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Ali Weiss: A New Yorker’s Definition of Proximity (A Case for the Cordoba House)

August 18, 2010

On August 14, 2010, as the debate over construction of the Cordoba House in lower Manhattan filled the airwaves, Ali Weiss read the following at The Paper Machete.

So it’s Ramadan. Ramadan Mubarak. It’s funny, I always forget it’s that time of year until somebody reminds me, usually by mentioning that they’re fasting — yesterday it was a woman in the grocery store, turning down a free sample of hummus. She said, “Thanks but we’re fasting.” And I thought, “Oh yeah, it’s Ramadan.” And my next thought was, “Ooh free hummus.”

That’s city living. I love getting news from the people next to me. I’ll spot the first marked forehead on the El and realize, oh yeah, it’s Ash Wednesday. Or I’ll see more and more tourists board the Red Line at rush hour acting like they’re on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride and realize, oh yeah, there’s a night game at Wrigley.

Yeah, we can we can get all this information from our phones, but we don’t have to. We live on top of other people. We spread the word without using words. We absorb each others’ stories.

We also absorb each others’ sweat, on stupidly upholstered bus and train seats — and I bring these up because I’ve no doubt these fabric seats were designed by a non-urban dweller unfamiliar with the realities of proximity.

I’m here to talk about proximity. What is proximity?

Thesis question: If Point A is “a few blocks away” from Point B, are Points A and B “near” or “far”? Do the people at Point A give a shit what the people at Point B are doing?

If you’ve ever lived or worked in downtown Manhattan, your answers will likely be “far” and “no.”

What the conservative pundits who oppose the existence of a mosque “a few blocks away” from Ground Zero fail to realize is that, in New York City, a few blocks is a such a schlep.

***

I grew up in New York City. And people will ask me, “What’s your favorite pizza place?” And I’m sorry but the answer is the nearest one to wherever I happen to be standing. I’m not gonna schlep to another neighborhood to grab a slice. You want answers, I’m partial to the Kandilla’s on 91st and Broadway because I grew up a block away from it, but I haven’t been back there since my childhood, I don’t know or care if it still exists, and one time my teen-aged babysitter refused to take me there because the neighborhood was bad. That’s right, one block away was a different neighborhood in our eyes.

In New York it’s 20 blocks to the mile, so “a block” is just 264 feet, 4 yards short of a football field.

And still, NOTHING shocks and awes a native New Yorker more than being required to sojourn more than a football field for a basic need. If I haven’t seen two bodegas, a nail salon, a pizza shop, a drug store, a smoke shop, a stronghold dive bar, some sort of Asian cuisine, a cute little retail place to buy earrings, a frozen yogurt candy joint and humans of at least four different ethnicities by the time I make it “a few blocks,” it’s not a neighborhood.

***

So. Compare and contrast: My twisted little New Yorker’s definition of proximity with that of a person who once bolstered her understanding of Eastern European politics with the observation that she could see Russia from her house.

To be fair to Sarah Palin, she never actually said she could see Russia from her house. But even if she had? Girlfriend, I grew up seeing Russians from my apartment. In my apartment! Wearing a housecoat and smoking Virginia Slims. My grandma. She came to this country from Russia and fell in love with a second-generation Irish man and they had to elope because she was Jewish and he was Catholic. How far we’ve come in the realm of religious tolerance. Right, Sarah? Thanks for your Facebook note on Hanukkah.

***

A few nights ago I called one of my best friends from home who’s a more knowledgeable Jew than I am and also happens to live and work a few blocks from Ground Zero. And I asked her “What do you think of the mosque?”

“The what?”

“The mosque.”

She sighed deeply. “I can’t even — speak into the phone, it sounds like you’re underwater being eaten by wolves, The WHAT?”

She’s the only one who can’t understand me on my fancy new phone. “The MOSQUE. THE CHURCH FOR MUSLIM PEOPLE! MOSS-KUH!!”

“Oh, the mosque. What about it, what mosque?”

She follows the news, but this story cannot get a reservation in the forefront of her mind. “Oh that thing,” she says. “Who gives a shit? Do people give a shit?”

I tell her about Sarah Palin’s crusade, and the benches-clearing melee on Twitter. “They’re calling it the Ground Zero mosque even though it’s up on Park Place.”

She says “There should be a mosque IN the World Trade Center. That’s New York.”

“They say it’s hallowed ground.”

“Yeah, hallowed ground?” she says. “Like the slave cemetery nobody ever talks about?”

***

And this is why I love her. As you may recall, on a sunny day in 1991 some construction workers breaking ground for a government building on lower Broadway made a grizzly discovery. Archeologists were brought in. They identified 400 bodies of African men, women and children, stacked in wooden boxes in the 18th century and forgotten.

It took protests and petitions and candlelight vigils to finally cancel construction and put up a plaque. And I can guarantee what never crossed anyone’s mind. Micromanaging the activities two blocks away!

You know what’s within “a few blocks” of the African Burial Ground? A church. Wasn’t Christianity the religion of those people who flew their ships into peaceful African villages and kidnapped everyone? And you know what else is within “a few blocks” of the African Burial Ground, this sacred resting place of former slaves, this horrific reminder of the cruelest extremes of capitalist trade? The World Trade Center.

***

But you know what else is a few blocks away from the African Burial Ground? Another hundred people getting off of the train. And walking to work. And grabbing some coffee. And selling some coffee. Just like so many souls did for the last time on 9/11. They’re having a drink and buying some clothes and raising their kids going to the gym. And, yeah, by the way, sheltered, Wal-Mart, GPS America, some of those people rushing around downtown are Muslim. And you might never know, or care, until they’re passing out free Red Bull in Battery Park and somebody says “No thanks, I’m fasting” and you think, “Oh yeah. Free Red Bull.”

