My most recent Fortune article on Zimbabwe has been on the newsstands for a couple of weeks, but it's not online yet. The short version: if Robert Mugabe stays in power and continues to thoroughly ruin the economy, he'll eventually run out of money to pay his security forces (the only thing standing between Zimbabwe and official failed state status) and may find himself in a position familiar to the people he has oppressed--cowering in terror at the barrel of a gun, being issued demands he cannot possibly meet.
An excerpt:
A passage from The State of Africa by Martin Meredith, recalls the explanation offered to citizens for cutting off their food supplies [during the Matabeleland conflict]: "First you will eat your chickens, then your goats, then your donkeys. Then you will eat your children, and finally you will eat the dissidents." But most of the dissidents left the country before anyone could stick a fork in them... That Mugabe has any resources left to plunder at all is a function of what is increasingly a remittance economy.
"The World's Worst Inflation" [Fortune]
UPDATE: It's online now. You can read it here.
See also Peter Godwin's excellent piece in Vanity Fair this month.
Belatedly: my last Fortune column has been up for a while. It's about nuclear energy, which has never been popular, but which I think no intellectually serious environmentalist can credibly dismiss as an alternative to fossil fuel burning technologies. Nuclear energy is cleaner, and empirically speaking, much, much safer. But we've all seen The China Syndrome and Chernobyl documentaries, which tend to take up more emotional space in the public psyche than things like actual evidence and hard numbers. (Never underestimate the power of Jane Fonda.)
The case for nukes [Fortune]
My last Fast Company column is up now. (As explained previously, my Fortune contract is exclusive for business writing, so I can't write for Fast Company anymore.) I expect that this will get me more than the usual allotment of hate mail, but you can only walk into so many Brooklyn boutiques with piles of artisanally crafted chocolate, sweaters knittedly lovingly by resident hipsters and all-caps exhortations to "BUY LOCAL" before the implied self-righteousness starts to make you twitch. (Me, anyway.) There are good reasons to buy local, but they're usually not the reasons why people actually do. From the column:
The same people who are horrified by the xenophobic implications of "buy American" campaigns also engage in a different sort of provincialism when it comes to their own consumption choices. Why? Let's face it, much of the buy-local movement has nothing to do with geography. The emotional tenor, at least, is much more about shunning corporate behemoths. If the farmer next door happens to be Monsanto, you rethink buying local. What buying local really means is buying boutique-branded artisanal products that are crafted with tender loving care by actual human beings.Or that merely appear to be.
Neighborhoodlums: Benefits of Buying Local? [Fast Company]
"As far as I can tell, there are only three constituencies outside the mining or commodities-trading industries who have historically demonstrated consistent enthusiasm for acquiring gold: street pavers in heaven, leprechauns, and survivalists." Thus begins my most recent Fortune column.
We did a series about where to put your money in a recession and I took the a look one of the more popular options for the truly paranoid: gold investments. Something must be in the air because I pitched it several weeks ago with the notion that I wanted to talk a bit about survivalists and why they love gold, and the next weekend I amused to see a piece in the New York Times about the popularity of survivalism--in the Styles section, no less. It's an interesting piece written by my talented former colleague, Alex Williams, and you can read it here.
Alex's piece notes that interest in survivalism is the highest it's been since the late 1970s. As it happens, gold is also the highest it's been (price-wise) since the late 1970s. From my column:
...for those who remember the late 1970s, survivalism wasn't the only thing going up at the time. If you have any interest in precious metals, you may recall that period as the last time gold went up precipitously, setting a record high of $850 an ounce in January 1980. The intersection of the two is not a coincidence.Both were in part triggered by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and concerns about the economy. In 1979 inflation was high, energy prices were high, unemployment was high, and global political instability was an ongoing source of anxiety.
Now it's 2008. Inflation is on the rise (unless you're averting your eyes and focusing only on "core inflation," as the Fed would have you do), energy prices are high, unemployment is going up, and political instability is an ongoing source of anxiety. Concurrently, survivalism is enjoying a revival, and after a horrendous performance during most of the '80s and '90s (dropping to around $264 an ounce in 2000), gold has once again shot up, reaching a record high of $1,030.80 on March 17.
You can read the full article here.
Should You Rush to Gold? [Fortune]
I have a doom-and-gloom inflation column is this week's issue of Fortune. Summary: We're All Screwed!
So how do we account for the discrepancy between the Federal Reserve's recent assurances that inflation is under control and the 91% of the population that's worried it isn't? There are several possibilities: The first is that we're all paranoid. We simply need reassurance from the authorities: Inflation rates are fine, nothing to see here, move along quietly. The second is that the Fed's insistence on focusing on "core" inflation - a measure that strips energy and food from the consumer price index (CPI) because they're theoretically subject to short-term volatility - makes inflation seem smaller than it is, or than we feel it to be when our gallon of milk that was 12% cheaper last year gets swiped across the grocery store scanner, beeping ominously like a tiny alarm bell. (While core inflation was just 2.3% in February, the CPI was 4%.) The third and most disconcerting possibility is that the CPI systemically understates inflation, in which case we're paying for it taxwise, and the government is underpaying Social Security recipients. In the words of many a UFO spotter, it isn't paranoia if they're really out to get you.
