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The magazine of the Columbia Spectator
20 September 2012 / vol. 13 issue 2
All-American Bloggers
Are VICE lady bloggers exploiting or exploited? by Kaitlin Phillips
Get to know NYC’s burgeoning black metal scene, pg. 14
Editor in Chief
Ashton Cooper
Managing Editor for Features
Anneliese Cooper
Managing Editor for Optics
Meredith Foster
Art Director
Cathi Choi
Staff Director
Anthony Clay
Deputy Editor, Lead Story
Rikki Novetsky
Deputy Editor, Online Content
David Salazar
Online Associates
Parul Guliani
Adina Applebaum
Senior Design Editor
Zack Etheart
Visuals Editors
Thuto Durkac Somo
Joe Girton
Visuals Associate
Stephanie Mannheim
Eyesites Editor
PJ Sauerteig
View From Here Editor
Melanie Broder
Interview Editor
Monica Carty
Features Associates
Somala Diby
Andrea Chan
Laura Booth
Anna Marcum
Zoe Camp
Nicollette Barsamian
Production Staff
Annie Wang
Somala Diby
Nikolai Roman
Suze Myers
ALL-AMERICAN LETTER TO THE EDITOR
BLOGGERS
Are VICE lady bloggers exploiting or
exploited? pg. 07
by Kaitlin Phillips
cover, back cover, and table of content
photos by Cathi Choi
CONTENTS
Head Copy Editor
Megan Kallstrom
03
Spectator Editor in Chief
Sarah Darville
FOOD
04 Rolling with the Foodies
Spectator Managing Editor
Maggie Alden
Spectator Publisher
Alex Smyk
EYESITES
TV
05 Boob Tube
Carolina Gerlach
ART
06 Drawn Together
20/20
12 Still Starving?
Laura Booth
Laura Hunter-Thomas
Protect Ya Neck
Find Us Online:
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© 2012 The Eye,
Spectator Publishing Company, Inc.
Alison Herman
Zoe Camp
EYE TO EYE
13 Law & Order and Linguistics
MUSIC
14 Metal For Maniacs
VFH
15 What A Gem
Monica Carty
Maria Castex
David Salazar
Will Hughes’ concise and
rather expert history of the
upstart of the AIDS virus and
its early manifestations at
Columbia, “Fight On: The Story
of AIDS at Columbia,” is to be
commended—but as a resident
advocate for the Gay Health
Advocacy Project, Hughes
entangles himself in a conflict of
interest when detailing the AIDS
experience at today’s Columbia,
and so oversteps his bounds.
The emergent message of the
piece for me and other Columbia
MSMs is that someone we know
holds one of the few keys we
have for on-campus testing. That
someone is going to walk around
campus with the knowledge of
our HIV status in his head, and
not only that, but he’ll also be
theorizing and reframing our
health for his own ends.
The “peer” aspect of GHAP is
a vestige of an older, scarier HIV
era. As a gay man living in a city
where contracting HIV is a real
and present fear, I want to know
my status with no stipulations. I
want it anonymous, confidential,
and administered by a health
professional. That’s all. The other
bridges, like who should know
and how I should tell them, those
I’ll cross when I come to them—
and on my terms.
That Columbia lets students
administer HIV tests is frankly
ridiculous.
If you take heart that a group
of people will be around to
support you the moment you test
positive—great, GHAP’s done
its job. But if you are like me
and squirm even thinking about
seeing someone you know in
the doctor’s office, if you think
you’ll need time alone to process
the massive change in your life,
or if you just want a greater
degree of freedom and choice
in determining your response
to your own health—I want you
to know that you are not locked
into this smiley-face hegemonic
vision of Columbia HIV support
and that more and varied
resources exist all over the city.
They’re but a few Google
searches away, and they don’t
come prepackaged with your
“peers.”