Bilal Dardai: Impact

August 18, 2010

On August 14, 2010, the week Senator Ted Stevens was killed in a plane crash, Bilal Dardai (The Neo-Futurists) read the following at The Paper Machete.

It might surprise you how many ways there are for you to react to a plane crash; and by “you,” going forward, I will mean “me,” but I am saying “you” because I don’t want to feel like I’m the only one who thinks this way. And by “react to a plane crash” I mean “a plane crash you are not actually in,” because I suspect that there are very few ways to react to a plane crash you are actually in, all of which are variations of “oh no, I am in a plane crash.”

You expect to react with horror, of course, because a plane crash is horrific, a mess of tangled steel and broken limbs, the crater it leaves, the stench of jet fuel ablaze. But there is a part of you that reacts with a strange sense of blasé, a part that thinks irrational things like “oh, must be that time of year again,” as if it were allergy season, as if plane crashes were ragweed. There is a part of you that reacts with cold science to the numbers and size, decides that your empathy is proportional to how many dead versus how many survived. There’s that CSI part of you that focuses on the culprit, pointing fingers at the weather, at the pilot, at terrorism. There’s that ugly little goblin in your brain that is frantically writing the inappropriate jokes, the Need Another Seven Astronauts jokes, the jokes that you hope you are decent enough to veto with extreme prejudice.

Sometimes there is somebody you knew on the plane, and this gives you a whole subroutine of emotional response that can play out for years. You could find out right away that somebody close to you just fell out of the sky, or you could find out years later that the girl who refused to go with you to the spring formal was on the plane that hit the Pentagon.

You could read one Tuesday morning that a plane has crashed in southwest Alaska, and that on that plane was former Republican Senator Ted Stevens. Ted Stevens, who had served as Alaska’s senator for forty years, the longest-serving Republican in history, before being ousted by a young Democrat in 2008. And you might be completely perplexed as to how you should feel about that.

You don’t like to admit to all of your schadenfreude because you don’t want people to think you’re a sociopath. But you can name, for example, a certain former Vice President, a man who you suspect has survived so many heart attacks only because Satan is trying to stall the inevitable primary challenge. You think to yourself that although you wouldn’t wish noisy mangling death upon said former Vice President you would not necessarily mind if it were to happen that way. And for a moment you might try to convince yourself that Ted Stevens, Bush-era-Republican Ted Stevens, open-up-ANWR-for-drilling Ted Stevens, the-Internet-is-a-series-of-tubes Ted Stevens, that maybe you feel that sort of animus for him as well.

But this argument fails, and you’re left with the empty feeling that you should at least feel something. So you’re taking hours of time at work to do what amounts to seventh-grade research on the life and times of Ted Stevens, more attention than you ever paid to the man while he was alive. And you find out that his middle name was “Fulton.” And you find out that this was his second plane crash in Alaska, that the last one killed his first wife Ann.

And you find out something you should have known in the first place: Ted Stevens was another in a long line of human beings who live to the age of 87 and then pass away, leaving behind a varied series of memories and perspectives of how that life was lived, and it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with you.

But you take the time to note that whenever this plane crash comes up again, it is going to be referred to as “the plane crash that killed Ted Stevens.” So you find an audience in a bar one afternoon and you remind them that this was also the plane crash that killed Terry Smith, Bill Phillips, and Dana and Corey Tindall.

But you don’t know how you feel about any of them, either.

Bilal Dardai: Size and Shape and Other Characteristics [Text and Audio]

August 18, 2010

On 5/22/10, in the wake of the crowning of the first Arab-American Miss USA, Bilal Dardai (The Neo-Futurists) read the following at The Paper Machete.

There was a word I intended to use in the first sentence of this monologue, but I couldn’t figure out which one it was. It was going to be epidemic but that felt melodramatic, or it was going to be proliferation but that felt apocalyptic. So it ended up being infestation. And I’m sorry for that. Because when you unleash the word infestation it ends up suspended in the room, like smoke from a hundred dying cigarettes, like oil on the surface of the ocean. It spreads and it crawls with arachnid legs across your nerve endings, infestation, it turns the crisp sugars of ginger ale to squid ink in your mouth, it mottles your oxygen, it sloughs down your esophagus like some alchemical horror of liquid steel and sepsis, infestation. I wish I could tell you that I found a better word, something sturdy and steadfast like abundance or ribald and colloquial like buttload. I wish I didn’t have to keep saying infestation but it was the only word that made sense to me in order to describe all of the question marks.

You’ll have to forgive me, because I didn’t see it, I wasn’t there. Or perhaps I was there but I wasn’t paying attention, or perhaps I was paying attention but I just didn’t care. It was like photograph fade or dolphin extinction, it was something that seemed to happen so gradually that I failed to notice until one day there they were, the question marks, everywhere, the infestation, staring back at me from the front page of CNN, from the front page of every American news organization. The question mark, that odd-looking duck of the punctuation family, the weird brother who sits in his room making dioramas of the lesser works of Poe, bent and bizarre like a chromosomal anomaly.

And you can’t blame the question mark, no, not really, any more than you can blame the fired bullet or the abused Rottweiler. There are writers behind the question marks and behind the writers there are editors and behind the editors there are boards, and behind the boards there are figures so high it would take you fifty years to count there. There are demands to draw viewers and surfers, to prioritize getting the story first before you could get it right. Somewhere along the way it occurred to an enterprising media maverick that you could get away with saying just about anything as long as you placed a question mark after it. As long as you implied that maybe you weren’t sure? That although most people would agree that the positions of our well-paid guest in the studio are hateful and uninformed, but maybe he has a point maybe possibly you decide for us with your comments and your ad revenue?

