Blogging on Meds

After Crocker made up a new word yesterday—Lebanize—to describe Iran’s actions in Iraq, these books jumped up on Amazon…

Walid Raad and Kate Brooks

Anthony Shadid on Lebanon…

Ex-Gawker editor Emily Gould has moved over to GalleyCat, my favorite book blog. It’s great that a talented, young, and funny writer like Gould is on the publishing beat. In an indutsry that takes itself way too seriously, Gould should add a needed dose of Jewish mensch-ismo.

Steve Coll’s last book, Ghost Wars, was possibly—ok, probably—the best foreign policy tract of the decade. Ghost Wars won the 2005 Pulitzer. Coll’s name grew in font size on the cover of his new book, The Bin Ladens. NYT.com gave the book’s review a front page feature yesterday, where Michiko Kakutani said:

Steve Coll’s riveting new book not only gives us the most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet, but in telling the epic story of Osama bin Laden’s extended family, it also reveals the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics. It is a book that possesses the novelistic energy of a rags-to-riches family epic, following its sprawling cast of characters as they travel from Mecca and Medina to Las Vegas and Disney World, and yet, at the same time, it is a book that, in tracing the connections between the public and the private, the political and the personal, stands as a substantive bookend to Mr. Coll’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2004 book, “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001.”

Tonight at 7:30 Coll reads at Barnes & Noble 1972 Broadway at 66th St, Upper West Side, Manhattan (Free)

(Pascal Maitre, National Geographic)

Last year journalist Paul Salopek was arrested in Darfur. He was held for five weeks. By then Governor Bill Richardson (D-NM) was in Khartoum negotiating Salopek’s release. The resulting story—about the land beneath the Sahara called the Sahel—is in this month’s National Geographic. Abstract, episodic, uber-novelistic—Salopek’s written one of the weirdest magazine stories in history—a beautiful tragedy that loops nation to nation, shifting like trauma fractured memory, while still managing to explain the geographic issues at the root of the Darfur conflict.

There were three of us.

Idriss Anu drove the Toyota truck that would be stolen by militants. Daoud Hari was the translator, and for this he would eventually pay with severe beatings. We were en route to the village of Furawiya when the pro-government guerrillas rose silently from the grass.

“Stay in the car,” Daoud said.

But it was already too late. Even as the gunmen sauntered up, their hair matted in dreadlocks and their chests slung with small blackened things that looked like dried ears but which were Koranic amulets, we still hadn’t grasped that we had crossed a threshold where it no longer mattered what passport you carried, that you were young and loved, that your skin was supposedly not of a torturable color, or that you were a noncombatant. Words had lost all currency as words, and by the time the grinning teenager with the Kalashnikov reached for my door handle, we were condemned to live and die according to choices made by others. We had become truly Sahelian.

Dauod Hari, mentioned above, has just published a Darfurious memoir called The Translator (Random House) about his work as a “fixer.” The prose is nimbler than A Long Way Gone and Hari offers a vision far more devastating than Ishmael Beah. Although Hari does offer some fun scenes with Nicholas Kristoff “acting like he always sleeps on a mat outside in the middle of warzone.”

Before she called Hillary a “monster” and said that Obama’s Iraq withdrawal plan was a “best case scenario,” Samantha Power was a rising foreign policy superstar. Power—Harvard professor, Pulitzer-winner—was forced to resign as an Obama campaign advisor after her comments, which were made on the UK leg of a book tour. Hopefully she will offer insight on the campaign and Iraq tonight.

7PM. Barnes and Noble Tribeca, at Warren and Greenwhich St.

Since I’m only page 70 (it’s great so far), here’s Penguin Press’ copy:

From Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power, an epic tale-part thriller, part tragedy-for our age, the political career and tragic death of the incomparable humanitarian Sergio Vieira de Mello.

If there is a single individual who can be said to have been at center stage through all of the most significant humanitarian and geopolitical crises of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, it was Sergio Vieira de Mello. Vieira de Mello was born in 1948 just as the post-World War II order was taking shape. He died in a terrorist attack on UN Headquarters in Iraq in 2003 as the battle lines in the twenty-first-century’s first great power struggle were being drawn. In nearly four decades of work for the United Nations, Sergio distinguished himself as the consummate humanitarian, able to negotiate with-and often charm-cold war military dictators, Marxist jungle radicals, reckless warlords, and nationalist and sectarian militia leaders. By taking the measure of this remarkable man’s life and career, Power offers a fascinating answer to the question: Who possesses the moral authority, the political sense, and the military and economic heft to protect human life and bring peace to the unruly new world order?

