"What is this? #mystery #enigma #whatisthis"
I saw this in a vintage store today. What the hell is it? A phone? Speakers? An alien life force?
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"Scary."
After I went to the journalism program at Yale, I spent a couple days in NYC. It was an amazing time. I ate at The Breslin, which I Ioved. I sat at the bar upstairs and enjoyed a Brooklyn Bramble cocktail (I tried the Pickled Gibson, but it was too weird for me), the market salad with tahini dressing (tasty!), and the duck and sausage (delicious). Thanks to Matt for being a cool bartender. I stayed at the Algonquin, which, oh my god, I loved so much. Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle! Dark wood! A cat named Matilda working the front desk! A copy of the New Yorker in every room! I will definitely return. On my first full day there, I went to see the Alexander Calder show at Dominique Levy. Everything was white, white, white there, and you had to wear booties to not scuff up the floor. The Calders were mostly small-sized, and there was a very dear set of miniature sculptures that fit into a cigar box, a gift for his wife. The rooms in which the pieces were shown were designed by Santiago Calatrava. After that, I saw the Richard Prince show at Gagosian. The show featured cheesy pulp books that were coupled with the original artworks that had been commissioned for them. It was a little odd, and somewhat amusing. Of course, the infamous appropriated shot of an underage Brooke Shields in the nude was included. As usual, Prince underwhelmed. After that, I went to the Met. This show required a warning, and I loved the China fashion exhibit. There were some amazing Tom Fords and a lot of glorious Galliano, but I wished there were more McQueens. Don't miss the weird, watery floating box on the roof garden. The next day, I had to check out the new Whitney Museum. So glad I did. It is super cool. It's like a stack of fantastic shoe boxes, or art-filled jewel boxes, and the views that frame the art make you feel agog. The all-floors show is America Is Hard to See. The top floors with older works were crowded and less impressive, but the lower floors with newer works were just spectacular. Oh, and I walked the High Line, too.
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A couple months ago, I saw an ad for Thread at Yale on Romenesko. It's basically a new three-day writing conference at Yale, although it describes itself as "a gathering of professional journalists and storytellers that does not care whether you work in print, radio, podcasting, or some form we haven’t even thought of yet." It's a hybrid event: there are lectures, Q&A's at bars, and workshops. The cost: around $2K if you choose to stay at the Yale dorms. So, I applied and was accepted. This was the inaugural Thread at Yale, and here's how, for me, it went, the pros and the cons.
"Yaleish."
OMG Yale
The main reason I went is because Yale. I mean, you know, it sounds fancy. I went to the University of California at Berkeley, which is not the Yale of anything. True to form, Yale didn't disappoint. I had imagined it as "where the one-percent go to school," and a lot of it looked like a church dedicated to elitism. And I mean that as a compliment. Yale is like Berkeley, but with way less communists and, as far as I know, no one going to class naked.
The speakers were super cool
The second reason I went: the impressive mentors lineup. The most famous mentor there would be Steven Brill, founder of CourtTV and Important Person in Media. He's also behind the Yale Journalism Initiative, and Thread is an "offshoot" of that. He was the second speaker on the first day. I wanted to like him, and I even hit him up about his mysterious media project with Jill Abramson, but for some reason he reminded me of Roy Cohn. He spent a lot of time sneering at most topics that were raised, which was sort of unfun. Suffice to say, Steven Brill is not my spirit animal. By contrast, Glynn Washington was the first person who spoke on the first morning, and he was endearing -- example: "Stories are magic." There were two evening events at bars, one featuring Emily Bazelon and the other featuring Gillian Laub. They were OK, but there was a bucket of beer being handed around, and Laub said "I" so many times it made me want to stick my head in the bucket. The second morning, we heard Steve Brodner speak, and he was hilarious and smart and irreverent, although I had to go take a call (journalism related!) in the middle of it, so I missed part of it. After Brodner, Catherine Burns, who's the artistic director of The Moth spoke, and she got way upstaged by the guy she brought with her, Matthew Dicks, who did a Moth story live about the day he died (and came back to life, obviously) that made me have feels, which was good if you want to have feels. (Seriously, it was great. It made me want to cry.) The last morning, we heard from John Branch, who was the most amazing of all the speakers, and who talked a lot about "Snow Fall," which was intoxicating and made you want to work for the NYT. That shit was inspiring. The last speaker on the last day was Ann Fadiman, who I thought was a bit meh, but she told a highly hilarious story about Tina Brown, and who doesn't like a good Tina Brown story?