My April Fast Company column is up now. It's about the self-help-ification of the business book genre and, well, its general cliches:
...There are the tortured metaphors (usually involving cute animals with simple, vaguely ambulatory problems -- mice chasing moving cheese, penguins realizing their iceberg is melting and having nowhere to go) and the slightly less persecuted similes (business is like The Art of War, business is like Winnie the Pooh, business is like having your pinkie finger pulled backward until the pain is intolerable). There is the gratuitous manufacture of new jargon that sounds like English but is in fact spoken only in hotel conference rooms near the airport...
Library of the Living Dead [Fast Company]
I wrote a short piece for Slate yesterday on why the Fed had to bail out Bear Stearns. It's a bit simplified if you've been digesting every piece of news that comes down the pipe about the story, but if not, and you want to know why your taxpayer money should be going to Bear (or JPMorgan, as it were), take a look for a quick explanation. (The short answer: when choosing between catastrophe and apocalypse, one generally picks catastrophe.)
Bear Run [Slate]
My Fast Company column for February is up now. You can read it here. It's about the health-ification of junk food brands. In the interest of research, various "healthy" junk foods were consumed in the making of said column:
I bought something at Whole Foods last week called Laura's Wholesome Junk Food Chocolate X-Treme Fudge Bite-lettes. I was willing to forgive the spelling of "extreme" here as if it preceded a dirt-bike competition, but the "bite-lettes" tasted so bad that I had to chase them with a Dove Organic chocolate bar, the medicinal aftertaste of which only disappeared after the consumption of a handful of Ferrara Pan Red Hots, which are, according to the packaging, a "fat-free food." ... Certainly, it's possible to find and highlight the healthy aspects of nearly anything (arsenic: cholesterol and fat free!).
Devil's Food [Fast Company]
PC Mag, which celebrates its 25th Anniversary this month, asked me to write a short essay on the future of media and how current trends will shape what happens in the next few years. It's hard to write short on that one, but I gave it a shot. The six-word summary: continued fragmentation and more consumer choice.
Also included in the issue are essays from Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Vint Cerf, John McCain and Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Shilling. (See here.)
The Media Company of the Future [PC Mag]
My Fast Company column for October is out now. The subject: Apple and Steve Jobs--the latter of whom just got subpeonaed yesterday, but I didn't talk about backdating because I think Jobs is pretty much in the clear on that one. Instead I talked about why I keep buying Apple products even though they consistently fall apart on me well before their ostensible expiration dates:
And yet I keep buying Apple products. I could blame myself for continuing this sort of irrational behavior, which is particularly irresponsible when you consider that a computer is a professional necessity. I need it to do important things such as adding an aquarium with little pixelated fish to my Facebook profile and sending fake David Hasselhoff sightings to Gawker.com. But I don't blame myself, because that would be unpleasant. So I blame Steve Jobs, who has seduced me into buying his sleek machines, even if their delicate organs seem to fail with alarming regularity, like the beautiful consumptive heroines in Victorian novels. Steve...is the human incarnation of the average Apple product: He's good-looking, he overpromises, and he's notoriously temperamental.
The Tao of Steve [Fast Company]
My September Fast Company column, which I wrote in late July, blaming Alan Greenspan for the subprime meltdown is online now. (It has been for a couple of weeks.)
I mention because I just got an email indicating that a certain big-budget-business-mag-that-shall-not-be-named is doing their primary October feature on ... the same subject. The title: "HIS FAULT: Blame Greenspan for the Credit Bubble." I guess it's a validation of sorts. (Or maybe we're both horribly wrong! MUAhahahaha!)
I have a review of Peter Bernstein and Annalyn Swan's All the Money in the World--How the Fortune 500 Make--And Spend--Their Fortunes in today's Observer. You can read it here. (The verdict: meh. It's not horrible, but if you must, wait for the paperback.)
The New Republic Online asked me to review Portfolio's second issue (after reading my panning of the first one). The verdict: the second issue isn't much of an improvement on the first. But this time I made a prescriptive recommendation: I suggested that the magazine could do with a leadership change at the top. My recommendation for a replacement candidate?
Tina Brown.
Seriously. You can read why here.
The Perils of Portfolio: Distressed Asset [TNR.com]
The September issue of Fast Company is on newsstands now and I have a back-page column on Alan Greenspan's famous inscrutability and the parts of his legacy we'll probably remember the most decades from now: the slow bleed housing market collapse, the proliferation of dangerous alternatives to traditional fixed-rate mortgage lending products, etc.. The column also takes issue with the public's willingness to read innumerable baseless facts into Greenspan's general statements. (It's not that Greenspan isn't smart; it's that the public is dumb--particularly when it comes to economics.)
The Hollow Man [Fast Company]
I wrote a little piece for Slate today on why TAM Brazilian, the carrier involved in yesterday's horrific crash in Sao Paulo, is the worst airline in the world. You can read it here. (And click here to experience the glory that is trying to leave a TAM terminal with your sanity intact.)