Chasing the Flame brings us deep into the thorniest, least well-understood episodes of recent world history-the conflagration in the Middle East, through Vieira de Mello’s troubleshooting in Lebanon in the aftermath of Israel’s 1982invasion; the clean-up of the cold war’s residue, through Vieira de Mello’s taming of the Khmer Rouge and his repatriation of four-hundred-thousand Cambodian refugees in the early nineties; the explosion of sectarian and ethnic militancy, through his efforts to negotiate an end to the slaughter in Bosnia; the struggle to nation-build in war-torn societies, through his quasi-colonial governorships of Kosovo and East Timor; and the engulfing of Iraq in civil war and terror, through his tragic final posting as the UN representative in Baghdad, where he became the victim of the country’s first-ever suicide bomb.

Readers of Chasing the Flame will recognize the particular mixture of deep reporting and incisive analysis that Power uses to imbue Sergio’s life with significance, and lessons, for our own. In this exquisitely reasoned and imagined book, Samantha Power reveals Sergio Vieira de Mello’s powerful legacy of humanity and ideological strength in an age sorely in need of both.

The New York Times Co owns 10% of the Red Sox and all of the Boston Globe. Since tomorrow is opening day, let’s look at one of the team’s minority owners’ recent struggles.

Let me get this straight. A newspaper’s print circulation goes down from 1.2 million in 1993 to about 1.1 million a day over 15 years but at the same time increases it’s audience 50-fold online and it’s worth less money? Huh?

Reading Eric Alterman’s New Yorker story on the death of US newspapers—it’s all gloom and doom, end of this and that. But then I found these figures:

Maybe this is a well known fact, but I am not sure people realize how big The New York Times has become.

The New York Times is the leading global news brand with an audience of 74 million unique visitors a month. That compares to a circulation of the paper edition of 1.1 million daily and 1.6 million on Sundays.

Online, the NY Times gets 50 times the audience that it gets in paper form. Wow. Yahoo News is next with 67 million unique visitors a month, but they are aggregating news. Next is The Weather Channel with 44 million unique visitors per month.

I’m confused. How is a company that loses 10% of it’s print audience but gains 500% online a loser? Oh, wait, the people who keep hammering on this work on Wall St. You know, those same folks who ruined our economy. Wall St hate newspapers. Because newspapers’ websites can’t figure out how to make money, there’s no short term gain. Deutsche Bank—an awesome company who banked with our boy Herr Hitler—says sell your NYT stock. But looking at the numbers above, it seems newspapers should recover profitability in the near future. Here’s one example how…

Each week, online news sites try out new ways to attract people. Yes, there is information diffusion via independent blogs and the like, but consider a breaking story like Spitzer-gate. Every person in an office in America—or the people with all of America’s $$$—clicked on NYT.com two Mondays ago at 2:00pm. That had to worth some money, having America’s entire white collar class look at your site, right?

Some context: When Lohan was up on NYMAG.com nude, Portfolio estimated it was worth $1 million, had they harnessed the advertising potential. A low-end estimate of Spitzter-gate would be, say, $3 million, or the annual cost of the Times’ Baghdad bureau. Soon enough, websites will figure out how to maximize ad revenue on a breaking story.

It’s too early in the digital era to say newspapers are dead. WhoreGate was the Times’ first mega-scoop of the digital age. All this profit-related Wall St pressure must be ignored until newspapers figure out what their content is actually worth in the webosphere.

(Among the participants: NYC short story queen Deborah Eisenberg, Guatemalan novelist Francisco Goldman, Sri Lankan-Cannuck novelist and Brick editor Michale Ondaatje, and New York Times’ Week in Review and Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus.)

New York’s most comprehensive literary festival, PEN World Voices, has announced it’s 2008 program. Many of the over 150 events are free, and nearly all are interesting.

Hot dog!

The Public and Private Lives of Writers
When: Wednesday, April 30
Where: The Town Hall:
123 West 43rd St.What time: 8–9:30 p.m.
With Coral Bracho, Peter Esterhazy, Rian Malan, Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Annie Proulx, Evelyn Schlag, A.B. Yehoshua; introduced by Salman Rushdie

Tickets: $12/$8 PEN and FIAF members and students

Ondaatje and McEwan together…with Padma’s ex!

