29 & 30: the intersection of disaster

2008-08-17T21:01:00.000-07:00

"Times Square Taxi Crash Causes Injuries"

"Another Glass Pane Hits the Street in Times Square"

seriously, y'all—it was the same freaking intersection! over the course of about four hours, a cab flipped over onto a median and hit six people, then a 15-square-foot pane of glass fell out of a skyscraper! onto the same intersection at 43rd & broadway!

WATCH THE SKIES

story twenty-nine: pray for him

2008-08-14T22:30:00.001-07:00

"Dying Woman's Unborn Baby is Saved"

the baby's in critical condition. let's pray. stay tuned for an update.

stories 24 - 28: the whirlwind

2008-08-14T12:48:00.000-07:00

so i'm the crime / emergency reporter now, all of a sudden. it's been exhausting, but pretty fruitful. the stories aren't long, but they're intense to do—you're running against the clock and the other papers!

so, here's what i did this week:

"Fumes Shut Down Subway Station"

"Two Injured as More Glass Falls at Bryant Park"

"Shots Fired Into Judge's Home"

"Developer Bruce Ratner Is Honored at Gala" (not technically part of crime / emergency beat, but i did it in addition to all that)

"Fumes Cause Evacuation of West Side Duane Reade"

sheesh! will this city just slow the hell down??

actually, even better context

2008-08-09T12:43:00.000-07:00

thanks to this post from user "k8t" over at metafilter.

Georgia and Russia fight over South Ossetia. The Caucasus never seem to settle down. Georgia, a "beacon of democracy" since its Rose Revolution in 2002 (which has seemed to turn into a benevolent dictatorship since), and its northern neighbor, Russia are fighting over South Ossetia. South Ossetia declared itself independent in 1991 although in Soviet times it had been part of Georgia. After an 18-month war that killed 1,000 (of a population of 60,000) between 1990 and 1992, South Ossetia is now propped up by Russia. Its citizens have Russian citizenship as well. In the past week, violence has escalated. Reports vary as to what exactly is going on, but it is certain that people have died and bombing is happening on both sides. Many argue that the timing is intentional, with August being prime holiday time in the Former Soviet Union and the Olympics beginning.

This is a very difficult situation for Georgia as S.O. isn't the only breakaway republic is is dealing with. There is also Abkhazia along the Black Sea coast. Russia has been meddling in these republics for years, and it's not likely Georgia would be inclined to grant them independence, as that would only allow Russia to move its sphere of influence even closer. Georgia's aspirations toward EC and especially NATO membership were also items with which Moscow has not been happy. Finally, the completion of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline has meant that oil can now move from the Caspian oil fields of Azerbaijan without going through Russia. So, it is not entirely surprising that Russia has bombed the Georgian oil port of Poti and also near the pipeline. Any disruptions in this supply chain will only increase the price of oil and enrich Russia even more - another example of how increasing worldwide demand for oil subverts democracy.

I was in Georgia last weekend and everything seemed perfectly fine. It is amazing how quickly things can change.

Background reading:
An excellent Slate piece on South Ossetia from earlier in 2008
Eurasianet coverage
Radio Free Europe coverage
Civil.ge (English language Georgian website - on and offline)
Global Voices Online

things are really, really bad

2008-08-09T12:37:00.000-07:00

like, really bad.

don't underestimate the significance of what's going on in the caucasus right now. read the NYT coverage of it after you read that link, to get the context, but basically, here's what you need to know: the kremlin just ordered an invasion of a foreign country. the last time they did that, they invaded afghanistan. and we all know how well that turned out for everyone. not a perfect analogue, of course, but still.

and bernie mac's dead. and john edwards announced his affair. at least no one blew up the olympics yet.

story twenty-three: live at the gay marriage trial

2008-08-09T12:33:00.001-07:00

"Paterson Win on Gay Rites Looks Likely"

okay, not a trial. but i wanted to reference an album by the fall.

update, as promised

2008-08-07T10:06:00.000-07:00

so, i'm most likely not doing a story on the hearing (i'll probably write something down when an actual decision comes down, after labor day), but the update, upon going to the gay marriage hearing, is that things look very bad for the alliance defense fund (the enemies of governor paterson's pro-gay-marriage executive order). the judge pretty much hated their lawyer and shot down everything he had to say, and kept saying "yeah yeah!" to the two litigators for the defense.

OLYMPICS SUPERSITE

2008-08-06T21:47:00.001-07:00

HERE IT IS

second one is my story.

story twenty-two: gay marriage set for trial

2008-08-06T09:03:00.000-07:00

"Christian Group Challenges Paterson on Gay Rites Order"

love that pun. a big issue with a complicated legal history. stay tuned for an update after i go to the hearing.

