★★★★ The reflected light showcased a clean, fresh mound of fill sitting by a trench being cut into Broadway. The sky was fully cloudless and the sun was sharp. All day, the sky stayed pristine. Even the grimy taxis and trucks were shiny. The air indoors was overheated, but a quick walk outside cleared the stuffy sourness away. It was just cold enough to still be wintry. People had gone to lighter coats, with interesting cuts. Only the shimmer and flicker of construction lamps in a building far, far downtown betrayed anything less than perfect clarity.

by James Joyce

no thats no way for him has he no manners nor no refinement nor no nothing in his nature slapping us behind like that on my bottom because I didnt call him Hugh the ignoramus that doesnt know poetry from a cabbage thats what you get for not keeping them in their proper place pulling off his shoes and trousers there on the chair before me so barefaced without even asking permission and standing out that vulgar way in the half of a shirt they wear to be admired like a priest or a butcher or those old hypocrites in the time of Julius Caesar of course hes right enough in his way to pass the time as a joke sure you might as well be in bed with what with a lion God Im sure hed have something better to say for himself an old Lion would O well I suppose its because they were so plump and tempting in my short petticoat he couldnt resist they excite myself sometimes its well for men all the amount of pleasure they get off a womans body were so round and white for them always I wished I was one myself for a change just to try with that thing they have swelling up on you so hard and at the same time so soft when you touch it my uncle John has a thing long I heard those cornerboys saying passing the comer of Marrowbone lane my aunt Mary has a thing hairy because it was dark and they knew a girl was passing it didnt make me blush why should it either its only nature and he puts his thing long into my aunt Marys hairy etcetera and turns out to be you put the handle in a sweepingbrush men again all over they can pick and choose what they please a married woman or a fast widow or a girl for their different tastes like those houses round behind Irish street no but were to be always chained up theyre not going to be chaining me up no damn fear once I start I tell you for their stupid husbands jealousy why cant we all remain friends over it instead of quarrelling her husband found it out what they did together well naturally and if he did can he undo it hes coronado anyway whatever he does and then he going to the other mad extreme about the wife in Fair Tyrants of course the man never even casts a 2nd thought on the husband or wife either its the woman he wants and he gets her what else were we given all those desires for Id like to know I cant help it if Im young still can I its a wonder Im not an old shrivelled hag before my time living with him so cold never embracing me except sometimes when hes asleep the wrong end of me not knowing I suppose who he has any man thatd kiss a womans bottom Id throw my hat at him after that hed kiss anything unnatural where we havent I atom of any kind of expression in us all of us the same 2 lumps of lard before ever Id do that to a man pfooh the dirty brutes the mere thought is enough I kiss the feet of you senorita theres some sense in that didnt he kiss our halldoor 6:30 PM EST he did what a madman nobody understands his cracked ideas but me still of course a woman wants to be embraced 20 times a day almost to make her look young no matter by who so long as to be in love or loved by somebody if the fellow you want isnt there sometimes by the Lord God I was thinking would I go around by the quays there some dark evening where nobodyd know me and pick up a sailor off the sea thatd be hot on for it and not care a pin whose I was only do it off up in a gate somewhere or one of those wildlooking gipsies in Rathfarnham had their camp pitched near the Bloomfield laundry to try and steal our things if they could I only sent mine there a few times for the name model laundry sending me back over and over some old ones odd stockings that blackguardlooking fellow with the fine eyes peeling a switch attack me in the dark and ride me up against the wall without a word or a murderer anybody what they do themselves the fine gentlemen in their silk hats that K C lives up somewhere this way coming out of Hardwicke lane the night he gave us the fish supper on account of winning over the boxing match of course it was for me he gave it I knew him by his gaiters and the walk and when I turned round a minute after just to see there was a woman after coming out of it too some filthy prostitute then he goes home to his wife after that only I suppose the half of those sailors are rotten again with disease O move over your big carcass out of that for the love of Mike listen to him the winds that waft my sighs to thee so well he may sleep and sigh the great Suggester Don Poldo de la Flora if he knew how he came out on the cards this morning hed have something to sigh for a dark man in some perplexity between 2 7s too in prison for Lord knows what he does that I dont know and Im to be slooching around down in the kitchen to get his lordship his breakfast while hes rolled up like a mummy will I indeed did you ever see me running Id just like to see myself at it show them attention and they treat you like dirt I dont care what anybody says itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses 6:30 PM EST because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they wouldnt be in the world at all only for us they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them what I never had thats why I suppose hes running wild now out at night away from his books and studies and not living at home on account of the usual rowy house I suppose well its a poor case that those that have a fine son like that theyre not satisfied and I none was he not able to make one it wasnt my fault we came together when I was watching the two dogs up in her behind in the middle of the naked street that disheartened me altogether I suppose I oughtnt to have buried him in that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well Id never have another our 1st death too it was we were never the same since O Im not going to think myself into the glooms about that any more I wonder why he wouldnt stay the night I felt all the time it was somebody strange he brought in instead of roving around the city meeting God knows who nightwalkers and pickpockets his poor mother wouldnt like that if she was alive ruining himself for life perhaps still its a lovely hour so silent I used to love coming home after dances the air of the night they have friends they can talk to weve none either he wants what he wont get or its some woman ready to stick her knife in you I hate that in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us so snappy Im not like that he could easy have slept in there on the sofa in the other room I suppose he was as shy as a boy he being so young hardly 20 of me in the next room hed have heard me on the chamber arrah what harm Dedalus I wonder its like those names in Gibraltar Delapaz Delagracia they had the devils queer names there father Vilaplana of Santa Maria that gave me the rosary Rosales y OReilly in the Calle las Siete Revueltas and