September 17,
2004
permanent
link
Today is the day to get ready for this jelly.
Today’s
interviewee (who, phonetically, is pronounced Kor-ee See-ka, for crying out
loud), is the former editor of Gawker and now has entrenched himself as a staff
member of Gawker media, which gives him time to write for little publications
like the New York Times and such. If you are my parents, you will read this
interview and wonder why such a smart young man needs to use such profanity, yet
at the same time marvel at his
roots. Everyone else:
just enjoy.
The Choire Sicha Interview: A Little Under Twenty
Questions
Where did you spend your summer, and what do you have
planned for
this fall?
There’s a very sad and very short Neko Case song called Andy. It’s about
the end of summer and the end of love. You should listen to it. I’d make
you an mp3, but Ms. Case hates mp3s apparently and you just don’t want
to piss off the queen of alt country. Especially because she works so
much with Dan Bejar, in their capacity as superfriends in the Canadian
supergroup The New Pornographers. Dan Bejar is one of the greatest
geniuses of our times – his new album is here .
And so because I respect him so much I must extend respect to the
brilliant Ms. Case as well.
Right. Well, Claire, honestly I work too much, though that's pretty much
a well-known fact. There are two very boring and overly psychological
reasons for this, one of which is that I woke up at the age of 31 and
realized I was going to die poor and alone, the other of which I’m not
going to tell you.
With regard to the first reason, well, of course, we all die alone, not
much fucking good working is going to do about that, unless you work
with people who all agree to die at the exact same moment as you. And
good luck finding such a place to work.
I guess you could all die in a crashing elevator together maybe.
What I was thinking in the shower this morning was this: the actual
range of temperature between the seasons is actually quite miniscule – a
variation of maybe 100 degrees? When one starts thinking of the infinite
range of temperature, the seasons seem like a minor thing to quibble
about. And yet we are such finely-tuned tepid creatures that this tiny
amount of heat and cold causes us great distress.
So why do I really care about summer and winter?
You covered part of the Republican National Convention. Did it live
up to its promises of hoopla and mayhem, or was it a letdown?
I’ll tell you the best thing about writing for the New York Observer,
for which I did a tiny bit of
Convention work. (Everyone else in the
city of New York was working for Maer Roshan on the New York mag
convention issue. Seriously, EVERYone.)
On the NY Observer’s website – which probably gets more readers than the
print version, and I have no data whatsoever to base that on, I’m making
up a fact here but I think it may be true, just given the permanent link
to the site from Drudge – they list an email address for the author of
each piece, which is delivered to the domain observer.com.
Once upon a time someone at the Observer would collect these emails and
send them to the writers in a batch -- but no more. My Observer mailbox
has bounced email for the last four months. Some nights I roll about on
my dirty sheets and wonder what unread emails wait for me there that I
shall never see. I’ll tell you, it HAUNTS ME in kind of a happy way –
like knowing someone who you don’t recognize is talking about you across
a room but you can’t hear them.
Back when I used to have those emails forwarded to me, some of them were
terribly unpleasant or angry or even mean. (I know!)
My least favorite email was from the writer Ben Marcus, who is married
to
Heidi
Julavits. He was upset that I thought it was okay to describe
him as
ugly. But, as I replied to him quite clearly, I thought he was
actually really
hot, but the
description of what I thought was hot
obviously repulsed him. Anyway he never wrote me back after I explained
this. I apologized for my objectification too, which I guess he missed
the first time around. I don’t think we understood each other very well,
which is always too bad.
Actually, that was my second least favorite email. My least favorite was
from the writer Ayelet Waldman, who is married to Michael Chabon. She
made presumptions about who I was that were not based on observable fact
because she had, in fact, never met me.
Then we had a nice chat.
The Republican National Convention, by observable fact, was a dreadful
atrocity perpetrated on each of us in New York City in our capacities as
residents, taxpayers, people, and animals. My personal opinion is that I
hope everyone who got arrested by being trapped in orange nets by the
police sues the Bloomberg administration into oblivion.
You work for Nick Denton, freelance, keep a blog and probably do
twenty other things I don’t know of. Is there anything that you’d like
to do that you don’t have time for?