None of which is to say I am opposed to the asking of questions; questions are, after all, the cornerstone of journalism. Who What When Where How and Why. That’s the story. That’s basic. That’s 101.

A story, then, in reverse order. Why: because it’s an American tradition. How: by outscoring forty-nine other competitors. Where: Las Vegas, Nevada. When: last Sunday. What: Won the Miss USA pageant. Who: Rima Fakih, the reigning Miss Michigan, a 24 year-old Lebanese-American and Muslim who has, by now, become the most downloaded masturbation fantasy of Middle Eastern descent since Princess Jasmine.

CNN’s Thursday morning headline regarding that story: “Miss USA: Muslim trailblazer or Hezbollah spy?” Of course, of course, it was taken down shortly afterwards and there was a very terse statement about how this was never intended to appear on our site in that hot-linked Helvetica; a joke, son, ah say ah say can’t you take a joke?

Now I should say: I’m not a fan of beauty pageants, even ones cast for diversity. Better writers and better feminists than I have already produced doctoral theses on the subject so I’ll leave that alone, save to clarify a few things—one, that Miss USA is not the same thing as Miss America, it was founded by a Miss America sponsor when the 1952 champion refused to pose in that sponsors’ swimsuits, saying that she wanted to be taken seriously. And two, the pageant is owned by Donald Trump, a man who seems to covet Hugh Hefner’s prime, Don Draper cool but has only ever managed to achieve the affable hostility of Jay Leno after six months of anabolic steroids. And I’d remind everybody that we live in an American era where a beauty queen can be elected governor of Alaska, quit that job mid-term, and still be considered a viable presidential candidate in 2012. So consider the carnival atmosphere already in play by the time we arrive at “Muslim trailblazer or Hezbollah spy?”

I’m not a fan of beauty pageants but after the week she’s had I find I’m a fan of Rima Fakih. Not just because she’s gorgeous, and she is, the sort of honeyed, desert-at-dusk beauty that Gibran and Hafiz might have ached for in verse. Not just because she’s smart, and she is, an economics and business graduate from the University of Michigan who articulates her thoughts well during interviews. Despite all of these excellent qualities, I find I’m primarily a fan because her very existence as Miss USA drives many of the people I despise to the heights of delectable and hilarious insanity.

Rima Fakih won the title of Miss USA ahead of Miss Oklahoma Morgan Woolard, another in a long line of blonde-haired blue-eyed cheerleader types who tends to win these things, a woman who had absolutely no regrets about voicing her support for Arizona’s new immigration laws during the interview event. Like Carrie Prejean the year before her, Miss Woolard will be seen as a martyr to political correctness run amok. I’m sure she will enjoy a fine career for the next few years as the comely spokeslass of a start-up organization that reminds you at every turn: we don’t hate Mexicans, we just wish they’d all go back to Mexico. Give us money.

Rima Fakih unsettles the latter-day Crusaders, the people who started using adjectives like “swarthy” because “camel jockey” had fallen out of vogue. They bloviate, they blog, that she is an infiltrator, a sleeper agent, and CNN, yes, CNN has to indulge this nonsense the same way they feel they have to when somebody claims Barack Obama is a secret Muslim infiltrator as well. Because on the slim possibility that these lunatics are correct, CNN would hate to lose out on the market share.

But most deeply satisfying, to me, especially, to a child of an Islamic society, somebody who has witnessed firsthand the absurd logic of dogmatism, is the way Rima Fakih gets under the skin of hardline conservative Muslims. Mumbling, bearded half-clerics who refuse to tolerate such a woman for her killer swimsuit bod and who also want to celebrate her accomplishments as a victory for all Muslims. The brutal thugs in the rural parts of Pakistan who would gang up and assault Rima Fakih in the dark corner of a Peshawar alley and then have her stoned for adultery.

I would like these groups to sit together in a room and hate on Rima Fakih together so they can see how they’re all essentially the exact same brand of useless carcass that will be forgotten when the world shifts again. I imagine the end of that infestation. I imagine the cognitive dissonance as detonator. I imagine seeing enough exploding heads to remake Scanners a hundred times over. I imagine it to be glorious.

But it is, again, only something I imagine. And in the meantime we will have to endure CNN and its experiments in the limits of question marks.

Shortly after her victory a Michigan radio group released a series of photos of Rima Fakih dancing with a stripper’s pole at a competition, which featured no actual nudity. The Muslims and the other moralists all had outrage to express about her indecency and how she was not the right person to represent any of them. Ms. Fakih’s response was to shrug, say that it was all in fun, and move on to the next topic. I’m sure our news outlets were very disappointed in her.

I’ve been raised to believe that being Muslim is a genotype of sorts, that regardless of what you believe you are going to be a Muslim because you were born as such. Viewed through that perspective I’m just as Muslim as Rima Fakih. And if nobody else wants her to represent them, she can still represent me.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:26 — 4.8MB)

Ali Weiss: Wonderboys: Justin Bieber and the Prime Minister

May 17, 2010

On May 15, the week Justin Bieber stopped trending on Twitter* and David Cameron became the new Prime Minister of the UK, Ali Weiss read this piece at The Paper Machete.

*Note: This piece is based partly on the odd fact that Justin Bieber suddenly stopped trending shortly after his appearance on Oprah. We now know that Twitter just happened to change its trending algorithm the next day, which explains the real reason the pop star ceased to trend. Science aside, the timing nonetheless blew my mind a little.

* * *

This week saw a seismic shift in the earth’s socio-political crust. For a several hours on Tuesday, May 11, teen pop sensation Justin Bieber, the reigning king and supreme overlord of Twitter, omnipresent poster child of the top ten tweeted terms, trended no more.