DOLLY CALLS OUT THE HATERS

2008-08-05T10:55:00.001-07:00

wow. this report from a dolly parton concert just saved my whole week.

"Poor little Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan," Parton said at her concert
last night at L.A.'s Greek Theatre. "Ain't it awful? If those little girls slept
with as many men as they say in the tabloids, why their little butts would have
more fingerprints than the FBI!"

AND

"People are always asking me in interviews, 'What do you think of foreign
affairs?' I just say, 'I've had a few.' "And the boob jokes were aplenty. "They
say, 'What do you think about global warming?' " Parton said. "I say, 'If my
globes get too warm, I just take my sweater off.' "

AND

She performed a honky-tonked cover of the Fine Young Cannibals' "She
Drives Me Crazy"
as my pal kristina (who found the thing) put it: "all this depressing news all the time, and then dolly parton puts a great spin on it."

one quick disavowal

2008-08-04T20:41:00.000-07:00

just so you know, i recommend that you do NOT read the latest story from me in the online edition of the sun. it's a gutted-down (like, as in, wordcount literally cut in half) version of last week's page-one feature. it's only up there to accompany the slideshow and go on the sun's olympics supersite, set to debut tuesday.

once again, sorry for the silence

2008-08-04T20:37:00.000-07:00

my laptop's in the shop, so i'm working at a terribly slow backup computer that i keep around for situations like these. makes posting regularly hard. will get back on schedule soon.

multimedia: abe speaks!

2008-08-04T18:55:00.001-07:00

we went to a pro-olympics parade and made a multimedia slideshow! and i'm talkin'! enjoy!

story twenty-one: the big chinatown story

2008-07-31T23:09:00.000-07:00

"Olympics Expose a Rift in Manhattan's Chinatown"

the product of nearly a month's work; page one of the print edition (if you wanna pick it up). let me know what you think.

they done made it

2008-07-30T20:17:00.000-07:00

holy freaking moley.

tim and eric get their moment in the sun with the NYT, and dave itzkoff totally sticks the landing. he totally gets what the dudes are all about, and puts it in plain english — a task i thought was impossible.

so that's good for newbies, but for superfans, here are some stunning revelations:

The Brule character has proved so popular that he is being given his own six-episode spin-off show, tentatively titled “Check It Out!,” starring Mr. Reilly and produced by Mr. Wareheim and Mr. Heidecker. “So much happens in a day of him improvising and us throwing stuff at him that you want to use it all,” Mr. Heidecker said of Mr. Reilly.

and uh:

Mr. Wareheim and Mr. Heidecker are also developing a game show for Adult Swim that would star the comedian Neil Hamburger. Mr. Wareheim described it as “a mixture of a Japanese bizarre game show and ‘The Price Is Right.’ ” And like everyone in Hollywood they would eventually like to make feature films. (“We’d like our first movie to be a pretty pure Tim and Eric vision,” Mr. Wareheim said, “before we get sucked into the Apatow system.”)

a NEIL HAMBURGER GAME SHOW??

and all of this in the same week that the house of representatives apologized for slavery. good job, america!

the new crop of "those shirts" are in!

2008-07-28T22:48:00.000-07:00

as i've said, this blog will not endorse a candidate, nor will it play partisan politics. that said, what the hell is going on at everyone's favorite "screw you, i want you to hate me" apparel superstore, ThoseShirts.com?

i'm not criticizing them for being "conservative" or hating "liberals" (whatever those terms mean in this election cycle). i'm just literally confused as to what some of their newer shirts are going for.

see, back in the day, you had easy ones, like this old chestnut:

okay, makes sense—guns are good, the sixties were bad. message conveyed. mission accomplished.

and you had the more openly partisan ones, like this classic:

now we're talking! sure, it's partisan, but more importantly, it's totally over the top. solid-gold ThoseShirts.com greatness.

but these days, we're getting into kind of a weird area.

first off, you've got these weird, delusional shirts that don't really mean anything. there's not one, but two shirts that endorse reagan for president in '08. here's one:

wait... what? is that supposed to be an attack on the democrats? how would that even work? if anything, the garment comes across as an attack on the republicans, for straying from their roots! since when has there been such nuance at ThoseShirts.com?

then we get into the obama ones, which just don't really make much sense.

first off, we have one that is childish, but not in the tried-and-true ThoseShirts.com brand of childishness. see for yourself:

yeah! fuck B.O.! body odor sucks so fucking hard! oh wait, you meant barack obama. okay. so, uh, fuck him! yeah! he represents... the FBI? or you work for the FBI, and you hate obama? what? where's the "hillary is a communist" rhetoric? you're just going to say "fuck him"? hell, this shirt doesn't even call barack a liberal! and in the brief time it takes for a passer-by to see you and judge your choice of shirt, he or she will be left baffled, thinking you have a mis-printed "FEMALE BODY INSPECTOR" tee. sub-par, at best, ThoseShirts.com.