I’m glad you asked this question, because now I realize I never have
thought of my life with regard to things I’d like to do and don’t have
time for. Who does that? Do people sit at their desks with their head in
their hands, thinking, if only I weren’t stamping these insurance papers
I’d have time to write that book? So go home and write it, bitch. Ask
Hubert Selby, Jr.
about that.
I have a terribly low vision of my life. Left to my own devices, I will
lie down and have a cigarette. For hours. (I know, Claire, stop judging:
smoke in bed, wake up dead.) And so these things, well perhaps there are
things that I’d like to do, and I am quite capable of making time for
them – but they all involve doing things that I don’t have the skill to
do. Like I’d very much like to draw in charcoal incredibly realistically
and with invention, like the work of Dominic McGill.
But I just can’t draw, no matter how frequently I do not try to learn.
For some reason writing for a newspaper seems to me the best thing on
earth, and I have no idea why I think such a stupid thing. I guess there
are just people who are messed up like that. Right now I’m allowed to do
that, and I can’t imagine that privilege will last for very long.
You’re now the editorial director of Gawker media: what exactly does
that entail?
Here is an email that I just sent to a staff writer who will remain
nameless.
(Or
rename mainless!)
“but in general house style is that on the first introduction of an
acronym, it's spelled out. DON'T MAKE ME PULL OUT THE STYLE GUIDE AND
BEAT YOU.”
I was lying. I haven’t written the style guide yet. But now I’m going
to, just so I can beat our writers with something.
Right now my job primarily involves not working at home, but instead
working in the home of our publisher Nick Denton, where I am denied my 3
p.m. nap. This is a real pisser, and every day I contemplate quitting
over this. The best thing about writing Gawker.com was the 8-post-nap.
You get up, post 8 items, and go back to bed for an hour or two. I loved
that part.
Were you hoping this was going to be a funny interview? Because
honestly, I’m mostly doing this to entertain myself at this point. My
boyfriend is out of town, it’s quite late, and I skipped dinner. I’m
having a seltzer and pomegranate juice cocktail! I so hate to drink
virgin cocktails alone.
Perhaps I’ll go back in and insert some jokes. If it’s not funny at all
ever, then I didn’t go back and insert jokes.
Funny is over-rated, by
the way.
Funny is easy. Puking up dinner is hard. (At first. It gets easier.)
What goals do you have as a writer that have yet to be met?
I don’t like people who talk about writer-hood. Take this, for instance:
“Of course, a writer is never truly on vacation. The printing presses of
the unconscious still pump out a nonstop edition even as one's attention
is arrested by the sight of migrating ducks, darting-green dragonflies,
dolphins at play.”
That was written by James Wolcott on his blog. Mr. Wolcott is a writer
for Vanity Fair. I don’t know Mr. Wolcott’s work as well as I should,
and I believe there is a book of his on the market that I should read
promptly. And I will! Pinkie swear! But those two sentences make me crazy!
I have a HUGE aversion to people referring to themselves as artists or
writers.
I have an ex-lover, who is now in prison so he can’t defend himself
(isn’t that what they call “ruined reputation” in libel law? Some phrase
like that – in any event, he is libel-proof, he can’t be slandered,
because apparently he has offended society, and really just don’t get me
started on THAT legal construct).
Starting over: I have an ex-lover, who, unrelated to my specific
complaint, is now in prison, who used to often make the case that
artists were different from other people. I found this viewpoint hugely
offensive. There is no artistic character. There is no such thing as an
“artistic personality.” This is a huge load of crap which people
(“artists”) use as an excuse to behave badly and make people who aren’t
working artists feel poorly about themselves.
Besides: we don’t need excuses to behave badly.
Everyone’s
a fucking artist! Everyone is the same! There is no
temperament, there is no specific sign of artist-hood, writers’ brains
do not work differently than “normal” people, and anyone who tells you
so is trying to steal your soul and puff themselves up at your expense.
Goals? Right now, an editor friend is arranging a lunch, at my request,
with a real writer so I can ask her to tell me how to interview people.
(That was an outrageously bad sentence. Perhaps I could find someone to
have lunch with to teach me about sentences.) So, I mean: my goal right
now is to learn how to interview people.
In general my model of interviewing is to display how stupid I am, ask
accidentally offensive questions, and generally mumble and stare
blankly, and also to forget to ask the questions that might give me the
answers I wanted.