I loved my mentor
Other mentors weren't there to lecture; they were there to lead the workshops we did in the afternoons. Reportedly, there were 72 attendees, and we were put in six groups of twelve, and we spent three hours every afternoon for three days with the same group workshopping whatever individual project we were working on in our real lives. The workshop mentors were: Mark Oppenheimer, Sarah Stillman, Jake Halpern, Graeme Wood, Roya Hakakian, and Linda Gradstein. My mentor was Sarah Stillman, who writes for The New Yorker, and is a deeply awesome person. She ended up being my I'm So Glad I Went. (Read her "The Invisible Army" if you haven't.) I heard one of the mentors (not mine) was not good at time management, and some of that group's participants were disappointed by the consequences of that.
The biggest issue was ...
I felt like a good-sized chunk of the attendees were a disappointing lot. Some attendees were great. I met some really awesome people, and I hope I made some friends, and there were some young people there that I learned from and who were awesome. But the group of attendees was about -- I don't know, like, 80% women? And that's just never a good thing. I wondered why this was the case with several people. Why so man ladies? Somebody thought it's because Thread used the word "storytelling" a lot in describing itself, and that sounded like some lady shit. Another person thought that it's because men don't think they need mentors, and women don't mind asking for help. At one point, some chick was knitting in the back of the room during a lecture, and it made me want to grab the needles and stab out my eyes. I guess because Yale and because High Caliber Mentors, I thought this would be a group of brilliant, hostile, drunken, ambitious male and female journalists who would be violently dissecting each other's work, drinking too much, and engaging in non-stop witty repartee. Instead, it felt more like a support group for women who wanted to tell their stories, but were like, oh, gee, I don't know, I need validation and permission, and there was way too much hand-holding, and getting along, and nurturing. Nurturing is to vom. I would not go back for this reason. I don't need a support group. I need a friendly flogging. But, hey, that's me. Knit on, sister, or whatever. (There were a lot of inexperienced people among the attendees. Or at least it seemed like it. I would have liked more experienced people. More rigor. More cranky veterans from the field. At one point, I looked around and wondered where they were, these working journalists who are fearless and don't need permission for anything, and then I realized they were out there doing stories and being cranky in the field. They were not at this event. I suppose this is what happens when the barrier to entry is money, not talent. C'est la thread.)
A bit of the bait and switch
I felt like because there was so much stressing of multimedia in Thread's description of itself on its website, that I would really learn a lot about multimedia. I did not. Sure, there were people from NPR and people from The Moth and photographers and a political cartoonist as speakers, but I wanted to learn more about how "Snow Fall" gets made, and how I can make a "Snow Fall," and what are the tools available to me, and how do I integrate words and these tech tricks, and there was none of that other than Branch. That made me feel baited and switched. So that was disappointing. Fix that for next time, Thread at Yale.
But what about those dorms
I stayed in the Yale dorms. Maybe the architecture was Brutalist, and the room looked like a Chinese prison. But, whatever. The twin bed did the job. I had a roommate. We each had our own bedroom. I mean, it was a dorm room, for fuck's sake. (If I had to go again and wanted to be fancy, I would stay at The Study.)
For fuck's sake, what did you eat and drink already
Ordinary is a super cool bar in New Haven. Recommend. Mory's is fucking bizarre. Probably the most WASPy place I've ever been in, and I don't get why you keep doing your Yale chants. For sure the only time George H. W. Bush and I have been in the same club. We ate breakfast (included!) in some Yale cafeteria with a giant moose head on the wall.
