We Can't Let Stuff Like This Get By in Mainstream (White) Media

Cultural appropriation never looked hotter 

The disheartening news that Mindy Budgor, a rich white American chick, decided to forego her very comfortable lifestyle to rough it in Kenya and become the "first female Maasai warrior" because she was bored with her high-paying job and fancy car has been sweeping the Internet for over a week already. The book (what else?) Mindy wrote about her experiences is called Warrior Princess: My Quest to Become the First Female Maasai Warrior (take comfort in the scathing, one-star reviews). 

Luckily, Mindy's story has been exposed far-and-wide for the white-saviour-complex-solidifying, self-indulgent, and offensive schlock that it is. But these critiques have been almost entirely from black bloggers (Try Spectra Speaks and Madame Noire, to start). 

Friendly Glamour magazine apparently didn't flinch when excerpting part of Mindy's lovely story. Neither did the mainstream-as-apple-pie Today show. The first golden moment in the Glamour excerpt arrives when our little warrior explains that her inspiration was insecurity:

If you'd told me a year earlier that I'd be deep in the bush, hair knotted from days in the forest, running in the direction of a 1,300-pound animal that could make short work of me, I'd have told you to get your head examined. Yet there I was. And I'd never been more sure I was in the right place. 

I hadn't always been so certain. As a young girl in Maryland, I wasn't the daughter my parents had hoped for. They wanted skinny and polished; I was what my mother referred to as pleasantly plump. They wanted a ballerina; my first day of ballet class, I got booted out for knocking over an entire row of dancers with a spontaneous cartwheel. (I switched to ice hockey.) No matter what I tried, I just never fit their picture.

Aw, guys! It's okay that Mindy made a mockery of Maasai culture (and made light of actual challenges of living in the bush -- see here) by using it as a token for self-edification before heading back to her white, wealthy lifestyle. Because when she was a kid, she just didn't fit in. Boo fucking hoo. If you're gonna try a little sob story to justify your quest to exploit Kenyans' customs for your own gain, at least try a little harder than that. 

But the clincher in this Glamour piece is the caption under Mindy's glowing portrait (in Kenyan robes, of course): 

"I tried to soak up as much of the Maasai's wisdom as I could—including their way of living in the moment," says Budgor, here in New York City. Coat, dress, Zero + Maria Cornejo; necklace, Victoria Simes for Zero + Maria Cornejo; belt, Salvatore Ferragamo; ring, Budgor's own (made from the horn of the buffalo she speared)."

Please, for sanity's sake, tell me this was written tongue-in-cheek! We have here a light-as-air, couture-ified description of an artifact taken from a white woman's "travails" in Africa, and of a culture that is facing state-imposed extinction. The cherry on top, of course, is that tired noble-savage BS about "living in the moment" that apparently every culture of dark-skinned non-Westerners is able to master, and that us "corrupted," educated, comfortable, future-having Whites just can't seem to grasp (Poor us!!). 

But this is all actually besides the point. I re-kindled this dying blog-in-training to riff on something else, which was unearthed in an article on Racialicious the other day by Spectra Speaks, whose anger-fueled tweet-rant about Mindy's book was spot-on ("Dear Western Saviorists, Stop Reducing Africa to a Play Pen for Your Personal Development"). She tells us:

Never has it been more essential for Africans to tell their own stories, actively share their perspectives online and via traditional media outlets as well. In so doing we at least make it harder for ridiculous narratives like this to be perpetuated without stirring up controversy. That said, there are other voices who really should be engaging the author of this book.

The emphasis is mine, and her point is astute. We can't stop self-righteous fools like Mindy from going to Africa to "find themselves." But we can try to make it harder for these people to get positive press, and for their stories and books to be lauded in mainstream media and women's magazines.

Which is why Spectra thinks "there are other voices" that should be opening up dialogues with this author. She means white voices. She's right. Unless white voices as well as black voices start calling out exploitative stories like Mindy's for what they really are, shameful and pathetic instead of inspirational and "empowering" (ugh, that word!), the mainstream (read: white mainstream) will never get the point. Because what we've got now is a cheery-as-kittens profile in Glamour and a "what-an-inspiration-to-all-women!" segment on Today. And that's not good enough.

We should already be at a point where a young woman like Mindy would be discouraged from writing such an insulting "memoir." We should be at a point where an editor at Glamour, upon seeing Mindy's book, would flip through the pages and throw it directly in the trash, just as she might throw out a memoir by a white supremacist. Or where a producer at Today would avoid profiling such a self-righteous, culturally-insensitive young woman for fear that another similarly-positioned person might try to "discover" herself in the same flawed, fundamentally racist way.  

Ironic, indeed, that I'm hemming and hawing about white people needing to speak up and transform the media on a forum that nobody reads. But if I ever get lucky enough to be a taste-maker in the national media, I'll take Spectra's words--and my own convictions--fully to heart.

In the meantime, let's hope Mindy doesn't sell a single book.

Young, Over-Educated, and Worse than Ever

Look how smart we are! Look! Are you looking?

What?
An invitation-only meeting of The New Inquiry, a "scrappy" online journal that offers literary essays and media criticism. The meeting takes place weekly in a clandestine bookstore (a "literary speakeasy of sorts") on the Upper East Side. Described in this NYT article.

Who?
"Members of the city’s literary underclass barred from the publishing establishment," meeting to discuss lofty topics such as Edmund Wilson and poststructuralism.

In reality:
A circle-jerk of over-educated, underemployed elitists who think they're above the publishing and literary industry just because they cannot find the jobs they want.
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Believe it or not, I'm not here to mock the content of The New Inquiry. The journal is for the most part well-written and thought provoking, albeit incredibly pretentious at times. So let it be.