—Allen Johnson
COLUMBIA MEMES
by
EYESITES
SHE DOESN’T EVEN GO HERE
P.J. Sauerteig
The Columbia community
was recently perplexed by the
highly-discussed arrest of a
young woman who posed as a
Columbia undergrad by adopting the fake name Rhea Sen,
befriending students, eating in
dining halls, etc. Much of the
discussion has revolved around
the central question, “Why
did it take so long for people to
realize that she’s not a student here?” To prevent future
incidents like this, The Eye has
crafted a meme highlighting
student activity that should
be considered suspect, even
dangerous.
Goes to Ferris
Email from Niamh O’Brien
TV break in floor lounge
GETS FANCY MAC ‘N’ CHEESE
READS ENTIRE THING
FOX NEWS
Floor plans to attend volleyball game
Gets dressed
Gives guy her number
GOES
WEARS COLUMBIA GEAR
HE’S IN PIKE
WEARABILITY
CLASSROOM COUTURE
The Internet is rife with post-Fashion Week fall trend lists, but are
any of the fashion world’s latest looks appropriate for, say, Intro to
Econ? The Eye is here to help you decide which runway trends are great
for class and which might warrant dirty looks from your professor.
Ashton Cooper
illustrations by Stephanie Mannheim
by
SLOUCHY PANTS
TOTALLY NORMAL
BIG BRIGHT COATS
ALL-LEATHER OUTFIT
PUSHING IT
PATTERNED SUITS
FUR ACCENTS
FREAK SHOW
03
ROLLIN’ WITH THE FOODIES
FOOD
FOOD TRUCK RALLIES ARE ON THE RISE
by Alison Herman
photo by Fayme Cai
A few vegans, a waffle vendor, and a security guard
walk into a parking lot. This improbable scenario isn’t
the set-up to a punchline—it’s a typical Tuesday at
LentSpace, a fenced-off lot at the intersection of Varick
and Canal streets in Hudson Square.
Owned by the Trinity Wall Street church and
operated by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council,
LentSpace is a textbook example of the renewed urban
spaces that have become increasingly widespread in
New York over the past decade. Like the High Line
park in Chelsea or the Dekalb Market in Fort Greene,
LentSpace has taken over an unused plot of land and
opened it to the public—acid-green picnic tables,
wooden benches, potted plants, and all.
It seems only fitting that LentSpace is also home
to another New York trend: Every Tuesday through
Thursday, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., a motley crowd
of three to five food trucks lines the lot, offering an
eclectic variety of dishes, from classic street foods like
hot dogs and falafel to more unusual options like vegan
wraps and Korean barbecue tacos.
“WE COULDN’T OPEN A
RESTAURANT, BUT I FOUND
OUT ABOUT THE FOOD TRUCK
PHENOMENON, AND I TOLD MY
DAD, ‘LET’S DO THIS, LET’S TEST
IT OUT THIS WAY.’”
Known as food truck rallies, events like the LentSpace gathering are nearly ubiquitous across the city:
the New York City Food Truck Association (NYCFTA),
which organizes the LentSpace rally, also hosts a
number of these chow-down collectives in Long Island
City, at the World Financial Center, and even inside
Chelsea’s Starrett-Lehigh office building. On Sept. 15,
the eighth annual “Vendy Awards” brought twelve
finalist trucks and carts to Governors Island to compete for the title of New York’s best street food vendor,
with top honors going to Piaztlan Authentic Mexican
Food and Melt Bakery. Though not officially organized
rallies, areas like Union Square and the Flatiron District
host up to a dozen trucks on any given weekday.
Rallies are just one sign of the surging popularity
of food trucks in major cities across the country. Once
not-so-affectionately dubbed “roach coaches”—
known more for cheap, straightforward preparations
of halal food or street tacos than sleek design or inventive cuisine—food trucks have enjoyed something of
a renaissance over the past five years, gaining both
04
Snap Food Truck at the LentSpace food rally on Sept. 19.
cultural capital and an expanding fan base.
According to David Weber, co-founder of the
popular Rickshaw Dumpling truck and president of
the NYCFTA, food trucks’ newfound popularity can be
attributed to a variety of factors, including the cost of
the business and the economic environment.