I have a short essay in the Wall Street Journal today. You can find it here. The Journal asked 12 people to write pieces on the significance of blogging (or lack thereof.) Other contributors included Harry Evans, SEC commish Chris Cox, Newt Gingrich, Mia Farrow, Tom Wolfe (who seems to think that wikipedia is a blog and says he doesn't read blogs because he's "weary of narcissistic shrieks and baseless information," which, funnily, is the same reason I could barely make it through his Portfolio piece on hedge funds), and then some actual bloggers like Jane Hamsher from Firedoglake and the Journal's own James Taranto.
In other news, I'm participating in another Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys reading on the 26th at McNally Robinson at 7PM. I'll be reading with Tom Dolby, Brian Sloan, Mike Albo and Bennett Madison.
And belatedly, Interview magazine put me on their "Pop A-List" of 50 people 30 and under in June. The list consists mostly of entertainment and fashion people (M.I.A., John Krasinski, Lily Allen, Emily Blunt, Arcade Fire, Proenza Schouler, etc.) but they threw in the YouTube guys, me, a guy named DVD Jon who figured out how to crack DVD encryption and Internet law expert James Grimmelman as the "web people". Along the same lines, Dazed and Confused put me on their "Digital 50" list of Internet creatives in the July issue. All very nice, though I'm not really doing any web stuff at the moment. It's all sleeping, reading and scribbling these days. Which is a nice change.
Foreign Policy asked me to do their "expert sitings" column for the November/December issue. Here it is.
From today's NY Sun, my review of Howell Raines's fly-fishing memoir:
Big Fish And Bigger Blunders
By Elizabeth Spiers
The New York Sun
'The One That Got Away" (Scribner, 336 pages, $25), the fourth book and second memoir by former New YorkTimes exec. editor, Howell Raines, opens with an ode to the author's longest-running loves after newspapers and immediate family members: the fish that has not yet been caught and the obvious corollary, for which the book is named.
An obsessive fly-fisher, Mr. Raines wrote the sequel to his best-selling memoir, "Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis," after a professional career in newspapers that ended very publicly and dramatically three years ago when Times reporter Jayson Blair was accused and found guilty of plagiarizing material in a number of prominent stories over the course of his short career. In the shadow of those events, it's easy to assume that the "one that got away"would be a reference to Mr. Raines's professional losses and perhaps even to Mr. Blair, whose transgressions went unnoticed by Times brass until it was too late.
But Mr. Raines offers a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the particular propriety of the metaphor in another, entirely different sense: "Here, several hours in this story of a modern-day Nantucket sleigh ride, we - or at least you, reader - must confront the sensitive fact that in our culture, 'fish story' is a synonym for 'lie.' Are you to believe what I've told you up to now and what I've yet to reveal simply because I promise here and now that everything happened just the way I'm telling it? Oh, yes, indeed, you may!"
And everything that has happened up to now, according to the author, has been a rollicking jumble of hard fishing in hard places with a cast of characters that includes benign fish-inflating liars, educated but sometimes ignorant people who met grisly deaths because they took their own stubborn advice, Mr. Raines's family members who, like Mr. Raines himself, simultaneously embrace and reject their Alabama roots, shameless practitioners of an unsophisticated substitute for fly-fishing that Mr. Raines derides as "fish-killing," corrupt politicians, and at least one totalitarian managing editor.
The journey begins with the author's early fishing experiences and ambitions to catch more elusive, challenging fish and culminates with more recent expeditions off of Christmas Island and in Russia. It also involves the acquisition of a new permanent fishing partner in the form of an unexpected second wife. Mr. Raines's elegiac prose is sprinkled with short expository digressions that contextualize or otherwise explain the personal significance of lost fish, the behavior and philosophies of people who have influenced the author's life, and the author's own beliefs about fate and one's ability to elude it, or lack thereof.
The most notable interruption to the fly-fishing narrative is Mr. Raines's forced analysis of his role in the Blair scandal and how it led to what he now believes was the inevitable result: his departure from the Times. But he takes his time getting there. Mr. Raines refers to Mr. Blair briefly in the first third of the book and then moves on to mourn the loss of a Florida marlin hooked off the coast of Christmas Island, a romantic if implausible prioritization for a man of his ambition and talent. This dismissiveness suggests that rather than reliving that particular episode of his editorship at the Times, Mr. Raines will eventually insist that the elephant in question is merely a large, ornately-shaped coffee table, and keep insisting as much to the last page. It isn't until the final third of the book that he finally addresses the Blair saga and his tenure at the Times in full. Mr. Raines's unsentimentally articulates his position, admittedly contested in other quarters, clearly and without conflict. He writes: "I realized I could spend the rest of my life thinking about ways that I might have handled the Jayson Blair scandal rather than ordering the publication of the 7,400-word story that I read while John McPhee cast his fly tirelessly from the bow of Mike Padua's boat. ... one could read the story closely and come away with the impression that I had ignored the stop-Jayson memo and all the other warnings that did not reach the top of the pyramid."
"The One That Got Away" might have been a summary defense masquerading as a fly-fishing memoir rather than a series of damn good fish stories with an obligatory (and possibly publisher-mandated) analysis of the most notorious public event in which Raines was a material participant had Mr. Raines still felt the need to exculpate himself three years after the fact. Neither is optimal, but the latter is certainly preferable.