My problem, of course, is with the holier-than-thou attitudes of the 20-somethings who attend these weekly meetings. If you wanna sit around with your college buddies talking about the ins and outs of poststructuralism, be my guest. But don't you dare project an identity of an underdog struggling to make it in a city that just won't accept your brilliance. What did you say to the writer of this article to make her call you the "city's literary underclass"? Who do you think you are: starving, radical writers who just won't get acknowledged by the mainstream? (This isn't even true, because The New Inquiry has endorsements from Jonathan Lethem and other big-shots). One attendee, a junior at Columbia, comes to the New Inquiry meetings to “discuss ideas at an extremely high level, without worrying about status or material support of traditional institutions: publishing houses or universities.” Don't you just love 19-year-olds who think they're smarter than everyone else?

Give me a freaking break. The people in this article are just bitter because they are over-educated and cannot find jobs. Helena, a recent Columbia undergrad, was apparently rejected from a top magazine. Rachel, a 2009 Barnard graduate, lost all interest in the publishing industry after a disillusioning internship at The New Yorker. Rebecca, with a Masters from Columbia in English and comparative lit, couldn't even get an unpaid internship. This article was written on her 25th birthday, but she was sad, "having graduated summa from Cornell, with a master’s from Columbia, only to find [herself] unemployed and back living at home with your parents." Frustrated and wallowing in self-pity and self-indulgence, it's clear that Rebecca and her friends attend the New Inquiry "salons" to stroke and fuel their elitist egos.

Boo Fucking Hoo.

Publishing is hard to get into -- I would know. But I will say this: the moment I graduated from undergrad (from a school not as good as Columbia), every single internship I applied to got back to me the next day. So I'm not sure why Rebecca had such bad luck. Could it have been that she went off to "write on a farm in upstate New York" for several months? And how could Rachel let the goings-on at The New Yorker, literally the most obnoxious publication on the planet, get her down about the entire NYC publishing world?

The real problem, I think, goes back to unbridled elitism. These girls aren't interested in working for just any publisher or magazine. They aren't interested in working for an unknown independent press or a big-time corporation like Random House. They need the perfect middle ground, a fine specimen of gritty intellectualism, fine writing, and underdog charm. And of course, it has to be trendy. Why else would The New Inquiry, in all of its self-imagined ruggedness, hold their "social debut" at the ritzy, hipster-chic Jane Hotel? Why else would they partner with Google and New Directions (a prominent indy press) and quiver in pleasure when a Vanity Fair writer criticized one of their essays via Twitter?

These New Inquiry club attendees are nothing but intellectually-masturbatory literary social climbers. Which would be just fine (albeit disturbing), if only the NYT writer had not called them the "literary underclass barred from the publishing establishment." It's not a freaking "establishment," and they're not barred. They just need to try harder to find a job.

Newsflash: Removing Your Clothes, Crying, and Taking Pictures of Yourself is not Artsy

Contemporary Art Space? More like MySpace

Lately, a pesky issue of self-indulgence has agitated me to the point of no return: Girls (worse, women) photographing themselves (or being photographed) in the nude or semi-nude and brashly proclaiming it "art," when really it's nothing but a grossly narcissistic expression of their own egos, and not even worthy of MySpace let alone competitive contemporary art spaces.

My rage was first incited last weekend, when I took a trip to PS1, the extension of MoMa that used to be a really cool outlet for art in Queens.... and now is a veritable bee's nest for swarming hipsters. PS1 has its attributes and interesting exhibitions, but it's certainly not impervious to useless bullshit (like all contemporary art centers). What really set me over the edge was the work of a 30-something young artist named Laurel Nakadate, who had the better part of an entire floor dedicated to displaying dozens of immense photographs that were cheesy, Internet-esque shots of herself crying in different positions, often half (or fully) naked. This part of the exhibit is called "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears," and some of the photographs (rather, pics) were worse than something I would have taken in 1997 with a disposable Kodak. 

I was ready to dismiss the "art" to the garbage chute of my brain when I caught Nakadate's statement, in which she explained that she traveled the country for 365 days, "deliberately taking part in sadness each day." PS1's website says: "These photographs document a year-long performance that began on January 1, 2010, in which the artist documented, and continues to document herself before, during, and after weeping each day." Constructed sadness, huh? BOO FUCKING HOO. 


Are we really at a point in self-indulgent hipster art culture that the expression of "sadness," a somber emotion with great poetic potential, is acceptably conveyed by one self-infatuated "artist's" experimentation with camera angles? PS1 clearly saw something insightful; all I see is shameless, embarrassing narcissism. 

"Do I look sad in just a bra, or should I take that off, too? "

As if Ms. Nakadate's "art" weren't enough to get my blood boiling (you don't even wanna know what else she had on exhibit), I nearly fell off the subway platform upon reading of Miru Kim, a 30-year-old "Manhattan artist" who, for 5 years, "has meticulously researched New York’s history and explored its unseen infrastructure. She disrobes and caresses the walls with her body at each location." This is like that article about idiots spelunking in NYC sewers because they're too bored with their everyday lives. Thinking she's marvelously original, Ms. Kim takes photographs of "edgy" places in New York... oh wait -- she doesn't even take the pictures! She just appears nude in them! She's just doing this because she thinks she's hot! (Seriously, when do you see an enormous artist exhibiting herself this way? It's only the attractively-figured ones. You know why? Because they just want an excuse to parade in front of the camera).