This so-called style was referred to as “aggressive” by a television
celebrity. I thought that was putting it in a quite flattering light –
for some unknown reason, this person spied intentionality behind what I
was doing.
This person probably thinks cats are telepaths too.
To many of us, getting paid to blog sounds like a dream job. Was
there any downside to working from home, collecting gossip, being
sarcastic online?
There really isn’t much to complain about in this sort of work. It’s
sort of a class in libel law 101 on the fly, and typos don’t go
unremarked upon, and everyone has an opinion about opinions, and the
more strenuous the opinion, the more strenuous the response. So there’s
a lot of furor in the air sometimes, which is weird – because you’re
eating cheese and cherry blintzes in your living room in your underwear
and you're like, what's going on?
And then you unknowingly publish something you think is mildly funny but
it’s actually a big deal and next thing you know Fox News Channel has
gotten a hold of your cell phone number and you throw your cell phone
across the room to get them to stop talking to you and then you don’t
have a cell phone any more.
So yeah it’s a weird joblet. You may be surprised to learn that there
are people who cannot blog well. It is, I have found, a skill. I did not
know that until I began hiring webloggers. Yes: there are people who
cannot blog.
Of course, there are people who cannot touch their tongue to their
noses, and they get through life just fine.
You’ve written for the New York Times, New York Post and several
others. When you become a high profile writer, do you still pitch to
these places or do they come to you?
I’ll make sure I let you know should I somehow become a high-profile
writer, or, really, a writer at all. Right now I think of myself as a
janitor who gets paid to write. (Rock!)
I’m a shitty pitcher. The things I’m interested in aren’t really, like…
newsworthy. There are two or three stories that I’m totally obsessed
with right now that I don’t really have a venue to write them in.
They’re very small stories, mostly about Korean women who run delis in
Brooklyn and their relationships with their vendors, and a woman named
Nancy who drives a taxi on far Long Island and stuff like that. I’d like
to write about… yeesh. How? I guess I’d like to write a Trailer Park
Talk of the Town.
Actually, janitor is one of the few jobs I haven’t had. Perhaps I will
think of myself as a barrista, or a counterman.
To be quite frank, which is really my goal here in all this mess, the
Times carries a weight that I think sometimes that no institution should
have – particularly the Friday art reviews, the criticism of Ben
Brantley and Michiko Kakutani, and the Sunday book review. Visual
artists live and die by Roberta Smith’s reviews in the Times – I’ve
always wanted to ask her what she thinks of her (quite possibly
unwanted) power. And yet, criticism is about deciding what is effective,
what is right, what is moving, what is innovative, and as readers we
have a responsibility to acknowledge the subjectivity of those sorts of
evaluations. So in a sense, we give that power to the Times, and to
critics, which isn’t fair of us either.
So no I don’t pitch very often because I have a hard time expressing
what I’m trying to say. I should just write the stupid things and send
them in, I guess.
But I won’t.
How did Gawker Media come to sponsor a blog for John Waters’ newest
movie?
I don’t really know what my job is besides working with writers, but at
least I know my job isn’t business development. That’s my co-worker
Gaby’s department, and she’s a biz whiz genius, and I bow to her.
Me, I like me some John Waters movies. I’m thinking today that Polyester
is my favorite – Edith Massey is just amazing in it. And God, I wish I
lived in Connecticut!
I imagine that a lot of people must think they have your real-life
personality pegged based on what they’ve read of yours. Is your everyday
personality different from what we saw on Gawker or see on your blog?
Well, I think, at Gawker, that people were certainly far more interested
in Paris Hilton’s vagina than in me personally. I just tried to connect
people with their interests and stay out of the way.
As for me, I have two private personalities – one is very hyperactive
and probably a little infantile and passive-aggressive, and the other is
rather maudlin – maudlin like I’ll spend a night on the floor listening
to Tindersticks. So I don’t really have an everyday personality.
I do have an everyday pair of jeans though – both of my personalities
wear pretty much whatever’s nearest on the floor when they wake up.
I shouldn’t joke about multiple personalities. One of my aunts professes
to have multiple personalities. Once this aunt was driving my mother to
the airport, and the aunt announced that she’d switched to one of her
pre-teen personalities. Of course, this personality didn’t know how to
drive.