Pisimbo and Mrs Opisso in Governor street O what a name Id go and drown myself in the first river if I had a name like her O my and all the bits of streets Paradise ramp and Bedlam ramp and Rodgers ramp and Crutchetts ramp and the devils gap steps well small blame to me if I am a harumscarum I know I am a bit I declare to God I dont feel a day older than then I wonder could I get my tongue round any of the Spanish como esta usted muy bien gracias y usted see I havent forgotten it all I thought I had only for the grammar a noun is the name of any person place or thing pity I never tried to read that novel cantankerous Mrs Rubio lent me by Valera with the questions in it all upside down the two ways I always knew wed go away in the end I can tell him the Spanish and he tell me the Italian then hell see Im not so ignorant what a pity he didnt stay Im sure the poor fellow was dead tired and wanted a good sleep badly I could have brought him in his breakfast in bed with a bit of toast so long as I didnt do it on the knife for bad luck or if the woman was going her rounds with the watercress and something nice and tasty there are a few olives in the kitchen he might like I never could bear the look of them in Abrines I could do the criada the room looks all right since I changed it the other way you see something was telling me all the time Id have to introduce myself not knowing me from Adam very funny wouldnt it Im his wife or pretend we were in Spain with him half awake without a Gods notion where he is dos huevos estrellados senor Lord the cracked things come into my head sometimes itd be great fun supposing he stayed with us why not theres the room upstairs empty and Millys bed in the back room he could do his writing and studies at the table in there for all the scribbling he does at it and if he wants to read in bed in the morning like me as hes making the breakfast for I he can make it for 2 Im sure Im not going to take in lodgers off the street for him if he takes a gesabo of a house like this Id love to have a long talk with an intelligent welleducated person Id have to get a nice pair of red slippers like those Turks with the fez used to sell or yellow and a nice semitransparent morning gown that I badly want or a peachblossom dressing jacket like the one long ago in Walpoles only 8/6 or 18/6 Ill just give him one more chance Ill get up early in the morning Im sick of Cohens old bed in any case I might go over to the markets to see all the vegetables and cabbages and tomatoes and carrots and all kinds of splendid fruits all coming in lovely and fresh who knows whod be the 1st man Id meet theyre out looking for it in the morning Mamy Dillon used to say they are and the night too that was her massgoing Id love a big juicy pear now to melt in your mouth like when I used to be in the longing way then Ill throw him up his eggs and tea in the moustachecup she gave him to make his mouth bigger I suppose hed like my nice cream too I know what Ill do Ill go about rather gay not too much singing a bit now and then mi fa pieta Masetto then Ill start dressing myself to go out presto non son piu forte Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is I s l o fucked 6:30 PM EST and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times handrunning theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him if you dont believe me feel my belly unless I made him stand there and put him into me Ive a mind to tell him every scrap and make him do it out in front of me serve him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress as the thing in the gallery said O much about it if thats all the harm ever we did in this vale of tears God knows its not much doesnt everybody only they hide it I suppose thats what a woman is supposed to be there for or He wouldnt have made us the way He did so attractive to men then if he wants to kiss my bottom Ill drag open my drawers and bulge it right out in his face as large as life he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part then Ill tell him I want LI or perhaps 30/- Ill tell him I want to buy underclothes then if he gives me that well he wont be too bad I dont want to soak it all out of him like other women do I could often have written out a fine cheque for myself and write his name on it for a couple of pounds a few times he forgot to lock it up besides he wont spend it Ill let him do it off on me behind provided he doesnt smear all my good drawers O I suppose that cant be helped Ill do the indifferent l or 2 questions Ill know by the answers when hes like that he cant keep a thing back I know every turn in him Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head then Ill suggest about 6:30 PM EST O wait now sonny my turn is coming Ill be quite gay and friendly over it O but I was forgetting this bloody pest of a thing pfooh you wouldnt know which to laugh or cry were such a mixture of plum and apple no Ill have to wear the old things so much the better itll be more pointed hell never know whether he did it or not there thats good enough for you any old thing at all then Ill wipe him off me just like a business his omission then Ill go out Ill have him eying up at the ceiling where is she gone now make him want me thats the only way a quarter after what an unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office or the alarmclock next door at cockshout clattering the brains out of itself let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again so as I can get up early Ill go to Lambes there beside Findlaters and get them to send us some flowers to put about the place in case he brings him home tomorrow today I mean no no Fridays an unlucky day first I want to do the place up someway the dust grows in it I think while Im asleep then we can have music and cigarettes I can accompany him first I must clean the keys of the piano with milk whatll I wear shall I wear a white rose or those fairy cakes in Liptons I love the smell of a rich big shop at 7 1/2d a lb or the other ones with the cherries in them and the pinky sugar I Id a couple of lbs of those a nice plant for the middle of the table Id get that cheaper in wait wheres this I saw them not long ago I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah 6:30 PM EST I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me 6:30 PM EST first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now 6:30 PM EST 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath 6:30 PM EST he said I was a flower of the mountain 6:30 PM EST so we are flowers all a womans body 6:30 PM EST that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today 6:30 PM EST that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say 6:30 PM EST and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old 6:30 PM EST and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens 6:30 PM EST and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain 6:30 PM EST when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red 6:30 PM EST and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again 6:30 PM EST and then he asked me would I 6:30 PM EST to say 6:30 PM EST my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him 6:30 PM EST and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume 6:30 PM EST and his heart was going like mad and 6:30 PM EST I said 6:30 PM EST I will Sunday February 7 6:30 PM EST