Urban Narcissa, staring into a lovely sewage reflection

NY Metro's take on Ms. Kim's impact on our art world is just too good to paraphrase indirectly, so I'll quote it here:


"[Kim] inserts her naked body into the 'organism' of the metropolis, producing ethereal landscapes that explore the interaction of classic femininity and twenty-first century urbane. Her artwork has been heralded internationally, though she has gotten into more than a few scrapes with local law enforcement, she says. She’s been chased by police officers, encountered a violent homeless man in an abandoned Hell’s Kitchen tunnel, and eluded NYPD helicopters for the sake of her art."


OMG she's so badass, getting in trouble for her art! There's nothing like a disillusioned idiot stalking abandoned tunnels and getting into altercations with violent homeless people... 

Oh, another thing: Miru Kim also poses nude with pigs in farm pens. ...And tries to make it sound deep.

"As I lay down next to a sow weighing five hundred pounds, I felt the warmth travel from the soft underbelly of the animal into my bare right thigh.  I could no longer reason whether I was feeling the pig's abdomen on my thigh, or the pig was feeling my thigh on her abdomen. The line between the subject and the object were obscured, and two souls mingled on the plane of contact." from: http://mirukim.com/statementThePigThatThereforeIAm.php

Self-Indulgent Performance Art Reaches Record Low

Videogames Adventure Services. Where do I begin?

Featured in the Times about a week ago (article here), V.A.S is "a company that constructs 'reality adventures' for paying clients." Run by Columbia M.F.A-grad Brock Enright, this mind-boggling service arranges staged kidnappings at $1,500 and full-fledged odysseys of strangeness for no less than $10,000. The customers? Yuppie idiots with cash to burn, idiocy to spare, an inability to create meaning in their own lives, and an overwhelming need to make others do it for them.

At first, it's kind of cool to read about the "adventure" Enright and his team plan for Cristina, one such client. Cristina meets the team in a bar, interacts with people who are actually actors, and gets to act out a series of riddles culminating with a disappearing ventriloquist. Well, it's really awesome, actually -- or it would be, if this had been arranged by her friends or maybe as part of a movie. But when we find out that Cristina paid up to $60,000 for the complete unraveling of this life-overlapping-art fiasco, it gets a little less awesome -- especially when we know, well, it's all staged.

At some point, you could almost commend Enright for being the mastermind of what seems like an ingenious structure. He brainstorms, designs, and organizes incredible scenarios that people only dream about (or see in The Matrix), receives all the money needed to make it happen, and makes a profit to boot. He gets to hire actors, blindfold people, and even stage abductions.

But Enright, shacked up in a Bushwick apartment with his girlfriend and child, is one of those performance art junkies who thinks that urinating and defecating on himself are profound forms of self expression, and that's an immediate turn-off. He is a pretentious provocateur extraordinaire, armed with a Columbia degree that surely won't turn away fans -- or buyers.

Speaking of these buyers, let's review a few:

-Margo, a 38-year-old former Goth who was harassed with fake phone calls nightly and eventually flown to Germany, where she unknowingly played the role of rape victim on stage.

-A married couple looking to reignite their romance, chased by staged assailants in a country wood.

And the best:

-David, who paid under $5,000 (a bargain, no less) for a "superhero fantasy" during which he was "forced through a labyrinth of puzzles and endurance tests" and trusted to rescue a female damsel in distress (planted by V.A.S., of course). 

The outcome? "The comedown hit me immediately," David reports. "Everything had been so heightened. The next day I had to go back to work, and it was tough. I got very depressed."

........

"Very depressed," huh? BOO FUCKING HOO. That's what you get when you pay shit loads of money to be the star in an alternate reality game that is not only not real, but completely indulgent and ridiculous and unnecessary to the umpteenth degree of all degrees. This reminds me of those fools who suffered "depression" when they realized Pandora, the fictional planet showcased in the movie Avatar, was not real, nor were the blue Nav'i (and their know-all Tree of Life).

...Really, people? You deserve to feel a "come down" if you think it's okay to pay several thousands of dollars to have someone else engineer a quest of meaning in your life, and to make you the center of the world. If you had any real consciousness, you wouldn't need this kind of validation.

"Hey Mom, I just paid $10,000 for someone to involve me in a perverse alternate reality game where I might be beaten, kidnapped, or flown out of the country with minimal notice. It's like, totally cool, yah."

Can't Grow A Mustache? At Least Your Fridge Can.

If you can't grow it, buy it.

As you all know, mustaches are a major cornerstone of hipster culture, and the ultimate trendy accessory for skinny white men. With just the right amount of Village People sexiness and old-timey appeal, the mustache has far surpassed the skinny jean (I think) in the attainment of "I'm Cooler Than You" status. And, along with everything else hipsters find cool, it has thus inspired mountains of useless kitsch and novelty items.

Let's peruse a few gag gifts online to see just how far the insanity has gone. While some of these items are undeniably cute, they are far beyond any kind of normal, and seriously need to be condemned -- not on the side of the retailers, who clearly have a pulse on the current market, but on the side of those for whom they have been created.

Exhibit A: "Fingerstache" Tattoos

It's one thing to not have an actual mustache. But to not pretend to have one? That's just bollocks! If there's anything hipsters love, it's a combination of vintage trends and materialistic throwbacks to childhood ("OMG remember those?!). The 'fingerstache' tattoos provide both.

Brilliant.







Exhibit B: Mustache Bandaids

Kind of in the "childhood throwbacks" category, but worse. While 110% of real adults do whatever they can to avoid showing their boo-boos in public, hipsters think it's cool to pretend it's 1993 again (or 1970, for that matter), and flaunt their minor injuries wherever possible. So don't try punching any skinny mustachioed guys in Williamsburg -- it might give them an excuse to wear these.



Exhibit C: Handlebar Wine Bottle Opener

A blogger who picked up on this item says it best, imagining the user on a date. "She'll be so distracted by your Handlebar Mustache Bottle Opener she'll hardly notice the label on your cheapskate $4.95 bottle of fine." If that's the case, they're a perfect pair.

