The Awl

Why Do People Take Snapshots of Themselves Holding Decapitated Heads?

Choire Sicha — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 11:10:49 +0000

Last year, the Army undertook a war crimes probe, with, as evidence, some 4000 photos and videos from Afghanistan. Which sound in some cases really bad, and in some cases, in extremely poor taste: posing next to dead bodies alone seems like a gross way to pass the time. Apparently people really get into this: "Soldiers have told investigators that such photos of dead bodies were passed around like trading cards on thumb drives and other digital storage devices." 12 soldiers in all have been charged, most of them for lesser crimes; five were charged regarding "premeditated murder." Now Der Spiegel has just published three of the photographs, but apparently has access to a large number of them. And now, what will happen? "Commanders in Afghanistan are bracing themselves for possible riots and public fury triggered by the publication of 'trophy' photographs of US soldiers posing with the dead bodies of defenceless Afghan civilians they killed." The first court martial will result in a guilty plea to murder—and evidence against the others involved.

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Cheery Talking Head Delivers Sad News, 00's Version

Choire Sicha — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:00:46 +0000

Why Journalists Should Think Hard About Their Twitter Wallpaper: A small but excellent point!

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Bizarre 'No Problem' Obsession Persists

Choire Sicha — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:50:26 +0000

The New York Times continues its inexplicable war against the phrase "no problem," which we noted last week. Asked an apparently very bored reader of the Styles section, to the Social Q's column: "Have you noticed that young people are substituting the phrase 'no problem' for 'you're welcome'?" The useless answer: "Take a common transaction: I pass you the milk. You thank me. I reply: 'No problem.' Well, of course it's not a problem! It's a common courtesy." Oh, these young people and their highly offensive slang!

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Hot Gadget News, by Joey, My Building's Porter, Who May or May Not Have Formerly Been An "Exotic Dancer"

Choire Sicha — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:42:23 +0000

From time to time, The Awl offers its space to normal, everyday people with a perspective on national issues. Today, we bring this special report on technology from one of my ~~Murray Hill~~ Gramercy-adjacent building's porters, who enjoys golf, tattoos, talking about sports with the doormen and who may or may not have been a "dancer" in his previous career. (As told to Choire Sicha.)

So wait, I talk into your iPhone, and then you post what I say? That is rad. Okay. Right, gadgets. Here we go. Shut up, Donnie! The other morning I was hanging around in the lobby, just passing the time, watching tenants come and go as they do, like that hot chick on 14 with the dog who is now single who always gets delivery for dinner now, you know her? And I am all like, 'Hey buddy, lemme bring that up to her and see if she gives me a tip, know what I mean?' Ha ha. Anyway! I get bored and so I was watching some sports YouTube clips on my iPhone, cuz fuck yeah, I just got one too dude! How badass is that shit?

Man, did you ever think of a time when you could carry around a thingie that is so awesome that you literally could stare at it for hours during work and basically pretend you don't even have a job at all? That is some serious fucking modern age stuff, and it is awesome. Yeah, hold on Mrs. Miller. Oh, you got it? Great, good for you, babe.

Okay but there is some other serious next level shit going on. So last week I went and got one of those new flat screen TVs that everybody says is the shit, with the sorta 3D football effect during games where you're like DUDE LOOK AT THE LACES ON THAT FOOTBALL. So I go up to the Sony building, because, where the fuck else are you gonna buy a TV now that there's no stores, like that Circuit City shit is done and over right? Fucking pansies.

So I go in there and, I don't fucking know, they have a whole fuckload of TVs. It turns out shopping for a TV is like, there's this one over here that might as well be a fucking car, and there's that one over there that's like basically a piece of crap from some abandoned hospital room, and then there's like four or five in the middle that cost less than 2 G's but more than two weeks pay, am I right? And these dudes who work there, they'll be fucked if they can explain what the shitting Christ is different between any of these things. So you know. You just sorta play spin the bottle and pick a fucking TV. Hey, Jimmy. Nah, I'm busy doing an interview. The laundry machines are fine! Nah, all the water in New York City is brown this year. Seriously. They changed some fucking pipes or something upstate somewhere. It'll wash out, don't worry about it!

Where was I? The TV. So. Except then you know you gotta buy a bunch of space age NASA fucking cables, called like "Hidme" or something. Basically they are just some bigass cables that cost two weeks pay, I don't know, Google it.

So you drag this shit home and you hook it up and then guess what? This modern age ain't all fucking great, you know what I mean? It's not like we live in space bubbles with free hookers everywhere on Planet Titties yet. When you use these weird Hid-me cables, suddenly everything is like you are watching fucking Mothra Hates On Godzilla. It's like you hear the sound and see the picture but it's all messed up, like watching Robin Byrd when you're really high. It's like you can hear her motorboating someone's tits and then like five seconds later you hear her going "Bllllbbbth." So what the fuck is that? These cables cost like fifty bucks, and they can't even get the sound into your TV without it being like a fucked-up foreign film? What the fuck is with this world, am I right?

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Reality Show Set Was Actually Turkish Prison

Choire Sicha — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:00:32 +0000

How bad do you want to be on TV? Bad enough that maybe you could be tricked into being held captive for two months in a villa outside Istanbul, because there actually was no show? BECAUSE YES, THAT HAPPENED. The nine women weren't harmed but "were told to fight each other, to wear bikinis and to dance by the villa's pool." Which, sounds pretty much like my last weekend, only much longer, and therefore better? But also, how do you know that the reality show for which you are "auditioning" is a real reality show, not a prison? There are a couple of ways to know, and one of them is that there are cameras filming things. But seriously this is clearly the worst thing about our modern age, the people being held captive, so much worse than blogs and Facebook. This is like, what if you were forced every day to update your status on a Facebook that wasn't actually connected to the Internet and no one could see it? Oh and also losing your liberty. Bad too.