by Brendan O’Connor

A photo posted by nana. (@jjoongie) on Dec 8, 2015 at 1:56pm PST

Recently, the New York City Housing Authority sued St. Mark’s Bookshop, one of its tenants, on the ground floor of the First Houses, at 138 East 3rd Street, in the East Village, for more than $68,000 in back rent. According to court documents, NYCHA issued St. Mark’s its first rent demand on June 26th, 2015, informing the long-struggling bookstore that it owed $18,374.34 for April, May, and June. At that point, St. Mark’s had been the city’s tenant for just over a year, since leaving its previous home on the ground floor of a Cooper Union dorm. The housing authority filed a petition on October 5th; the bookstore’s initial defense was to claim that the necessary parties had not been appropriately informed of the demand for back rent, and that too much time had passed to come knocking for it now.

One day after the city filed a very convincing cross-motion, Bob Contant — the sole remaining owner of the store — announced on Facebook that the bookstore had secured an unnamed “investor” who “has proposed to take over our lease and pay the back rent if we can raise enough money to stock the store.” Described by the New York Post as a “mystery mogul” and “publicity-shy magnate” (and characterized by Contant as “a serious book person and buyer”) the investor is “acting as a friend,” Contant told the Village Voice. Actually, “he” is more than one person. “I’m one,” Charles FitzGerald, who is named as the assignee on the bookstore’s original lease with NYCHA, told me on the phone, laughing. “There are several.”

FitzGerald came to the East Village in 1959 from the West Village, moving into the building at 11 St. Mark’s Place. A few years later, he opened a store there, before moving to 9 St. Mark’s Place. After forty years in business — during which time he bought and sold several buildings in the neighborhood — FitzGerald decided to retire as a merchant and fully embrace his status as a landlord in an up-and-coming area. “He still loves the neighborhood, but he wants to use the income he could earn by leasing the store to buy land in Maine, and with commercial rents on St. Marks Place climbing, the timing is right,” the New York Times reported in a 2005 story about the neighborhood’s changing retail market. And so he has. “Land conservation is my great purpose,” Fitzgerald told me. He’s acquired thousands of acres of land in Maine since the sixties, including six thousand acres that are under easement and to remain forever wild, and another 3,000 to be retained as organic farms. “I’ve always had my hands in the dirt, since I was six years old,” he said. He also owns a house and a beach shack on Martha’s Vineyard, and he still owns 9 St. Marks Place, 12 St. Marks Place, and a fifty percent stake in 33 St. Marks Place.

As it happens, the bookstore used to be one of FitzGerald’s tenants, before it moved into a building owned by Cooper Union, in the early nineties. “That bookstore has a legacy of quite a few debts,” FitzGerald said. “You need substantial capital to stock a bookstore.” He ought to know — he gave the store $50,000 in 2014 to restock its shelves after the move. “I love books. Hate digital,” FitzGerald said. “You couldn’t invent something better than a book.” He still wants to help, but doesn’t want to put good money after bad. “It cannot be revived unless there’s a clean slate,” he said, describing a plan to start a new store under a different name, paying Contant and Terry McCoy, who co-owned the store until very recently, to run things as salaried employees. He does not, however, want to do it alone: “I would probably not assume the lease unless the capital was there.” FitzGerald, though, isn’t the one working to raise that capital. “I don’t know who’s out there,” he told me. That responsibility has fallen to a man named Rafay Khalid, who covered the bookstore’s $22,000 down payment on its lease with NYCHA. “I love books,” Khalid told me over the phone. “I’m not wealthy.”

