In light of CNN talking head-to-be Kathleen Parker taking a brave stand on how Obama does things in “a woman’s way” (and she’s not saying that as “evidence of deficiency, but rather” that it “suggests an evolutionary achievement”! No, She swears!), I’ve been looking at our inbox with gender in mind. Right now, we’re getting a lot of emails from writers about our “submission policy.” (Thanks, Time. Also, I guess our submission policy is: let’s talk?) But they all have something in common. The emails from men are pretty direct. The emails from women are often kind of… apologetic!

Inquiry letter from a man:

“Do you take pitches? Should I just write something and send it? Do I have to tickle the balls? I want to write for the awl, dammit.”

Inquiry letter from a woman:

“As an long-time admirer of your site (and non-too-frequent registered commenter), I’ve been too shy to pitch as I’ve never felt like my work measured up to your fine standards.”

Inquiry letter from a man:

“Can you offer a word of advice regarding how submissions work, desired timetables, what you like the pitches to look like, and so forth?”

Inquiry letter from a woman:

“I’m sure I’m going about this all wrong, but I couldn’t find any sort of submission area on the site. What I’m wondering is, how does one go about becoming a contributor to The Awl?”

On one level, it’s not bad that many people are polite and self-deprecating! I mean, I have a tendency to file stories to editors with the preface “HERE IS MY GARBAGE, SORRY.”

And also I guess some of this is good news? I mean, at least the sexual services being offered are from men. (Though I don’t think that offer is very earnest, and I resent that.)

I will report back in short order regarding trends in our transpeople submissions.

Happy Social Media Day, Everybody!

Hey, “the revolution of media becoming social” (and freeing itself from the tyranny of copyediting, apparently) gets its 45,385th chance to shine today! Say goodbye to reading magazines just to read them or maybe reflect on their content and start metamicroblogging and adding the “Tw” prefix to already made-up words and campaigning to become the mayor of your local Starbucks. Or, you know, you could just book a train ticket.

by Dan Horton

Dan Horton, a friend and former colleague, works on tugboats out of the New York Harbor for a living. Two weeks ago, he flew down to Louisiana to take a job on a barge unloading crude oil from the skimmer boats that clean the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Crew are only allowed to send and receive one email a day; his girlfriend, Lori, passes along his daily email to friends and family. With their permission, we’re passing them along to you. -Dave Bry

Subject: Daily Dan: Black Oil Baptism
Date: Tuesday, June 22nd

Family,

Going to write a short one today. I’m on break and don’t want my partner to have to go too long without a cigarette. He’s a good guy and I like to keep him happy. Decade older than I am and I can’t hope to keep up with him on deck, a regular Ricochet Rabbit.
 Today we offloaded a good deal of the crude oil/seawater that we have onboard onto another smaller barge. It gave me a chance to swing valves and run pump engines, do ballast and connect an eight-inch hose. It was the busiest day we’ve had yet and I was running ragged. No breaks on the afternoon watch. I’d never worked in “black oil” before (though technically, crude oil isn’t yet refined enough to be called black oil). My last barge was all “clean oil,” diesel and kerosene usually. Black oil is a different beast, a little harder to work with. I got a good coating of it on me, so I now consider myself properly broken in.
 I have to run, but wanted to let you all know that I’m doing fine and miss you all.

Tomorrow’s post will hopefully have more to it.

Best,

Dan

Subject: Daily Dan: Crew Change Special

Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010

Hey Babe,


Nothing much to report today. The crew I’m working with will be getting off 
sometime this morning and the other crew will be getting on. Everybody is 
in that weird crew-change mode… Kind of high strung and spacey, getting a 
little nasty towards each other. We had a relatively easy day yesterday 
(especially compared to the day before!) with only one boat alongside and 
now we are steaming around, waiting for word from the crew boat. The weather 
picked up a little bit and the small skimmer boats left the site this afternoon. It wasn’t really much to mention, from our perspective. 
I wasn’t really 
feeling the weather much at all until I came up to the upper wheelhouse, but 
it’s definitely swaying and bouncing up here.
 The way that I understand how this process works is that the small 
skimmer boats gather together patches of oil for the larger skimmer boats-usually boats with holding tanks either for oil response or for carrying the 
”mud” from drilling-that then use their equipment to suck up the patches. 
I’m guessing that the larger boats also just drive through the slick to 
vacuum the stuff up.
 One of our pastimes is trying to figure out how all the various deck 
machinery on the boats that come near us works, or what it’s for. Last night there 
was one of the larger skimmer boats alongside us and they had the biggest, 
most impressive crane I’d ever seen on a boat. It was massive. I finally 
had to ask what kind of boat it was when they weren’t chasing oil slicks and 
they said they carried an R.O.V. (Remote Operated Vehicle), one of those 
unmanned submersibles you’d see on Discovery channel. The R.O.V. wasn’t 
on board last night, of course, which was too bad.