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Roger Ebert, Are You In Good Company?

Choire Sicha — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:00:34 +0000

Roger Ebert came out of the A.A. closet last week, with a long and fascinating essay about his experience in A.A. Lots of people loved it, and found it pretty educational. But what are the negative repercussions of this, asked some in the comments-as A.A. has no public spokespeople and it asks that media outlets keep members private and also (mildly) asks that members don't represent the organization publicly. (It seems like a fine point-but how well can an alcoholism treatment program be perceived if its spokespeople later kill people whilst driving drunk, say?) Of course, it's unlikely that Ebert will give people a bad impression of A.A., unless he goes on a stabbing spree or something later this year, which in any event would be kind of awesome, really-and yet he now finds himself in some pretty strange company, with people who've gone public to improve their reputations and/or careers... or just because they were too wasted to know better. Or because they had a tacky memoir to sell!

· DJ AM, who suddenly died on Friday, reportedly surrounded by crack pipes, was open in the press about being in A.A.; his time there clearly (and sadly) did not have the most satisfactory outcome. He just filmed a pilot for MTV about substance abuse interventions.

· Robin Williams, announced he was returning to AA when he fell off the wagon after twenty years of sobriety... not long before his second wife left him.

· Scott Proctor, the jerky Marlins pitcher who used to try to bean batters when he was on the Yankees. What a charmer.

· Stephen King also went public, and he is really pretty creepy. Ha, no, really, he's great! Scared. Don't hurt us, Stephen King!

· Like the first thing Jayson Blair did when he got busted at the Times for making things up and for stealing stories was announce that he was in A.A. now. When contacted by members to ask that he leave the organization out of his troubles, he replied that his case was different.

· There's Theo Fleury, the hockey player who has a memoir coming out shortly, who used to try to climb out of the penalty box to beat people.

· Oh yeah. Chris Farley. That ended well.

· A number of the schmucks on the Times' "Proof" blog, who ramble on and on about A.A. like it was their LiveJournal.

· Do we even have to talk about poor sweet Lindsay Lohan?

Some will see the Ebert essay as a corrective to the trashy tabloid ways that A.A. gets used by people. And sure, he is different! But there's one thing Ebert and Lohan and Blair have in common: they all think, rightly or wrongly, that they're acceptable spokespeople.

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Things Don't Have To Be "Real" To Be Good

Choire Sicha — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:28:24 +0000

Even though it's a fake, the Jenny Holzer Twitter is still really good. There's something profound about authenticity in there, but I'm off to find some lunch!

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The Two Twitter Users You Meet In Heaven

Choire Sicha — Fri, 22 May 2009 07:17:25 +0000

Pretty much every day I decide I want to nuke Twitter from my life. But the secret is in being careful with what you consume on the Twitter. Twitter's greatest user is longtime indie musician Kristin Hersh, of Throwing Muses fame-and now I realize that her husband Billy O'Connell has his own account too. If you only follow the two of them, you get this hilarious double open-faced sandwich of child-rearing and band-touring and adult debauchery. Related true story: I walked up behind a friend the other day, and he was watching the Twitter tutorial video on their website. Me: "What are you doing!?" Him: "THIS DOESN'T EVEN MAKE SENSE."

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Bret Easton Ellis Is Alive And Hiding In Los Angeles

Choire Sicha — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:00:14 +0000

Where is Bret Easton Ellis? He is living in Los Angeles, spending lots of time on Facebook, and also he is finishing the sequel to "Less Than Zero," which will allegedly be published a year from now, according to Dana Goodyear. Also he is struggling with Twitter. And quoting Joan Didion, perhaps unknowingly.

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In Online Cuddle Puddle, 'New York Times' Takes All Comers

Choire Sicha — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:24:42 +0000

Today's in-house New York Times "Innovation" email-it comes out every Friday from the web folks and it touts, well, online innovation-addresses one of our favorite topics: The idiot emails that reporters blast the newsroom with when they are looking for random sources for a story.

To: The Staff
From: Jonathan Landman and Denise Warren
April 17, 2009

Those of us who work in the newsroom have grown accustomed to occasional e-mail blasts titled "Newsroom Reporting Help." They're pleas for help, reporters looking for sources. Sort of like this: "For a story about struggling artists and writers I am looking for struggling artists and
writers. Do you know any?"
Crowdsourcing
OK, fine, but if you're going to ask the crowd for sources why limit the inquiry to such a small, insular club? Maybe you prefer struggling Upper West Side artists, or ones from Montclair. Maybe you don't want to tip off the competition. To the folks at ArtsBeat, that's oldthink.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/attention-artists/

Well, the point they make is actually a good one! We see a lot of these emails from reporters and we always think: that is so sad that you are talking to your little echo chamber, looking for random "sources" to put in your story. Because they're just going to end up with a bunch of other people who ALSO went to Princeton! Taking it to the blogs is at least a step up. That way they'll just get the extroverts and the exhibitionists-but of all stripes!

Sadly, the Times didn't praise young TV reporter Brian Stelter, who, for a time, was regularly vomiting onto his Twitter requests for sources. It's an insanely effective technique! But one that has recently quieted-one wonders if he was asked to cool it. (Probably not! Innovation, however ugly, has no enemies!)

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