Bad news, eh?
What did the New York Press have against you in naming you one of
New York’s “50 Most
Loathsome New Yorkers”?
I think now that this is how the New York Press says “I want to touch
your penis.” Or… perhaps it’s how the New York Press says “I hate you.”
It’s a mystery. Certainly the naming of me to the list was far outsized
for any actual status I would occupy in the actual city of New York. As
for my level of loathsomeness, I suppose they would know better than I,
because who that is loathsome knows it? Or else how would Karl Rove get
out of bed in the morning?
When and why did you originally move to New York?
I arrived in Port Authority on a Greyhound bus. Two men said they’d help
me with my luggage, and I said, AH HA! I’VE HEARD ABOUT THIS! And I
didn’t let them. I went downtown and met Dale Peck through a mutual
friend. Dale was living in England at the time, and he needed a roommate
and I was bored in California… sort of. So I rented a room from him that
was so small (HOW SMALL WAS IT? IT WAS SO SMALL…) that I had to fold up
the single-size futon frame to open or close the door.
And then he went back to London and left me in this house with a bunch
of alcoholics who painted houses for a living and I was working as a
psychiatric researcher at Kings County Hospital. Weird.
Apropos of nothing, nothing at all, I switched brands of cigarettes
today, to Newports. The idea being that since these menthols are
disgusting, I would smoke less. It’s only barely working.
If you had to live anyplace else, where would it be?
Isn’t this interview going on a bit long, Claire? Would you SHUT UP ALREADY?
As a matter of fact, I do now live part-time somewhere else. It is an
undisclosed location in the 631 area code – easily accessible to
Manhattan. I like to bop back and forth. I like that too much.
I don’t really think I live anywhere. I’ve never owned a car, I don’t
have credit cards. I’ve lived in New York for 11 years now? And I’ve
never had a lease. I get a bit… agoraphobic? Is that the word? About
leaving Manhattan. I feel safe on this island and I feel less safe when
I think about leaving it. I’m afraid this tendency may grow, I’ll be
Manhattan-bound. Perhaps my safety zone will shrink and I’ll be unable
to leave Ciao For Now, the café on 12th Street where the East Village
homosexual elite meets and greets.
I’ll stop torturing you about your Evanston roots after this, but is
there anything particular about your attitude or mindset that is
distinctively Midwestern?
How close do you think most of us came to killing ourselves in high
school? I think many of us came a lot closer than our parents would like
to think. When I look back on high school in Evanston (which is the
suburb directly north of Chicago, for the uninitiated), it makes me
nervous all over again.
I remember this one party – I had moved to LA after high school, which
is where I’d come from right before high school, well, outside of LA –
and about six months after graduation I was visiting back in Chicago.
Somehow I found out that a bunch of kids from my class were having a
party at one of those big fancy houses towards Lake Michigan. These
houses, honestly, were the biggest I’d ever seen – I used to love going
to visit friends in high school and I’d get lost in their homes. Their
pantries had pantries! And all the wood paneling was old and beautiful
and dark, and they had stairways – often two sets of stairways. They had
maid’s rooms which they converted to craft rooms! I thought these people
were very rich but actually they were probably middle-class.
Jim Romenesko, the premiere media blogger, lives in Evanston by the way
– EXACTLY on the corner where I had my first apartment for a couple
months after high school. Funny!
So: I went to this party and I walked through it like a ghost. I walked
up to Tim Herbert, who’d been a pretty good friend in high school – we
all thought he was going to be the next David Letterman, he was SO funny
– and asked him for a light and he lit my cigarette and just walked away
without seeing me. It was like high school, that long nightmare was
over, and I was invisible and free.
Maybe 10 years later I was driving through Evanston on my way to Chicago
from Minneapolis and I parked in front of my mother’s old house there
and had a good cry, and I have no idea why.
My mother sold our house to an East Asian couple when we left, as a way
to say fuck you to the whitest neighborhood I’ve ever seen. That cracks
me up.
If you had to firmly lodge yourself in the art world, the literary
world or the media/journalism world, where would you make your home?
If there’s a literary world, please don’t make me get on a spaceship to
go live on it. Is it like the universe’s penal colony? Is Flash Gordon
there, writing a memoir?