“I do things quietly and I get things done,” Khalid, who was initially reluctant to be named in this story, but relented, said. “This is a lot of work, but I keep quiet about it.” Khalid first came to be involved in St Mark’s Bookshop in 2014, when he served on a thirteen-person committee, the purpose of which was to guide the store during its change of location. Khalid, an investment analyst at Global Credit Services who volunteers at Word Up Books, in Washington Heights, told me that he’s also supported Red Emma’s, a radical, horizontally-organized bookstore in Baltimore, which he sees as a model for what St. Mark’s Bookshop could be. “Rafay was instrumental in connecting Red Emma’s with NYC-based co-op lender, The Working World, when we were looking to finance our expansion in 2013. He’s been an enthusiastic supporter of the work we do, but there’s no financial connection,” worker-owner Kate Khatib, one of Red Emma’s eight co-founders, told me in an email.

Khalid said he hopes to raise at least $200,000 to support his and FitzGerald’s plan to give the bookstore a fresh start — $100,000 of that has already been put towards building out the new space in the NYCHA building*. (Clouds Architecture Office designed the new store, which won an AIANY Design award last year.) Now, “All we need are books,” Khalid said. “If there are books in the store, people will come in.”

Well, that’s not all they need — there is still the matter of NYCHA’s money. “They may be amenable to a positive settlement,” James West, the East Village attorney representing the bookstore, told Bedford & Bowery early last month. “I mean, they don’t really need the back rent.” Actually, they do: more than seventy-five percent of NYCHA’s buildings are more than forty years old, and require approximately $17 billion in unmet capital needs — and a deficit that could balloon to $2.5 billion in the next ten years. West has not responded to multiple emailed requests for comment, and the voice mailbox at his office was full.

What Khalid and FitzGerald propose, and what they hope the city will agree to, is a new lease, with a new company — under a new name, Khalid said repeatedly — that will pay a higher rent than it is currently paying. In return, it will forgive the back rent. FitzGerald, any investors, and a management committee will direct how to allocate any funds raised, including whatever is left of the money Khalid hopes to raise. (St. Mark’s Bookshop is also running a Gofundme with a $150,000 target.) “I think of this as a startup,” Khalid said. “St. Mark’s 2.0.”

Correction: This piece originally misspelled Bob Contant’s last name; it is Contant as in “content,” but with a different vowel, not Conant as in Scott Conant who ran some cool restaurants for a while.

*Correction 2: Khalid has not raised $200,000 but wants to — this sentence has been updated to reflect that.

23 Descriptions of Women in Songs Ranked By How Stoked a Millennial Feminist Would Be If a Man Said Them About Her

by Elizabeth Logan

23. “She’s nothing like a girl you’ve ever seen before/nothing you can compare to your neighborhood ho/I’m trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful… a sexy bitch” — “Sexy Bitch,” David Guetta feat. Akon

22. “She take my money when I’m in need/yeah, she’s a trifling friend indeed/oh she’s a gold digger way over town/that digs on me” — “Gold Digger,” Kanye West feat. Jamie Foxx

21. “She’s a rag doll/such a rag doll” — “Rag Doll,” The Four Seasons

20. “Rag doll, livin’ in a movie/hot tramp, daddy’s little cutie” — “Rag Doll,” Aerosmith

19. “I met this little girlie/her hair was kinda curly… these girls are really sleazy/all they just say is please me” — “It’s Tricky,” Run-DMC

18. “She’s a good girl, loves her mama/loves Jesus and America, too/she’s a good girl, crazy ‘bout Elvis/loved horses and her boyfriend, too” — “Free Fallin’,” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

17. “The girl can’t help it, she was born to please, and if she’s got a figure made to squeeze/she can’t help it, the girl can’t help it” — “The Girl Can’t Help It,” Little Richard

16. “She loves to laugh/she loves to sing/she does everything/she loves to move/she loves to groove/she loves the lovin’ things” — “Any Way You Want It,” Journey

15. “Uptown girl/she’s been living in her uptown world” — “Uptown Girl,” Billy Joel

14. “She’s a very kinky girl/the kind you don’t take home to mother/she will never let your spirits down/once you get her off the street/she likes the boys in the band… she’s never hard to please/that girl is pretty wild now/that girl’s a super freak/the kind of girl you read about/in new wave magazines/that girl is pretty kinky” — “Super Freak,” Rick James

13. “She my trap queen” — “Trap Queen,” Fetty Wap

12. “She was only sixteen” — “Only Sixteen,” Sam Cooke

11. “Her voice was soft and cool/her eyes were clear and bright/but she’s not there” — “She’s Not There,” The Zombies

10. “Black dress with the tights underneath… And she’s an actress but she ain’t got no need/she’s got money from her parents in a trust fund back East” — “Don’t Trust Me,” 3OH!3

9. “Kisses like cream/her walk is so mean” — “Steal My Girl,” One Direction

8. “She wants it now/and she will not wait/but she’s too rough” — “Pretty Girls Make Graves,” The Smiths

7. “She was more like a beauty queen from a movie scene” — “Billie Jean,” Michael Jackson

6. “She walked in through the out door/she wore a raspberry beret” — “Raspberry Beret,” Prince

5. “She like a song played again and again/that girl, like something off a poster” — “Replay,” Iyaz

4. “She’s so swishy in her satin and tat/in her frock coat and bipperty bopperty hat… she’s an old-time ambassador of sweet-talking, night-walking games/and she’s known in the darkest subs for pushing ahead of the dames… but she’s a queen and such are queens that your laughter is sucked in their brains” — “Queen Bitch,” David Bowie