Um, no
Someone at the start of the conference, a leader, indicated we were not to quote with attribution what was said at the conference. At least, that's what I and others understood him to say. (Here's me not doing that: It was Mark Oppenheimer who said it.) Are you fucking kidding me? Tell writers what they can't write. That's how you start off your writing gathering. Sign me out. Thank you for not successfully censoring me.
Here's the thing
Am I glad I went? Yes. I learned a lot in the margins. In the spaces between events, and in the random connections with cool people, and in the time I spent walking around and feeling like, you know, I'm a writer, and I'm good at this, and this is great. I happened to embark on another journalism project with a great publication at the same time, so I'm really excited about that. I took one road there, and being there kind of led me down another, and while I believe in Janet Malcolm wholeheartedly ("Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible"), and I wish people who choose to tell stories would spend less time pretending their committing some valiant act and more time admitting they're parasites upon the human race, I felt invigorated by the fact that I was, at least, you know, thinking about these things, and grappling with these things, and not sitting at a fucking computer staring at some screen waiting for me to put something on it. At one point during the event, as part of The Moth presentation, we watched an excerpt from this story, the late Mike DeStefano talking about his wife, who was dying of AIDS. At one point, he says, "You know, and we're junkies. You know, we were junkies. We were different. We were fucking freaks. People crossed the street when they saw me, you know? And her. She was a prostitute. She was a fucking drug addict." Great stories are not about $2K conferences at Yale, offering each other nurturing support, and vague stories about some love affair you have had with a narrative that goes nowhere. It's about peeling back your skin and exposing yourself, going deep and revealing the unseen, being out in the field and forgetting about what everyone else's doing as the story unspools before you. Don't be safe. Be brave. Stop asking for permission. Do the stories. The hard ones. Easy is bullshit.
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Check out Literalogue
Buy THE TUMOR! "This is one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."
I watched "Big Eyes." I didn't care much for it. I like some of Tim Burton -- the scissors kid is my favorite -- but this one just bit. First of all, I don't care much for the real paintings: these wide-eyed waif things. And while Christoph Waltz is a pleasure to enjoy as a monster in "Inglourious Basterds," in this role he just grates. Amy Adams is the put upon artist/wife, but here again I prefer her better as a tough-talking bartender in "The Fighter." What's glorious and great and fantastic in the movie is everything behind these two quarrelers: the mid-century modern houses, and the alarming Burton color choices, and the surrealist eyeballs of ladies at the supermarket. The rest is a mess. If you want to watch a couple fight for two hours, this is your movie. I guess I would've had more sympathy had I liked the artworks, but, you know, I don't.
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Image credit: Chris Vervaeke
When I decided to self-publish THE TUMOR, my new short story about a guy who wants to kill his wife and her tumor, I chose Gumroad as my payment platform because a) my friend Clayton Cubitt recommended it, b) it's super easy, c) it looks great. And, as of yesterday, you can pay with PayPal on Gumroad purchases. This is the perfect option if you like using PayPal and/or felt unsure about using Gumroad for the first time. So cool of Gumroad to do this!
As far as updates on this experiment in selling fiction online, thanks to my great readers, it's been a rousing success! My goal was to sell 100 copies, and last weekend I reached my goal. Because Gumroad offers the option of using Pay What You Want pricing, which enables customers to pay what they want for whatever product they're buying, my sales are $609 on 102 copies. So that's an average sale price of about $6. Not too shabby, and way more than I ever would've made selling that story to most literary magazines.
Currently, I'm at work on my next story that I'll be selling the same way. It's about a man, a female robot, and a brave new world in which everyone's a little cyborgian. I hope you'll keep an eye out for it.