“I think that for entrepreneurs, part of the reason
the resurgence of food trucks came starting in 2008,
2009 is it’s closely correlated with the economic
downturn,” Weber says. “There becomes a scarcity
of capital. It’s a lot harder to pull together a million
dollars to open a new restaurant in Manhattan, but
you might be able to put together a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars, two hundred thousand dollars to
open a food truck.”
The Mexico Blvd truck is an example of a business
bred by economic consequence. After experiencing
a layoff—and general weariness of the service side of
the restaurant industry—Jordi Loaeza and his father
Jorge co-founded the enterprise. “When we started
looking at the numbers … everyone loved the project,
and everyone loved the idea, but it’s just a lot of
money to drop on a restaurant you don’t even know
is going to work,” Loaeza says. “We couldn’t open
a restaurant, but I found out about the food truck
phenomenon, and I told my dad, ‘Let’s do this, let’s
test it out this way. Get up a whole bunch of area and
see what our clients are, maybe for a restaurant in the
future, so we can be successful.’”
In the same enterprising spirit, many owners don’t
see the food truck as the end of the road—especially
after establishing a loyal customer base. Many trucks
now operate brick-and-mortar sites in addition to
their mobile menus. Founded in 2008, Van Leeuwen
Artisan Ice Cream currently runs stores in Boerum
Hill, Greenpoint, and the East Village. Other trucks
that have expanded their business into storefronts
include the Treats Truck, Mexicue, and LentSpace
regular Kimchi Taco. “Entrepreneurs have been looking at food trucks to incubate a new business and get
it started, and, from that business, grow,” Weber says.
“Working out the brand, working out the kinks in the
operation, getting a foothold, and then growing … It’s
a great way to hone a business.”
Naturally, owning a business comes with its perks
as well as its challenges, and the latter are more often
than not imposed by the city. Since 1965, for example,
New York City has banned mobile vendors from selling
merchandise in metered parking—a law that made
perfect sense when metered parking was still a rarity,
but which now prevents food trucks from legally setting up shop throughout a majority of the city. Weber
founded the NYCFTA to lobby against such regulatory
obstacles in January 2011; the organization also operates as an advocacy group, working to ease restrictions
and licensing regulations on New York mobile vendors.
The NYCFTA now boasts 43 member trucks, including
Mexico Blvd and Kimchi Taco.
At the end of the day, food trucks will always
offer a high-quality alternative to expensive and
tax-inclusive restaurants—which explains why the
group congregated by the trucks consists mainly
of twenty- and thirty-somethings wearing jeans
and tailored button-downs, the de facto uniform of
nearby tech companies.
Darren Wong, who works at a social ad agency,
visits LentSpace three or four times a month, and puts
plainly the case for food trucks: “They usually have
better food than normal places. I like choices. I like
variety. Also, I can just get in and out, so I don’t have
to go through a whole restaurant crowd.”
For us of working out of Morningside, Hudson
Square is probably too far for a lunchtime commute.
Luckily, several well-established food trucks, including Wafels & Dinges, Coolhaus, and the alumni-owned
Korilla BBQ, acknowledge the money-making potential of a college campus, and regularly make stops at
Columbia. These new food trucks are trendy, inventive, and affordable—but most importantly, what college student wouldn’t prefer rib-eye to ramen? a
BOOB TUBE
TV
LADIES ABOUND ONSCREEN—BUT NOT BEHIND IT
by Carolina Gerlach
illustration by Kady Pu
Mindy Kaling, breakout star of the Emmywinning TV show, The Office, garners a lot of
attention for her wit and comedic timing as Kelly
Kapoor, Dunder Mifflin’s token mean girl and
general hot mess. Eventually, Kaling became the
only female writer on the hit NBC series, writing
and directing numerous episodes before ultimately being promoted to Executive Producer.
This season, FOX gave Kaling a seven-figure deal
to create her own pilot. The Mindy Project, which
premieres on September 25th (and can already be
viewed online), is an ingenious blend of Kaling’s
typical humor: girly naïveté mixed with feminism, a different take on the modern woman
looking for love.