3. “She’s got a way about her… she’s got a way of pleasin’… she’s got a smile that heals me… she’s got a way of talking” — “She’s Got a Way,” Billy Joel

2. “Every little thing she does is magic” — “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” The Police

1. “She’ll only come out at night/the lean and hungry type… the woman is wild, a she-cat tames by the purr of a jaguar… she’s a maneater… oh, the beauty is there, but a beast is in the heart” — “Maneater,” Hall and Oates

by Logan Scherer

Thirty-one years after Faye Dunaway demanded that no more wire hangers ever be placed in her closet again, Angela Julius demanded her peach bellinis back. During the final week of Bath & Body Works’ two-for-twenty candle sale, she called all four Bath & Body Works stores near her home in Neenah, Wisconsin, with the hope of acquiring two rare scents: Winter Candy Apple and Iced Gingerbread. On the final day of the sale, an employee at the Appleton store offered to make the short trip to the off-site location where the two candles were kept. The plan was simple. Angela would trade in the unused, large three-wick peach bellini candles she’d recently bought for the two new ones in the same size. Through heavy traffic — it was a Sunday and the Packers were playing — Angela made her way to Appleton. When she got there, the candles hadn’t yet arrived. The cashier went to the back of the store for the manager. Fifteen minutes passed before the manager, Jen, appeared with bad news. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I honestly thought we had your candles at our off-site store, but we only have the small four-ouncers in.”

Jen offered to call the other nearby stores (Fond du Lac, Green Bay, Oshkosh), failing to realize that Juilus had already called them every day for the past week. When Julius asked for something — anything: a free item, a gift certificate — as a consolation for what she had just gone through, Jen suggested that Angela reach out to the company headquarters via the 800-number on the original peach bellinis receipt. “When you call, you’ll get a live person,” Jen said.

“A live person?” Julius asked. “Who do you think I’m talking to right now? Am I talking to you who is not really here? Are you reality? Because I thought you were a live person. Are you not a live person?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I can’t help you,” Jen said.

“I want to leave this store,” Julius said. “Give me my candles now.”

In the time since the Appleton Incident, Angela Julius has become a cult gay icon. She had her moment in October 2014, when the YouTube video she posted, as Az4angela, recounting the candle drama went viral. Now, almost a year-and-a-half later, most of the people who still follow her are either fellow candle and home-goods aficionados or young gay men, like myself, who have found in this transfixing suburban mother an unlikely diva to worship. “Do you accept az4angela as your lord, savior, and true gay icon?” one tumblr user asked. Another recorded an entire video describing why he believes Az4angela is one of the greatest women ever, putting her alongside Britney Spears and Mariah Carey in his pantheon of special ladies. In 2015’s horror-camp comedy Scream Queens, gay TV creator and diva-worshipper Ryan Murphy paid homage to Angela by making one of the show’s wanna-be sorostitutes, Jennifer, a candle vlogger. Jennifer eventually gets stabbed to death while making one of her videos, her corpse turned into a life-size candle.

Julius, sitting on her bed in a Packers t-shirt and fleece, as she eviscerates Jen from Appleton, embodies the qualities of all the major divas adored by gay men. She has the rage of Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford verbally and physically terrorizing her daughter in Mommie Dearest; the kooky charm of Little Edie deconstructing her idiosyncratic style for the camera in Grey Gardens; and the unexpected vulnerability of Whitney Houston breaking down on Being Bobby Brown. Through the camp lens of gay male culture, debasement is a source of pleasure. When Faye loses it, we lose it with laughter. When Whitney’s at her lowest, we’re at a high. What may seem to others like misogyny is, in reality, self-deprecation. Like Dorothy Zbornak cracking jokes at her own expense, we understand that we are the things we mock. What straight people find so wretched and off-putting about these starlets-turned-monsters — excess emotion, effeminacy, hysteria — are also the things that they hate about gay men.

Angela lacks the one characteristic that unites all these gay icons across generations, the one thing that brings us to Faye, Little Edie, and Whitney to begin with: glamour. How can delight emerge from debasement without a glamorous inception? The hypnotic lure of Grey Gardens doesn’t come from the image of these reclusive women living in squalor — it’s in their unspoken backstory, the knowledge that these relatives of Jackie Kennedy were once at the top of the New York social scene before they retreated forever into the ruins of their Hamptons estate. Az4angela represents a new kind of gay icon, a suburban diva, de-glamorized from the start. She’s a diva who was never a star. In the world of post-millennial gay male diva worship, ordinary subjects can become the object of our camp infatuation. That’s because internet culture and reality TV have so thoroughly glamorized the mundane. Glamour is no longer restricted to the glamorous.

