Wow wow wow! The title track to Gil Scott-Heron’s latest album, I’m New Here, is incredible! The album came out a few months ago to rave reviews, and I’d heard some stuff that proved the once-great groove poet was back in strong form after years of horrible addiction and jail. (This was warm relief. I saw him in the mid-’90s, and he looked like a person who might not be living very much longer.) But I hadn’t heard this one til the video came out yesterday. It’s a cover of a Bill Callahan song. And while Callahan (a.k.a. Smog) is an old favorite of mine, I believe his song has just been taken away from him forever.

News of a fracas at an engagement party in Brooklyn gives hope to all who worry that the city is losing its historic character: “There was a bunch of fighting and yelling, people running in and out of the restaurant and tastelessly dressed women cat fighting or threatening to cat fight. They were all behaving like unflattering stereotypes about certain Italian-Americans.”

“An article on Friday about art-related parties in New York misidentified the artist who has been staging a series of weekly parties since last July. He is Ryan McGinness — not Ryan McGinley, a photographer, who also organizes parties, as the article noted.” Most confusing New York Times correction ever? Here! We can help, with this handy guide.

Ryan McGinness
b. 1972
Likes skateboarders.
BFA, Carnegie Mellon University
Gallery: Deitch (or post-Deitch Deitch)
The presumably not-gay one.
Makes big, jazzy, stencily, explosiony installations, paintings and things. This is him wearing a hard hat and talking about stuff.
How to identify the work: stencil, design, layering, etc.:

Ryan McGinley
October 17, 1977
Like skateboarders. [Like(s) skateboarder(s)] [LET ME HAVE SOME FUN PEOPLE]
BFA in Graphic Design, Parsons
Gallery: Team
The gay one.
Shoots post-Nan dreamy photos of pretty pals in natural and urban settings; most are emaciated; most seem like they take drugs; lots are the gay. Does lots of commercial work now, including the NYT mag. This is who goes to his openings.
How to identify the work: usually looks something like an illustration from a hipster’s photo Tumblr after too much Thoreau and Whitman:

Because the media demands it, your president sat down with Matt Lauer last night to display some rage. This poor guy, though… he just can’t pull it off. “I want the American people to rest assured that once we determine which ass is deserving of kicking, that will indeed be the posterior which receives a forceful foot. Let me be clear: ass will be definitively kicked. “ Etc. I mean, fine, if you’re going to buy into the line that there needs to be a show of fury, by all means go for it, but this comes off as so academic and forced. I would rather see him rip all the books out of the shelves behind him and yell, “RARRRRRR! OBAMA SO MAD ABOUT OIL SPILL! OBAMA SMASH!” and then knock of a couple of Lauer’s teeth out for emphasis. But I guess this is the best they can do.

The copy may come straight from the Associated Press, but the headline is pure New York Post. I’m particularly impressed by the sense and restraint: “Crone” is so much more economical than “shriveled harpy” or “withered harridan.”

As is the case with these things, it was the pictures of the oily birds-the one that looked like some gurgling monster; the one that lay on its back like a human, dying-that yielded the most authentic reactions to the oil spill I’ve yet seen. Showing the photos to three friends, I watched the anger over the oil spill subside in their faces, the frustration drift from their voices as they scrolled down the page, lingering on each new frame. Unprompted, all three eventually said the same thing: “It makes me feel helpless.”

More than any other word, perhaps, helpless is the one best for describing exactly how what’s happening in the Gulf renders people. Rage, hate and embitterment are indeed part of the equation as well, but it seems obvious that those are mostly the byproducts of rampant powerlessness (this, by the way, is also a very, very basic explanation of violence in the inner-city). The president, the oil company, important Hollywood celebrities and the world’s best engineers are stumped, and here we are, not any of those things, forced to watch the pelicans try in vain to flap their sludge-burdened wings.

In a way, the very word “helpless” seems wrong in this situation. In fifth grade, I once hit a river stone with a golf club and watched it zoom away much faster than I’d anticipated; right before it cracked Alison Stevens in the forehead, I felt helpless, knowing damn well I couldn’t take my decision back. Nowadays, I sometimes feel helpless when my cellphone dies. It seems like a criminal understatement to say it makes us feel helpless to watch endless shit pour into a delicate ecosystem, poisoning everything in its wake, spoiling coastlines, ruining industry, sickening for God knows how long those charged with attending to it.

This helplessness is unorthodox. This helplessness is existential, which is why it’s hanging on everything, like the oil itself.

When I hit that rock into Alison’s forehead, snapping open her skin and drawing into her eyes a rush of blood, what made me feel most horrible wasn’t the pain I’d caused her, but the negligence that lead to that pain. I knew smacking stones with a driver in a crowd of people was dangerous and idiotic, but I did it anyway, because it was fun. In the same vein, I believe what hurts most about the oil spill, what we find most terrifying and jarring, is that there was no way we could not have expected it. Drilling gaping holes into the crust of the earth with fallible equipment in order to summon forth millions of gallons of hydrocarbons is difficult and extraordinarily precarious. The disasters the oil industry has caused around the world in the past 20 years alone are numerous, each instance massive and tragic and wildly destructive in and of itself. Yet we continue to do it, day after day, decade after decade.