but this one... uh... well:

um... what? i'm literally in the dark about this one. can someone explain it to me? he's a wimp, just like mickey mouse? i'm sure there's some political reference point here that i'm missing. i'm literally asking for your help. point it out to me.

and, moving away from the election, we get a shirt that is deceptively classical in its form:

okay, so on first glance, you think "alright, a vintage ThoseShirts.com winner! it takes something that liberals hate, something that's totally violent, and says that it's a good thing!" but would you really rather be torturing someone? i mean, brandishing a gun, sure, that's something people will respect you for, and they'll say "you are doing your patriotic duty" (i'm serious). but just saying "i would like to torture someone"—does that really convey a message that you want to send? there's nothing inherently manly or conservative about torture, is there? it has its defenders and detractors, but who says "it's awesome! i want to do it!" and is respected by anyone?

then again, i guess i should expect that last one from the people who brought you this old-school beauty, which still brings a swelling to my bosom:

god bless something.

story twenty: uprooting construction

2008-07-28T21:27:00.000-07:00

"Mayor Announces Changes to City Construction Projects"

do you think the building boom is over in NYC? the jury's still out...

not a slow news day in asia!

2008-07-27T19:18:00.001-07:00

so, as of this writing, the top story on nytimes.com is about how excited the US basketball team is to compete in the olympics (not really an A1 story on an average day, my friends), the top story on wsj.com is about a somewhat famous private equity investment firm going public (maybe worthy of a front-page headline in a paper's business section), and the WaPo has a piece about theories on the oil spike (certainly interesting and relevant, but not really breaking news).

sure, it's a sunday. but stuff is going down, people! there is news to be reported! get with it, major american newspapers!

let's just look at two really freaking crucial stories that were buried today.

(1) chinese authorities link muslim groups to terrorist bombings; say those groups are planning attacks on the olympics. okay, that one is just a goddamn no-brainer. muslims! terror! bombings! the olympics! where americans will be! americans like the basketball players you seem to care so much about, new york times! and what's more, the chinese government is most likely exaggerating about the attacks, or at least using them to justify the sure-to-be-high levels of repression that are planned for the games. this is pressing stuff! and it's not run-of-the-mill, either: people need to get educated about who the uyghurs are, and what's going down in muslim china.

(2) istanbul blows up. to their credit, the major papers are picking up this story, but obviously not giving it pride of place. look, we're talking about the most populous city in europe (or, if you don't consider it to be part of europe, the third most populous city in the world), a country that is an unstable ally in the iraq war (with its own agenda there), a country with a precarious balance of official secularism and rising religious discontent, a country where kurdish separatists have just recently taken foreign nationals hostage... basically, a powderkeg, and you're talking about sparks being lit in one of its most crowded neighborhoods, then having those sparks linked to kurdish "terrorists." shouldn't we all be getting worried? and not thinking about an american firm known for its buyout strategies?

my point is that it is never, ever a slow news day. any news junkie — or editor of a paper with an international focus — who says it's a slow news day is just not paying attention.

story nineteen: small contributors

2008-07-25T08:46:00.000-07:00

"Number of Small Campaign Contributors Soars"

just a brief on a report that the campaign finance board issued. thought you should know.

story eighteen: brooklyn flea UNDER ATTACK

2008-07-24T07:37:00.001-07:00

"Brooklyn Flea Market's Future is Focus of Town Hall Meeting"

STAY TUNED, BROOKLYNITES

also, the story got picked up by the NYT (scroll to the "neighborhoods" section).

are they really allowed to do that?

2008-07-23T16:39:00.000-07:00

Mortgage-Lobby Chief Resigns

By ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON and DAMIAN PALETTA
July 23, 2008; Page A4

WASHINGTON -- The chief of the mortgage industry's most powerful lobby group resigned Tuesday, just as the industry is defending itself from a hostile Congress and a punishing housing slump.

or, as i like to put it:

KEMPNER: Hey, look over there! [Runs offstage]

JELLYFISH UPDATE

2008-07-22T09:18:00.000-07:00

the story got gawk'd, and i have to say, it is quite odd how the jellyfish became yesterday's big story in four of the city papers. what the hell?

story seventeen: jellyfish (...?)