Peach bellinis are the new wire hangers and the Mommie Dearests of today are actual mothers: suburban women who freak out on camera not because they’ve fallen from Hollywood grace but simply because they’re having a bad day. Their freakouts happen in strip malls, casual chain restaurants, and, most often, in the comfort of their own homes. We watch Jenelle Evans, of Teen Mom 2, argue away the possibility of having to miss a Ke$ha concert to serve her sixteen-day jail sentence with the same glee that we watch Elizabeth Berkeley push Gina Gershon down a flight of stairs in Showgirls. We press replay on the clip of Marguerite Perrin losing her shit in her living room over the ungodly behavior of her exchange family on Trading Spouses as quickly as we press replay on the clip of Joan Crawford attacking her daughter.

We’re not in Hollywood anymore. We’re in the Pittsburgh children’s dance studio run by Abby Lee Miller of Dance Moms. We’re in the kitchen of Patti LaBelle’s most vocal, queenly fan as he tries her sweet potato pie for the first time. We’re in the backstage of Mohegan Sun as grown women prepare to compete in a beauty pageant on Game of Crowns. We’re in the Bath & Body Works in Appleton, Wisconsin. Even those who make the jump from suburbia to the Hollywood C-list remain eternally attached to their suburban roots. The “New York” nickname that Tiffany Pollard adopted as a dating show contestant on Flavor of Love and later used to brand herself in all her reality spinoffs refers not to NYC but to her hometown, Utica.

The great critique of gay male diva worship lies in its power to find and embrace that which is latently queer in mainstream cultural objects. But at a moment when gay life itself is becoming more and more normative, when same-sex marriage is a sanctioned reality, when even Lady Gaga has gone “normal,” it’s no longer an art to see the queer in straight popular culture. The gay is already staring us in the face. Now, we need to look harder — and elsewhere — for sources of camp pleasure. That’s what these suburban divas offer us: a new strategy for queering straight culture. It’s why the best response to bigoted clerk Kim Davis is the video that turns her into a gay icon. (The creator of the video is, incidentally, T. Kyle, one of Az4angela’s biggest gay fans.) Remixed to Lady Gaga’s “Applause,” Davis, as she emerges from the courthouse to a screaming crowd, suddenly becomes a glamorized heroine — her stringy hair, glasses, and nondescript clothes taking on surprise beauty in the Kentucky light. As the love object of the people she hates, she is the ultimate suburban diva.

With reports that Elton John is collaborating with Lady Gaga on her next album, it sounds like we’ll have a new gay soundtrack in our future. But there’s a better, longer, gayer playlist already out there. It has candle reviews, not dance hits; weight-loss vlogs, not torch songs; home product hauls, not empowerment anthems. Angela posts a new video to her YouTube account every single day. On lucky mornings and afternoons, we also get a live Periscope stream while she’s commuting to work, sitting in the Walmart parking lot, or walking her shih tzu, Snookie. Each time she turns on the camera, she greets us with the same fresh fierceness and tells us like it is. She’s chronicled her Ulta customer service calls, taught us how to make our own Febreze for fifteen cents, and shown us what’s in her gym shower caddie. It’s all part of the living album we can play now and forever, 1,729 tracks and growing, the masterpiece Gaga will never top: Angela’s Greatest Hits.

What are you doing on this wet spring day? Getting ready for the return of baseball? Making plans for where you’ll be on Easter? Finally finishing your taxes? There’s just so much to do, here in late March. Anyway, here’s some eerie-ass plinky-plonky harp music which is actually considerably more enjoyable than that description might convey. Enjoy!

★★Black specks and lines traced the little jagged edges all over the shrinking snowbanks. Broadway was sheeted with water in the morning sun. The clouds were soft-edged, fading from white to blue by subtle and odd degrees. The breeze felt cool and rinsed; the gutters were a catalog of litter and grime. Then the clouds took firmer shape, with tight blue divisions between them. A while more and the spaces were gone. The pavement darkened and someone walked along Fifth Avenue with an umbrella. Drops fell, too big to be drizzle and but too sparse to be rain. The gray held, almost solid — save only in the northwest, where its edge failed to meet the horizon, and streaks of orange and pink glowed under the gap.

Apparently at the end of a teleology that began with the Big Bang is Uber, a startup that wants to end car ownership, replace the transportation infrastructure in every city, and transform the way physical objects — “food, goods, and soon maybe much more” — move through space. This is why the basis of Uber’s top-to-bottom redesign are the fundamental units of the bit and the atom, representing technology and the “human stuff,” respectively, because Uber is where they “come together” (a more graceful riff on Steve Jobs’ old spiel that Apple is where “technology and the liberal arts” intersect). The result is a wholly non-committal, infinitely flexible design framework that is perfectly adept for a future where Uber’s ever-shifting icons hover over everything, everywhere, at all times.

The longer promo video for Uber’s redesign, which sadly isn’t embeddable, and which vaguely resembles a fake promo from a movie set in a mildly dystopic near-future that ends on a tentatively hopeful note (“most of the evil state-controlled omniscient death machines whose beautiful designs tricked us into welcoming them into our homes are dead but now we must rebuild,”) is a strange document, one that promises a future of “safe efficient movement of people and things at a giant scale” through Uber (sounds good) while boasting that “Uber ultimately succeeds because we think about the human stuff first but the way we do it, that’s our secret” (hmm).