Anyone who’s consistently read the news for the past couple years knows for a fact that people consuming less meat would knock a sizable dent into the oil industry. But we don’t do that, because beef tastes good and Fette Sau is fucking fun. Also, even if everyone stopped eating meat altogether, there’s still this:

In America, food completes a 1,500-mile journey, on average, before making it to your mouth. How did it get there? Trucks, trains, planes, and ships … which run on diesel and jet fuel. The asphalt the trucks drive on? Made with oil. The tires? Yep, they include oil, too. Tractors, fertilizers, pesticides? Oil, oil, oil.

And because nobody wants to eat cheese grits or crunchy, salty strips of bacon in an uncomfortably hot room, we pump our homes and restaurants (and movie theaters and offices and…) with air conditioning, never letting summer get in the way of some decent brunching. We drive our cars to our brunches, as well as other places, as walking or biking would be too time-consuming, sweaty, exhausting, uncouth or, say, with a family of four, downright impossible. Those of us who don’t drive say nothing about it to our friends who do, especially not the ones with $50,000 fuel-slaughtering luxury SUVs. Because to bring up the environment to other grownups sounds whiny and pretentious at best, secretly envious at worst.

Petroleum goes into the rubber in our shoes (probably even those hip, hippie TOMS ones) and is integral to keeping textile factories literally running smoothly. And in 2008, the CFO of Procter & Gamble, whose scores of brands include Gillette, Herbal Essences, Old Spice and Gucci Fragrances, noted, “Virtually everything that goes into our products comes from crude oil or natural gas or some other commodities.” We need oil to produce our books and newspapers and garden hoses.

If you’re reading this, it’s quite likely you’re not only an early adopter of computer technology, but also surrounded by it at work and home. Besides all the oil needed to produce the plastic needed to produce our MacBooks and iPhones and Androids (about eight percent of the annual supply), once we wait in line for hours to obtain those things, we end up using them horribly inefficiently. In fact, because we never turn our gadgets off so that we might access them quickly when we do need them, “of the $250 billion per year spent on powering computers worldwide, only about 15 percent of that power was spent computing — the rest was wasted idling.”

If we were bakers, oil would be our flour, an ingredient in the goods themselves, of course, but also something to rub on rolling pins, dust counter tops, coat nuts before adding to batter and share with neighbors to do with what they liked. By day’s end, there would be flour on our faces, in our hair, under our fingernails and all over the floor.

We know this stuff. We’ve been spoonfed it ad nauseam for years now, through books, movies, magazines, PSAs, newspapers and one another. The only reason it’s worth bringing up here again is because I think it’s this ubiquitous information that is at the root of our most current, entirely profound bout of collective helplessness. When we look at those blackened birds, or those men and women trudging through the sludgy Gulf waters, we feel helpless not because we’re not down there ourselves wiping feathers with dish soap, but because we know it’s only a matter of time before it happens again. We know that if we boycott BP and instead fill up our cars at Exxon and Citgo, we’ll in essence only be rewarding Exxon and Citgo for not screwing up the world most recently. We know that we’re going to buy new computers and clothes, and leave the AC on while out at dinner so we can come home to a cool apartment. Whether or not we’ll admit it to ourselves or our children, who most deserve to hear the truth, we know that, despite its inherent danger, despite the evils it’s wrought, despite the awful people it’s enriched for centuries, despite the fact that it’s ruinous to things both tangible and intangible, we’re never going to stop using oil. To do so would be akin to giving up water-even though you can technically survive without ever consuming a drop of fossil fuel.

We feel helpless because we are helpless, our wings so sticky it’s easy to forget we ever had any.

Cord Jefferson also writes at The Root. Photo from the “Deepwater Horizon Response” official Flickr.

by Ned Frey

Many Facebook users like to illuminate dark corners of their lives, casting light where the sun rarely shines. They keep us plugged in to so many aspects of their daily existence! And thanks to recent changes Facebook made to its default privacy settings, they may be plugging in more of us than they bargained for.

Unlike in past years, when most users’ status updates were viewable only to their friends or members of their “networks,” changes made a couple months ago to Facebook’s default setting left users’ status updates exposed to the whole world (unless users proactively changed those settings back to a more restricted state). And now, using new search tools like Your Open Book, anyone can search and view all public Facebook status updates, on any subject they choose!

A few weeks back, I used this tool to find out who was masturbating in Facebook land. This week I decided to probe a new alley by searching on the word “buttplug” (with and without a hyphen). Let’s find out what Facebook Nation had to say on this topic!

Lori is a satisfied customer!

Ashley has something interesting she could bring on Antiques Roadshow.

Nathan is recalibrating some of his preconceptions about higher education.

Clara is forgetful.

Ian is too!

Mandy is putting her fate in your hands!

Patrick says “boo ya!” -give that man a fist-bump!

Greg will have an interesting story to share at an A.A. meeting one day.