It seems that with the rise of the blog came the dawn of Acceptable
Male Gossiping: men commenting on pop culture without looking like Cindy
Adams. Do you agree, or have all those Vh1 commenty shows just given
gossip a new name and look?
This actually is an interesting theory, one which I haven’t thought of
before. I’ve never really seen those VH1 shows, though I’ve appeared on
a couple.
The last time VH1 called me for a show I hauled my ass out of bed to the
Dark Tower of Viacom and checked in with security. They didn’t have a
security pass waiting for me, so I left. They called me on my cell, but
by that time I was down the block already and didn’t feel like walking
back. Haven’t been back since.
I’m not sure if there is anything more useless to the world than
spouting recycled celebrity gossip in a blacked-out hotel room in a
one-hour slot between Lloyd Grove and Joan Rivers.
Also, people often seem to think one gets paid for being on clip shows?
That is not the case.
And anyway, I shouldn’t be on those sorts of shows – I can never
remember which celebrity fucked which other celebrity.
But you’re right – straight men gossip now, and follow gossip. Gawker’s
readership is exactly 50/50 gender-wise. And they’re not all ‘mos,
believe me.
I had a working theory about the corporate plans to en-woman men –
witness Cargo, the men’s shopping magazine, witness the changes in GQ
and Details. Retailers are understandably excited now that men think
they’re fat in a similar way that women think they’re fat.
If only men menstruated, they could make a killing off masculine hygiene
products. Maybe they’ll make that happen soon! I wouldn’t mind having a
period.
You have a semi infamous
roommate. Do you have to defend him a lot?
Feh. Defend Dale? We’ve lived together quite communistically for a very
long time now, and I think part of that is allowing each other to have
our own idiocies. Dale is incredibly loyal and giving and is very
conscientious about letting me be an asshole and make mistakes. And I
let him do his things. We agree on a lot of things, but we certainly
have major differences in opinion on cultural stuff.
Although we both HATED the season finale of Six Feet Under. Truly.
I’d like someday for us to have a big house, or two sort of our own
compound, and we’d have wings for our lovers. We’ve always wanted to get
adjacent apartments and semi-join them – enough space for me to work
with my increasingly loud music as I deafen and for him to watch the
endless episodes of Friends which he Tivos.
If you had to punch one media person in the face, who would it be?
There are people in this industry who lose perspective. It’s easy – one
tends in New York City to believe one’s own hype, I suppose, and then
people become monsters, hopefully just temporarily. I know a legger from
a gossip columnist here in town who I nearly developed a major aversion
to – now I like him very much. But young, hungry people move to New
York, inexperienced with personal or professional tragedy, and they
believe that the gossip industry is a useful thing. So I met this young
man and he was so objectionable and so full of his minor power – and
these are the most dangerous sort of people. They make excuses and cut
corners and often they burn out of Manhattan – but quite often they stay
and succeed.
Also they make you feel old.
Also if there were no gossip, we would all get through our days just fine.
And also: the ways in which things wind their way into print, either for
gossip or for media reporting, are muddied and complicated. There are
things that are printed and not printed, and reasons behind that,
personal reasons: favors, biases, grudges, ambitions.
At a certain level of involvement, you can read a sort of
self-referential language in media and gossip reporting: you know why X
event is covered the way it is and why Y person is slammed or lauded.
There are many, many trustworthy reporters in this industry, including
among the gossip folks, who all work very VERY hard. There is only one I
trust completely, David Carr, media dude of the NY Times, because he
understands the sanctity of print, the weight of published words, in a
way that I haven’t seen in anyone ever. I feel almost like it tortures him.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, I think Greg Lindsay is one of the
most rash and therefore most entertaining reporters. He doesn’t give a
shit how he treats subjects and this often makes for an amazing read.
There is Phoebe Eaton, who combines the spice of Greg Lindsay with a bit
more caution and respect.
Hey, Johnny Ramone just died. He had prostate cancer for five years.
Poor Johnny. That sucks. What can you say that’s eloquent about death?
It sucks – at least for us. It’s probably fine for Johnny now.
How does it feel to be the 106th person interviewed for Zulkey.com?
I have greatly enjoyed many of your interviews in the past. I think
perhaps I have enjoyed mine the least of all.
There are more interviews here.
Read
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