That's not to say that Mr. Raines should have skipped the Blair episode entirely, but the memoir as a whole is more a volume of bits of wisdom gleaned from personal experience and supporting anecdotes than a look at the author's interior and undoubtedly complex motivations, which would have made it infinitely richer. Raines doesn't want to confess too much, personally or professionally, and in failing to do so, his own story becomes a fish tale of sorts, albeit a good one, told eloquently and with great wit.
Even the best memoirists are inherently unreliable narrators - unwitting well-intentioned liars and benign tellers of fish tales. If they were not so, we would be left only with a dry chronology of facts, journalistically sound and more amenable to Times standards, but devoid of any hint of the personal biases, stubborn wrongheadedness, and radical revisionist interpretations of facts-as-they-happened that truly explain why and how the events occurred and how they affected the subjects.
It would be easy to attribute Mr. Raines's lack of regret and reluctance to delve any deeper into the Blair situation to arrogance rather than reflection and resolution, but, if true, he exhibits an unusual self-awareness even on that count. In responding to charges of hubris - an accusation lobbed at successful New Yorkers like so many tennis balls, and in the same sporting fashion - Mr. Raines writes unapologetically: "When was the last time they handed out important jobs in New York on the basis of humility? If hubris was going to take me home, so be it. At least I'd be leaving on the horse I rode in on."
Ms. Spiers is the publisher of DealBreaker.com
From the Observer's profile of Nick:
"Most everyone at Gawker is a misfit of some sort," Mr. Denton instant-messaged. He ran down a list of his present and former employees’ characteristics: "rumored to have been fired … for being high on the job"; "never went to college"; "only wears 1960s clothes"; "notoriously unemployable."
Let's see... never been fired, went to college, pretty employable last time I checked...
...
But I like 1960s clothes!
Here's some random op-ed stuff I've written for mb lately:
Life After Nielsen
Grab your soda and popcorn and turn on the TV! The hurricane starts in five minutes!
If You're Thinking of Starting a Women's Mag...
An open letter to would-be women's mag editors
Citizen Media Critic: Chicken Soup for the Soul Magazine
The best-selling book series begets a magazine—and never-before-seen Elvis photos
My report from this weekend's Billy Graham crusade:
On June 24, on the first night of what the Billy Graham Evangelical Organization was calling the "Greater New York Crusade," Graham began his first sermon by saying that "after all we'd heard and seen" -- the newspaper accounts, the TV appearances, the enormous building-size banners with large, steely-eyed Graham heads staring off into what one presumes can only be eternity -- "I'm probably an anticlimax." And he was. That's not to say that parts of him were not impressive. Graham is, after all, the "respectable" evangelical. He's not the guy who declared a SpongeBob Squarepants video "pro-homosexual." (That was James Dobson, who, full disclosure, employs one of my cousins.) He's not the guy who said "abortionists" were responsible for 9/11. (That was Jerry Falwell.) And he's certainly not the guy who routinely whacks people on the head with his palm, "slaying them in the spirit" and "curing" them of terminal diseases, broken bones and, it would seem, the capacity for rational thought. (That would be Benny Hinn.)
A spiritual three-ring circus [Salon]
Well, not like that. Not today, anyway.
New York sent me to try out for "The Apprentice" last week and I got fired (FIRED!!!). Sort of.
Who Would You Hire? Cutthroat Business at the Apprentice Tryouts [NYMag]
The cover of New York magazine this week (and next week--it's a double issue) features a little second person fiction piece I wrote. It is, quite literally, the cover story.
The text is a bit difficult to read on the cover, so here's the full version:
“I haven’t had good sea urchin in ages,” you think. “And I’m really, really in the mood for good sea urchin.” Any kind of sea urchin will do - fried, flambéed, you don’t care. Your sea-urchin craving happens only once every few months or so, and your wife thinks it has something to do with your mother, whom you once described as “prickly.” This is not surprising, because your wife hates your mother. At any rate, you have no idea where to find good sea urchin. Or bad sea urchin, for that matter. You’d ask your assistant for a recommendation, but she’s too busy faxing merger documents to the wrong tax attorneys. You’re not even sure she knows what a sea urchin is.
The day’s mail sits unopened in a pile on the edge of your desk and you reach under a stack of FedEx envelopes for this week’s issue of New York Magazine. It’s the annual “Best of New York” issue. You’ve never considered “best” an objective qualifier, and you suspect that magazines that publish “best of” issues are engaging in some sort of institutional solipsism - things are “the best” because the magazine thinks they’re “the best,” but you decide to go with it. They’ve obviously spent months researching this stuff, and what difference does it make how New York Magazine differentiates between one knitting circle and another? (Is the instructor wittier? The knitting better? Do the amateur knitters - the knitting poseurs - go elsewhere?) You note that the Best Place to Buy Flat-Screen TVs is the place you bought your 36 inch three months ago, and you feel a little smug. You didn’t get your massive, superamped entertainment center from any old store; you got it from the best store.