2008-07-21T20:01:00.001-07:00

"Spotlight on Jellyfish After the Triathlon"

i'm gonna be honest—i'm not super-proud of this one. i don't really know what it was supposed to be, and i think that uncertainty comes through in the text. but there it is.

update: keeth smart audio slideshow

2008-07-21T08:59:00.001-07:00

you can view it here.

big trouble in big china

2008-07-21T07:24:00.001-07:00

i reeeeeally hope that stuff like this doesn't keep happening.

people really ignore the level of domestic terrorism that china could theoretically face, as well as its ongoing prosecution of a low-level counterinsurgency against the uighurs.

this could be bad news.

story sixteen: the tribulations of keeth smart

2008-07-20T20:15:00.001-07:00

"Fencing Captain Brings New Perspective to Third Olympics"

my first long-form profile at the sun (they don't do many of those—it's not that kind of paper). we're doing weekly profiles of olympians. i'm really proud of this piece.

oh and i'll be re-linking soon, when we have this multimedia thing for the piece up on the site. there were some snafus, i guess, because it wasn't ready for the site yet. whatever. you'll get to see it soon.

"it's a sign, alright!"

2008-07-20T18:12:00.001-07:00

so of course, i loved the dark knight. and afterward, i thought to myself, "when has a hugely successful summer blockbuster ever been this good before?"

and now i know the answer:

NEVER FORGET.

story fifteen: clinton, obama, malaria

2008-07-19T18:17:00.000-07:00

"President Clinton Says He's at Obama's Bidding"

closest i'd ever been to the guy. the article doesn't focus too much on the main event of the day, which was the malaria deal, so here are some links to stories that focus on that aspect:

WSJ writeup (complex, but written before the actual event)

AP writeup (short, sweet)

NYT writeup (pretty straightforward)

story fourteen: trenton & anchorage top NYC in GDP

2008-07-16T23:11:00.000-07:00

"Odd Sign of Strength: Trenton Tops City in Per Capita GDP"

do with it as you will.

i know apologies mean nothing on a blog

2008-07-16T20:09:00.000-07:00

but sorry for the silence. some stuff's going down in the family. i'll post when i can, but don't expect me to be too prolific.

oh wikipedia, will you never cease to amaze me?

2008-07-15T16:44:00.001-07:00

who greenlit this as a category?

story thirteen: tools against sexual assault

2008-07-15T08:17:00.001-07:00

"City Introduces Forensic Tool For Rape Cases"

not a big story, but i'm a little proud of it in that the NYT sent a reporter but didn't care about the story; rather, they just wanted to ask bloomberg about this charlie rangel mishigas.

stupid amtrak

2008-07-14T09:09:00.000-07:00

they upped the fares.

honestly, we really need some kind of competition here, or at least a little bit of federal intervention. then again, i suppose the federal government has other things to worry about right now.

story twelve: the mysterious wonder-councilman

2008-07-13T21:24:00.000-07:00

"Council Member Liu Excelling in Fund-Raising for Unknown Race"

a stoic man, playing his cards close to his vest. but playing them quite well.

also, i did the number-crunching for this page-one whistleblower: "How Payroll of Paterson Dwarfs All"

i just did the numbers, folks.

UPDATE:

NY1 picked up my john liu fundraising story. it's down at the bottom.

respect for the departed

2008-07-13T08:57:00.001-07:00

i'm sure that i'm not the first to have asked this question, but what's the grace period on speaking ill of the dead?

i'm not speaking ill of anyone, but i know there are liberals, centrists, and media critics out there who are just chomping at the bit, waiting for their editors to let them rip into tony snow.

none of the obits slammed him, although many of them had subtle indications that future retrospectives would not be so kind to the former white house press secretary.

probably the most fair and balanced (pun partially intended) obit comes from peter baker, who used to be a white house reporter, albeit in the clinton years. most of it is glowing and respectful, but baker knows when to point out the important contradictions/subtleties of the man:

When a flamboyant radio reporter demanded to know whether Snow was going to evade a typically offbeat question, Snow chuckled. "No," he said, "I'm going to laugh at it."
In short, Snow led the first press briefing for the talk-show era, and he played the role with gusto. As the first working journalist in 30 years to serve as White House press secretary, he loved nothing more than jousting with reporters and expressed disappointment when they did not challenge him enough. To him, the job was the "Disney World of communications," as he once termed it. But at times, it seemed to be more about theater than information. He demonstrated little interest in the nitty-gritty of policy and delegated most off-camera reporter inquiries to his deputies. Precision was not his strong suit; translating difficult decisions into easily digestible explanations was.

the NYT does a mini-biography that kind of acknowledges the problems he faced, but doesn't delve too deeply.

the AP tries to play it down the middle, for better or worse. they play up the "something of an embarrassment" comment that snow once made about bush, using that as a way to counterbalance the man's general conservative outlook. not sure it all weighs evenly, but it must have been awkward to do an AP-style obit about a media figure.

the AFP doesn't even try to insinuate anyone's negative feelings about the man.