There is always a smudge cloud of smoke over the Deep Water site, it 
takes up a good tenth or so of the horizon. Though I have a hard time gauging 
that-it’s a long cloud.

I miss you,

Dan

Subject: Daily Dan
Date: Friday, June 25th

Lori,


There is a new crew onboard. This new crew operates on Eastern Standard 
Time, so I lost an hour’s sleep on my off watch. They moved me to a smaller 
bunk room, which I have to share with a female cadet. She claimed the bottom 
bunk before I even knew that I was switching rooms. The top bunk is really 
high and it appears that the reading light does not work. I am twice her age and am an actual paid merchant mariner, not a 
cadet. Been working on boats since she was in diapers, I am sure. This is 
the obsession du soir. I do accept that I am being a tad silly, but such is 
boat life. Serves me right for being an unlicensed deck ape.

Reading obsessively. Already polished off the first two books by that Swedish crime writer.


Love,


Dan



P.S. We have Satellite TV. I saw a story on CNN about how crowded the ground 
zero site is with boats and how that is a potentially dangerous situation. 
We stay about four-to-six miles out from that area, so no worries for us in that 
department. Plus, the tug and barge are an integrated unit totaling about 600 feet long, so we are bigger than most of these boats out here. (I 
assume there are bigger boats but I haven’t seen them as of yet.)

Earlier this week, the American folk singer Jake Holmes sued Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and the band’s associated publishing and record companies over copyright infringement involving the hazy classic-rock staple “Dazed And Confused,” which Holmes claims was nicked from him when he opened for Page’s pre-Zep band the Yardbirds in 1968. Holmes’ take on the song, which appeared on his 1967 debut “The Above Ground Sound” of Jake Holmes, is above; you can hear the Led Zeppelin version below if you’re far away from a radio station that gets the Led out on a semi-regular basis.

For his part, Page — who’s credited as the track’s lone writer — thinks that these long-simmering accusations are a pile of rubbish; “What’s he got, the riff or whatever?… I haven’t heard Jake Holmes so I don’t know what it’s all about anyway. Usually my riffs are pretty damn original,” he told Musician in 1990. Although some people who were playing with Page at the time might disagree about those assertions:

“We played with Jake in New York and I was struck by the atmosphere of ‘Dazed and Confused.’ I went down to Greenwich Village and bought his album and we decided to do a version,” [Yardbirds drummer Jim] McCarty said. “We worked it out together with Jimmy contributing the guitar riffs in the middle. Don’t you think he’s the riff-master?”

Apparently, Page also bought the album the same day. According to Yardbirds historian Greg Russo, a certain John Alusick witnessed Jimmy Page purchasing it at Bleecker Bob’s Record Store on Bleecker Street. The Yardbirds quickly set about adapting the song that had captured their collective imagination.

Yardbirds singer Keith Relf tinkered with the lyrics while drummer Jim McCarty and Jimmy Page expanded the song structure itself. The song stuck to the original arrangment until the bridge. Even at this point, the fret-tapping acknowledged Holmes’ original. Then Page threw in some eerie effects, bowing his guitar like a violin. Whereas a violin’s neck is curved, a guitar neck is flat. Consequently, Page was only able to bow a couple strings at a time to produce an bizzare melody. When he bowed all six strings, the effect was startling. Strange moaning and whooping sounds were produced. This was a gimmick he had incorporated into his bag of tricks back in his studio days. He had first used it on two tracks on the Little Games LP, “Glimpses” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor.”

To be fair, Page was a rock and roller in the 1960s, so maybe he just doesn’t remember all that. And you have to admit that adamant self-glorification is a better defense than mewling about mixing up research notes!

Sad news for hip-hop last night, as word spread that the groundbreaking graffiti artist and MC Rammellzee had died of as-yet-unknown causes. Born in Far Rockaway, Queens, a fixture of the fertile downtown New York scene of early 1980s, the mysterious figure known as Rammellzee is probably most famous for appearing in three films: Henry Chalfant’s Style Wars, Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style (that’s him rapping in Wild Style in the clip above) and, playing the role of “man with money,” Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise. And for “Beat Bop,” a song he made with his Bronx cohort K-Rob that was produced by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Writing in the liner notes to the very excellent old-school rap compilation ego trip’s The Big Playback, ego trip’s Chairman Mao calls the song “the grand-daddy opus of hip-hop experimentalism.” (Since I’m plugging, a disclosure: I used to work at ego trip.) It’s long, as Mao described it, “ten minutes and ten seconds of sublimely funky abstraction…” But really, really worth a listen. Recorded in 1983, it still sounds like a future we haven’t caught up with yet.