One to avoid would be Mia Farrow discussing Darfur with sexxxymann philosopher and Pakistan-hater Bernard Henri Levy. I mean, Mia’s cool and she fucked Philip Roth, but who wants to hear an actress discuss genocide with an overrated “public intelectual.”

Free, Burma:

May 1 | Burma: A Land at a Crossroads
When: Thursday, May 1
Where:Instituto Cervantes New York: 211–215 East 49th St. 
What time:1–2:30 p.m. 
With Ian Buruma and Thant Myint-U; moderated by Dedi Felman

And many more…

Free and open to the public. No reservations.

Demons dreaming,
Breathe in, breathe in…
I’m coming back again…
Voodoo, voodoo, voodoo, voodoo. 
—Sully Erna, Godsmack, “Voodoo”

They call Jim Morrison “An American Poet.” Dylan’s lyrics are studied at universities. But they forget Sully Erna, singer of Godsmack, a band from Haverhill, MA. Godsmack wrote and recorded the greatest music in world history after Mozart, Kenny G, and Robert Johnson respectively.

(Blake, Auden, Pound, Erna)

So the other day I was sitting around, holding a seance and listening to Godsmack’s s/t debut, thinking about the time I saw them at a bowling alley in Haverhill, MA, back in 1998. Life doesn’t get much better than ‘Smack playing an Alice in Chains cover for an encore.

(Academy Lanes in Haverhill: Home of glow bowling!!!)

Anyway, back to the seance. I’m dripping wax on my pet lizard Goober (pronounced goo-bah) when “Voodoo” comes on. Soon I enter a trance and drift to my bookshelf, unconsciously yanking down Robert Stone’s voodoo novel “Bay of Souls.” I read the whole book while ‘Smack’s s/t LP plays on repeat.

Twelve hours later I awake from my trance covered in Cheetos dust and slobber. All I can think about is voodoo. Where is this leading? Oh, just to a first-hand account of an all night voodoo affair in the Haitian jungle…

It all started in Las Cayes, on the bottom left of the above map…
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Last week I guesstimated an Eliot Spitzer memoir would sell for $8 million. But what would this memoir of memoirs’ cover look like? New York Magazine put two book designers on the case:

Left, Rodrigo Corral. Right, Chip Kidd.

Kidd’s hilarious cover, with the Chanel knockoff plus “E.S., VIP” and headshot, shows why he’s the best designer in books.

Penguin Press has two new hardcovers on the shelves, beautifully designed by Darren Haggar and Abby Weintrab respectively.

Dean Wareham from Luna (best band) and Galaxie 500’s book.

Strange enough, one of Luna’s best songs is called “Bonnie and Clyde,” sharing a title with the Faye Dunaway/Warren Beatty film on Mark Harris’ cover.

Jean Feraca, I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death and the Radio

March 13 07:00PM - 08:30PM at Strand Book Store
Located at the corner of 12th Street and Broadway, NYC

“Jean Feraca, Wisconsin Public Radio’s Distinguished Senior Broadcaster and poet, will read from her new memoir, I Hear Voices, accompanied by her son, Dominick Fernow, electronic artist Prurient. The focus of this mother and son duo will be the first chapter in the book, “My Brother/The Other,” which tells the extraordinary story of Feraca’s brother, Stephen, a man with “a life force that verged on the diabolic,” who left home at an early age for Pine Ridge Reservation and was adopted into the Sioux tribe. To carry the text through Stephen’s redemptive death, Prurient will perform dark layers of synths and electronics to create a landscape where the voice breathes a message of existential paradox.”

If you aren’t familiar with Prurient it’s hard to just throw you into a new genre and give you an overview. It’s not like saying “Oh you like the Bright Eyes, man you’ll dig Okkervil River!” plus no one should ever say that. My suggestion is that if you have an interest in thick synth blankets of feedback with structure, tension and dissonance you should start with Pleasure Ground. If you’re a noisemin you know the name, if you’re not and maybe had a Throbbing Gristle phase or pretended to have a Throbbing Gristle phase in order to get laid by a germanic goth chick that was probably into sketchy shit you have some point of reference. If this doesn’t make any sense it I’m kind of psyched because you’re a clean slate and my job becomes easier. Prurient, or Dominic Fernow to be proper has a grip of releases ranging from limited edition cassettes to lathes and CDs. Dominic also opened the New York source for noise, experimental music and black metal, Hospital Productions. The Village Voice has already romanticized the Hospital Productions store located in the basement of Jammyland on 3rd Avenue in Manhattan so we’ll skip over the whole “a dark lair of black metal and experimental music” prose and get to the main course. What’s inspiring and incredible about the store is the care and craft of so many of the releases sold there. While intricate packaging was always been a staple of many noise releases since it’s inception, it really appeals to the early nineties guy in me that consumed any 7″ screened on a paper bag or cover with something glued on it. I know Dom wasn’t into Nuzzle or Mohinder so it’s coming from a completely different head , don’t worry. Knowing that these records were crafted by someone and not a machine adds to the experience. Knowing you can get tapes and records packed with human hair, blood, skin and probably / maybe doo doo adds a new layer. Two Prurient releases probably came out since I just typed that I bet they’re incredible.

