Mehretu and Goldman Sachs: “They need artists to bring perfume to the terrible stench of their death”

“The writer and activist Meridel Le Sueur once wrote, in reference to artists feeding at the corporate trough, ‘They just want you to perfume the sewers. They need artists to bring perfume to the terrible stench of their death.’ It’s a pity that an artist as talented as Julie Mehretu cannot imagine other possibilities for herself as an artist than to take millions from Goldman Sachs and ‘just hope it will feel O.K. over time.’”
–MEOW!

Those of you who are not Skidmore ’06 or Sarah Lawrence ’07, which I realize is most of you, will remember Adele Sammarco, who once upon a time was making the blabber happen on NY1 nearly as frequently as Roma Torre. (You will particularly remember this if you spend a lot of time in NYPD detention, a mandatory NY1 viewing area.) Wherever has she been? She has been doing PR in Staten Island and preparing suit against NY1 for the sex harassment: “Sammarco says she was subjected to retaliation after complaining she was groped and forcibly kissed by another reporter and ridiculed by an altered photo depicting her with huge breasts and a blooper tape showing a technician trying to fix her pants zipper with pliers.” Ooh, an infamous pants-fixing blooper tape! Can’t wait until NY1’s counsel leaks that on the YouTube.

“At Fortune, [former New Yorker managing editor Ralph] Ingersoll developed what came to be called the ‘corporation story,’ a profile of a company.’ He had the idea of writing about The New Yorker…. published, anonymously, in August, 1934. It was ‘The Making of a Magazine’ told straight, which made The New Yorker look exactly the way Ross didn’t want it to look. It also violated Ross’s creed: ‘I do not want any member of the staff to be conscious of the advertising or business problems of The New Yorker. If so, they will lose their spontaneity and verve and we will be just like all other magazines.’ Ingersoll’s story, which ran for seventeen pages, comprised, chiefly, sketches of the staff and their salaries (E. B. White: ‘With Thurber, he is wheel horse to The New Yorker’s wit. He makes $12,000 a year’)….. None of this sat well. Ross was particularly pained by Ingersoll’s portrayal of Katharine White. ‘You had her ‘eloping’ with White in the original draft,’ he later wrote Luce. ‘Nice for her children.’ (What Ingersoll did print was: ‘She is a lady who has her own way.’) Ross wanted revenge.’It is not true that I get $40,000 a year,’ he wrote, in a memo he posted in the office. ‘The editor of Fortune Magazine makes thirty dollars a week and carfare,’ White wrote in a one-sentence Gossip Note in the next week’s Talk of the Town. Ross bided his time.”
–This is a terrific and lively history of the New Yorker v. Time

… until the very last paragraph, which is a TOTAL piece of garbage that should have been deleted! But obviously quite worth a nice leisurely morning read.

It (Isn’t?) Easy Being Mean

by Rod Townsend

In the end, I guess it’s just so easy, and that’s the whole problem.

It certainly was easy this past weekend. Sometime after a breakfast, but before a birthday picnic, I sat in my buddy’s apartment as he checked in with Facebook. “Oh, I guess people are getting their iPads today,” he said. Sure, I knew that people were waking up early and getting their long-awaited iPads, even camping out. (The only thing I’ve ever camped out for were Sting tickets, after his first and greatest solo album, so I sort of understand, but actually don’t.) Anyway, he shows me a picture of what seems to be a nice enough looking guy, sort of sleepy-headed in a shirtless pose with his iPad and a caption: “Look what came this morning.” The inkling was initiated.

The next day was Easter and after breakfast, but before a few hours on the Christopher Street pier and an amazing Italian Easter feast, I was on the computer while my buddy worked on some photography in the other room. That inkling was asserting itself in my head. Guys with iPhones [NSFW] and people generally taking pictures and posting them where everyone can see and the nature of bragging and well, just something about it just rubbed me the wrong way. These people with their iPads. What were they really doing? While it could be interpreted as bragging, there also seemed to be something desperate and lonely at the root of it all. I wanted to expose that root and kill the bragging plant.

Twenty minutes. Found pictures of random folk with an iPad, mostly from Flickr. Copied the image URLs into Tumblr with no explanatory text. Gave it a bleak look with a preset theme. “Lonely People with iPads.” Threw a link to Twitter. Watched the followers grow. Watched the links propagate. Put up more pictures. Saw it on Buzzfeed. Like I said, easy.