In lieu of the Canadian star, one found a nebula of British terms. Tory. LibDem. UKelection. And of course, that hot young new kid the block: David Cameron.

Now, statistically we’ve seen Justin Bieber blips before. During the Health Care debate, Justin Bieber briefly vanished, overcome by terms like C-SPAN and baby killer. But soon enough, Justin Bieber was back, out-trending Joe Biden. And it must be noted that Justin Bieber still topped “GE2010″ overall for the week. We must not underestimate the power of millions of fangirls.

But what made this week dramatically different is that, by the next day, Justin Bieber was permanently gone.

One could say that Justin Bieber’s ousting by the Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition has marked his final blow! Since then, Justin Bieber’s involuntary resignation from trending, has sparked protest from an organized female tween faction. This group outright accuses Twitter of deliberately banning Justin Bieber. They demand a recount with full transparency.

For Americans, here’s what’s really mind-blowing about the day Justin Bieber trending died. Not only did David Cameron hit Justin Bieber with an out-trend from which he has yet to recover — he did it on the day, Tuesday May 11, that Justin Bieber appeared on Oprah.

This hits straight to my core, because Justin Bieber’s appearance on Oprah marked his official introduction to MY people. Until this day all I knew about Justin Bieber was that Justin Bieber trended, Justin Bieber was Usher’s protogee, and several of my female 11-year-old improv students put Justin Bieber in every scene. And, I guess Justin Bieber’s SNL and Funny or Die videos briefly scored my attention until I realized I could be watching Glee.

But an appearance on Oprah? New game. Now my leader is finally taking my hand and telling me, slowly and clearly cause she knows I’ve got laundry in the dryer, who the fuck this child is.

And on the day I learn? On the day Justin Bieber tugs at my heartstrings, with his single mom, and his special surprise for three cute little black girls with a daddy in Iraq? The day we boring, 30-plus white chicks finally gain the emotional motivation to Google Justin Bieber? Justin Bieber ceases to trend.

I, for one, will be culturally insignificant no more. I should also add, on a personal note, this all happened in the same week they announced plans to cancel both Law & Order and Hello Kitty, who is 36 now. I have nothing left to give; I almost called Christopher to cancel my appearance here today.

But in my moment of darkness I decided to devote the balance of this week to an intensive course of study on the next big thing. And that is David Cameron.

David Cameron might not be trending today, but just you watch. In David Cameron I have found MY Justin Bieber.

Both are exceedingly, boyishly attractive, non-American English speakers. Both receive uniformly glowing praise from a rabid fan base. Both are record-breakingly young for their respective posts. And both have met Barack Obama.

Both David Cameron and Justin Bieber suffer harsh criticism from haters left of the mainstream, who would point out that Justin Bieber’s music sucks — if you can even call it Justin Bieber’s music — and that David Cameron will preserve tax breaks for the upper classes while dismantling the National Health Service.

Exhibit A: Promise vs. Parody

It’s hard not to go dreamy over David Cameron. Just his name conjures up both David Cassidy and Kirk Cameron.

+ =

David Cameron has a video on TED.com where he gives an Al-Gore-worthy slide show about how the internet and social media have put government and politics and public services back into the hands of the people. Hot. There’s a black power fist symbol on the “power to the people” slide! (2:51)

In one example David Cameron shows a slide of Chicago’s own everyblock crime map! (9:10) I love you already David Cameron. You’re an Oxford-educated royal descendant talkin’ about Chicago crime! There’s David Cameron, all up in our map, like, “you can see this, looks a bit like a chef’s hat but actually that’s an assault, the one in blue. You can see what crime is committed where and YOU have the opportunity to hold your police force to account.” I feel you, David Cameron. Hey! We can totally cut spending on actual physical cops in bad neighborhoods and just choose not to live there, ’cause the Internet warned us!

Even though David Cameron is a conservative; David Cameron loves Barack Obama. There is a video on Youtube of David Cameron at home, sipping coffee and reading the papers as Obama wins the election. In this video, David Cameron talks about how cool “BAR-ack” is. In person. Cause they had like so already met.

And, this week, Barack Obama talked about how cool David Cameron is, and he quoted Winston Churchill about their special relationship. Cause, let’s face it, Gordon Brown may have stood for actual power in the hands of the working class, but really he just reminded us all of that embarrassing DVD thing Obama did. Now we have a fresh start.

Obama is David Cameron’s Usher.

David Cameron and Barack Obama are like samesies. This week, they both met with the grandpa-hot Hamid Karzai. I guess he’s LA Reid in the analogy, and the record industry is the Taliban. But I digress.

This is just really a great time for girl to get super into global politics and here’s the biggest reason why:

Can we please discuss David Cameron’s gorgeous wife, a former fashion executive named Samantha? YAY!

I like to imagine she “takes tea with a best friend Carrie who writes for the Guardian and a barrister named Miranda, and dear Charlotte who’s married a Jew and adopted a Paki….”

Samantha Cameron already made the cover of Harper’s Bazar a few years ago. I now live for the day when Samantha Cameron and Michelle Obama come together on a manicured lawn somewhere. The Huffington Post will roadblock its site with a twenty-minute interstitial slide show set to a last-minute Lady Gaga / Beyoncé recording made especially for the occasion, which will outsell Justin Bieber’s entire catalog in one hour.

So let’s not miss the boat on this dreamboat. Let’s stay tuned to David Cameron. Let’s trend David Cameron. And as he suggests on TED, let’s watch David Cameron. Closely.