NPR takes a weird middle path, by having their most conservative commentator, juan williams, do a personal speech about snow, thus letting them have their cake and eat it too.

and of course, there are plenty of individual columns from fox news that are very positive.

so my point is, when are people going to start talking about how much they hated him? what's the moratorium on things like that? i'm not saying i hated him (no partisan stance in this blog), but it's not like it's a secret that he was persona non grata with a large swath of media commentators.

hell, even the daily show was holding back in its final interview with him, months before his death! and the daily show was probably more critical of tony snow than any other source!

when can we expect the backlash?

either way, my thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends.

story eleven: brazilian tourism boom

2008-07-10T21:07:00.000-07:00

"Brazilians Lead City's Tourism Charge"

i'm not making up that part about the restaurant being named the ipanema.

why doesn't anyone talk frankly about 4chan?

2008-07-10T15:57:00.001-07:00

i don't know what the hell is going on, but there are two big stories about 4chan that went up this week. the WSJ has an article up, written by jamin brophy-warren, and lev grossman wrote one for time. ah, another episode in the millennia-long struggle for adults to understand teenagers (and those with the maturity of teenagers).

despite the fact that the articles are about 3 years too late to be breaking news, they're actually pretty well written! indeed, if you don't know about 4chan at all, the pieces are pretty decent entry-points, given that they're written in plain english. i don't know of a better way to sum up the format of the venerable message board than by copying and pasting these two paragraphs from brophy-warren's piece:

4chan is a quaint throwback to the earliest Web pages that have since been eclipsed in the newest iterations of the Web. While other Web sites focus on flashy-social networking features and eye-catching advertisements, 4chan's design is archaic and the color scheme is two-tone. Each page on 4chan features photos and text. One user will post an image of something to start a discussion on one of the more than 40 different subject areas spanning origami and automobiles. Other users follow up with responses or requests for more images.
"It's like Craigslist -- hugely simple and highly useful," says David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. 4chan's utility is its ability to gather millions of people in conversation in a single place and create a "meme-rich" environment, says Mr. Weinberger.

but in a way, that user-friendly writing defeats the purpose.

i don't want to be an elitist internet jerk, but i have to say that 4chan is fundamentally incomprehensible unless you: (a) use it for more than 2 hours a day over at least a 1-month period, (b) have an extensive knowledge of geek culture in all its forms, (c) have a willingness and desire to learn all the previous memes, and — and this is the big one — (d) are not easily fazed by insane amounts of racism, homophobia, misogyny, and death-worship.

sure, the time article acknowledges those concepts' existence on the board—"If you're looking for obscenity, blasphemy, homophobia, misogyny and racial insults, you don't have to dig too deep," grossman quips.

but he, as well as brophy-warren, spends the vast majority of his time talking about how 4chan is a "meme-factory" and how it created lolcats. sure, that point is relevant and everything... but it misses the forest for the trees, really.

it's a classic journalistic problem. you have to dance with the one that brung ya. if the story is "here's the site that created alla dem memes they's talkin' about these days," then you focus on that aspect of the environment, ignoring the rest.

it's like writing about an annual parade—the thesis is always going to be about what tiny aspects make that year's parade unique, and never about the fact that thousands and thousands of attendees are just having a good time, like always. so we never read the real truth of the event, because the event is far more boring than the lede makes it seem.

so, the fact that, like, 73% of all posts on 4chan are shockingly racist (moreso than the homophobia or the sexism, the racism is insane) is not the story that people will hear about. because the story is memes, memes, memes.

and yet, the parade analogy doesn't excuse reporters who examine 4chan. it's the most popular message board in the world, everyone. that makes it a big deal, not just on the internet. how can we ignore the fact that the most-used message board on the planet, the insane, lawless vanguard of the internet, is more of an obscenity fest than a meme-fest?

everyone who uses 4chan knows it. but they're not reporters. except me, i guess, but the trouble is... if i wrote an article about the truth of 4chan, would anyone care? does everyone really just want to hear about lolcats and nothing else?

and what does it say about me that i'm too afraid to actually post any of the offensive images from 4chan onto this blog? have i wimped out, too?

stories nine & ten: local vacations & a beaver gets an award

2008-07-08T23:09:00.000-07:00

two "briefs" today:

"New Yorkers Urged to Be Tourists in the City"

but don't say the word "stay-cation."