In an interview with New York Magazine,
Kevin Reilly, an executive at FOX, said of Kaling:
“She has a very contemporary voice. She’s really
smart about how open she is to being a mixture of
both vulnerable and strong; she’s a woman that
I think other women relate to.” In the article,
Kaling is dubbed “The New New Girl”—in comparison to Zooey Deschanel’s quirky portrayal of
Jess in Liz Meriwether’s New Girl, Lena Dunham’s
raw and self-deprecating Hannah on Girls, and
even veteran comedy goddess, Tina Fey. The world
of the small screen has turned into one giant race
for prom queen, as female television powerhouses
are pitted against each other to determine the
newest “it” girl. There just doesn’t seem to be
enough room for women at the top of primetime
television. (You don’t see columnists quarreling
over whether Aaron Sorkin would beat Matthew
Weiner in a cage match.)
In the past two television seasons, women
claimed headlines with the success of shows like
2 Broke Girls, New Girl, and Girls, all of which
star and are written by women. These shows have
garnered an unprecedented amount of press—particularly in the case of Girls—for showing women
in a “new light,” one that isn’t necessarily comfortable for everyone. Lee Aronsohn, co-creator
of Two and a Half Men, made comments to the
Hollywood Reporter in April that women are being overrepresented, saying, “We are approaching
the peak vagina on television, the point of labia
saturation. Enough, ladies. I get it. You have periods.” While his crude and misogynistic comments
received backlash, they also point to an interesting
question that the small screen hasn’t yet been in a
position to face: Can women actually be overrepresented on television?
Throughout the history of TV, for the most part,
men have told the stories of women. Only one of
I Love Lucy’s five writers was female. Perhaps
because of this, female characters have often played
into stereotypes rather than challenging them,
which continues to influence the way our society
understands and treats women. The recent television issue of Vanity Fair, which features actresses
either naked or scantily clad, emphasizes this lack
of opportunity for women in the primetime world.
This is still how women are represented in television: not as directors or writers—women working
behind the scenes were noticeably absent from
the issue—but as sexual objects. Julie Zeilinger, a
sophomore at Barnard, founder and editor in chief
of TheFBomb.org, and author of A Little F’d Up:
Why Feminism is Not a
Dirty Word, commented on
the cover: “If they had represented writers and directors, it would have opened
the eyes of so many women
that that is something they
can possibly do.”
While it may seem like
the “boob tube” is finally living up to its name,
women actually remain severely underrepresented in
television, according to Dr.
Martha Lauzen, the executive director of the Center
for the Study of Women
in Television and Film at
San Diego State University. Dr. Lauzen has been
tracking the percentages of women in front of and
behind the camera since 1998. According to her
studies of the 2010-2011 television season, women
comprised just 15 percent of writers for primetime
television broadcasts, while the previous season
reported nearly twice that number of women penning comedies and dramas on television.
According to her study, women comprised 25
percent of all individuals working behind-thescenes, including producers, writers, editors, and
directors. So, while female characters are represented plenty on television, only 25 percent of that
content is actually written by women. Situation
comedies, particularly, lack equality: Dr. Lauzen’s
study reports that sitcoms employ 22 percent
women and 78 percent men. And only 41 percent
of characters on television are female, proving
that inequality isn’t only in our lives—it’s on our
screens. So no, Lee Aronsohn, the “peak vagina”
has yet to happen on television. But even if it had,
should that matter?
According to Zeilinger, it shouldn’t in the
slightest: “It’s pandering. What bothers me about
that question is that it always seems to be, are
women underrepresented or are we
representing them too much? We
can never seem to strike this equal
place, which is the main issue of
feminism,” she says.
Enter Mindy Kaling, Lena Dunham, Liz Meriwether, and other
women who buck the status quo.