Instead of shimmying down the sketchy ladder into the Hospital you should visit the Strand tomorrow night if you are in New York to hear him do his thing while his mother reads from her memoir, I Hear Voices. I’ll be there and I’ll be jealous of both of them as it’s an impressive and unique opportunity. I know your inner NPR voice is telling you what a rich event this could be and at the least you’ll have something interesting to spin to your housemates or fellow free lancers while you sip Kombucha and bash Elliot Spitzer.

Visit the Hospital Site : Here

Pick up the Prurient / Kevin Drumm release - All Are Guests In The House Of The Lord. The only time I was ever disturbed by music was the first time I heard Swans in my teens, I knew there was something mangled and frustrating going on, something that was more shocking than loud guitars and demon imagery. In my adult years I’ve laughed at corny slideshows and drum circles by Neurosis, laughed louder at grown men in corpse paint and became really annoyed by “metal” records that are always compared to “the sound of hot steel ripping through your larynx while you take your last gasp”. All that stuff is bullshit, All Are Guests In The House Of The Lord is disturbing, draining, droning and lucid. You need to let it sink in and give it your attention and it will reward. Trust me I’m cynical, old and a pain in the fucking ass and few records impress me in this way.

Then go here

Read Jean Feraca’s blog, once again get familiar and gear up for tomorrow.

Lastly go here if you’d rather be really pedestrian and read boring reviews by interns that are “so over Justice” and like the sketchy Brian Eno records.

What Would Spitzer’s Memoir Sell For?

Suppose this whole thing gets McGreevy, and Silda leaves Elliot. Then Silda sues, leaving E in need of some quick cash. How do disgraced pols raise fast dough? They write books.

So, how much would RAWDOG: The Life and (Fast) Times of Elliot Spitzer sell for?

Some perspective. Greenspan got $7 million. Tony Blair: $9 million. But Bubba C holds the record, at $12 million.

A Spitzer book is worth, say, $8 million? Bob Bennet, get to work.

Last night I saw Charles Bock read at the Half King, a bar owned by two writers, Sebastion Junger and Scott Anderson. Although he said the book’s title was in part inspired by a Marylin Manson song, Bock—grunged out with bracelets and slicked back hair—was excellent, reading two segments from his panoramic Las Vegas novel. The second of which was about a stripper’s loser-y boyfriend stealing her pot and scamming away—hilarious and dead-on. Thanks to the Half King’s Clay Ezell for putting together another great night.

(Vegas, by Lee Friedlander)

Beautiful Children, Bock’s first novel, is currently #33 on the NYT Best Seller list, after debuting at #11 last week. The book received a lot of NYT attention, including the cover of the Book Review and a Bock profile in the Magazine.

Last week Bock’s publisher Random House put the book online as PDF download. At last night’s reading, Bock said 30,000 people visited his website and 15,000 downloaded the book. Put in perspective, the average first run of a mid-list hardcover book is 25,000. Even a “hit” debut novel rarely sells more than 50,000 copies. Bock’s download sure got his book into a lot of hands.

This week, a letter ran in the Times Book Review hating on Bock’s cover treatment:

Tattoo You
Published: March 2, 2008
To the Editor:
Never have I finished an outright rave — and a front-page one at that — less convinced of a novel’s merits than I was at the end of Liesl Schillinger’s review of Charles Bock’s “Beautiful Children” (Feb. 3). It is only the latest example in a worrisome trend of slathering praise upon the prose of a certain genus of writer — Marisha Pessl comes to mind — who operates in a constant, hysterical pitch, at the expense of precision, lucidity and memorable elegance.