Exhibit D:  "Flavor Savers" Chip Clips 

'Cause even soy crisps won't stay crisp in a Williamsburg pantry full of Salvation Army clothing dust. These come in different colors for mustache diversity, so the hipsters will feel like they're celebrating the "colorful" aspect of their neighborhood.

Exhibit E: Mustache Candy

Um, these look like bats.

Exhibit F: Mustache Jumbo Magnet    

As the product description puts it, "Everything looks better with a mustache, right?"

Wrong. Very, very wrong.

Goldman Settles for Silver

Goldman employees have yet another reason to cry into their company-card dinners this week. The firm's budget for compensation and bonuses has reportedly dropped to $15.4 billion (down 5% in 2010). That means that instead of receiving an average bonus of $498,246, faithful workers must settle for a mere $430,700.

Boo Fucking Hoo.

What's Next, "Dog & Deluca"?

Far more than the revolting sight of dogs dressed in brand name clothing, ads for 'organic' and 'wholesome' dog food have caused me a lot of angst over the years. After all, nearly 50 million Americans struggle to feed themselves, and millions more don't have access to healthy foods like fresh produce, whole grains, etc -- yet lucky pooches are getting gourmet dinners served right under their anus-sniffing snouts.

Lately, I've encountered a series of commercials that have driven me to the brink of fury. They're for a brand called 'Blue Buffalo,' and here's an example. I couldn't load the isolated clip, so you'll have to bear with this one -- it starts at 1:02 (or, watch here).

Like, Oh em gee, Kim. "Ground corn was the first ingredient, not meat," says this frumpy valley girl.

Boo Fucking Hoo, lady. I'm all for not serving animals by-products and poison, but seriously, ground corn? That is the issue? And the romantic montage of mood-lit poultry and colorful produce that follows is not only cheesy as all hell -- it's frankly insulting to anyone who might never have access to such a nice assortment of foods.

"I love Murphy like family, so I wanna feed him like family," she continues.

Someone should tell Mom Jeans over here that Murphy is a fucking dog, and would eat literal garbage if given the chance (ever seen those glammed up chihuahuas sniffing turds on the street?). Something else tells me that this woman probably spends more time caring for her dog than for her family -- if she's got one (Yes, I know she's just an actor, but she's representative of real idiots out there).

I have nothing more to say. WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE TODAY?! 

Tiny Furniture? More Like Big Nuisance.

You might have seen this annoying poster. If not, you are seeing it now.

Sometime last year, I was slightly irked to read about Oberlin grad Lena Dunham's "low budget" film Tiny Furniture, about a young woman who "returns home from college, moves in with her wildly successful artist family in a pristine TriBeCa loft, all the while trying to find a place to stand in the world" (it was in this Times article). "Oh great," I thought, "another story about a rich college grad 'struggling' to make it on her parents' dime. Boo Fucking Hoo."

So imagine how pissed I was when Tiny Furniture blew up at IFC and started getting acclaim in lots of other places, too. Worst of all, Dunham has even scored a deal with HBO. The show is Girls, a Sex and the City-esque look at 20-something privileged white chicks making it big in New York City (gee, how original). Dunham plays an "eternal intern" at a publishing house, the Yale grad Allison Williams (daughter of NBC anchor Brian Williams) has a gig at a fancy PR firm, and another girl is doing some other kind of artsy "job" that in real life one could only get with a great connection (the same applies to the cast of this show, clearly).

And of course we're not seeing this lovely portrayal of the intern world on a youth-targeted network like MTV, which airs stories of low-income minorities, uneducated guidos, pregnant teens, and fat people. No, it could never be on MTV because then all the hipsters would have to go through great lengths to explain how "ironic" they were being by daring to watch such a lowbrow network, and obsessively lament over how sad it is that MTV is no longer about music.

Luckily for the show's future viewers, Girls will be on HBO, just gritty enough to count as "authentic," but also sufficiently upperclass and "artsy," so when they get together with their whiskey-brewing recording studio intern buds, they'll feel okay watching.

Let's just hope that Girls doesn't go 'wild' -- we already saw enough yupster undressing this weekend during the No Pants Subway Ride -- and that's enough for a long, long time.

Rats, Beware: The Hipsters Are Coming!!

 

Why is the "Underground" so damn trendy -- in this case, the literal underground?! If you liked what you learned in DieHipster's post about hipsters filming "movies" in an abandoned Brooklyn subway tunnel, you'll love this.

Decked in flannel and scarves, with expensive camping gear in tow, a bunch of fools led by Steve Duncan and Erling Kagge (a Norwegian mountain climber) blazed an intrepid trail through tunnels, sewers, and other underground spaces beneath Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Lucky for us all, they had the fine privilege of documenting their romp in a full-length Times article, with a day-to-day diary and a slide show to boot (**EDIT: and an NPR bit, too!!)

The author of the article, who went along on the guided trip, had me in conniptions by the first paragraph:

It must have been the third or fourth day — time, by that point, had started to dissolve — when I stood in camping gear on Fifth Avenue, waiting as my companions went to purchase waterproof waders at the Orvis store. We had already hiked through sewers in the Bronx, slept in a basement boiler room, passed a dusty evening in a train tunnel; we were soiled and sleep-deprived, and we smelled of rotting socks. Yet no one on  that sidewalk seemed to notice. As I stood among the businessmen and fashionable women, it dawned on me that New Yorkers — an ostensibly perceptive lot — sometimes see only what’s directly in front of their eyes.