You continue to flip through the magazine, see the Exhale yoga center, and remember how flummoxed you were when you were feeling even more stressed out than you feel right now and were looking for a yoga center that didn’t creep you out, and you resolve to try this one. You also notice that New York’s food critics have singled out your favorite restaurant as having the Best Quesadilla. You applaud your own good taste. Your stomach growls. You ask your assistant to call your wife and ask her for the name of that place you had that sea urchin dish that time. “You know. That place,” you say - clarifying for her benefit. “I’m not going to have time,” your assistant protests. “I’m leaving today at 4:30.” You look at your watch. It’s 2:15.
You wonder if New York will receive protest letters from readers who disagree with their picks. “Dear Editor,” you imagine yourself writing, “In your ‘Best of New York’ issue, you stated that Asiate had the ‘best’ potted duck in New York. I feel that you have misrepresented the facts. Had you been more thorough in your investigation, you would have discovered that the best potted duck in New York is in fact found on West 78th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam in the kitchen of my dear aunt Geraldine.”
Your mental composition is interrupted as Best Poker Weekend catches your eye. You wince as you think of the $600 you lost to Jack’s annoying younger brother two weeks ago and vow revenge. You ask your assistant to call the Borgata in Atlantic City and inquire about registration for the next tournament, but she’s busy responding to an urgent and confidential e-mail from the only surviving son of a dead Nigerian dictator, who is apparently willing to enter a lucrative business partnership with her if she’s willing to accept the transfer of $18 million into her personal bank account. You wonder if New York has a Best Incompetent Assistant-Replacement Agency category.
A few pages later, you notice a recommendation for Best Men’s Facial. You’re fairly comfortable with your metrosexuality and freely admit that this may be the best category so far. You absent-mindedly rub your face, irrationally assuming that you can determine whether you need a facial by doing that. Yes, you conclude, it appears that you need a facial.
You recognize the Best Place to Spend a Mint on a Puppy as the place where your wife bought her chihuahua’s “couture” dog collar. The dog - which you hate - has a habit of running between your kitchen and living room, yapping ferociously and punctuating turns with a sharp little ARF! Yap, yap, yap, yap, ARF! Yap, yap, yap, yap, ARF! Sometimes it slips on the rug and goes crashing into the wall. Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, ARF - whack! You feel a tiny bit of glee every time it happens. You wonder if the Best Place to Spend a Mint on a Puppy is interested in buying a slightly used chihuahua. You write down the name of the Best Craft Studio, because the yapping, couture-collared piece of evil in question recently decapitated your 4-year old’s beloved doll, Clare, mistaking her for some sort of threatening domestic predator. You also make a note to call the Best Environmentally Friendly Exterminator, since the only thing the dog appears to have no interest in chasing, biting, or even mildly annoying is the bug population in the basement.
You continue flipping through the magazine. Best Vintage Lamps. The perfect gift for Aunt Geraldine, you think. Best Same Day Dry Cleaner. That would have come in handy yesterday when your assistant spilled her venti latte over your Hermès tie. Best . . . Sea Urchin. You smile. Mmm . . . sea urchin.
Bergdorf Goodman Magazine (they have one--who knew?) approached me several months ago about writing a first person secret-of-my-success article on, say, how I broke into journalism with blogging. I told them that I thought it would sound too much like an after school special and would erroneously presuppose that there was some level of intelligent planning on my part. So instead I wrote the following:
On the Virtues of Being a Dilettante (The Secret of My Success: An Utter Lack of Focus.)
Bergdorf Goodman Magazine Spring 2004
I could tell you that I'm a Jack of All Trades and a Master of None, but that would be a bald-faced lie. I am, in fact, a Jack--or Jill, as it were--of Enough Wildly Disparate Trades to Be Thought Somewhat Eccentric Yet Not That Terribly Interesting and Master of Three or Four Obscure Areas of Specialization, Most of Which, If My Career Trajectory Is Any Indication, Have No Practical Applications.
In centuries past, there existed a certain type of person sophisticates called a "Renaissance Man." The Renaissance Man was an artist and a musician, a scientist and a mathematician--all at the same time. He was respected, admired and heavily subsidized by powerful Italian bankers.
But the Renaissance days are gone, and with them, the respect and admiration once showered upon Renaissance men. (The Italian banking industry, surprisingly and against all conceivable odds, still exists.) Renaissance men are now wrongly and unfairly maligned as "dilettantes."
They are not dilettantes.
I, however, am.
In December of 2002, I became editor fo a weblog (an online journal that provides readers with news and commentary) called Gawker.com that purportedly chronicled what I then described as "the darker Manhattan-centric themes--class warfare as recreational sport, pathological status obsession, and the complete, total and wholly unapologetic embrace of decadence." Frankly, I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that, but it looked good (or at least spell-checked) at the time.
During my nine-month tenure as the editor of Gawker, I accumulated a small following of loyal readers, a disturbingly expansive repertoire of bad jokes about the recreational abuse of trendy narcotics and a cease-and-desist letter from Catherine Zeta-Jones. (I also thumbed my nose at the oppressive--dare I say, fascist--style conventions of most traditional publications and used parentheticals with ruthless if not wild and gratuitous abandon.)