If you haven't tried selling your work online, I highly recommend it. THE TUMOR project has had a profound impact on me in a couple of ways:
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"Does this ass make my truck look big? #florida #obama #confederate"
There's a lot of this in the south end of Florida: Confederate flags and anti-Obama bumper stickers, red trucks and patriotism, hunting and swamp life living. After a while, it becomes part of the scene. The Confederate soldier descendent hawking redneckabilia at the flea market. The house painter who bleeds red, politically-speaking, that is. The stories about the time a wild hog killed a dog. Maybe they're clinging to the past, or maybe they're hoping for some kind of other future. They're wary-eyed and weary of the current United States. If you could let them secede, they probably would. Meanwhile, technology is racing past them, transforming everyone else into someone else. I'm not sure if they're close-minded or just afraid.
Check out THE TUMOR! "This is one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."
When I self-published THE TUMOR -- my awesome, terrifying, twisted, weird, cool new short story about a man who wants to kill his wife and the tumor that stands between them -- my goal was to sell 100 copies.
Thanks to your fantastic taste, I'm almost there! To date, I've sold 98 copies.
If I sell two more copies today, I'll have reached my goal and will feel better about myself, and you will feel better about yourself, and the world will keep spinning, and the universe will be pleased, and we all want that, don't we?
Buy it here!
(It's been called a "masterpiece of short fiction.")
Image via The Car Lounge
Last weekend, our second weekend of performances, I started to get better at improv. The tide turned for me when it was my turn to sing a song during Country Jam, and the endowment from the audience was FBI agent. As the other players went, I scrambled in my head to think of an idea. A song about a federal agent who goes to Colombia to acquire cocaine and screw hookers, perhaps? It started to get confusing. To make it worse, someone else stepped forward to sing a song about Female Body Inspectors. Now, I was next. I should point out, BTW, that this was during the "for adults" later show on Saturday night. This doesn't mean everything is a dick joke. It does mean every other thing is a dick joke. Well, not really. But there were some amusing jokes about Bruce Jenner, and boobs, and whores. In any case, as it was time for me to step out and sing my song -- I should add here that I cannot sing, sound terrible singing, and am a bad singer -- I was reminded of that wise old adage: go with what you know. So I sang a song about a federal agent who watches porn on the job all day, and his favorites included "Barely Legal" and something I made up on the spot called "Wet and Lovely." The lesson here, I believe, is to be yourself and be someone else at the same time. That way you can do what you love and do something very badly, and through some odd magic, it might turn out right.
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Image credit: Gary MacLeod
Hello, (your site wouldn't send my message)
Would you read my novel for the price of $100? Even that's busting my balls, but I need hardcore feedback & I've been told its good, but I need it read ALL the way through. I'd appreciate you not fucking ignoring my email & consider this. I've not read TUMOR, but I blazed through your sight & you seem honest enough. Annoying, but honest. Appreciate a hasty response. Again, it's $100 to read my work & provide feedback.
Thanks,
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There's a mention of me and my infamous True/Slant trigger warning post from 2010 in the Washington Post's "Columbia Students Claim Greek Mythology Needs a Trigger Warning."
Trigger warnings quickly spread to include discussions of everything from eating disorders to self injury to suicide. In 2010, sex blogger Susannah Breslin wrote that feminists were using the term "like a Southern cook applies Pam cooking spray to an overused nonstick frying pan." Breslin argued that trigger warnings were pointless or, even worse, self-defeating. A trigger warning is "like a flashing neon sign, attracting *more* attention to a particularly explicit post, even as it purports to deflect the attention of those to whom it might actually be relevant."
I pitched an op-ed piece to the NYT on the subject, but they didn't respond. Here's an excerpt:
Interestingly, the Columbia piece recounts an anecdote in which another student expressed to a professor a desire for a book by Toni Morrison to be included in one of Columbia's Literature Humanities classes. According to the student, the suggestion was brusquely dismissed. But the fact of the matter is that Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved would require a trigger warning, as well. Its main character, Sethe, an escaped slave, recalls her sexual assault at the hands of two white men who physically attack her and steal her breast milk. Therefore, it's entirely possible trigger warnings would stand between students and their reading Morrison's Beloved, Richard Wright's Native Son, Harriet Ann Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. All important works, all of which feature material that would demand trigger warnings.
