VICE, Yankees, BlackBook, Animal, Gwkr, and miscellaneous adventures and expeditions in trouble. Celebration music for this week, before it all starts again tomorrow…
Oh, man.
Mo and I have recieved our next mission: Party Crash at the National Book Awards. Seeing as how our first two caused a decent amount of trouble, I have no doubt that this one will (A) get the least amount of traffic and (B) be the most fun. Mo in a party dress, me in a suit (maybe even: a fucking tux), getting plastered at Cipriani and assaulting Dave Eggers, Junot Diaz, Andy Borowitz, Colum McCann, and crazy ass senile old Gore Vidal (in that order). FYI, a National Book Award nomnation looks like this. My mission is to get a picture of Mo wearing one with this and one of these along for the ride. Intended effect something like this.
I am excited.
Pictured left, the Yankees mascot, in front of City Hall. Pictured right, the Phillies mascot, with an avid fan.
In Which We Discuss The Japanese Subway Gas Attack, Mormons, Scientology, Neighborhood Psychos, and Glee
Each week, ANIMAL will rank the world’s most despicable, deplorable, and undesirable human beings walking the earth, making the news. Behold: Evil Empirical. Last week, we covered religions. This week: cults.
2012, Spoiled
I learned the following secondhand not from a BlackBook employee, but from an agent’s assistant who works for Mr. Emmerich’s agency who passed me a draft of the screenplay, and I’ve been holding this in for way, way too long. Either way, I don’t give a shit if I’m blacklisted from screenings. This is awful moviemaking and lazy storytelling. Here’s hoping it gets better. This is why the world ends in 2012 and what happens after:
Michael Barnett's First Week At Black Book: Success, Unequivocal Stripe
My favorite:
One time I really fucked up a hand-to-hand with my drug dealer. I had done it a hundred times before with him, but this particular day it was so bad and awkward I felt inclined to inform him that I’m a huge fan of The Wire and that, as a fan of a show that prominently features the drug trade, I should have known better. WHATEVER. IT MADE SENSE AT THE TIME. This transition should go much much better I would imagine.
Well done, Michael.
“ Stumble home from the bar at 4:00 a.m. to pack bags. I am supposed to head to Oxford, Mississippi, right away—I’m taking part in the Southern Foodway Alliance’s conference down there. Needless to say, I passed out. Christina Tosi, Momofuku’s pastry chef/defacto adult, calls at least 8 times. On the ninth time I got up and found the phone, which was in my closet under a pile of clothes and I was pissed… WHY was somebody calling me? Didn’t they know I was still DRUNK from the night before? It was 5:00 a.m. Tosi explained to me what was going on. I had to get to Ssam Bar to pick up her and Gabe, a cook who’d be coming down to help us, and head to LGA. I was fucked up. Tosi wanted to kill me. I was literally falling over in a drunken stupor like Dudley Moore in Arthur. My life had two-day hangover written all over it.
Oh my god. Wait until you get to the part of about him being “pilled out” and losing a cooler full of food to “those fuckers.” David Chang and Peter Meehan’s book tour blog on GQ’s website is going to be something between Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail of ‘72 and the first twenty pages of Lunar Park for the foodie set. This is going to be awesome.
“ One time there was a reporter working somewhere else, whose stuff I liked, and I said, ‘Peter, we should look at hiring him.’ And Peter said, ‘I would, but he violates the one principle I have: Against the hiring of assholes.’
Jared Kushner on former Observer editor Peter Kaplan, who is the man.
Fix this shit, Foster.
Story of my life.
Follow These People, Goddamnit
I’ve never done a “Follow Friday” or anything like that, but some new people have showed up on the Dumblr and I figured I’d give them an appropriate welcome since, you know, we’ve needed some new blood in here for a while. Meet a new class:
- Matt Duckor is an intern at Eater, one of my favorite sites on the internet that has been for a long, long time; he’s doing the Gatekeepers series, he does lots of lists, I lost a $20 bet to him over Marea’s NYT rating that he still needs to collect on. He slaves away his days for Lockhart Steele who, with Krucoff, started blogging and the Lower East Side, or something.
- Rohin Guha is BlackBook’s ace in the hole: he’s putting up more posts than any of us, and is basically the last working freelance in New York, as I understand it. But really: he’s a gay Indian blogger who’s incredibly strange take on pop culture resembles something between the culinary creations of the guys from Ace of Cakes if there were to consume copious amounts of acid and do tribal raindances to obscure Sugababes B-Sides all throughout the night. I could not appreciate this person more.
- I’m only putting Caleb on here so he’ll step up his blogging game, but he’s a working musician in a working band in Baltimore’s “New Brooklyn” (bullshit) indie rock scene.
- You might already know Max Abelson, who writes about real estate for the New York Observer and posts once a day, but it’s always wonderful, and it’s not about real estate. Fun fact: I almost looked at a room in Max’s apartment but flaked out due to bad scheduling.
- Alaska Miller who I believe at one point was a Valleywag intern is an odd egg, but almost always plays a pretty straight angle.
- Nadeska Alexis writes about hip hop for BlackBook, The Boombox, and other places. She once got really fucking high with Kid Cudi and helped me count a bunch of stupid New York Post graphics. She’s on a three month tour of Southeast Asia right now and she’s going to freak out when she realizes that Wale released his album without her here.
- Finally, A little bit of a sad: Rod Townsend is about as old-school a blogger as you can get, though he’ll probably take umbrage with that designation. Sorry, Rod. He had a column at Gawker for a short while that was excellent and he’s generally funny and kind and was one of the first people I ever met who I was aboslutely terrified of who couldn’t have been nicer. Well, Rod recently (and quietly) retired his blog, Manhattan Offender, and he might have given up the sport. Here’s hoping he’ll start again, because his shit is really, really great and he reminds me of the New York filled with the kind of New Yorkers that I wanted to move into that can sometimes still be found.
None of this comes without a motive. I’ve been trying to bring back something called Bloggherea. Remember life without Twitter? I do, because, despite being an avid user, I fucking hate Twitter. I’m no good at it and I enjoy reading words that don’t make me feel more retarded which Twitter mostly does, unless I’m reading Big Ben’s feed. I’ve always been a bigger fan of the left side over the right. But there are no more blogging roundups because people don’t have the time for long-form reading (and by long-form reading, I mean: fucking blogging), so I’m going to take a very futile shot at putting out something a little more substantial than a Twitter roundup to go through on your subway commute. Hell, maybe you can print some of these people out. It’s going to be small, it won’t be a big deal, I’m not getting paid anything more for it, and it’s probably the opposite of what I’m supposed to be doing or how I’m supposed to be handling the glut of information out there. This one’s strictly for fans, which is most likely two people (Krucoff and Bakes, maybe?) and me.
So, see something, please, say something: BlogghereaTips@gmail.com. We’re gonna try to get this one going as soon as possible, with a big fuckin’ logo and everything.