Steve Heisler: Heisler on Conan on TBS (Very Funny)

May 10, 2010

On April 17, 2010, the week Conan O’Brien’s TBS deal was announced, comedy critic and producer Steve Heisler read the following at The Paper Machete.

If Conan O’Brien never told a joke again, he’d be the funniest person in all of television. Instead, he’s the funniest person in all of television until proven otherwise. And you know what? It’s probably going to happen in November. On TBS. Very funny.

For those of you who haven’t been following the Conan deal, which is so prevalent you could have simply placed your eyes near or around virtually any website in existence, here’s the story for you, you lazy chachwang. Conan was in talks to bring his show to Fox, a TV network known for all things funny, and cancelled.

But while those talks were going on, TBS, very funny, a network known for saying it’s funny because they air Family Guy reruns, swooped in like Pope Benedict on a molestation scandal cover-up. They got very serious very quickly, offering Conan ownership of the material he creates, a matching budget to Fox but over four shows a week instead of five, and what they promised would be the biggest marketing campaign in history during major league baseball.

Even George Lopez called Conan to offer his time slot, perfectly content to be Conan’s non-union Mexican equivalent. The deal went down in only 10 days. You know what else takes 10 days? Eternal repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Clearly, this deal…was important.

The media exploded in speculation, an inevitability as predictable as the sky being blue and Larry The Cable Guy getting laid in Larry The Cable Guy movies. At first people were like, whaaaaaaat? TBS, very funny? They wondered what the hell had just happened. Then they tried to convince themselves, and us, that this was good. On cable, Conan could do a show the way he wanted. His ratings didn’t have to be as high. According to New York magazine’s Vulture, on cable he could portray “rear entry sex.”

Then the holes started being poked: Could Conan get as good of guests on TBS? Would competition with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report be a death sentence? Could Oprah ruin this somehow? It’s a lot to digest.

Me? In the words of my AV Club brethren, I’m cautiously optimistic, with an accent on the cautiously. I just didn’t think The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien was funny. At all. I loved the Late Show though. Sometimes. When I watched it at least, which wasn’t all that often I suppose. Conan on the Late Show at least was brazenly weird and unabashedly smart.

But Conan on the Tonight Show was like a kid wear his dad’s suit: He knew it, we knew it, but we all chose to ignore the fact that things didn’t fit quite right. Jokes went on too long, and were punched at the end with multiple tags as if to say, “Hey, a joke just occurred,” which is a boon to comedy if I’ve ever seen one. The banter with Andy Richter was, to put it mildly, bad. And as he struggled to find his lanky and awkward place on the late night landscape, viewers moved on. And not just ex-Leno loyalists, but a lot of you. Certainly me.

Obviously the situation was different than it is now: That was NBC, this is TBS, very funny. But the main similarity is that there was much fanfare over his move, and after a little while interest was lost. It’s a glaring exhibit A that people seem to be ignoring, and the more we all analyze what Conan can and can’t do, the more I tune out to that, too.

I needed more information. So, to finish this piece, I went to talk to the people who will tentatively be doing the actual watching—some real man on the street journalism. And in this day and age, the men on the street stroke their penises on Chatroulette. So that’s what I did.

I mean, minus the stroking the penis thing.

So I took a picture of Conan with a monkey on his shoulder, like his Twitter icon, and printed it out big. I put it on a clipboard, propped it next to my camera, and wrote, “Are you gonna watch me on TBS?” in the corner. That way I could type and let it sit there in the chat window. I sat back and waited.

I’m not really sure what I expected. Probably something along the lines of, “GEE I LOVE CONAN OF COURSE [strokes dick].” But while I found much of that, for lack of a better word, schween-ness, that sentiment and that enthusiasm were both decidedly not present. People stared at “me” blankly; most clicked next within one half of a second. The responses I got to my query were, “Yes.” “No.” “What’s conan?” “I’m British.” “Feel good?” “Hey boy, you so sexy, ” and a lot of yelling. I was on for hours. Hours.

I tried Facebook, posting messages on the pages of Jay Leno, George Lopez, and to hedge my bets, an anti-Irish group. I simply asked if anyone would be watching when Conan premiered on TBS very funny in November, and what might stop them from watching. A day went by. Only one person commented on my Leno post, then promptly deleted the response.

I told myself maybe these Facebook ignorers felt the way I did: Too much talk about Conan tentatively being funny on TBS very funny, not nearly enough of Conan actually being funny on TBS very funny. Zero time, in fact, an infinitely small number situated at the border of positive and negative integers, good and evil, Max Weinberg and the Max Weinberg 7.

I tried one more subtle tactic, which was to hijack a conversation at dinner last night with people much smarter than me. I wasn’t sure if I’d get the information I was seeking, because it was a situation in which nobody was nearing nor attempting to near ejaculation, that I knew of.

But as soon as I brought it up, it became clear my friend Kellen had given Conan a lot of thought, and realized something that in my haste to come to a conclusion on the matter, I hadn’t even considered. It wasn’t NBC or censors, ratings or expectations that had been Conan’s biggest problem on the Tonight Show. It was the talk show format itself. People like us got tired of Conan because people like us are growing tired of talk shows in general.

We don’t care about talk shows—they’re something our parents used to and continue to fall asleep to. We watch those shows for the comics themselves, and the ways they play with the form. The Daily Show and Colbert Report have their own take on the template; so do things like The Soup. It’s already been established that Conan can do anything he wants at TBS very funny, so why not start from scratch entirely? The endless possibilities have even less ends than I could have ever imagined.

Which is why I have to make like Green Day, and ask that you kindly “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” There’s literally nothing more to say. Chatroulette knows it. Facebook knows it. And now, I know it. Let’s let this guy [point to Conan] figure out a few things before we resume speculating, and let’s all spank this guy [point to monkey] in the mean time.