Soiled, sleep-deprived, and smelly? Boo Fuckin' Hoo: that's what you get when you leave your cozy Park Slope apartment and take a vacation in a goddamn sewer. And time had started to dissolve? Give me a fucking break. Your companions are buying equipment at a fancy outer goods store on 5th Avenue, and one of your guides climbed Mt. Everest... yet you think you've got some kind of epic street cred?! Like, "Oh, I am so deep. Look at how rugged and dirty and authentic I am compared to all these capitalist Wall Street suits and fashion-conscious women. They're so superficial and I'm so real. Poor souls, they only see what's in front of them..." (Yeah, exactly: they see a grimy rando standing outside a fancy clothing store. Grow up, already: nobody cares!!!)

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to post pics from the slide show here, so you'll have to take a look yourself. I'm not sure which is worse: the fact that one of the travelers wore white sneakers (Photo 4) while exploring a dirty old train tunnel, or that the group took an artsy fartsy snapshot (Photo 7) of a woman who's been ACTUALLY LIVING in an Amtrak tunnel for several years as some kind of supremely offensive and exploitative relic. Actually, the worst part has got to be the guides' stupid, ironic expressions of rugged hardship and struggle in Photo 10, as if it were not indeed their own privileged choice to explore the most putrid parts of NYC as an enlightened project of "urban spelunking."

New Year, same old shit.

Incredibly Rich Professionals Get Married and Insist on Letting Us Know

Enjoy your ceremony, but keep it out of the Times, please.

Alright, we're all used to the annoying profiles of rich people getting married and bragging about it in the New York Times. But here's one that I'm having some trouble stomaching, as it is just so irrelevant to normal people -- even to normal rich people! It's like the universality of this situation has gone completely down the drain by the sheer pervasion of wealth, fancy job titles, and name-dropping of classy Manhattan bars and restaurants. Hope you'll see what I mean in the case of Thursday's profiled wedding.

The bride, Mina Guiahi, is a portfolio manager at Millenium Management (she's since moved on to other high-profile companies). Her parents, described as "wordly and secular college professors," are members of the Iranian elite, having moved to Huntington (Long Island) right after the start of the 1979 revolution, living in Paris briefly before emigrating. The groom, Jesse Levinson, is a Jewish/Catholic-raised adviser for the State Dept. in Washington on Palestinian economic affairs (he's no slouch, either).

Their story? They met at a swanky Seattle wedding. They both lived on the Upper East Side and started training together (running) in Central Park. They broke up. Two years later, they met again at Underbar in the W Hotel in Union Square (um, seriously, do we have to know that?), and had a great kiss. They ran into a guy struggling with a flat tire and Ms. Guiahi gave him a few hundred dollars (?!?!) to get him going again. Rrrright.

"And then he [meaning Mr. Levinson] was gone," the article dramatically puts it. "While other couples nuzzled at the NoHo hotspot Bond Street," Mr. Levinson informed Ms. Guiahi of his decision to take a year-long post in Iraq, causing the couple to be heart-wrenchingly separated. Especially since might never come back from war...... OH WAIT! He was working with an elite government institution!!! (And seriously, the "NoHo hotspot Bond Street"?! What is this, Sex and the City? Can't you stop name-dropping for a New York minute?).

Still, at least Mr. Levinson might have been in actual danger. You know what Ms. Guiahi's big "risk" was at this juncture in life? "Co-managing her first portfolio at Diamondback Advisors as the financial markets crashed." Boo Fucking Hoo!!! Something tells me you'd be A-OK even if you lost your fancy financial job.

I only clicked on this article so I could read about how a couple stays together when one partner goes off to Iraq and the other cannot see him/her for a whole year (because that's what the headline intimated). But this is quite another scenario. Not only did the bride and groom indeed see each other over this year of cross-global suffering, but they took romantic rendezvous (plural) in places like Paris and Istanbul. If this weren't enough to bear, we have to read about their their cutesy ways of adapting to each other and their lavish, culturally-diverse wedding ceremony at (wait for it) THE HARVARD CLUB!!!

Are you fucking serious, New York Times? Why must you unceasingly endorse self-indulgent stories of the Elite that nobody, except for their friends, can relate to?? Stories about rich people are fun, but only when they involve crazy pictures or drug scandals (and anyway, that's why we read Perez Hilton and US Weekly, not the Times). This BS should never have made it past the couple's wedding slideshow or toasts, let alone to my computer screen.

Shoeless Schmuck Does Shanghai

I wouldn't be surprised if this 'Sole Man' were a 'Sole Bachelor,' too.

My favorite yuppiehipster-hater just tipped me off to a piece of journalistic gold: an NPR snippet on English filmmaker Arthur Jones, who has decided to spend a year barefoot -- in China. During the barefoot mission, which is taking place in the "urban jungle" of Shanghai, Mr. Jones continues to conduct business meetings and do his "job as a filmmaker," whatever that could possibly entail (actually, I'd rather not know).

And why, you may ask, is this well-off Brit voluntarily forgoing a luxury that, I think it's safe to say, literally millions of people in China cannot afford? Because, he claims, "It opens your eyes. You're suddenly in touch with everything around. And it feels like you're a little child discovering the world for the first time." A few lines later, he shares the downside to barefooting it: "You don't take anything else in; you spend the entire time staring at the floor" (...Could NPR have meant this satirically? Let's hope so). Clearly this guy has no idea what he's talking about, and hasn't even gotten his media spiel down pat.