My tendency to mock New York-based magazines and newspapers made Gawker a masochistic pleasure for Manhattan media people, and, as a result, a number of ostensibly sane editors at otherwise respectable publications hired me to write for them. I awoke one morning to the startling realization that I was, professionally speaking, a journalist. (Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find himself a cockroach, and I imagine that the experience was not entirely dissimilar.) It was at that point that I left the weblog for the milk-and-honey of free office supplies.
Gawker was, career-wise, the inevitable product of a series of statistically improbable circumstances and my own crippling inability to focus on any single subject for more than five minutes. As a dilettante, I had assiduously built a resume by taking a progressively unlikely series of unrelated jobs, until the only remaining unturned stone involved writing satire about the Hilton sisters.
I've been a tech equity analyst, I've screened deals for venture capitalists, and I've written business plans for companies that needed capital. (I also wrote turnaround plans for the same companies after they got funding and spent the money on bad technology and overpaid employees--the former of which didn't work and the latter of which didn't work, either.) Prior to that, I was the fifth employee hired into a Silicon Alley dotcom at the height of the tech boom--a job I got because I co-founded an industry-related nonprofit while still at Duke University. My lingering hopes of working for a nongovermental organization in a foreign country had been dashed by a failed attempt at the same, and my plans to become a spy were curtailed by the CIA's repeated insistence on ignoring my resume. (I had written a senior paper on the ethics of terrorism, an award-winning policy paper for a state agency on chemical weapons disposal and could say "Where are you going with my luggage?" in Italian, Spanish and Arabic. You'd think this would have made a difference, but no.) I exhibited, at the time, a certain moral flexibility that would have made me an excellent candidate for investment banking, but I was apparently allergic to exceedingly large paychecks and health insurance. (Thus my latest career in journalism.)
Popular Western philosopher David Byrne asked American radio audiences in the 1980s How did I get here? "This is not my beautiful house," he added. "This is not my beautiful wife." To Byrne’s existential query, the audiences responded that they had no idea how they got here, that their beautiful houses unfortunately belonged to Charles Keating’s S&Ls, and that their beautiful wives were in fact characters in made-for-TV movies starring Meredith Baxter-Birney. But it’s not a bad question, and my answer is fairly simple. I know exactly how I got here: I tried everything else.
In today's edition of "Read My Stuff," we have a conversation with Alec Baldwin at a party for Tina Brown (Tina to hubby: "Oooh, Harry, have you met Elizabeth Spiers? She does this snarky little website she thinks no one reads.") in which Baldwin says he wants to be gay but isn't into the whole "sex-with-men" part.
We also have a short piece on ex-NYT magazine editor and Kennedy biographer Ed Klein, which was fun. (You know you're getting somewhere when the subject angrily demands to know which editor assigned you the piece.) The irony here is that I'm probably the only person in New York who doesn't give a shit about the Kennedys.
The Face asked me to do a little piece on the rise and fall of the trucker hat. It's in the September fashion issue:
Eulogy for the Trucker Hat (The Face)
September 2003.
It's hard to say precisely when the trucker hat made its first appearance in the realm of American indie coolness, or to determine its exact origins. One can only imagine that on a seemingly normal spring day approximately a year ago, an anonymous hipster in some urban mecca of disaffected irony—Austin, Williamsburg, take your pick—raided his grandfather's closet and found a foam hat with a mesh backing. The anonymous hipster then scratched his purposely scruffy chin, and thought, "I bet I can get away with wearing this in public."
And so the trucker hat trend was born, and an icon of blue-collar life in rural hamlets with limited fashion options went from chic to shit almost overnight. Celebrity stylists ruthlessly affixed them to the craniums of various clients, like Pharrell, Kelly Osbourne and Christina.
Now they shamefully sit in display windows of assorted international chain stores where any jerk from Ohio can purchase them and pretend that he, too, is an urban warrior with a flair for style and a subtle appreciation of working-class values.
How did this happen? Two words: Ashton Kutcher. Ashton began wearing the trucker hat as Punk'd debuted on MTV and climbed the ratings charts. Having escaped the confines of sitcom oblivion, Ashton's face and his hat were plastered all over every teen bedroom in America. The trucker hat was officially mainstreamed.
By mid-May, the trucker hat had become so ubiquitous that the New York Times ran a style section story declaring the trucker hat phenomenon "over." That its style section, not traditionally the arbiter of cutting-edge fashion, was even aware of its existence indicated that it had probably been "over" six months earlier.
By mid-July, even Ashton had abandoned his signature accessory for something far sexier—freshly botoxed arm candy in the form of 40-year-old Demi Moore. (Can you blame him?)
And where is the anonymous hipster who started it all? Trying on capri pants after getting his rat tail haircut trimmed in some dark corner of indie America, and thinking, "I bet I can get away with wearing this in public."
I interviewed Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk for the Post on Thursday. (Read the article here.)
Palahniuk reponds to fan mail himself and typically sends little packages to readers. (Or anyone, really. He sent a letter to the Believer magazine requesting a correction that was printed in the last issue. At the bottom, there was a note that read "Enclosed: 1 box Brown & Haley Belgian cremes, 1 'Jesus Light': 'incandescent night light with on/off switch,' 1 Chuck Palahniuk t-shirt.")