Bilal Dardai: The Watch

March 31, 2010

On March 13, 2010, the weekend Daylight Savings Time began, Bilal Dardai read this piece at The Paper Machete.

My wristwatch has been getting louder.

I first notice it sitting at my desk again, across from the screen again, just myself and the blank white document again, my elbows on the armrests and my hands entwined again, staring at my empty frustration with the same hateful, predatory eyes that you need in order to survive ten minutes in a room with Garry Kasparov. Blocked again, subdued again, and the room is so quiet you could hear the angel on the head of the pin, screaming with terror as it drops.

But I don’t hear that. I hear my wristwatch. Tick, tick, tick, but it’s not tick. It’s heavier now, it’s more profound, it’s thick. Thick. Thick. Thick, and I don’t know when it became so assertive. I don’t understand. I think of this wristwatch, my wristwatch, sneaking off late at night with a book on how to boost your self-confidence, slamming its dial up against the wall so it can get just enough light to read Pro-Active Tip #44, Communicate Your Needs Clearly, so now it does. It’s become this bizarre little Willy Loman wrapped around my arm, repeating echoing echoing repeating Attention Must Be Paid.

And I don’t mean to further personify something that already has hands and a face, but the only other solution I can imagine, because it’s ridiculous to think my hearing has somehow grown sharper with age, is that certain frequencies of sound have become quieter, so much so that now the regular volume of my wristwatch can cut through to my ear. I find it deeply unsettling to think that frequencies of sound can die out permanently, that a sound could go extinct. If I believed that, I think I’d find it monstrous to shut off a radio ever again.

So I tell you that my wristwatch has been getting louder and we all recognize it for the metaphor it is, that even though I’m talking about my wristwatch I am not in fact talking about my wristwatch. I’m talking about mortality. I’m talking about our understanding of mortality, our sense of ending. How we all hear our own clocks ticking, how we all hear our own graves stalking closer. There’s a skeleton holding an hourglass. There’s a boatman with the head of a jackal. There’s a withered old hag with a thread and a pair of scissors.

Here is where he starts talking to you in the third person. He starts calling you his friends and adopting this odd wise man of the tribe cadence, as he encourages you not to be afraid of time. He tells you how there’s no point in being afraid of time, my friends, because it’s a constant of the universe, time is, persistent and unfeeling, it was here before the atoms and it will be here after the matter implodes. Time is the great consumer and nothing you can do will stop it, my friends. Relax, he says, and enjoy your devouring.

Here is where he drops the third person. I was only doing that for dramatic effect, he says.

Early tomorrow morning we lose an hour. It just up and vanishes, poof, like a plane traveling too close to the wrong side of Bermuda, but then, it was always just a borrowed hour, wasn’t it; something we gave ourselves as a gift last autumn. I’m fascinated with Daylight Savings Time. We lose an hour of sleep, sure, we all groan about that, even those of us who were planning to be out all night, even those of us who don’t sleep very much anyway, we feel this innate sense of burglary when we spring forward. It’s a government program, you know, and so I admit, I am waiting with a sick sense of enthusiasm. I am waiting for that first teabagging maniac to cry out that socialists have taken to stealing time from the American people, they have stolen an entire hour from us all and they are feeding that hour to Barack Obama’s Kenyan voodoo vampire TelePrompter; RISE UP, AMERICA! RISE UP before the socialists pull down the sun itself and use the cover of darkness to pass all of their unholy legislation. They are going to indoctrinate your children with medical marijuana! They are going to allow homosexuals in the military to marry their own stem cells!

Where was I. Daylight Savings Time.

Things I’ve learned about DST.

You’ll look at a map of the world, you’ll see it divided up into countries that practice DST, countries that used to practice DST, and countries that never practiced DST, and those last two categories, used to and never, that is the majority of the world, right there. The primary Daylight Savings regions are the United States and Europe, and there’s probably a very venomous polemic to be delivered about white imperialism and its relationship to the clock, but I don’t have that written here right now and I don’t truly believe it anyway. Every time we shift the clock backwards or forwards it messes with farming, travel, medical devices, record-keeping, heavy equipment. We do that on purpose!

Here’s what I like about that. Daylight Savings Time is this rare acknowledgment of the fact that we invented time; that minutes and hours do not just occur, on their own, in nature. We can give ourselves another one, of course, we can take one away, of course. We’re the ones who decided how many, how long, how often. We are the masters of the measurement. We have all this fear of time but we’re the ones what shaped it in the first place, we defined it, we acquired for it an infinite number of temporary outfits. After the apocalypse time is going to keep marching on but it won’t have purpose. Time needs us or it isn’t really Time. That’s the power we have.

So what I’m saying, what I’m trying to say, is this. We have to lose an hour tonight. That’s decided. So this is the hour I’d like to lose.

An hour of bullshit from any awards telecast. Toss it. An hour of infantilizing stereotypes masquerading as situation comedy. Scrub that. The hour you have to wait in line at the unemployment office. The hour you’re just sitting on the tarmac. The hour you waste being angry at something stupid you already knew he was going to say. Gone. However many millions of dollars BlueCross BlueShield spends on fighting health care reform in one hour, BCBS gets that money back so it can pay out some fucking claims with it. All the statistics; however many people just disappear in Burma, in Iran, in Rio, per hour, however many women are raped, however many children are molested, however many guns go off, however many people starve to death, let’s stuff all of it into that one hour, cram it into a cannonball and drop it down a volcano. Let’s get rid of that hour.