We do, however, learn of the supposed health benefits to going barefoot -- the kind of shit that yuppies find orgasmic. Mainly, it's been determined that shoeless runners put less stress on their feet, suffering less impact. There's even been a study showing that rickshaw runners in India and China who did not wear shoes had fewer cases of foot fungus and infection than did their shoe-wearing counterparts. Maybe it's just me, but I have a feeling that a case of athlete's foot becomes irrelevant when you're living in a dirty slum and likely to die from a host of horrendous diseases. I'd like to see Mr. Jones shack up with a rickshaw runner and compare foot health with beggar children: hopefully he'll get a sense of how fucking lucky he is to have the option of wearing shoes at all, while others must risk stepping on dangerous materials, not to mention garbage and sewage, everyday.

In fact, unless this filmmaker extraordinaire is willing to buy slippers for every beggar child in the city (and upgrade every middle-class kid's Nikes), he should put his fucking shoes back on. This fool makes Chinese businessmen in $5,000 Gucci loafers seem justified and normal. What an ungrateful moron.

To the self-proclaimed 'Sole Man," who plays childish games in the street like jumping on white lines to avoid scorching pavement, I hope a shoeless Chinese child rips all the clothes off your back and snatches your camera equipment so he can buy himself his very first pair of real shoes. Boo Fucking Hoo, you barefoot hippie.

Wall Street Won't Take You: Try Vaudeville Instead

Sorry, you're not getting your "shot" here.

"New unemployment claims slip; housing starts tick up," is the title of this USA Today article. The gist? Fewer Americans have been requesting unemployment benefits (claims haven't been this low since August 2008), indicating that the economy might just be getting better. Also, more people are building real estate and buying imported goods; in short, Americans are "confident and willing to spend." As I am neither a statistician nor economic analyst, to me this is a run-of-the-mill optimistic update, and I'll accept it as news. It's nice. It's helpful. It'll do.

But it's also infuriating. Why? Because when it came to choosing a photo to accompany this article, some idiot did not choose an image of new construction, Holiday shoppers, or smiling New Yorkers on the rush hour train (I'm sure you could think of many more acceptable choices). Instead, he/she picked an AP photo of a Santa-hatted, 20-something dreamer named Jesse Paloger, who was found standing on Wall Street with a cardboard sign touting his many assets, including "experience in sales, marketing, management" and a degree in accounting and economics. Mr. Paloger's sign also points out that he's a "Go-getter from California looking for my shot," and "ready to interview" (First, is this the Grapes of Wrath reversed? Second, please, please tell me you wouldn't actually interview on Wall Street with a Santa hat on).

The problems with this photo:

1. It has nothing to do with the article. The article isn't about how recent grads and yuppiehipsters can't find jobs so they have to live at home and do chores so their parents won't hate them (though, god knows, we've seen enough of those). It's not even about a lack of jobs at all. It's about a supposed decrease in unemployment. So why are we looking at some unemployed rando in a Santa hat?

2. Of all the people affected by the job market and trying their best to find jobs in uncertain times, THIS guy was chosen as a representative. This guy, who has so much time on his hands that he's standing on the street essentially impersonating a panhandler in the cold, when he could be working or applying to jobs, or reading a book or something. And god help him if his goal was actually to find a job this way (I'm guessing he's trying his luck at amateur comedy), because last time I checked, a Wall Street hopeful has to either know somebody very important or really have his act together. This guy clearly has neither advantage.

3. As much as it pisses me off that this well-dressed idiot with the hubris of a recent degree (which clearly didn't help him at all, in the job or brain departments) is standing on the corner impersonating a homeless person, it's far more bothersome that the AP reporter who took this photo was so goddamn intrigued by Mr. Paloger's lame comedy act that he deemed it newsworthy. And as if that weren't bad enough, someone at USA Today then chose this guy's photo as a perfect accompaniment to an article that has nothing to do with it (it's not even like Mr. Paloger is applying for unemployment or something). What idiocy: an insult not only to panhandlers, but to college graduates actually trying hard to find jobs, and the parents who paid for them to go to college. 

Alas, the hipster-pandering media curse strikes again. 

NYC Nomad Has Lots Of Baggage

If the decadence of the '20s was characterized by jazz-age consumption, the '50s by rampant consumerism, and the '80s by drug use, the decadence of this generation is fueled by youth self-indulgence. The 2010s are an age of self-gratifying, liberal-arts overload;  of well-to-do Westerners who wish to grace the developing world with their graciousness and the blogosphere with their trendiness and "authenticity"; of young adults who seem to be more self-aware than ever. Sure, nobody could have been more "artistically" self-absorbed than John Keats and his Romantic cohorts, but at least they didn't have Twitter and tumblr with which to update their dew-worshipping friends every 5 seconds.

Unfortunately, Ed Casabian does. This 29-year-old, who calls himself "The NYC Nomad" on his spiffy tumblr blog (http://thenycnomad.tumblr.com/), was just featured in the Times for his intrepid couch-surfing (er, air-mattress-placing) New York lifestyle. Having chosen to forego conventional adulthood after a disastrous breakup with a girlfriend of 7 years, Mr. Casabian starting moving to a different apartment every Sunday, spanning the boroughs and social stratospheres, all the time sustaining his job as a web financial analyst at a company that sounds mysteriously like Digg. He stays with friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends -- whoever will take him in -- and documents each stay in neat little pictures of him and his new buddies doing hipster-friendly activities in cute little settings. He even uses the blog to solicit for places to stay -- and to gloat about finally making it into the Times (of course, by ridiculing him I'm just helping to expand his media reach, but hey: his name, when circulating around YuppieHipster world, will no doubt garner enough Google hits to put me on the radar, too). So let's soldier on.

Mr. Casabian, who hails from Massachusetts (no doubt from behind the Tofu Curtain), claims to have fallen into his current way of life after leaving the co-op that he and his girlfriend bought, and riding his bike around Central Park in a wave of depression. Then, in a bout of spunky post-adolescent exuberance known only to the likes of highschoolers and Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City, he decided not to settle down anywhere and chose a "nomadic" (::cringe::) life instead.