The easiness is a huge part of this whole “meanness on the Internet” problem though. See, I was trying to emerge. I’ve done the mean-type blog before. (LOLgay, anybody?) In February I started This Is FYF with a collaborator. We gave ourselves some simple editorial guidelines: Don’t use empty adjectives (fabulous, fierce, gorgeous). Don’t be shrill or bitchy. Don’t be mean. Write about what you love. In some ways the site was a reaction against your typical gay sites that depends on the screaming queen type of writing that turns off many. Beyond establishing ourselves as what we were not, we were trying to create a site from a more confident point of view, or at least one that wasn’t constantly screaming for attention.

Things went smoothly, but old habits are easy to fall back upon though. One night while relaxing and reading, television channels were flipped for some background noise. American Idol came on the screen, and there were new (to me) judges. Ellen Degeneres was a known quantity, but the brunette lady judge was not. She was caustic to the contestants. Even though the show isn’t really topical to FYF, I threw a post on the site: “Sorry, but I haven’t watched American Idol in ages. Who is this garrulous bitch?” Within fifteen minutes I recognized it for what it was: hateful.

It wasn’t just in my own site where the nastiness would come out. On this site there was a profile of a young fellow moving from Michigan to Manhattan (like Madonna!) to work for Gawker. Sort of half-reading it, I got to a name I’d seen around and recognized: Rachel Sklar. To my knowledge, I’ve never met Rachel Sklar, but her name often pops up in stories that, well, annoy me. It’s the whole “we’re a forefront of the revolution of the Internet and we live in an incestuous bubble” stories that are reported by folks in the same bubble. Typically I know to avoid such stories, but in this instance it just set me off. (And my vitriol often comes out at pretty much anything penned by Gawker’s Brian Moylan. If I read another “we gays think this” piece, I might just make a serious lifestyle change.)

The guilt of these acerbic moments is assuaged by others on the Internet that gladly will rally behind an angry statement. Virulence is viral. Lonely people with iPads soon had contributions coming in from other Tumblr users. (Some even sent pictures of children.) And while viral and attention-getting, they do nothing to the subjects except continue the meta-enabling cycle. Think of the things we wouldn’t have if our attention was not expent online. There would be fewer Lady Gaga’s and more Florence and the Machines!

What to do though? The facility the Internet provides to allow impulsive, negative, lazy thought to come out is unmatched. We have “cyber-bullying” in our schools and advertiser dollars and book deals going to blistering, boisterous bloggers. Just like a lot of things in life, the first step is to take a moment and think before acting. While it is easier to stop by McDonald’s for a quick bite, a proper restaurant or even a home-cooked meal is going to yield a greater pleasure. Making quick impulsive buys will satisfy a shopping compulsion, but saving up for something you love will satisfy longer-term. Smoking will calm your nerves temporarily, but maybe taking a regular yoga class will be far better on your system.

So sure, the Internet makes it easy, being mean. Instead of shaking your Internetty fist at all that angers you though, what if you ignored it and discussed things that do work, things that are wonderful, and encouraged others to do the same? It would take more mental work perhaps, thinking through the nature of the things you cherish (or just even like), but the synapses of your brain would be better used and maybe your mood better. In time you might just find that the nicer approach was easier all along.

Rod Townsend is the co-founder of This Is FYF and, yes, also the proprietor of Lonely People with iPads.

To: The Staff of I Can Haz LLC
From: Choire Sicha
Re: My Free Expression

David, I know you’re busy with the accountant, preparing our 2009 taxes (which: LOL), but I wanted to bring to the company’s attention my Barack Obama-given right to pump my breast milk at work, as well as the right of all our wonderful contributors to come into the office, pump their breast milk, and then depart (with or without it). You boys might not have this as a high priority, hence this memo. My right to a “reasonable break time” in the pursuit of milk expression is now the law of the land, as it is for both employees and nonexempt hourly workers, at companies larger than 50 employees, and other companies, such as ourselves, that wish to become real companies.

Furthermore, you will notice that I must be provided with a room other than the bathroom that is both private and “free from intrusion” by both co-workers and the public, where I may pump my breast milk. Please begin construction on this room. (I would like it to be free from intrusion by the cat as well, but there’s nothing in the law about that, I don’t think.)

So. Where is my pumping station? Do not make me call Mary HK Choi over here. If you go visit a real business, you will see a pumping station about every 20 feet (that’s the little room that’s usually being used-by men!-to make cell phone calls). If you want some advice, you could ask Nick Denton-Gawker Media has a headcount of more than 50, so they’ll definitely be installing a pumping station in their groovy, open plan, glass conference room havin’ office.

I will follow up on this memo in 2014, when I Can Haz LLC is going to be forced somehow to provide us with health insurance. Unless I have died from lack of health care by then, which actually isn’t entirely impossible.