If I’m still awake at 1:59 tonight, and I probably will be because I usually am, sitting at my desk with that blank white document, again, I’ll pull the dial out of my wristwatch and adjust the time an hour forward. While I adjust my watch, it stops completely until I push the dial back in. It might cross my mind, in that moment, to not push it back in, and let it suffocate, slowly, on a long-dead second.

I’m not going to do that. That’s not the deal we make with our wristwatches. You don’t wear a wristwatch as a reminder that you’ll die someday, and you don’t wear a wristwatch to remind yourself you’re still alive. But if it’s getting louder, like I think it is, if it’s actually bothering to speak up for itself, then it’s a reminder that so should I.

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Steve Heisler: What’s The Deal With Seinfeld?

March 31, 2010

On March 20, 2010, in the wake of Seinfeld’s newly-launched NBC series, The Marriage Ref, Steve Heisler read the following at The Paper Machete.

May 14, 1998: A cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld ends Seinfeld’s nine
season run with the selfest of referential episodes, drawing 79
million viewers. Nothing happens, and some people are so distraught,
they sling anti-Seinfeld bile on what is known at the time as a
“message board.” Meanwhile, in the future, Bill O’Reilly claims in
2008 that a cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld and cocreator Larry
David were so cynical they, “tanked the final episode on purpose.” I,
however, forgot most of what happened in that episode until I read the
synopsis online just now.

June 25, 1998: A cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld meets Jessica Sklar
at the Reebok Sports Club—which is what non fancy boys might call the
gym. Seinfeld was perpetually single, having previously dated one of
the writers on his show and a high school student, when he was in his
late thirties. Sklar, on the other hand, had just returned from a
three week honeymoon in Italy with her husband. 18 months later, she
and a cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld are married.

March 31, 1999: A cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld contributes $1,000
to the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush.

January 1, 2001: Ted L. Nancy releases Letters From A Nut, in which
the aforementioned “nut” writes hilarious letters to famous people
pretending to be a nut. November 25, 2004: Ed Broth releases Stories
From A Moron, in which the aforementioned “moron” writes hilarious
letters to famous magazines pretending to be a moron. Neither author
is ever seen publicly and both books contain a foreword penned by a
cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld, leading many to believe that a
cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld is pretending to be two people other
than a cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld.

March 30, 2004: A cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld is interviewed on
The Today Show alongside an animated Superman, to promote a series of
webisodes advertising American Express.

November 18, 2004: The puffy shirt worn by a cushy yet cocksure Jerry
Seinfeld in Seinfeld is donated to the Smithsonian Institute—a place
dedicated to, in the words of James Smithsonian himself, “the increase
and diffusion of knowledge.” A cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld is in
attendance, and demonstrating his knack for saying what everyone is
thinking, remarks, “This is the most embarrassing moment of my life.”

November 2, 2007: Despite impressing comedy fans all over the globe
back in 1998 with his decision to get back to his stand-up comedy
roots and not do films, a cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld does a
film. It’s called Bee Movie, a movie about CGI bees that a cushy yet
cocksure Jerry Seinfeld purportedly sold to a prone to bad decisions
Steven Spielberg with just the title. A cushy yet cocksure Jerry
Seinfeld fittingly voices the lead bee, who just graduated from
college. The film receives a mixed bag of bee-related puns, including
one gem from NPR: “A-pollen-ly personal.” Meanwhile, in the past, a
cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld promotes Bee Movie by dressing up
like a bee, talking to Kanye West, and jumping off the roof of a
building at the Cannes Film Fest. He also appears in the season
premiere of 30 Rock, donning a wig to make him look more like he did
in Seinfeld, and at one point literally turning to the camera and
plugging Bee Movie as directly as possible. NBC follows up by airing
22 short skits depicting the quote-unquote “writers room” and starring
a cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld. A cushy yet cocksure Jerry
Seinfeld embarks on a whirlwind press tour.

October 8, 2007: Amidst aforementioned press tour, I interview a cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld, in person, for 20 minutes. I begin the interview by handing him some baklava, which I ran out to purchase after seeing a few preview clips of the movie, with all the honey flowing, and the dripping, and the yellow. A cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld eats my baklava, which all euphemisms aside, is exactly what it sounds like. I find him cushy, yet cocksure, casually demeaning like my much older cousin. I ask him how much money he has in his pockets, and consider the interview a defining moment in my journalism career even though I already predict the movie sucking. Meanwhile, in the future, it does.

September 6, 2008: Those weird ads with Bill Gates and a cushy yet
cocksure Jerry Seinfeld air, shilling for that immortal, flawless
product Windows Vista.

February 28, 2010: After the Winter Olympics closing ceremonies, a
cushy yet cocksure Jerry Seinfeld debuts The Marriage Ref—a show where
celebrities watch footage of middle America couples having arguments,
make fun of them in an attempt to sway host/professional ref/chronic
leaner Tom Papa in his decision; then those couples are brought up on
screen and told the results as they wait on the edge of their seats,
eager to hear what Zeus-like directives a cushy yet cocksure Jerry
Seinfeld and his cushy yet cocksure pals up on Olympus are about to
dole out like a lightning bolt, lightning bolt, lightning bolt. I
watch in horror as the man who I once thought spoke directly to me
about nothing speaks now to no one about everything that is dumb, and
stupid…dumb. I wonder aloud, “Does Jerry Seinfeld disappoint himself?”

Ali Weiss: How to Make Teabaggers Stop Worrying and Love Reform

March 30, 2010

On March 27, at the first Paper Machete since the passage of the Health Care Reform Bill, Ali Weiss read the following.

For those of us who wanted it, Health Care Reform is now officially: SO last week. We had the dramatic Sunday, the emotional Wednesday, the plot-twist on Thursday. By yesterday morning, Obama was staring out from the cover of the NY Times with a shit-eating grin on his face, holding up Rove and Romney’s books like a big game hunter. The implied caption was, as it always is, “Everyone chill the fuck out.”