Schillinger approvingly quotes a sentence of Bock’s: “Electricity lit up Ponyboy’s skeletal structure as if it were a pinball machine on a multi-ball extravaganza, and the mingling odors of brimstone and sulfur and sweat and burning skin filled Ponyboy’s nostrils.” This describes, we are told, the administration of Ponyboy’s newest tattoo. It is easy to see why, in the current literary climate, this sentence attracts admiration: it loudly conflates the human body and the book’s setting, Las Vegas; it declares the obsolescence of the comma as it pounds out a list of nouns; its zeal for gaudy metaphor nearly splits it at the seams; and it turns up the biblical volume with the sinister “brimstone.”

But the sentence suffers from several conspicuous flaws. For one, it lurks at the edge of tenability when it describes the electricity illuminating Ponyboy’s “skeletal structure.” It then attempts to shoehorn in the metaphor of a pinball machine, whose vividness further divorces the sentence’s central idea from a credible reality, and then finally, in order, I imagine, to deploy four nouns rather than three, it falls irritatingly into redundancy: brimstone and sulfur, as a quick trip to the dictionary will confirm, are synonyms.

This is only one sentence of many. (Bock’s novel clocks in at 417 pages.) But it is telling that Schillinger chooses to cite it — her admiration for this particular species of sentence is symptomatic of what American critics have lately been letting pass as good prose, just as her admiration for the novel as a whole represents a troubling tendency to confuse page count with ambition and rambling, undercooked writing with originality. A day after reading that sentence, and many others that have been similarly praised in recent years, one is left not with a cogent, gripping image, but only the residual odor of sulfur and brimstone, and a wish for more writing that, like Ian McEwan’s, lodges firmly, even painfully in the mind. It is difficult to forget a sentence like this, from “Atonement”: “The world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.”

Ian MacKenzie
Brooklyn

Funny that Mr Mackenzie wishes “precision, lucidity and memorable elegance” in other’s sentences yet fails in writing them himself. (I stole that thought from Hassan Chop.)

Ah, the First Novel. In New York, hyped first novels attract more hate and debut than anything this side of Clinton-Obama. But for a moment, let’s celebrate the fact that a debut literary novel by a Goth dude is currently on the Best Seller list.

Someone told me this blog is getting stale, and that someone’s probably the only person who actually reads it. For that, I apologize. I’m new to blogging. Back in early December, a major Manhattan website had an internal crisis and wound up with a bunch of job openings. My agent set me up with an interview, but the guy who was hiring said, “Bro, how can I hire someone for a blogging position who doesn’t even have a blog?” He had a point. A few days later, John Claude Lacroix, Medicine’s founding partner, called me while I was on vacation in Miami. “Dude, write for my site,” Lacroix says. “Dude, send me the info. I’m in,” I say. Now just two and half months later, we’ve already gone sour.

Still, I enjoy the act of writing so much that I’m obviously willing to continue. But from this day on I’ll try extra hard not to bore readers. Rather, today I’ll use Portfolio Magazine as a lead in to a discussion of media, art, and politics. Also included is an unpublished essay written right when John asked me to blog.

In Miami, when John conceived this whole thing, I was attending Basel Miami, North America’s largest contemporary art fair. Yesterday, when my over dinner someone decried Med’s online sourness, I had just attended an opening for a group show of Iraq photographers. Below is one of the images from the show, taken by Stefan Zaklin, of a dead American in Fallujah.

The tie between Miami Basel and the Iraq war can be found in the pages of Conde Naste Portfolio this month. The magazine, now on it’s sixth (?) issue, has hit its stride. Si Newhouse staked $100 million—about the same as Transformers’ budget—to launch Portfolio. Media gossips at the Observer, Gawker, and Fishwbowl covered Portfolio’s every hire and fire, issue by issue. No feature was left untouched. The New Republic dispatched Elizabeth Spiers to write 3000 words on why Portfolio sucks (no longer avail online). Rumors of Michael Lewis getting $12 a word proved unfounded. Tom Wolfe did a cover story. And Portfolio trudged along.

Well, I finally bought my first issue, thanks to a cover story about Iraq by Denis Johnson, former junky and current National Book Award for fiction winner. Johnson stays up in Kurdistan, covering the oil boom. His story is hardly Jon Lee Anderson getting shot at in the opium fields. But Johnson writes a great piece nonetheless. With sentences like this:

This evening, Rambo orders beef Stroganoff, therefore so do I, to my considerable regret, and he sips a German beer I should get the name of, but I’m more interested in clocking his consumption, because I wonder if it’s possible for this specimen to chug down the calories and still look capable of pinning an elephant in four moves at the age of 47. 