Of course, Mr. Casabian has had his fair share of "look how much I endure to be free spirited in the big city" moments, many of which are all too embarrassing. At one point he asked the company that manufactures the air mattress he carries around to "sponsor" him on his journeys, and the proposition was declined (News Flash: most respectable money-making institutions, unlike the New York Times, are not willing to enable the idiot shenanigans of overgrown hipsters who are "finding themselves" in ways that no normal people have enough time or money to do -- or for that matter, would ever want to). Second, he was able to use one very temporary Central Park South address to pick up a girl uptown, only to be refused a second date when he moved soon after to a "not so chic" spot in Queens (Why he assumes it was his living locale -- and not his clear unwillingness to grow up -- that turned her off is beyond me).

But in the end, Ed Casabian is not our everyday bike-loving NYC-dwelling hipster extraordinaire who brags about his BoHoNomadic lifestyle on the Internet. He's more of... well... an emo kid. I started this post with the purpose of expressing my contempt for the infuriating self-indulgence involved in the NYC Nomad's desire to document his childhood romp through the boroughs. But now, I am left not wanting to say "Boo Fucking Hoo," but just a regular old "Boo Hoo," for real. Ed Casabian, it seems to me, is a manchild on the run from any kind of stability, stunning hosts with an "uncanny ability to fall asleep in weird places," and leaving the overall impression of a lost, homeless puppy. Cearly unable to get his life together after a longterm relationship turned sour, he seems to be clinging at best to a strange persona that I'm not sure he's even cocky enough to uphold. To me, it's apparent that he devised this media-bait homelessness scheme primarily to get noticed by the hipster blogospohere and the ever-pandering Times. More than reviling or fury-fueling, his story is just ...pathetic.

Find the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/nyregion/13nomad.html?_r=1

Rich Kids Pay Big Bucks for Ghetto Life

Ah, yes. Yet another lovely Times article ("The Price 20-Somethings Pay To Live in the City," 11/12/10) touting the courage and steadfastness of unfortunate rich kids who must live in the city in apartments paid for by their parents. This fine piece of journalism might be a month old, but it chronicles an ongoing problem for the well-off recent grads of NYC. Their apartments (like nobody else's in New York, obviously), are pretty freaking small.

And they're also sometimes in high-crime areas. Abe Calvin Quezada, a 22-year-old interning at a recording studio in Manhattan, recently gave up his sub-par room in a loft in Bushwick for a renovated tenement near Marcus Garvey Blvd (that's in Bed Stuy), which boasts a tiny 10-by-6-foot bedroom. He thinks this apartment is nicer than his Bushwick flat, but finds the neighborhood downright "fishy," recalling gun shots outside his window and a sighting of a handgun-toting motorcycle rider on a Sunday afternoon. He doesn't feel very safe, especially since he works late.

If I heard this story from someone living in this neighborhood who grew up there, or because it was literally the only place they could afford (with a legit paying job), or because they had no other choice, I'd sympathize with their complaints. But to Mr. Quezada, who chose this spot because it was something Mom was willing to subsidize so he could keep his unpaid hipster lifestyle going, Boo Fucking Hoo.

As for further "tales from the front lines" (more on that terminology later), there's Stefan Rurak, 26, an Oberlin-educated furniture maker who moved to New York 5 years ago and currently lives in an illegal, 9-by-12-foot space in the back of a former furniture store in Greenpoint. He gains some of my favor by at least admitting he "lucked out" by finding this place for so cheap, but loses it all when he insists that the area isn't yet swarming with "college kids in tight pants," and that's why he likes it (leave it to a hipster artist to get all excited when he thinks he's still the only one in the neighborhood. It's like the thrill experienced by the first Jamestown colonist)."It's not that I like New York so much," Mr. Rurak says. "But things happen here that wouldn't happen in other places."

Yup, you're right, Stefan. Only in New York City do people like Mr. Quezada have the privilege to live in and finance tiny apartments in shitty, crime-ridden neighborhoods to fulfill their "dreams," whereas many people living there would literally kill for something better. Only in New York do privileged dweebs find immense self-gratification in downgrading their lifestyles, whereas everyone else is busting their asses to upgrade theirs. Only in NYC does someone like you, Stefan, get a flat-out burst of praise in the Times for living in an illegal room in Brooklyn, when poor families are so often being thrown out of shit holes like that for legal and monetary reasons, even while working full-time, backbreaking jobs and having literally no where else to go.

Paid work is hard to get -- I know that. If you can afford to have an unpaid internship, and if Mom is willing to pay your rent, that's seriously great. But you better feel lucky. Don't expect people to feel sorry for you because you live in the ghetto (or a window-less closet) to sustain your artsy hipster lifestyle, when you could have stayed in your parents' house or in a huge apartment back in Cleveland or wherever you're from. Cut the ego trip: you're not suffering; you're living large.

And to the folks at the New York Times, please refrain from using war lingo like "front lines" in idiot pieces like this -- I don't care if you're being "ironic." Save it for articles about actual war and global tragedy (last time I checked, you guys report on that stuff too). It's obnoxious, disdainful, and makes a mockery of just about everyone on the planet.

Article Here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/realestate/14cov.html

A Man With A Big, Irrelevant Problem to Consider

Believe me, the dumb polaroid format is only the tip of the iceberg.