For now, television remains a man’s
world, but with these ladies in the
ring, it might not stay that way for
much longer. Kaling praises Tina
Fey for proving to the world that
women are, in fact, pretty damn
funny. In an interview with Glamour, Kaling says: “Unfortunately,
I do think there’s a weird extra
scrutiny of female show runners
and executive producers that isn’t applied to their
male counterparts. Hopefully Tina has helped
change that.”
The Mindy Project indicates a potential game
change—a continued focus on the success of
powerhouse women, such as Kaling, Dunham,
Fey, and Meriwether. “I think it will have a huge
impact, because more women are able to see that
it is something that can happen on television,”
Zeilinger says. “There might not be that many
women behind the scenes, because it’s not that
they don’t know they’re able to, they just don’t
really consider it an option unless they have that
role model.” a
“...IT ALWAYS SEEMS
TO BE, ARE WOMEN
UNDERREPRESENTED
OR ARE WE
REPRESENTING THEM
TOO MUCH? WE CAN
NEVER SEEM TO STRIKE
THIS EQUAL PLACE.”
05
ART
DRAWN TOGETHER
THE MUSEUM OF COMIC AND CARTOON ART HAS A NEW HOME
by Laura Booth
photos by Laura
Booth
The second floor of the Society of Illustrators building was recently transformed into
every kid’s vision of a perfect Saturday morning: chock-full of cartoons and comics galore.
That’s because the Museum of Comic and
Cartoon Art, better known as MoCCA, recently transferred its assets from their original
location in SoHo to the Society of Illustrators’
well-established residence on the Upper East
Side. Now, the print work of famed artists,
from Gene Hazelton, a primary contributor on
The Flintstones, to Tommy Castillo, who has
worked on darker portrayals of the Batman
character, have the entire second floor of the
Society of Illustrators’ building to call home.
“THE MAJORITY OF WORKS
THAT MOCCA HUNG ON ITS
GALLERY WALLS...SHOWED THE
SIGNS OF THE ARTIST’S CRAFT:
PASTE-UPS, WITE-OUT...”
The move came on the heels of some confusion over MoCCA’s location. The abrupt closure
of their original physical space on July 9, as
documented on the organization’s Facebook
page, came as a shock to several members, eliciting disappointment, despite the promise that
a new venue to house the organization’s permanent collection would be announced shortly.
Although the reason for the closure of the space
in SoHo is not made clear in MoCCA’s press release, comics blogs and their commenters have
implied that the Museum may have been forced
to shut its doors due to difficulty fundraising.
While some members of MoCCA may have
doubts about the new location—in that losing physical autonomy could potentially hurt
the organization—the change may ultimately
offer a mutually beneficial relationship for
MoCCA and the Society of Illustrators. After all,
according to comicsbeat.com, the Society of
Illustrators has itself suffered from monetary
troubles, owing to the decline of illustration as
a popular art, and collaboration with MoCCA
may be just the kind of energy the institution
needs to rejuvenate.
Karen Green, Butler Library’s graphic novels
librarian, served on the Board of Trustees at MoCCA before its move and remains optimistic for the
changes ahead. When asked if the transfer of assets
06
would work out in MoCCA’s favor, she replies, “No
question. The Society is a long-standing institution, and they own their own building,” whereas
MoCCA, as Green phrases it, “was located on the
fourth floor of a landmark building that allowed
no external signage”—a lack of advertising potential that would surely give any niche museum its
fair share of woes.
Aside from the virtues of the new space, Green
adds, “There is a thematic overlap in the two
missions, and many artists were members of both
organizations.” This sentiment has been echoed
by many in response to the announcement,
especially given that the Society of Illustrators
plans to continue the event for which MoCCA was
most famous—the MoCCA Fest, which takes place
every year at the Lexington Ave. Armory— and
intends to honor current MoCCA memberships
through the end of the year. As Green noted, “The
commenting public appears to think the transfer
to the Society is a great development.”
Viewing the pieces in MoCCA’s private collection, which have now been on display since
Sept. 4, offers some perspective into MoCCA
members’ hesitation to see the assemblage lose
its own private location. The pieces, which
hang against bold red walls, provide a glimpse
into the artists’ processes in a way that the
meticulously finished pieces of the illustrated
collections cannot.