"Municipal Art Society Honors an Eclectic Mix"

the beaver could not be reached for comment, as of press time.

beck: the untold story

2008-07-08T18:23:00.000-07:00

today, beck hansen, born bek david campbell, sold to us as beck, had a double celebration. now's as good a time as any for me to tell you his secrets.

but first, the auspiciousness of today, july 8th, 2008. cause for celebration #1: beck had his 38th birthday. cause for celebration #2: he released his 12th (or is it 10th? or 8th? it depends on which albums you count) LP, modern guilt. it's great, but i'm too much of a fan to judge it with much objectivity. feel free to read what everyone else thinks. (i'm particularly fond of the rolling stone review.)

and so, with that double-whammy as a time-peg, i figured it was high time to do something i've meant to do for a long, long time: write down what he told me behind closed doors in the autumn of 2006.

mtv has a little sub-division called mtvU, aimed at college students, and they have a show there that they put out periodically, called "my shot with..." it's pretty simple: they give college kids the chance to interview their pop-culture idols. in 2006, with the information hot off the presses, the high lords of mtv sent word out to beck fans that they could sit on the interview couch with mr. hansen. i applied, went through several vetting processes, and got the gig.

on october 20th of that year, i entered the mtv studios, planted myself on a designated sofa, and after a bit of delay, he entered the room. we talked for about 45 minutes. i can't really describe the rush, but that's not important. if you want a more detailed account of how it all felt, here's a memoir i wrote about it (sans secrets) right after i did the interview, but before it was aired.

here's what mtv aired (sorry for the watermark—it was one of my first dvd rips, back in 2006, and i was using lame freeware):

My Shot With Beck from Abraham Riesman on Vimeo.

(oh also, i've lost a lot of weight since then. don't judge.)

now, here's the thing: they butchered the interview. they took 45 fascinating, revealing minutes and cranked out a 3-minute set of soundbites primarily aimed at selling the CD. can't say i exactly blame them, but it still feels shitty. and more importantly, they destroyed the remaining footage. it's gone forever.

but i have my memories.

so, without further ado, here are some points of interest that beck told me, and which have been lost to time until now. choose to doubt me, if you want, but i swear to god he told me all of these things:

1999's midnite vultures was originally going to be produced by richard d. james, aka aphex twin. how much of a wild insanity fest would that have been? apparently, the deal only fell through because richard was buying a new house at the time.
the only song he hates performing is "debra"—a huge fan-favorite. he said people took it as a satire of R&B slow-jams, a reaction that made him uncomfortable, because he wanted to write a genuine slow-jam—no mocking intended. he didn't want to mock a genre he loved so much.
despite his reputation as a secretive fellow, he thinks he doesn't hide his faith, his home life, or his real self—what you see on stage or in the hour of DIY videos he made at his house is basically all there is, given how tour- and recording-filled his life is. he was surprisingly calm when he talked about the topic of his personal life, even though i said "faith" (and i saw the producers cringeing, what with the flak he gets about scientology). he really felt that there wasn't anything to hide. (take that assertion for what it's worth—the anti-scientology types out there won't buy it, i'm sure.)
nevertheless, he let me in on the raising of his then-two-year-old son, cosimo henri. it was a-do-ra-ble. i asked him if he sang songs to put his son to sleep, and he said yes. i asked if he sang his own hits, and beck laughed and said, "no, see, he forces me to write new songs." apparently, cosimo would say things like "daddy, sing your song about the airplane," and beck would say, "but i don't have a song about an airplane," and cosimo would then just demand that beck make one up!
also, he said cosimo was weirdly inspiring, given that he was at an age when kids don't really know what words mean, so they'll just string together bizarre sentences, based on how the words sound. dammit, beck had an example, but i have forgotten it.
he was a huge proponent of filling his website with tracks that would never see release anywhere else — like three nick drake covers that he abruptly posted just a few weeks prior to the interview — because he didn't really know how to fit lots of his songs onto albums. i mean, where would those nick drake covers go on an LP of mixed-genre acoustic funk?
he'd just seen orson welles's f is for fake, and recommended it to me.
working with michel gondry is freaking insane, because you have no idea of what his general vision is going to be—he just tells you to do things, and none of it makes sense until you see the final product.
UGH HERE'S WHAT FRUSTRATES ME: i know i asked him (a) about how his music is received differently in japan, and (b) whether he has strange dreams, and i KNOW that he had interesting answers to both questions, but they're gone, like tears in rain.

man, when i started this post, i thought i was going to be all proud of myself for what i remembered, but now i'm just angry at what i forgot. i'm not sure i'll be able to sleep comfortably tonight. well, maybe some director kept a copy of the full thing somewhere, and it'll surface someday.

but in general, it was the first time he'd ever talked candidly about his personal life, which is a big deal for beck fans. but mtv (and his handlers) probably didn't really want you to see that stuff.

oh the terror of memory.

story eight: allegations of slavery

2008-07-07T22:26:00.000-07:00

"Ex-Ambassador Enslaved an Immigrant, Lawsuit Claims"

let's see what happens with this one. stay tuned. it has a lot to do with filipino politics, but it still has relevance here.

story seven: local campaigns and social networking

2008-07-07T10:05:00.000-07:00

"Social Networking Sites a 'Revolution' for City Candidates"

it's not necessarily the same at a local level as it is at a national level.