CAS/hs

Small-eyed and thick around the middle? Get ready for some lovin’, says Science! “Two studies, one using American movie actresses, the other Playboy Playmates of the Year, found that in uncertain times, such as when the economy is stuttering along, beauty icons tend to be slightly more ‘mature’ looking women-taller, heavier and sporting larger waists and less babyish facial features.”

I’m a little too old at this point to have a “favorite band,” but if I made a top ten list The Delgados would most definitely be on it. Here’s the first video from former Delgado Emma Pollock’s new album, The Law of Large Numbers. It is pretty cool, and I think I’d say that even if I weren’t a fan.

“Coker acknowledged that he thought Shaver became ‘a little annoyed’ with him after he took out his pocketknife and stirred his whiskey and water because the bar had no swizzle sticks. But other than that, Coker said, he has no idea why Shaver got angry enough to shoot him.”
-Legendary musician Billy Joe Shaver is currently for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. The 70-year-old Shaver, who claims self-defense, shot Billy Coker in the face outside Papa Joe’s Texas Saloon in Lorena.

Come on, flamingos! If a tiny little vole can fight off a big coyote, and four chickens (chickens!) can kill a canine invader, surely fifteen of you should be able to defend your own turf. But apparently not. “The paw marks are very clear-it was a wild fox,” said Jukka Salo, director of Finland’s Helsinki Zoo, where an entire flock of fifteen pink flamingos were slaughtered after the hungry animal climbed over the fence earlier this week. “When it got in, it acted just as if it were in a hen house, killing and creating mayhem.”

The video above explains something, I guess: These gawky birds do seem to suck at fighting.

by John Murray

Eduardo Ravelo is the new ‘face of Ciudad Juarez terror,” according to the LA Times this week. This mean-looking specimen is the purported leader of the Barrio Aztecas street gang, the mostly teenage subcontractors that the Juarez drug cartel uses for the murder, kidnapping and torture of its rivals in the city. Near the end of last year, Ravelo was quietly placed on the FBI’s ten most wanted list, and a couple weeks ago, he reached a criminal pinnacle, officially supplanting Osama bin Laden as the FBI’s number one most wanted man in the world.

His sudden rise is spectacular-and there’s much competition. After all, Juarez has been the “most dangerous city in the world” since around 2007, when Mexican president Felipe Calderon began his “war on the cartels.” Home to a murder rate that topped out at almost 2700 in 2009, officials estimate that roughly 100,000 Mexican nationals have left Juarez for El Paso during the past 3 years, essentially as refugees. Is this all his doing?

Ravelo’s name is missing from just about any English-language press concerning Juarez in the past several years save for two minor occasions: when he was placed on the most wanted list at the end of 2009, and when three people affiliated with the US embassy in Juarez were murdered, allegedly by Azteca hit men, on March 15. (His name returns all of 46 Nexis mentions in a search of all English language news.) But since the embassy murders, Ravelo’s name has become more popular.

There have been, roughly, 5000 drug-related murders in Juarez between 2007 and today, and just about all of them are unsolved. But when three people associated with the US government are killed, suddenly we have Eduardo Ravelo offered up as the perpetrator, the man responsible: Juarez’s black knight.

Ravelo is exactly what the LA Times says he is: a face. In the U.S., our public sense of justice demands that a specific someone pays for affronts to our honor. That’s what’s so absurd about the reaction to the embassy employee murders. We act like a neutral party that has been drawn into a war our neighbor is fighting that doesn’t concern us, and we’re shocked. Never mind that El Paso’s sister city, sitting just inches from the land of the free, has had a higher murder rate than Baghdad for 2 years running. Forget that at $35-$45 billion a year, the drug industry is an inextricable part of the Mexican economy, totaling revenues bigger than any of its other exports, including that of oil and migrant labor combined. And of course, don’t mention that the whole reason it exists is because of the U.S. market that feeds it endlessly. Our goal, instead, is to get that guy who did this to us.

That’s essentially the nature of the war on drugs as well. The DEA doesn’t hunt out the carotid artery of the drug trade so much as it hunts images; a seizure of cocaine in Houston, a truck full of marijuana in Atlanta. We want what Commissioner Burrell from ‘The Wire’ infamously wants: “dope on the table.” We want the perception that we are doing something about it; winning battles, as a strategy of war.

The best part about Eduardo Ravelo is that he’s right there, just across the Rio Grande. As a street criminal, Ravelo makes more sense to us than institutional crime. He’s much more tangible for US authorities and the public than the real leaders of the cartels and their corrupt associates in Mexican businesses helping them stash their cash-or the government and military officials helping them move their product. He’s the perfect diversion from the unseemly notion that we could have a country to our south whose social fabric is being destroyed by the same industry that helps it stay afloat economically.

John Murray is a lover of obscurity. He lives and writes in Arizona.