But for those of our fellow Americans who didn’t want this thing to pass, it is, as they say, far from over. And a little bit scary.

Palin has dusted off McCain to take the old act back on the road. On Tuesday, she tweeted: “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!” Pls see my Facebook page.”

On her Facebook page she’s got a map showing crosshairs over every state with a House Democrat up for re-election. Her minions, the Tea Party Patriots, make message board comments like: “GM stands for government motors, well I had a Chrysler and it was junk just like the government healthcare!!” And “ I do not want to be RULED in the USA!!!!”

We’re never going to convince what James Carville calls “vile two-bit wing-nuts” any differently. People with vested financial and political interest will continue to ignite fear, and so forth.

So, how do we make the Teabaggers stop worrying and love reform?

Not by quoting the “truth” about the bill. That begs for a “hell no!” and much more exciting lies.

Not by making analogies about libraries and mandated auto insurance. That will only spark counter-analogies like the C-word, Canada, and in some circles the H word, which we know.

And certainly not by telling sob stories. Seriously, shut your stereotypical bleeding heart liberal mouth. At Town Hall Meetings last summer, I repeatedly heard: Big business helps us, we help ourselves, anyone else can go suck it.

One man told me: “We can’t tell insurance companies what to do. That’s socialism!” (Do you think they have your best interests in mind?) “We need big business strong, to create jobs!” (Where do you get your health insurance?) “My labor union.”

A high school kid said: “When my father got injured he lost everything. That’s the way it is. He worked his way out of it and I’ll be damned if our money goes to helping anyone else not willing to work too!”

And, most to the point, one woman screamed in my face: “Healthcare is a privilege, honey, not a right!”

You’re not gonna change those minds.

So, how DO we make the Teabaggers stop worrying and love reform? Perhaps, and just perhaps, it’s by sounding exactly like them.

What would the Teabagger sound like if the Palins and the Limbaughs and the Becks of the world taught them to love healthcare reform? Could perfectly decent values, like personal freedoms, responsible spending and self-help, actually be spinned to sound pro-reform?

Let’s try it. In support of the individual mandate, deemed unconstitutional in Tea Party rhetoric, employ the No Free Lunch argument, sprinkle in contempt for the poor, and add hatred of college-educated artists to taste.

Here’s how it might sound:

Fucking Chloe down at the shop took the day off again. Another headache. Calls up talking about her goddam acupuncturist. “Oh, no, no, no, I don’t belieeeeve in medicine for migraines they’re the body’s little way of telling us there’s a problem, you don’t want to numb them out”. I’ll numb you out you self-entitled little bitch, stop spending money on body art and get your ass to a DOCTOR!!!!

I know it’s a small business but I work a second job in an office down in the loop so I can pay the 300 bucks a month for my own individual plan, and THEY WON’T EVEN COVER MY VAGINA!!!! That’s cause of when my bike messenger boyfriend gave me genital warts. And it costs 563 bucks without coverage to buy the cream that SLOWLY BURNS THEM OFF!!!!

So I’m squirming around in my desk chair cause I don’t get any PTO as a part-timer, and he goes and slams his fixed-gear Schwinn into one of them runaway Priuses down under the 90/94 overpass!!!!!!!!!!!!

And he hasn’t met the 7,000 dollar deductible in his crappy plan so they won’t pay to SEW UP HIS CHIN, and I gotta cover for Chloe while he sits in County for 8 hours behind a line of gang bangers getting their bullets removed FOR FREE on MY FUCKIN DIME!!!!!

He texted me from triage about some teenaged pregnant bitch with a PSP, which I probably bought for her too after whoever STOLE it for her passed the cost of inventory shrinkage onto the PAYING PUBLIC!!!!!

Yet because my boyfriend has a fuckin CASH MONEY JOB, he’s just not quite destitute enough to get a HANDOUT to cover the fifteen hundred bucks in bills we got from THREE DIFFERENT DEPARTMENTS IN THAT HOSPITAL!!!!!

So he’s out biking with a fresh set of stitches, I can barely sit down, Chloe’s a walking time bomb cause I guarantee she walks the streets of Bucktown seeing nothing but SPOTS OF LIGHT, the gang bangers owe NOTHIN, and the expectant mom’s too busy keeping her SIMS alive to LIFT A GODDAM BROOM!!!!!

You know what there oughtta be????? YOU KNOW WHAT THERE OUGHTTA BE??!?!?!!!!! There oughtta be a goddam LAW!!!!! Says everybody in this country, who LOVES THEIR FREEDOM, has to GET THEIR OWN GODDAM HEALTH INSURANCE!!! AN INDIVIDUAL MANDATE!!!

I am tired of SHOULDERING THE LOAD for the lazy little leaches of society!!!! It’s time all those shitheads CHIPPED IN!!! And then MY costs will start to go down!!!! ANYONE WHO’S EVER JOINED A SAM’S CLUB KNOWS HOW IT WORKS!!!

This is just an example, of course. You can substitute at will. But the general idea is to sound exactly what a Teabagger might sound like if Fox News had taught them the HCR bill was “good.”

A few other quick tips before I go: When undercutting Palin, don’t be afraid to ooze with misogyny. They did it to Hill. We were too delicate. Get her in the crosshairs!

And um, as far as the Teabagger’s blind love and trust of rich people and corporate interests? That’s a hard one to overcome.

But there is one way to turn any “vile two-bit wing-nut” against rich people. Say the health insurance companies are run by Jews. Is it true? I have no idea. But does it fit into the current rules of engagement? You betcha.

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