Trigger warnings: still stupid.
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Image via MasterPlanner
Improv is getting better because: I speed read Amy Poehler's book, I want to get back into TV, showing up is enough, standing in the corner staring at your phone doesn't help, singing bad with a good attitude is better than singing well with a shit attitude, if you believe you are happy, other people will find you entertaining, fake it 'til you make it is sometimes the best course of action, impromptu digging graves for Mickey Mouse is never a bad idea, yoga helps, Pilates helps, physical therapy exercises help, walking helps, being outside yourself to put on a performance isn't really that hard unless you make a big deal about it, which no one wants to hear about, so just do your job and figure this is taking you somewhere else in the future.
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Recently, I read Amanda Palmer's The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help. I found it's an interesting book -- in part, because I relate to it. For much of her life, Palmer is relentlessly autonomous. A solo hustler, she works as a living statue to pay the bills, and it's this job that teaches her what people really want, which is, in her mind, to be seen. (I concur.) The trouble starts when she: gets famous, marries a rich and famous guy, and gets pregnant. In theory, the latter two fail to fit with her gypsy lifestyle. So, the narrative follows her as she attempts to have it all: her own life and a connected life. I hear you, sister. The best thing about the book is Palmer's seeming fearlessness (of course, reality is more complicated than that), whether it's stage diving, leaving her recording label behind, or asking her fans to fund her album (they coughed up $1M). There's also an unexpectedly moving anecdote in which on a particularly shitty day she inadvertently ends up getting a massage from one of her online haters. In a way, there's something repellant about Palmer's hustle. You cringe when she asks for things, makes a spectacle of herself, writes a poem that gets blasted as an homage to a domestic terrorist. Then you realize that what you're creeped out by is your own inability to ask for what you want. It's amazing how much our culture pathologies asking for things. One gathers there's nothing Palmer won't ask for -- that said, it turns out accepting that for which you have asked is another challenge altogether. Inspiring.
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Image credit: John Dominis
I was thinking about annotating "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?" I really loved Elon Green's annotation conversation with Gay Talese on "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold."
Where were you, relative to Sinatra? I was about where I’m sitting now and the bar was where the door is. Maybe 40 feet. There were tables on all sides of us and the dance floor was over towards the left. I had a direct vision of the bar. The lights were low, but there was almost a spotlight on the bar. Whereas we in the back at our tables were looking through a semi-darkness at people. So you could see his face? Yeah, I could.
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"Sunday loungewear. #guns #ammo #firearms #Sundays #fashion #shirts #selfies #money #currency #millennium #2A #righttobarearms"
The other night, I watched "Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck," and I feel sort of ambivalent about it. On the one hand, director Brett Morgen is awesome, and I loved "The Kid Stays in the Picture." I loved the movie's weird ways it tried to bring Cobain back to life: animated scribbles, disturbing shorts, raging audios. Visually, it's a mix of a multitude of sources, from home movies in the backyard to Nirvana on "MTV Unplugged." You get the impression that Cobain was: too smart, too sensitive, and too talented to survive: public scrutiny, celebrity, and drugs. The story follows him from nowhere kid to bratty rock star, awkward virgin to globally desired, broke to loaded. In a way, his back story isn't that remarkable. You remain unclear: Was this guy that great or was his timing impeccable? At a certain point, Courtney Love as Nancy Spungen shows up throwing around her tits, her messy blonde mane, her drug happy ways. The closest thing you get to a happy ending is the advent of Frances Bean, their love child. On the other hand, the experience of watching the film is not dissimilar to sitting through a 132-minute episode of "Intervention." Here he stands, our tragic heroine. We watch him: get fucked up, fuck over people, and fuck up his life. The only difference between "Montage of Heck" and "Intervention" is that Cobain's life story features more drugs, more money, and more notoriety. Surely, heroin isn't the only drug that rules this musician's fucked up life. The shots panning across acres and acres of thousands and thousands of leaping and dancing fans and groupies make you wonder how high you'd feel if you ever got so lucky. The most pathetisad moment of the debacle is when Cobain is sitting there holding his baby daughter and nodding off in a drug stupor. Years ago, I was a waitress in an Italian restaurant, and there was another server who was in the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink stage of his addiction, and I recall him drifting off during one of our conversations. It was just that glamorous. You feel bad in the end when they throw up a clip of him as a towheaded kid, and they remind you that he was only 27 when he shuffled off this mortal coil with a shotgun blast, but "Montage of Waste" might be a better title for it.