NY1 put it at the head of their daily political roundup, too. well, it's the headline at the top, and the story's at the bottom of the page.

a funny thing and a terrifying thing

2008-07-06T16:27:00.000-07:00

first, the funny thing: the guys at spill.com come up with the dark knight, as done by michael bay. spoiler — boobs.

then, the terrifying thing: peter maass argues that equatorial guinea's teodoro obiang might be worse than mugabe.

long-stewed books and the implicit future of journalism

2008-07-06T15:13:00.000-07:00

in a recent essay in the WaPo, jonathan karp — the publisher and EIC of venerable publishing house twelve — offers a very concise analysis of today's publishing market, and its potential future. shocker: he thinks intelligence is coming back.
'
i'm not the first to blog about the essay: the also-venerable leon neyfakh already covered it for the observer, calling it a "precise, sober critique of the publishing industry."

the gist of the essay is contained in this pithy assertion: "We are living in the age of the disposable book."

any subway rider or bookstore browser can back up paragraphs like this one:

Visit your neighborhood superstore, and you will be overwhelmed with ephemera: self-aggrandizing memoirs by recovering addicts; poignant portraits of heroic pets; hyperbolic ideological tracts by insufferable cable TV pundits; guides to staying wrinkle- and toxin-free; odes to Warren Buffett and Jesus Christ; manifestos for fixing America in 12 easy steps; manly accounts of the best athlete/season/team ever; and glittery novels about British royalty, love-starved shoppers, mournful cops and ingenious serial killers. (There are more novels about serial killers than there are actual serial killers.)

of course, that phenomenon is nothing new (he recalls working on tracts by manuel noriega in his early days), but has reached a fever pitch.

but all is not lost, he exclaims! like marx, predicting the inevitable, dialectic-induced collapse of capitalism, karp foresees the industry exhausting itself of such garbage. what will be the linchpin of that self-implosion? what will save the print industry?

why, digital competition, of course.

Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction will die off, and the next generation will have so many different entertainment options that it's hard to envision the same level of loyalty to brand-name formula fiction coming off the conveyor belt every year. The novelists who are truly novel will thrive; the rest will struggle.

bizarre, right? no one in the world of prognostication about journalism sees the blogosphere as a way of improving — much less saving — print from itself. but here karp is, saying slow-cooked works like those of franzen or messud will make a return:

Consequently, publishers will be forced to invest in works of quality to maintain their niche. These books will be the one product that only they can deliver better than anyone else. Those same corporate executives who dictate annual returns may begin to proclaim the virtues of research and development, the great engine of growth for business. For publishers, R&D means giving authors the resources to write the best books -- works that will last, because the lasting books will, ultimately, be where the money is.

now, what can i add to what karp has already said? an implicit corollary that might be bad for major newspapers, but good for hard-working journalists.

see, one of the long-standing fears among newspaper editors has been that more and more reporters will go the way of bob woodward, largely abandoning periodical reporting and instead taking on lucrative nonfiction book contracts.

i mean, why not? just like gus says, a lotta times, if you really want to get a story right, you need to get all the angles. and how can you get all the angles if you're in the pressure-cooker of a daily, or even a weekly?

that's where karp's predictions might be good for publishing, good for journalists, but bad for periodicals. if the publishing industry really does start going for more long and thought-out books (although he's referencing fiction, non-fiction would clearly fit into his rubric, as well), that could mean more of a market for big-name writers at the NYT, the WSJ, the WaPo, the LAT, the trib, the times-picayune, the new yorker, and so on, to get contracts with publishers. and then boom—you've got better books about nonfiction topics, with real journalism that gets all the angles, but a gradual abandoning of the periodical ship.

of course, i'm prognosticating based on a prognostication, and that's about as useful as a blog blogging about a blog that blogged itself. but it's a thought, and i don't think it's too far-fetched.

ghost story: obit for clay felker

2008-07-03T09:09:00.000-07:00

"Clay Felker, 85, Trend-Spotting Editor"

sorry this one's a bit late. forgot to post it. i wrote half of it, and it was a real honor to interact with some of the people who remember him. other great obits and memorials are available at the NYT, the observer, and of course, new york magazine.

story six: whole foods and urban development

2008-07-03T08:36:00.000-07:00

"Whole Foods Seen as Boost to TriBeCa"

the store sort of represents what the area around ground zero has become, for better or worse. as one anti-gentrification activist put it to me, it's not really gentrification if there weren't any poor people there to begin with.

i know everyone's already blogging about it, but...