…it’s hard not to enjoy Johnson’s piece.

Portfolio’s sole problem is it’s limited scope. See it’s a business magazine trying to act like an ASME contender like VF or The Atlantic. My humble advice? Pull back on “business”—such a cruel concept anyway, ripping people off, don’t you think?—and play up the economics. Recent business best-sellers have been in The World is Flat and Freakonomics vein. Political economy—not business. With writers like Johnson, Portfolio should explicitly (like in an editor’s note) expand its breadth beyond “business” and into “political economy.” Using an all encompassing term that covers capitalist democracy and more allows the magazine to go deeper.

For instance, this month Adres Martinez writes a front of the book piece on campaign finance. He compares election spending to what large corporations shell out for marketing. Wendy’s spent $315 million last year, or the same as Kerry in 04. ATT spent $2.2 billion, about twice what this year’s race is to cost. Perfect political economy writing here…

The Portfolio stories that stay too business-y are boring.

Not boring is Jay McInerney’s Art Basel piece. Like Johnson, McInerney is a (former?) druggy novelist. Unlike the universally praised Johnson, McInerney is all too often derided for being a caricature of his younger self. Hey, is it Jay’s fault that he wrote Bright Lights, Big City, the only pure 80s NY cocaine classic?

Since then Jay’s lived it up as a wine columnist, model fucker, Strokes hater, foie gras eater, West Villager, without ever really leaving NYC or the Hamptons. He’s easy to hate on, for sure, but his books are fun and well written. Plus, the guy needs to exist. New York needs an 80s writer holdover who isn’t dead or completely washed up, someone who still lives “the life.”

So read the first paragrph from the Basel story:

Thursday morning, 4:30, I’m walking back to my hotel from Le Baron, the transplanted French nightclub that sets up shop on Collins Avenue for the week of Art Basel Miami Beach, with Paul Sevigny, a D.J., and Patrick McMullan, a photographer. (Who’s buying whom? Read “How Stars Are Born at Art Basel.”) Patrick’s been hard at work shooting the parties that have become such a big part of the festival, and Paul’s come down from New York to spin for one of them—I forget which. Ralph Lauren, Pucci, Swarovski, Audi, and UBS, the banking giant that’s the main sponsor of the event, are among the corporate entities that have hosted events tonight, and those are just the ones I can remember. The festival officially opened 12 hours ago, but the serious collectors and V.I.P.’s swarmed the Miami Beach Convention Center starting at noon, and the serious party people had attended dozens of soirees the night before. Iggy Pop gave a concert on the beach tonight, and not long after that I found myself on the lower floor of the Delano at Lenny Kravitz’s nightclub, the Florida Room, chatting with transvestites and trying unsuccessfully to make conversation with Lance Armstrong. (View other art shows around the world.)

Flashback to December. I’m at Basel, John calls, this blog thing is about to happen. I’m also working on a Miami piece for, um, myself I guess. This was my first lede:

Friday, 3am: Collins Ave, South Beach. Outside Rokbar, Tommy Lee’s club. During Basel, Rokbar’s been taken over by Parisian disco Le Baron. On this night Le Baron was hosting Purple Magazine, a $20 French fashion text that mixes downtown NY low-culture with Parisian high-sleaze. The party’s door sets nightlife records for arrogance.

“This,” cue a nose-y French accent, “is a family affair tonight. No one is getting in,” unless you’re Paris Hilton, who showed up with Brooklyn tattoo artitst Scott “Saved” Campbell, to hear DJ Paul “Chloe’s Brother” Sevigny, owner of NY mini-club Beatice Inn.

All this attitude to get into an ugly room—the walls are lined by faux-amps and televisions playing subversive videos—only to be swarmed by guidos of both the Miami-Armani/Exchange and French-snakeskin boot variety. Down the street was another party, hosted by Eva Mendes for V Magazine. Earlier, Scion (the car) had partnered with Swindle Magazine (founded by graphic designer Shepard Fairly) to host a party showcasing graffiti paintings on hotel rooftop. Vanity Fair and Moma did parties that night too.

Fuck, I guess we all did the same things in Miami.

Anyway, Jay McInerney basically launched Chloe and thus her brother’s career.

Chloe naked in Purple Magazine.