An anecdote that got cut from the story: I was asking Palahniuk about his promise on his audioblog to send people who ask the best questions handmade packages ("some piece of crap you can sell on eBay") and what those questions tended to be:
"A lot of people ask me which character in my books most resembles me," he said, "And I always say Denny from Choke, and I end up telling this long story…"
I demanded, of course, that he tell me the long story, and Palahniuk explained that one of the character's scenes in the book was loosely based on his own experience.
"It was like the reverse of the shower scene in [the Stephen King thriller] Carrie," he said. "When I first inadvertently learned to masturbate—and I didn’t know what it was—I thought I'd invented it. And my first thought was, 'I'm going to make so much money off of this!' I actually saw myself giving seminars!"
Palahniuk is, incidentally, a member of the Portland Chapter of the National Cacophony Society—a group of pranksters, who were responsible for, among other things, the spontaneous appearance of a few hundred people in Santa suits last year. (The pranks in Fight Club were partially influenced by the society's activities.) I asked him if he'd heard of flash mobs, and he said no, so I ended up sending him the Gawker anthology of flash mob articles.
A ranty little essay I wrote for the New York Post on Stephen King's new career as an entertainment columnist:
He's Still the King
What's truly scary about America's top horror writer
New York Post - 08.04.03
Stephen King has been acting strange lately.
In the most recent issue of Book magazine—which is partially owned by Barnes & Noble—the horror novelist wrote a fictional essay about the publishing industry rewarding serious literature monitarily. (That's why it's fictional.)
For example: King writes that he read Jonathan Franzen's bestseller, The Corrections, and hated it because of "that maddening New York 'tude that seems to whisper, 'I'm smarter than you, more sophisticated than you, better-read than you—just better than you' at least once on every single page."
He then proceeds to mock Franzen's "constant taking of his creative temperature." ("How is Jonathan feeling today?")
Given the majority of King's work ("The Shining," "Carrie," "Cujo," "Misery," to name but a few) one half expects the essay to end with Franzen in pieces—literally. Killed, perhaps, in a tragic body snatching incident or a good clean axe murder—a bloody ending rather than a snarky punchline.
What's happening to Stephen King?
Has he lost his instinct for violence and gore? And why is the Prolific Master of Sublime Horror masquerading as The Guy Who's Randomly Freelancing for Pseudo-Literary Publications That Go Unread by the Masses?
Actually, King is soon to reach a more mainstream audience in a widely-read magazine—Entertainment Weekly.
This week, the Post's Keith Kelly broke the news that the legendary thriller writer will write a weekly pop culture column (for a reported $60,000—or $5,000 a column).
It will run on the back page—once occupied by the recently fired humorist Joel Stein. When asked to comment, Stein quipped that "every column should end in a gory death."
Maybe Stein has a point. Why not have every column end in a gory death? They are, after all, King's specialty and they happen all too infrequently in popular culture.
Think of how much better "Glitter" would have performed at the box office if Mariah Carey made her final exit screaming hysterically as some netherworldly villain ensured that she'd never abuse another personal assistant again.
Then again, gory deaths are so passé. So 1987. So Nightmare on Elm Street Part III.
Mere "blood and guts" is easy. King's forte is psychological manipulation—the tension he masterfully builds up, the affinity for the outsider, his willingness to shock with unadulterated (but rarely gratuitous) violence.
It would be refreshing to learn in King's new Entertainment Weekly column, for example, that Hollywood celebrities are really humanoid zombies. Many of us have long suspected this anyway. Who hasn't, when watching the cast of "Friends" make their requisite appearances on "Access Hollywood," thought that Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer could quite conceivably be sharing the same brain?
Let's assume, however, that King decides to completely abandon the horror genre and write sincere—albeit humorous analyses of Hollywood culture. The Book magazine piece was admittedly funny, and it's easy to see why that kind of sharp humor would be more difficult to work into, say, a particularly graphic description of a chainsaw massacre.
The questions remain: Is Stephen King making a concerted effort to demonstrate his versatility? Does he feel like he's not taken seriously as a writer? Or is this new career move simply indicative of his inability or unwillingness to continue to churn out mass market thrillers?
After all, he seems to have undergone quite a transformation since he was nearly killed in a car accident a few years ago. He's been bravely writing, for example, about his struggle with alcoholism, admitting that he wrote many of his bestsellers while drinking.
But King seems to have trouble abandoning the horror genre altogether—much to the delight, of course, of his fiercely loyal fans. They don't seem to want to accept their master's declaration that the next installment in his long-running "Dark Tower" series, due out next year, will be his last.
These same fans were also strangely unfazed by the news that King planned to collaborate on a Broadway musical with John Cougar Mellencamp. Talk about scary.
At any rate, Hollywood is sure to provide King with more horror stories than he could fit into another lifetime of books. Reality TV alone frightens both small children and adults with moderately discriminating tastes.
There is, of course, one possibility we haven't explored. Perhaps this Stephen King—the one who's writing pop-culture columns for EW and gearing up to be the next Billy Joel of Broadway—isn't really Stephen King at all. Maybe it's an imposter. An imposter with evil intentions.