This is certainly true in a way: No startup has ever engaged so aggressively or skillfully with the machinery of politics and local governance — which is composed entirely of humans and money — so early in its existence. Uber’s users are its advocates are its users. So maybe the secret is… lobbying and elaborate political stagecraft? Or maybe it’s talking about how Uber is utterly transparent in its desire to eliminate the thousands upon thousands of people behind the wheels of its entire fleet? It gets weirder, though! “We leave no bit or atom unturned to create industries that serve people and not the other way around.” So it doesn’t create people to serve an industry — and I have certainly not heard about Uber breeding humans. But how else can one think of Uber drivers than as a large mass of people in the service of industry until they are eventually eliminated?

Anyways, this is all just to say, great redesign.

by Haley Mlotek

Political campaigns are a natural predator of pauses. Like other imaginary opponents threatening this American way of life, silence must be defeated or converted. There is simply no time to waste!

The excruciating length of the 2016 campaign is now just as safe to deride in acceptable cocktail party conversations as it is to discuss, say, the weather, or a critically acclaimed cable television drama, a funny little exception to the rule about avoiding politics in mixed company. Even people with opposing viewpoints can come together in their sheer boredom of hearing the same stump speeches day in, day out. With the Iowa caucuses behind us, we’re finally seeing the days we thought would never come: Soon, at least, we’ll have…candidates. As opposed to….more candidates. Wait, why is this better? Isn’t this potentially worse? I’m picturing the triumph of some of our most unanimously loathed candidates now, the would-be presidents who are pretty safe to deride at the parties I’ve been attending, unless someone invited a man who takes pleasure in being deliberately contrary. We’ll have to hear so much, so much more than we already have, if that’s even possible! There will be no mute button loud enough to protect us.

A good strategy, in the absence of a real-life mute button, is to just not listen. As the good people of Iowa were doing whatever it is that comprises a caucus, I was out with two Canadian friends, one of whom reported that Bernie Sanders was ahead right when I sat down for our late dinner, and then we didn’t discuss American politics again. By the time we had moved on to drinks, a quick Twitter search showed that Ted Cruz had started his victory speech; later I was home, and though I could’ve checked it out for myself, I preferred to believe the tweets reporting that Cruz had spoken for so long that Fox News had simply switched over to Bernie Sanders right before midnight, because it’s important to celebrate those moments in life when someone is saying so much while they pretend like they’re saying nothing at all.

In a speech that was neither victorious nor concessional, Sanders spoke about how this “virtual tie,” in his words, was its own badge of honour. When he started this campaign, “We had no political organization; we had no money; no name recognition. And we were taking on the most powerful political organization in the United States of America.” Sanders strikes me as someone who thrives within this kind of margin, too close being the place where he feels fine making a call. After all, he is right. Even after analysts and other political psychics started predicting real gains against Hillary Clinton, the qualities that earned him so much exuberant support never transformed from liabilities to assets. I guess that’s a strategy too, and it has been open season for strategies. We have candidates who vary widely in their experiences and plans, long-shots turned sure-bets and sure-bets turned into the human embodiment of sorry who? when their face appears on our screens. A lot of things seem different, even though I keep reminding myself that this is merely my Canadian eyes reading something that isn’t there. Candidates always positions themselves as outsiders! In haters we trust.

From his second-place position, Donald Trump managed to make a speech that was both victorious and accessional. The parallels — aesthetically and politically — between Trump and Sanders are not the kind of united front I think they would want to present, but they do reflect some similarities. For example, they’ve both amassed a large population of the same kind of undesirable voter: “They are angry at a political system they see as rigged,” John Leland began in Saturday’s New York Times. “Both groups are heavily white, more male than female, and both are fuelled partly by people who, in interviews, express distrust of their parties and the other candidates, especially Hillary Clinton.”

If I were to apply this demographic profile to my (narrow, limited) purview, I’d say it’s one comprising the contrarian men inexplicably invited to parties I really should stop attending. An angry white man is nothing to joke about, or so they keep telling me; an angry white man who views himself as anti-establishment, beyond being the kind of paradoxical inaccuracy so deeply impossible it should cross over into being very funny, is even less of a joke. Sanders has been unfortunate enough to be made the recipient of a related hashtag: the #BernieBro. It was recently the subject of a Facebook-based experiment by Jezebel’s Joanna Rothkopf, who picked two pro-Bernie Facebook groups to bait, leaving the comment, “Bernie is great, but isn’t Hillary more electable?” One group simply deleted the comment (political elegance is refusal, or something) and the other was equally predictable: “No she’s a fucking twat,” read one response. “I am of the opinion that $hillary is a fucking twat. TWAT TWAT TWAT. Bye felicia!” Rothkopf pointed out that even as these comments were posted, sensible Bernie Bros came to her defence. While one Sanders supporter said she shouldn’t even be in the Facebook group after posting such a statement, another responded, “Yes she should, we would love for you to come aboard the Bernie train. Please watch, continue to do your research and keep asking questions. We need to keep educating people not turning them away. Everyone should #feelthebern.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s followers, though lacking in an effective group designation (on Trump’s Instagram he sometimes refers to his supporters as the #TrumpTrain, which if nothing else shows that money and a persistent influx of fringe support can still not buy alliterative cleverness in a hundred and forty characters or less), are both surprisingly and predictably hateful, and — surprise! — their latest targets are women. They get really excited when they have the opportunity to criticize a woman’s appearance, and and they really like when they can find a way to relate a woman’s attractiveness to a woman’s sexual viability.