Back in 1994, Jay kept seeing this young lil thang around. He dubbed her the “It Girl” and wrote a profile for the New Yorker. Without Jay’s 7000 word love in, would Chloe be on Big Love today, would the Beatrice Inn exist? While not solely responsible for Sevingys’ dual rise, Jay’s piece in 94 certainly helped…

More on Jay and Chloe, and an unpublished essay on Basel Miami…
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I hate comic book literature. My reasons are petty: it’s boring. But I love Las Vegas. The beginning of Charles Bock’s first book, Beautiful Children, may be littered with comic chic—nerdy artists, young kids who don’t get poon. Neon dreams and outsized prose make it a worthy read. Random House has put it online as a PDF, free!

(Last night at Jet, Floyd Maywheater’s bday, Mirage, Las Vegas. Wire Images)

New York, New York!
Robert Polidori.

Here’s some more first rate fiction about an America city—one which Polidori shot better.
Richard Ford, who left Knopf for Ecco this month, New Orleans short story in The New Yorker:

Farther down the street, which stretched out toward the faraway lake and the hot white sky, a crew of young shirtless black men was gutting a house and loading the usable timbers and shingles onto a sagging pickup. But almost no one was living in any house now, or in the acres of streets in either direction, streets that looked like open fields. It was the Lower Nine. It was the land far below sea level, the submersible land that had always been poor and black but had been a place to live. Now that seemed finished. Louise’s school had made field trips to here, and written poems and essays all about it, painted desolate pictures, written letters to kids who were now in other cities, and in which the letter writers had predicted that everything would soon be restored and become even better. So far that hadn’t happened.

New Orleans, Polidori:

Ford again:

Often, at night, Walter Hobbes would lie awake in his apartment high above the broad curved sweep of the river, where container ships and tankers hung at anchor, their white running lights illuminating bits of the dense breezy darkness, and wonder what had caused Betsy to suddenly need to be divorced from him. It hadn’t seemed necessary, even if Mitch Daigle had come onto the horizon, as he unfortunately had. Mitch Daigle wasn’t even all that bad a fellow. He and Walter had known each other at the Bar Association, and been friendly doubles opponents for one summer at City Park. Mitch was from Ville Platte, a good coon-ass boy who’d come down to the city the way Walter had from Mississippi, to ride the oil-and-gas boom, now long over with. There had been a slew of them, young lawyers who’d arrived for a single reason and then made a stand. There wasn’t a need to be long-established if you had money, and everybody did. The town welcomed that. They had both gone into private practice afterward and drifted away from their old firms. Then Betsy helped Mitch find a house on Palmer Avenue and made love to him right on the client’s tester bed, and everything got wrong. Betsy explained to him during the divorce that she’d read a book in college at Hollins, about some children who were caught in a cyclone on a South Sea island. All the animals on the island—birds and lizards and furry creatures—went crazy before the storm came. Which didn’t explain anything. It had become fashionable to blame bad things on the hurricane—things that would’ve certainly happened anyway—failures, misdeeds, infirmities of character that the hurricane could’ve had nothing to do with. As if life weren’t its own personalized storm.

Ruth Fowler was born in the UK. Her first book, No Man’s Land, will be published by Viking in June. The book, a memoir, details Ruth’s three years as an illegal immigrant and stripper in Manhattan, working at the notorious strip-club Scores, as well as Flash Dancers, New York Dolls, Lace and VIP. She writes the blog Mimi in New York, and has been featured in New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Guardian (UK), The Observer (UK), The Sun (UK), Gawker and Page Six. She has written for The Village Voice, Wired, The Observer, The Guardian, New York Magazine and The Times UK, and is currently working on her second book and a screenplay.

Ever since ex-stripper Diablo Cody won an Oscar best original screenplay Ruth’s been bombarded with interview requests. Are we entering the Strip-Lit Era?

EXT. SITTING IN A CAR IN THE PARKING LOT OF A STRIPMALL

FAITH: You’re a Fat Christian.

VII, the world’s foremost, exclusive photojournalism agency, is opening a gallery/store in Dumbo. Friday, from 3pm on, they’re celebrating with an open house.

Laura Greenfield is known for her work photographing women. She recently directed THIN, seen on HBO.

Marcus Bleasdale is the latest photographer to join VII. He shoots a lot in African conflict zones.