Megan needs to get a better handle on things.

A.J. is… uh… from the Netherlands, apparently. And now we know how to say “buttplug” in Dutch!

Well, that’s all for now. But perhaps we’ll share some more revealing Facebook updates soon-maybe including one from you!! Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!

Ned Frey has no updates to share at this time.

Only 80% of the fiction writers on the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list have been published in the New Yorker before.

“It was so powerful and I was so into it at the time. It was like a dream come true, really, dancing for my mate’s band. It was punk as fuck, really…. It got to the point after the show where I had to wear a collar on my neck because I got whiplash.”
–Antony Hodgkinson explains being the stage dancer for Nirvana.

by Nate Freeman

I made a brief sojourn to my hometown this weekend only to find my twin brothers and father engaged in a shouting match, and I soon found out why: Helen Thomas had been sacked from her role as the speaker at my former high school’s commencement ceremony. Even before today’s announcement of her retirement as a Hearst columnist, Thomas had reached an agreement with my cherished alma mater-Walt Whitman High School, in Bethesda, Maryland-to bow out from the June 14 services.

The decision, of course, came out of the shitstorm of controversy over her suggestion that Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine.” In its wake, DC-based publications have begun to chime in on the whole turn of events. In his op-ed for the Washington Post, Richard Cohen mentioned the Whitman graduation debacle at the end of his HelenThomasGate analysis, calling the cancellation “understandable,” but also suggesting “it would be wonderful, though, if Thomas could go through with it and tell the graduates what she had learned in recent days.” And earlier today Howard Kurtz answered a question regarding the graduation during a live Q&A; on the Post’s site.

And while it’s no surprise to see upper-middle-class parents in a D.C. suburb up in arms about this sort of thing, I know what it’s like to be a confused kid at a Whitman graduation, and I know there’s more at play here. The long-lost ignorant high school senior inside of me wants to know… what do the kids think?

Well, apparently the kids are thinking, too! The Black & White-the Whitman student paper that I was the editor of a million years ago-is reporting that the students are prepping for their four years of parent-funded half-assed activism (that’s what college is for, right?) by feigning some independent opinions. The article says that after the fateful Thomas comment was leaked, senior Erica Bloom took to her friends list and invited her buddies to a Facebook event organizing a protest. By Sunday, Principal Alan Goodwin made the decision official in an email to Whitman parents.

In an e-mail to Whitnet Sunday night, Goodwin explained that graduation is designed for celebration, not a venue for divisiveness.

“Although this development may understandably disappoint some parents and students because of their different viewpoints,” Goodwin wrote. “I am asking, once again, for all of us to focus collectively on the jubilant celebration of 450 seniors and their families who have worked hard to share this festive occasion within the Whitman community.”

But even before the cancellation was announced, dissent brewed among the student body. The Facebook event was far from static! The Black & White article reports that a few students took a break from their usual diet of photo commenting to throw in their two cents on the event page’s message board.

“In the audience at graduation, there will likely be Holocaust survivors and people, like me, whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust,” senior Emily Massey wrote on the Facebook event. “Having Thomas speak would be deeply offensive to all of us.”

While many students are angered by Thomas’ comments, around 215 students are “not attending” the protest because they felt Thomas’ political opinions don’t have an implication on her credibility as a speaker.

“I would pass on hearing about her insulting and flawed political views any day,” senior Dena Goodman wrote on the Facebook event. “However, we would definitely be passing up a great opportunity to hear her speak about her (really long) life and impressive career.”

The event to organize a protest has been shut down, but another Facebook group entitled “Helen Thomas should have been our graduation speaker”-started by Whitman senior Will Bartlett-is still active. “This group affirms a belief in reasonable discussion and feel that in this scenario, a clear minority was able to override a larger majority by distorting the issues and discussion,” the group’s description reads. It currently has 100 members, most of which are Whitman students, and a slew of comments on its wall. In fact, things got complicated.

Principal Goodwin also told the Washington Post that he received calls and emails from Whitman students (and, of course, Whitman parents) calling for Thomas to be replaced.

But Facebook-based picketing aside, can we really say that these young high schoolers-who are probably still hungover from all that Mike’s Hard (and Ice?) they consumed at their senior beach week-have a firm grasp on what’s going on here? Or do their fresh eyes and untainted souls share with us insight that the rest of us are too jaded to provide? More importantly, will my mother still force me to sit through this Helen Thomas-less service just to watch my brothers walk the stage in their shitty polyester gowns?

In looking at the decent amount of well-conceived activism here, it seems my high school’s current students do, in fact, recognize what’s at stake. They’ve read enough to gain a cursory knowledge of how this graduation speech fits into the entire story, and having done so, they’re only a few clicks away from creating a Facebook group and affecting potential change.

But let’s be honest-these kids are all 18 now, and it’s warm outside. In a few weeks they’ll get their diplomas, settle into a summer of bumming around the suburbs trying to get older siblings to buy them beer, and order will be restored.

Nate Freeman is a proprietor of The ## and a former columnist for the Duke Chronicle-and one of The Awl’s summer reporters.