Here, especially, is the place to look at the kinds of mirrors political campaigns inevitably turn into: They show opposing sides more reflections than oppositions. The trends and patterns that appear from all sides do not say that we’re in this together — lol — but they do more to tell us about a sweeping spread of sentiment, the kinds of emotional reasoning and social archetypes that predict wins and losses of all sorts, not just in politics. Also, now that we’re really looking, don’t Bernie and Trump kind of resemble each other? You know, the wild hair, the ill-fitting suits, their carefully cultivated underdog status manifesting in the way they hold their shoulders on a slight slant when they hold a microphone. Oh my god, now that we’re really thinking about it, has anyone ever seen Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the same room at the same time? No, just kidding. I love a good political conspiracy as much as any late-night Wikipedia reader, but it’s already enough of a mindfuck to consider how much of the two-party system remains a two-way mirror; it’s already bleak enough to look up just as American politics returns to a constant channel flipping between men who, for all demographic purposes, look exactly the same.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, I was originally hoping to see what kind of cold-weather accessories the candidates wore in Iowa, but global warming is real. There is no dignity in weather preparedness; it’s so hard to look presidential in a puffer jacket. The unseasonable warmth means that candidates can keep their necks bare and their shoes pristine, deflating all hopes of seeing the candidates in their snowsuits (not to mention hopes of a hospitable planet for future generations perhaps governed by these very candidates, but I digress). Jeb Bush appears to feel the same way I do about the winter weather; here is, for some reason, a photo of him staring wistfully at a pair of Timberlands.

Jeb on Trump’s footwear: “if it’s the difference between Berluti and timberlands, I’m going timberlands” pic.twitter.com/Y0Br4BcpUN

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) January 22, 2016

Voters, find a candidate who stares at you the way Jeb Bush stares at these sensible winter shoes.

Last night, everyone did a good job of looking like slightly better-lit versions of themselves. Sanders combed his hair and Clinton wore red lipstick. Marco Rubio’s suit sleeves were just a little too big. It was the same with Trump and Cruz, a detail about men’s clothing that has always felt telling: Is it aspiration? Are they hoping to grow into the sleeves? Or is it a vanity they don’t prioritize? How can they not notice, and why does nobody tell them? When they move their arms the excess fabric moves away from them, the kind of sartorial effect I want to believe says more than it really does. In the meantime, I’ll take whatever I can glean from realizing that Ted Cruz always wears two watches:

Of all the things to be creeped out about with Ted Cruz, I’m finding the 2 watches thing to be the most unsettling pic.twitter.com/boZ4ut6Mmt

— Kenny Keil (@kennykeil) February 1, 2016

If a stopped watch is right twice a day, are two watches right four times a day? Like most things Ted Cruz promises to find out, I dread hearing those results.

Anyway, maybe global warming real isn’t real after all. Iowa is in the middle of a blizzard right now, which conveniently started after the caucus was over. “That’s right, Iowa, you won’t be able to blame the weather if you shrug off your civic duty,” a rather pointed statement coming from the Des Moines Register. Although I’ve seen more pointed statements come out of this current Iowa caucus; for example, a journalist from Canada’s National Post shared this photo of a t-shirt for sale at a hotel gift shop:

The are so many journalists in Iowa right now the hotels are selling journalist specific souvenirs. pic.twitter.com/JadS4eVsRH

— Richard Warnica (@richardwarnica) February 1, 2016

I’m waiting for the t-shirt that simply reads, “Are you still talking?” But I guess that’s what the mute button is for.

Pomp and Propaganda is a new occasional series about the aesthetics of the 2016 presidential campaign. It is written by a Canadian.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

So, we’ve heard from a few people that the Gawker editorial union, represented by the Writers Guild of America, East, is planning to walk out next week — apparently on Wednesday for two hours, between noon and 2PM, or approximately the length of a long lunch — over a breakdown in negotiations for annual cost of living salary increases. The sites will also go dark for that time. The union has asked for, we’ve also heard, something like a guaranteed six percent annual increase. Management has offered… zero percent. Asked about the walkout, Hamilton Nolan, “a guy in the union” generally considered the ringleader, told me, “I can say you’ve heard some bad rumors! But I can’t discuss, sorry.”

Gawker recently sold a stake in the company to Columbus Nova, the American investment arm of Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg’s Renova Group. The group not only has a seat on the board, but veto power over Gawker’s budget and the hiring/firing of “executive officers and senior members of management.”

Negotiations between the editorial union and the company are ongoing. Good luck!!!

Photo by Cory Doctorow