VII derives its name from the number of founding photo-journalists who, in September 2001, formed this collectively owned agency. Designed from the outset to be an efficient, technologically enabled distribution hub for some of the world’s finest photojournalism, VII has been responsible for creating and relaying to the world many of the images that define the turbulent opening years of the 21st century.The following photographers will be on hand to sign books and answer questions
Lauren Greenfield
Marcus Bleasdale
Ron Haviv (ED Note: Haviv has done amazing work in Iraq)
Christopher Morris (ED Note: Morris is possibly the best political photographer in US)
Jessica Dimmock

What is VII DUMBO? First of all, it is the new location of VII’s NY office. In addition, we will operate a street level gallery space and a bookstore for photojournalism. Visitors will be able to see printed works by the VII photographers hanging on the walls (selected by Hasted Hunt), as well as buy books by VII photographers and other noted photojournalists. We plan to use the space for events such as panel discussions, book signings, lectures and workshops. The simple idea is that we want to create a physical place in NY, where we can support and promote photojournalism.We look forward to seeing you in VII DUMBO, starting February 29th at 3pm. We will also be open on weekends, to accommodate weekend visitors. The address is 28 Jay Street in the DUMBO district (2 blocks west of the YORK STREET stop on the F line).

GALLERY FCB AND NOVEMBER ELEVEN PRESENT

BATTLESPACE

UNREALITIES OF WAR

Photographs from Iraq and Afghanistan by

Photographers:Alvaro Ybarra Zavala, Andrew Cutraro, Ashley Gilbertson, Balazs Gardi, Ben Lowy,Christoph Bangert, Eros Hoagland, Ghaith Abdul Ahad, Guy Calaf, Jason Howe,Jehad Nga, Lucian Read, Luke Wolagiewicz, Mike Kamber, Moises Saman, Peter van Agtmael, Rita Leistner, Stefan Zaklin, Stephanie Sinclair, Teru Kuwayama, Yuri Kozyrev, Zalmai

Feb 28—April 30

Opening reception Feb 28, 6-8pm Gallery FCB16.W 23rd Street NYC

(good football player, better murderer)
Today, a reader and fellow blogger at everydayyeah.com shares a quick review of the new book by Juice’s former agent (scumbag), Mike Gilbert. Apparently our blogging comrade doesn’t think books about murder are cool.

It seems that Mike Gilbert, who was O.J. Simpson’s agent for 18 years, thinks he’s a writer, but instead of writing about something topical that the whole world would be interested in like the Juice’s roll in Naked Gun or how O.J. got hooked up as the Hertz Rent-a-Car spokesperson Mr. Gilbert is going to churn out the same old tired fodder that we’ve been hearing for decades. To be honest, I think the only people who even still care about Mr. Orenthal James slaying that Goldman and the Brown girl are the respected families.

Read the gory details here

By pure coincidence, I was reading journalist Jeanine Di Giovanni’s Madness Visible: A Memoir of War when Kosovo made its recent bid for independence.

A first-hand account of the breakup of Yugoslavia, Madness Visible offers insight into the complex situation in the Balkans in the late 1990s, and also reflections from several years later. At one point, Di Giovanni considers the impact the atrocities in Bosnia will have on its future:

Milosevic is in The Hague, the first head of state to be tried by an international court, and Karadzic will eventually be hunted down. But is it too late? During those dark years, no one came to save Bosnia. Neither God, nor the Orthodox saints, nor the angels – despite all the candles the old ladies lit in the cemeteries and the prayers they said – certainly not the UN or the Western leaders, had tried to save it until it was too late.

In return, a whole generation will spend their lives trying to process the horror of what they saw. The stench of the place, the slow smell of death, will erode everything. Thousands of peacekeeping soldiers can’t cover it up, and all the World Bank money and Danish and Austrian economic aid can’t fix it.

[A friend] had said to me, in that field in Kozarac, when he showed me the Orthodox cross burnt into his scalp: “Evil things happened here.”

When contemplating the fate of Bosnia, Di Giovanni later asks:

What happened to this country? Who lit the fuse? How far had people gotten this time from past wars, past hatreds, past desires, past petty grievances? Would someone send someone to a concentration camp again in eight or ten years?…Would they inherit the same sense of humiliation and bitterness and the quest for retribution passed on from generation to generation?

People are clever. They know that unless they learn from the past they will continue to repeat the same mistakes, over and over. The same web of violence, terror and destruction. I just don’t know if they will, or can, get past it.

Given that the US Embassy in Belgrade is currently in flames, Madness Visible seems an eerie foreshadow. But I hope I’m wrong.