More Gawking

Once my initial sputtering at the audacious vapidness of another Slate article died down, I gave my memory a brisk shake in hope of dislodging some stray crumb of meaning that I had missed before. I was rewarded by a stale, but otherwise edible morsel along these lines: the Gawker story is one about the urbanism of New York. What's-her-face who wrote the thing attributes the vitriol of the Gawking-class to just that: a special type of class rage developed by the well-educated young aspirants of the publishing industry running up hard against the economic reality of the city's finance and real estate industries. She locates the source of their rage in their understanding that Manhattan has been stolen from them.

So this is a problem of physical displacement? Are we watching the rear-guard action of the world's best educated refugees? In a way that I kind of like, this elaboration--perhaps embroidery?--of her idea explains the strange pointlessness of the Gawker enterprise. These displaced masses are not trying to take back the homeland, they are trying to poison the well. This was certainly the sense I got from the now-defunct Gutter, Gawker's architecture gossip blog. The tone was not so much 'Nothing is sacred,' the quality our Authoress seems to locate, but 'Nothing is good enough.'. It is so exhausting for the audience precisely because this attitude has no endgame. It isn't played on a field of relative values; it is an endless rehearsal of the same attitude in postures. It is a reaction, not a strategy or even a tactic. And it's a lousy lens for watching our city.

Putting It to Bed: Boredom in Publishing

I just spent way too many minutes reading the New York Magazine cover story on Gawker. As usual, I was left with two distinct impressions from my visit to NYMag:

1. It's unspeakably annoying to have to click to a new page every 1000 words. Can't there be a better way to generate ad revenue than pre-digesting every article into fragments that make you even more distractible? Are they so embarrassed by their articles that they actually hope you won't have the conviction to finish one? Which leads into:

2. Why does every NYMag article feel like a visit to the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum? Another completely engrossing concept has been left bafflingly untouched, despite the heaps of stuff that looks like research piled up in every corner. It's amazing that two projects, so different in medium, subject, and method, can have identical personalities as unswerving underperformers.

It's a real shame to get to the end of several thousand words and not have a single one of your questions answered. The only time there has ever been anything approaching clarity skittering across the surface of my mind after one of these articles was after the profile of Katie Couric. When I opened the page I thought to myself, Of all her possible outlets, why would she open up for a profile in this magazine? When I got to the end I realized that it must be because only those jokers could have provided her with six pages of ink and basically require nothing on which to hang a story. It's kind of like someone decided to re-inflate the dessicated husk of a USA Today story back into its original NYTimes nutritiousness, but had never seen the meatier version to begin with

I'm hungry and on my way to dinner. Can you tell?