Or maybe we've all been reading too many Stephen King books.
© 2003, Elizabeth Spiers
My latest article—a profile of The Sopranos' Drea de Matteo—from the Fall issue of Black Book magazine:
Fuck the Industry
From mobster's moll to punk rocker, Drea de Matteo cusses like a sailor and hates having to do press. We'd like to protest.
Black Book Magazine - Fall 2003
Drea de Matteo is every publicist's nightmare. She hates doing press, and doesn't rave about her new movie unless asked, neither of which make high-powered Hollywood flacks very happy.
She is, however, acutely aware of how she's perceived by the dreaded members of the Fourth Estate. "Because I am from New York and because I do curse a lot, they always like to say that I'm just like Adriana," she says. "You know, if I say 'fuck,' then I'm 'like Adriana.'"
"I didn't say fahckin (nasally Adriana voice)," she clarifies, laughing. "I said fuckin'!"—an unmistakably Manhattan accent on the fuckin'.
Drea's natural voice is lower, more gravelly than Adriana's. It's the seductive alto you'd imagine a 1950s Hollywood sexpot using to seduce a Rat Packer as she casually removes the cigarette holder from her lips with an immaculately gloved hand. We've been talking for 20 minutes or so, and to be fair, Drea has said "fuck" approximately 12 times. That's about a fuck a minute. But as someone who says "fuck" a lot myself, I'm not inclined to think it's a bad ratio.
Drea's hair is pulled back into a conservative ponytail at the nape of her neck and the glasses on her nose slide down a bit when she laughs. With no makeup and no jewelry, the 30-year-old looks far less imposing than the seemingly Amazonian fashionista she plays on The Sopranos. (Adriana's hair probably adds a couple of inches.)
Then again, she can lay some of the blame for her image problems at her own door. In the early days of The Sopranos, she purposely played on the fact that she came from a blue-collar Queens neighborhood. "It was all bullshit," she laughs. "I was born in Queens, but grew up on the Upper East Side. I went to those fancy all-girls schools. But I kind of hammed it up a little bit for the sake of the character.
Now she says she's ready to be herself, publicity be damned. "Last year I was trying to break away from it and let people know I wasn't like that," she shrugs. "And now I don't really give a fuck (13) what people think."
"I'm really just shy, too," she says. "I don't like walking down a red carpet. It makes me feel self-conscious. I think that whole thing about wearing clothes, and you can't wear the same clothes again, and stylist this—fuck (14) that. Leave me out of it."
In spite of co-owning Filthmart, an East Village vintage clothing store, with her ex-boyfriend, she insists she "hates fashion." "I fucking (15) hate it. I hate clothes. I hate getting dressed." An odd sentiment for someone who runs a clothing store, but Drea says she only started Filthmart to help her ex, who is "still her best friend," although she's now dating Shooter, the son of late country singer Waylon Jennings.
Shooter's a musician "like his daddy," and Drea's a music junkie, so it's a good match. "The Rolling Stones, Rush, the Velvet Underground," she says. "Waylon Jennings." She smiles. "I'm listening to a lot of Waylon Jennings."
Drea's music obsession has recently spilled over into her film career. "If I could have been a rock star, I probably never would have acted," she says. "If I couldn't act, I'd probably either be directing orr doing something in the music business."
In her upcoming film, Prey for Rock 'n' Roll, she plays Tracy, a member of a rock band led by Gina Gershon—a role she initially approached with mixed feelings. "I just wasn't sure if I wanted to do a rock 'n' roll girl movie, because they can be pretty bad," she says. "I've already made a few bad choices, as far as movies go. I'm very proud of The Sopranos and any theater I've done, but as far as films..." Her voice trails off. "Except for Abel Ferrara's movie, ['R Xmas,] because I love him."
The script for Prey for Rock 'n' Roll was developed by Drea's business partner, Robin Whitehouse, and based on a musical that originally played at CBGBs, and was written by tattoo artist and musician Cheri Lovedog. "I am now very proud," Drea says, "because it came out really good, and Alex [Steyermark], the director, made sure it didn't become some cheesy chick flick."
What are her regrets?
"Deuces Wild," she says. "I can't say I really regret it. I learned what I learned from it. But I knew the script was in a bad place and I did it anyway."
"I don't regret doing Swordfish," she adds, "but it wasn't my kind of movie. Originally they hired me to do it with a Texas accent. I'm really good at accents, so I said yes. And they took the accent away from me, or they weren't going to let me do it, because I guess it was [John] Travolta who didn't believe that I could do another accent. I was kind of annoyed about that."
Perhaps Drea's been acting a little too well. "I think I've been on maybe 15 auditions since I've been on The Sopranos," she says. "People don't even want to see me anymore, because they really think I'm Adriana."
But Drea is not worried about being permanently typecast. "I could bitch about it and be bitter and be annoyed, and start hating the fact that I'm on The Sopranos. Or I could say 'fuck this business,' I don't like these movies anyway. Why do I even want to be in them? And half of them, I don't. So the only way to really deal with myself now is to do my own projects—I don't need the industry anymore."
© 2003, Elizabeth Spiers