“The majority of the works that MoCCA
hung on its gallery walls was original comic
art,” Green says. “That means it was larger—
often, much larger—than what you see in print,
and it showed the signs of the artist’s craft:
paste-ups, Wite-Out, corrections, marginal
messages to the printer,” and so on. The exhibits at the Society of Illustrators also highlight
the comic artist’s process by displaying the
various iterations of the work before it went
to print. In this way, although illustrated and
comic and cartoon art are technically the same
medium, there is a certain disconnect between
the illustrated pieces of the other galleries and
the vivacity of the cartoons.
Still, according to art handler Johnny Dombrowski, an employee of the Society of Illustrators, the Society is doing its best to give MoCCA
the individual attention it deserves. “I never
got to go [to MoCCA’s old location],” Dombrowski says, “but I’ve seen photos, and they
tried to stack the works to use as much space
as possible.” The second floor at the Society of
Illustrators is far larger than MoCCA’s original
location, which allowed the exhibit’s curators
to better emphasize individual pieces by spacing them farther apart. “We’ve been trying to
give it as much press as we can,” Dombrowski
added, citing a new section of their newsletter,
which is to be permanently set aside for MoCCA
and its news.
Works currently on display at MoCCA.
Although the success of the merger can’t
be judged just yet, it does reveal something
about the broader context of niche art in New
York City: Condensing projects doesn’t mean
that either the Society of Illustrators or MoCCA
is compromising its own agenda. Rather, the
organizations intend to use each other’s best
attributes—MoCCA’s attraction to youth, and
the Society of Illustrators’ prestige—to increase
their strength as a unit.
The result? According to Dombrowski, for
comics and cartoon lovers, it’s something of a
fantasy. “I grew up on comic books, so there’s
some pieces I go crazy over and have to stop to
look at every time I pass them,” he says. “It’s
really cool seeing all the different stages, and
the cell animation, too.” a
ALL-AMERICAN
BLOGGERS
ARE VICE LADY BLOGGERS EXPLOITING
OR EXPLOITED?
BY KAITLIN PHILLIPS
PHOTOS BY CATHI CHOI
D
uring an interview with the
multimedia artist Richard Phillips, a journalist suggested that
the appeal of Lindsay Lohan—a
muse of the artist’s—was the
“constant tension [of] whether
she’s going to make it or not.”
“That is very precisely an American question, you know? It stays with us, and she has
embodied that,” Phillips agreed.
The Writers: the Drug Addict, the Slut, and the
Internet Weirdo
You may scroll past their bylines: Cat, Slutever, Marie Calloway. Idle magazine flipping yields
hybrid versions: Caitlin Marnell, Karley Sciortino,
and Jane Doe. At the right time and place in New
York—a deli in Alphabet City, the Bedford L-stop,
and a nondescript midtown hotel, respectively—
they might elicit a double-take.
IN FOCUS
COURTESY OF CAT MARNELL
THE ENTERTAINMENT
VALUE OF THAT
WHICH IS ‘RECKLESS,
ABRASIVE, OR JUST
DISGUSTING’ HAS
NOT BEEN DEVALUED
IN THE LEAST.
Cat Marnell (xoJane.com), Karley Sciortino
(slutever.com), and Marie Calloway (mariecalloway.tumblr.com) are three female writers made
“famous” by publishing stories of their own lives on
the Internet. But last year, unless you were browsing their host sites, you might not have caught their
work: a deft mix of sex, drugs, photos, dialogue, and
name-dropping.
Yet, in 2012, the standard media profiler has been
focused on all three women. (Okay, it’s possible you
didn’t take fastidious note of all that passed through
Page Six, VICE, the New York Observer, New York
Magazine, and Purple in the past year, and still don’t
know who they are.)
Cat is the 30-year-old former beauty editor, trust-funder, and drug addict. Karley is the
26-year-old former London squat dweller, sex
blogger, and slut. Marie is the 22-year-old former
co-ed with a Tumblr, a “literary seductress,” and
Internet weirdo.