“Why bother calling yourself ‘Anna Chapman’ if you’re going to speak in a thick Russian accent and make Facebook videos describing your venture firm that is looking for risky investments in Russia-and record the video in Russian? ‘She came from Russia, with love’ reads the [New York Post] lead about the accused Russian spy whose ‘cover’ probably related more to New Yorkers’ suspecting Russian entrepreneurs of being gangsters rather than agents of Moscow Center, and then feeling xenophobic and correcting themselves. I mean this lady may as well have kept a smoked fish in her Gucci handbag wrapped in a front page of Pravda for cheap snacking on the go!”
–The Spy Who Loved Us Also Didn’t Love Us Hard Enough To Spy Very Well.

“Every publicist in this town keeps a do-not-invite list, because some people are just freeloaders.” That’s the closest that a restaurant publicist person will get to admitting the truth, which is that they burningly hate at least half of the world’s food bloggers. And the only people who hate food bloggers more than restaurant publicists are restaurant managers. They won’t say so publicly-and sure, they appreciate it if the blogs actually bring in customers sometimes! But pretty much? They consider them hideous leeches. That quote comes from Hall Company’s Sam Firer-and full disclosure, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten at a single restaurant they represent, which seems unlikely-from the discussion that has ensued over the recent and rather remarkable Time column by Josh Ozersky.

Ozersky, who also seems to dislike food bloggers as well, confusingly, seems much-beloved in New York food-blog circles (yes, I said circles), but/and in that column Ozersky wrote about how wedding caterers all suck and you, like he just did, should have high-end professional chefs do all the cooking for free for your wedding. This was really unusual!

And it was not at all cleared up by a statement from Time that announced, improbably, that Ozersky is “friends with a variety of chefs and those relationships inform much of his writing.” Has anything issued from a press office as a “clarification” ever made everyone less happy?

So I guess just think of him as a guy reporting back from inside another universe. Let it wash over you-it’s now just lifestyle porn, with the Ozersky brand explaining some sort of weird high life, on the order of some rent-a-jet in-flight magazine. He’s not one of us regular people now.

DC Comics has given Wonder Woman a makeover just in time for her 69th birthday, and a storyline in which Wonder Woman is out to avenge the destruction of Paradise Island. So the overall vibe given off by her is darker, more serious, “designed to be taken seriously as a warrior” — not to mention, more ready to be franchised into a tie-in clothing line for similarly disaffected female fans. (Think American Apparel, not Underoos.) After the jump, a side-by-side comparison of the old Wonder Woman costume and the new one.

The Times quotes Wonder Woman redesigner Jim Lee as saying that he wanted her to look stronger “without screaming, ‘I’m a superhero.’ “ All well and good, and it’s nice that her hair got toned down a bit, but doesn’t “stronger” also mean that the woman would have something resembling muscle tone?

[Side-by-side comparison via]

Given that about 85% of everyone on the Internet spent yesterday fighting with each other-seriously, what the holy fudge was with yesterday? Why was everyone such a huge, out of control, high-riding bitch? Yesterday was all about seeing bad intentions everywhere (I found some!), and, sure, there were lots of bad intentions to be found, but particularly if you were out looking for them-maybe we should all take Hugh Ryan’s advice and go on a nice long train trip. As any of the airplane-phobic can tell you, America’s sad, abandoned little train system is a magical place, filled with weirdos, ex-cons, fun grandmothers, men with great, dying accents and women who smoke those wonderful Misty cigarettes-and a complete lack of Internet service. Think about it! It might be just what you need!

Listicle Without Commentary: 21 Songs That Prove 2010 Has Been A Startlingly Good Year For New Music So Far

21. Justin Bieber feat. Ludacris, “Baby”

20. The Vaselines, “I Hate The ‘80s”

19. Fantasia, “Bittersweet”

18. Wye Oak, “Emmylou”

17. Ne-Yo, “Beautiful Monster”

16. I Blame Coco feat. Robyn, “Caesar”

15. Cotton Candy, “Fantastic & Spectacular”

14. Monarchy, “The Phoenix Alive”

13. Inky, “Let’s Get Sad”

12. Big Boi, “General Patton”

11. LCD Soundsystem, “Change”

10. hollAnd, “Sauvignon Blank”

9. Sade, “Soldier Of Love”

8. Erykah Badu, “Gone Baby Don’t Be Long”

7. Janelle Monáe feat. Big Boi, “Tightrope”

6. Raheem DeVaughn, “I Don’t Care”

5. Tracey Thorn, “Singles Bar”

4. The-Dream, “Florida University”

3. R. Kelly, “When A Woman Loves”

2. Sleigh Bells, “Rill Rill”

1. Robyn, “Dancing On My Own”