2008-07-02T15:40:00.000-07:00

you should read zev chafets's NYT mag profile of rush limbaugh. it's a quick read, and an interesting one, if not terribly provocative or deep-digging.

anyway, the main reason i blog to you now is because of one section in it, from a conversation zev and rush had about other broadcasters:

At dinner the night before, Bill O'Reilly's name came up, and Limbaugh expressed his opinion of the Fox cable king. He hadn’t been sure at the time that he wanted it on the record. But on second thought, “somebody’s got to say it,” he told me. “The man is Ted Baxter.”

lol to the max.

what in the HELL

2008-07-02T14:58:00.000-07:00

ian curtis's gravestone was stolen.

i finally watched "v for vendetta" (thoughts on britain and dystopiae)

2008-06-30T21:31:00.000-07:00

i held out for years, on principle. i'm not sure why, given that i was never the biggest fan of the original comics (they're lesser alan moore works, and i think he's acknowledged as much, in the past). i guess i just didn't want to see another moore creation tarnished.

anyway, it was fine, i guess. horrible ending. really, ending credits? you had to play "street fighting man," even though you nixed one of the best lines of the book, which is V entering the bishop's room and quoting "sympathy for the devil"? and of course, natalie portman's accent was awful and john hurt sort of phoned it in. blah blah blah, you can read such criticism elsewhere, and elsewhen.

my question was this: why do british dystopias fascinate me so much? i'd say "fascinate us so much," but i'm wary of generalizing. no american dystopia has gripped me in the way that "children of men" or "nineteen eighty four" have. or "brazil" and "blade runner," for that matter—both directed by brits (terry gilliam and ridley scott, respectively).

i've spent all of seven days in the united kingdom, and yet it is the british dystopiae that most fascinate me. i'm tempted to say that the fascination stems from the fact that britain is already like a parallel universe to me—very recognizable, but significantly different. but i don't think that's the whole story. i even love pink floyd's "the wall," with its weeping protagonist begging the audience, "does anybody here rembember vera lynn?"

maybe i'm with slavoj žižek on this one: britain is the only major world power without a written constitution. therefore, the law and freedom are both based on collective memory. in a fallen world, when memory is lost, britain is lost. as an entity, it no longer really exists. it is the purest form of dystopia, because it is the negation of the society as it once was. no more memory, so no more britain. well, the britain that remains is but a rump state, no matter its geographic span. it has quite literally lost its ideological soul. in the US, there will always be documents of the law, even if someone tries to shred them. so perhaps britain is the more pure ground for dystopia.

anyway, i also have to wonder: if conditions continue to improve in iraq, will dystopiae be as necessary as they were when "children of men" came out? because back then, i swear to god—there was nothing more powerful than that film. it retains nearly all of that power, but there's a slight chip away at the armor, now that it doesn't seem like the whole world will become like iraq circa late 2006.

the horrible man inside me doesn't want the dystopias to go away.

ghost story: a school in the bronx

2008-06-29T20:59:00.002-07:00

"High Test Scores, and Criticism, Follow a South Bronx Principal"

contributed to this one by doing on-the-ground reporting in the bronx. all the quotes from the kids were quotes i got. but of course, elizabeth green is the real hero here, so i'm just making a note, not taking credit.

story five: pride parade

2008-06-29T20:53:00.001-07:00

"Gay Pride Parade Wins Political Trifecta"

a bit arduous to report, given the rains (don't believe the photo—it was hella rainy most of the time) and the roadblocks, but i got it done, so there it is!

so much for crossing fingers

2008-06-29T08:19:00.000-07:00

instead of the revised US-korea beef deal making those protesters in seoul any happier, it just got them violent.

The rally turned violent after some protesters used ropes to try to drag away police buses used as barricades to prevent them from marching into the presidential Blue House. Riot police immediately fired water cannons and sprayed fire extinguishers to repel them.

Angry protesters attacked police with steel pipes and stones, while police used clubs and shields against the crowd. Several hundred protesters were hurt during the rally that continued until Sunday morning, according to a coalition of civic groups that has organized weeks of demonstrations.

Police said the clash left more than 100 riot police injured and about 50 protesters were arrested on charges of assaulting police and illegally occupying streets.

how are we gonna fix this problem???

an unnecessary post about a television program

2008-06-28T22:46:00.000-07:00

well, after years of pressure, i finally started watching "lost" earlier this month. at the urging of a certain lady-friend, i plowed through the last few eps of season 1 this weekend. hella worth it.

basically, i'm telling holdouts like myself: it's okay to come out of your holes. i know that JJ abrams has hurt us before, but i think it's worth it to stick around for this one. just watch the pilot, and you'll be into it. there's lots of silly daddy issues in the first season, but if you're willing to not pay too much attention (like, watching over dinner after a long day at work), then it's hella good, and you get to the great parts.

seriously. JJ hurt us in the past, and will in the future, but i think it's okay to give in to this particular temptation. comic book writers write it now! brian k. vaughan!