Thank you, New York Times. Lest I go a single day without a well-manicured interview of a self-indulgent, privileged New Yorker, you are there to reassure me that these people's random stories are not only representative of all of NYC, but are relevant to everyone as some kind of "big news." Obviously, we'd never read about the commonplace dilemma of a middle class black woman, a random old person, or a Pakistani immigrant, etc.; these people don't seem to exist at all to the Times unless there's an actual issue involved, or if one of them does something really notable, really bad, or is tragically killed. But somehow stupid, quotidian stories of well-to-do "trendy" people always get top priority, as if everyone cares. The unrelenting yuppie-pandering aspect of the Times is part of what makes today's account of one 30-year-old's very unimportant dilemma ("A Man With a Bicycle To Consider," 12/06/10) especially banal and infuriating.

Matthew McLaughlin, a sweater-wearing dude who teaches science in the Bronx (he began, not surprisingly, with Teach for America), is undergoing the very tough process of buying a fabulous apartment in the city. And so far, his prospects are pretty good. He's got a reasonable budget, "enjoys experiencing life in different areas," loves diversity, and all that jazz. The catch? He has to accommodate his lifetime companion and transportation aid, his just-trendy-enough bicycle.

Like loads of other bike-riding yuppiehipsters who just looove New York, Mr. McLaughlin takes great pride in saying that he previously lived in notorious parts of upper Manhattan like Harlem, Washington Heights, and Inwood, where each of his apartments was simply great, save for certain downfalls -- "poor maintenance, excessive noise, no view," and in one case a toddler dribbling a basketball all day long (No view?! A toddler dribbling a basketball? Boo Fucking Hoo). At the start of his recent apartment search, McLaughlin applied to live in two co-ops in Hudson Heights, but got denied (good thing, our vegetarian hero rationalizes, as the veg options are decidedly limited there). ...This speaks for itself.

If you're not already vomiting at the sheer inanity of this article (which, I remind you, is located in arguably the greatest news source in the Free World), let's read on. All would be just peachy for Mr. McLaughlin if only he did not have to accommodate his dear bicycle. Since he must be able to ride back and forth to work, he cannot live in Brooklyn (he claims it's because he doesn't want to switch schools, but maybe he's just afraid that the A-List hipsters there will rag on his bike). He simply will not tolerate a public bike room (the two-wheeled beauties must be kept conveniently stacked against the wall, in a hallway dedicated exclusively to that purpose). And he needs a suitable view so that he can "witness weather patterns developing" (as much as I'm gagging, I have to at least give the guy credit for wanting to know whether to use his water-resistant messenger bag instead of his sensible backpack).

He ends up choosing Astoria, hands-down, in an area located right across the RFK bridge from the Bronx. But the dilemma rages on. One nearly-perfect apartment has only a "partial view" of Manhattan, which is simply too much of a sacrifice for Mr. McLaughlin (what, weather patterns don't develop in any part of that vista?). Others don't have the requisite bike-leaning hallway he desires. Finally, he finds a perfect spot, where "every window had a view of Manhattan. There was a hallway for his bikes. In the living room, he could create a seating area around the television as well as a dining area with a table for six, just the right size for playing board games with friends." Not too soon after, he moves in with his cat, Parvati (please tell me it wasn't named after the Harry Potter character). To this day, he is thrilled with the place. On occasion, our hero even skips the elevator and hauls his bike up the stairs (which, he boasts, are nothing compared to the ones he climbs with his bike on the RFK bridge en route to work).

Before you get positively ill over the image of Mr. McLaughlin playing Cranium with his bearded Teach-for-America buddies or making the Everest-like trek up his apartment stairs with his bike in tow, consider this: what he loves the most, after all that biking and teaching underprivileged kids in the Bronx and eating expensive vegetarian cuisine, is seeing the "twinkling lights of Manhattan," which are far preferable to the daytime cityscape.

I'll suspend my nausea for a hot minute, as I have a definite sore spot for the nighttime skyline, too, and appreciate a guy who cares for his bicycle (plus, he's probably got great legs). But the fact that Mr. McLaughlin's disgustingly privileged and commonplace story has not only reached outside the confines of his moleskine, but has made the New York Times, fills me with nothing less than bitterness and contempt. Boo Fucking Hoo: your story is useless.

Article here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/realestate/05hunt.html?hp

Would You Like Some Boo Fucking Hoo With That Deli Sandwich?

Things have been pretty tough for Greg Corkett, former Senior Operating Officer for HSBC. For the past two years, instead of analyzing and negotiating mortgage packages worth up to $500 million from a cozy NYC office, he has been out in the field, “toiling at the low end of the housing-loan food chain as a mortgage broker in Great Neck, N.Y.”

And “toil” it must be indeed. Not only must Mr. Corkett help affluent people buy homes in one of the most exclusive areas on Long Island. He must also, due to his measly $95,000 yearly salary (down from somewhere in the 400k’s in past years), deprive himself of a luxury that practically everyone, even those with very little money at all, can afford.

He sometimes skips lunch.

And that’s not nearly all. When Mr. Corkett isn’t skipping lunch, which we can assume is just about every day he has time for it, he does something far, far worse. He orders from “the local deli.” If that’s not indicative of his crippling poverty, I don’t know what is. Plus, something tells me this “local deli” is no dirt-cheap bodega, but rather one of those alliterative, dual-named luxury spots, like Dean & Deluca or Guy & Gallard. Rather, since he’s working in Great Neck, I’m guessing it’s an overpriced Kosher sandwich shop, where a bagel & lox goes for no less than $8.95.

“It’s an awful lot of work for, frankly, a small fraction of what I used to make,” Corkett said about his corporate downgrade.

But seeing as this “small fraction” is still at least 3x what most New Yorkers make, and that his “toil” (a word that conveys nothing less than Gulag labor) is a cushy real estate job, this is what I have to say to Mr. Corkett:

Boo Fucking Hoo.

Article Here: http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2010-12-03-lesserjobs03_CV_N.htm