“Lady Bloggers”
To compare three women writers—simply
because of their gender and the medium in which
they write—seems at first a fundamental miscal-
08
culation. Is it enough that they have each written about sex for VICE? Probably not. (Arguably
their most-famous peer at the magazine, Kate
Carraway, responded to an email query: “I don’t
know why I’m being compared to other females at
VICE, specifically.”) But to say they don’t represent a very specific cross section of bloggers is
to ignore the way in which women writers are
grouped on the Internet.
Molly Fischer, in the n+1 piece “So Many Feelings,” uses the term “lady blogger” to describe the
attempt of early women’s websites to “assault the
standards [set by] mainstream women’s magazines.”
The early editors of Jezebel did so by making a point
of “[proving] their aptitude for bad behavior—and
not bad meaning titillating, but meaning reckless,
abrasive, or just disgusting,” writes Fischer.
These days of Jezebel are long over (which
isn’t as much an indictment of the website as it
is the reality of having been institutionalized in
the landscape of the Internet). But the entertainment value of that which is “reckless, abrasive, or
just disgusting” has not been devalued in the least
in American culture. And, more to the point, its
shock value is best retained when it is delivered by a
woman—especially one who is young and beautiful, in the public eye, and unwilling to divorce her
persona from what could be construed as questionable social choices.
But as VICE—the once stereotypically maleoriented media conglomerate—begins to capitalize on this female-writer-gone-wild paradigm,
and ostensibly fills a chasm in ladyblog land, the
question arises: Are these women exploiting or
being exploited?
Or, are they just being themselves?
Cat: Crack-Skinny or Cracking Up?
As any casual observer of the Mary-Kate Olsen
bag-lady phenomenon can tell you, the downtown
scenester is never without her props. Cat slings her
“graffiti-tagged Balenciaga bag,” seemingly swims
in “white rags,” her wrists wrapped in rosaries. She
may or may not be clutching a juice cleanse. Trying
to look past those “PCP eyes and Adderall thighs”—
her words—might take more moral energy than it’s
worth. The Wall Street Journal profile described her
as “caked in makeup,” also taking note of “a leaf
caught in her unkempt hair.”
Then there’s the stylized Cat, with collared
shirt and tight blonde ponytail, caught by a handheld camera seven months ago. Despite her goodgirl looks, she intones, with droll self-confidence,
“I’m xoJane Beauty Director Cat Marnell, and I’m
about to snort a line of bath salts.” Laughing, Cat
momentarily loses her self-satisfied smirk and
raised eyebrows. A line of powder is cut with an
insurance card.
“This is Jane Pratt exploiting me, because I’m in
negotiations for a raise!” Pratt, the amused editor in chief of Sassy fame, can be heard confirming
this in the background. “Say ‘Media!’” pipes Cat as
she lowers her head to the table, then snorts. (SAY
Media is the Publisher of xoJane.)
The video ran in the post “WORST BEAUTY EDITOR IN THE WORLD: I SNORTED A LINE OF BATH
SALTS IN THE OFFICE TODAY EDITION” on Feb. 21.
Cat explains, “[I] didn’t write [my daily blog post] …
And I wanted to put something up today, so here.”
By April 2, Marnell was flagged by SAY Media
human resources, the publisher of xoJane, and
“put on disability” because of erratic performance
related to her drug use. The night before her leave of
absence from the site, she popped pills and spilled
coffee during a New York Magazine interview. The
journalist described her as “troubled and clearly
high” and seemingly “freaked out simply by being
awake.” Her May 15 return-post on the site elicited
500 comments.
On June 14, an item on Cat’s exit from the
company ran in Page Six under the headline
“Drugs more fun than work.” xoJane was losing
its “most-read writer on staff,” reported Jezebel’s
Tracie Morrissey.