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Tonight was the first night of doing the improv show in front of a group of living, breathing, drinking people. It went well. I think. I am an introvert, so performing is a challenge for me, and it's different to do stage work versus the TV work that I've done in the past. It's a bit of another situation altogether when the audience member is sitting five feet from you. Of course, anxiety is the enemy of comedy, so there were times when I was stilted or awkward, but I really didn't want to choke, and I don't think I did. So far, improv has taught me how to fail better, that you must do anything rather than do nothing, and how to sing a made up song about people who are bipolar. Thanks, improv.
Buy my new short story, THE TUMOR: "One of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."
"My mugshot in lobby. #stiltz #crack #whore #mugshot #theater #beauty"
I was delighted to see a mention of Bunny Glamazon in the New York Times today. The Arts section profiles a piece of installation art at the Venice Biennale by Mika Rottenberg, "NoNoseKnows," which features Bunny.
The large woman with the fecund nose — played by one of Ms. Rottenberg’s outlandish regulars, a 6-foot-4 fetish performer who calls herself Bunny Glamazon — comes off as a Western overseer even more enslaved by the system than the workers she outranks, like a queen bee locked into the heart of a hive.
I met Bunny while doing a segment for Playboy TV's "Sexcetera." I'm 6'1", but Bunny dwarfed me. For one scene, we had Bunny slam me against a wall. I've never felt so small.
Glad to see she's still in business!
Hey! Buy my new short story, THE TUMOR: "This is one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."
The last couple months that I blogged at Forbes, I averaged around 500K uniques a month. At the time, that equaled about $5K a month in pay from Forbes to me. So, how did I achieve that?
Keep it simple
Image credit: Chanel Preston
The reason my traffic was that high was due in large part to one post: "What Porn Stars Do When the Porn Industry Shuts Down." (To date, the post has over 1M views, and it's the second most popular post I ever wrote in the three years that I wrote that blog. This is the most popular one.) Recently, the porn industry had shut down due to a male performer testing positive for HIV. The post started with a question: When adult performers can't work, what do they do with their time? The answer was more interesting than I expected.
Do the work
Too many shithead millennials today are too big of giant pussies to get on the phone or leave the house to do a fucking interview, much less work a real world beat. God, could you be anymore cowardly? Instead, the females and males of the species develop their mental dadbods by recycling original reporting that somebody else has done and everyone else has "aggregated" already. (If this is your job, you are a loser and a parasite.) For this piece, I got on the phone and interviewed people. It. Really. Wasn't. That. Hard.
Go for the obvious
The reason that damn nail salon piece was so popular was that the story was right in everyone's faces. Or at least the face of every journalist in New York City. With the porn story, every time the porn industry shuts down because a performer tests HIV+, the same dipshit outlets post the same stories about it. In this case, I thought the story behind the story was more interesting. These actors and actresses, crew members and directors, performers and editors weren't sitting around beating their meat or painting their nails during their industry's moratorium. They were out there hustling, supporting themselves and their families, worrying and praying. That's what made them human. And that's what made people who fuck for a living relatable to everybody.
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