When she managed to file work on time, Cat favored a fast and loose prose style that coupled nicely
with what amounted to a policy of self-indulgent
honesty. She tuned up the writing, and spewed
anecdotes like clockwork. Posts were unpredictable, unapologetically egotistical, and just as likely
to let spelling and grammatical errors slip as comic
or cosmic gems.
In a post on the Clarisonic Skincare Brush, she
rags on “the types of girls who … always are all,
‘Isn’t it FREEZING?’ and bust out like 50 gnarly old
pashminas form under their desks to swaddle themselves in like they are the Lord Baby Jesus Himself
while they chatter to each other and sip chamomile
tea (real caffeine = too intense).”
Only in the rare post in which she lost control
MARIE’S WRITING OFTEN
SUGGESTS A SORT OF
PERVERSE NAÏVETÉ.
of the performance did the writing (and the writer)
seem manic rather than dialed up. Readers for
whom solipsism was not an affront liked her character—the death drive, the refusal to be bored or
boring, and the totally sincere belief in the power of
beauty products. And of course, the linchpin in her
public persona: a laissez-faire stance on addiction.
(An Atlantic Wire piece on Cat gravely reminds the
public, “We’re talking about an illness, not a ‘lifestyle choice.’”) But who better to give concealer tips
than the beauty editor who smokes crack?
Seven days after the Page Six story, the first
installment of a newly acquired weekly column,
“Amphetamine Logic,” ran online at VICE. She
called it “The Aftermath” and addressed who she is,
an explanation that made passing reference to the
New York Magazine and Page Six stories.
Cat later tells The Daily Beast she came to
New York as a pregnant 17 year old, having been
“kicked out of school for drugs two weeks before
graduation.” In the fall, she started college at
the New School. “Marnell did none of her work,
hardly came to class, and charmed her professors to get by,” wrote Caitlin Dickson of The Daily
Beast. She managed to graduate with a degree in
nonfiction writing.
Though Cat remained indifferent to traditional
academia, she often recalled this period with great
fondness on xoJane. Cat was not an aimless youth—
indifferent, sure, to fiscal responsibilities or guilt.
(She refers to her ever-dwindling trust fund as “a
gilded cage” in a VICE column.) She knew exactly
what she wanted: “to be an editor with high rank
and power somewhere.” And she left college having logged time in fashion closets at magazines like
Nylon, Vanity Fair, and Glamour.
It is easy to forget that through her early twenties, Cat was not only a high-functioning addict,
but also a person who “worshipped everyone [she]
worked for, and [she] worked very hard.” At the
young age of 25, Cat got her job as a beauty editor at
Lucky Magazine.
Two and half years later, she lost that job—her
“dream job”—because she couldn’t get clean.
When that happened, she just gave up, and spent
an entire year unemployed, locked in her apartment, spinning out.
Then she went to work for Jane Pratt, founder
of xoJane.com. Because, to Cat, it will always be
“about being a beauty editor, and about nightlife,
and graffiti writers, and getting away with everything in my crazy life.”
Or perhaps it’s better distilled in the first
“Amphetamine Logic” column: “‘THE PLEASURE
PRINCIPLE’ I have scrawled at the top of my bathroom mirror in YSL Rouge Volupte lipstick, #17, a
bright coral.”
Karley: Squat Sex to Sex Blogger
Slutever, or Karley, is a bottle-blonde AllAmerican with the face and body-dimension
combo to land French Playboy at 22. Freelancing in
London for Dazed & Confused magazine at the time,
co-founder Jefferson Hack handpicked her for the
spread. “He was curating people associated with
him [for Playboy], his crew,” she tells me, shrugging. Karley’s [pin-up-next-door] looks are effectively a photographic mandate. In photos, American
flags are systematically hung as a background, if
not literally wrapped around her. On the fourth of
July (we ended the night at the same house party),
I watched her rocking effortlessly on her haunches
09
IN FOCUS
COURTESY OF CAT MARNELL
in four-inch stars-and-stripes platform shoes and a
skin-tight red mini-dress.
It was Friday after 4 p.m. when Karley opened the
door wearing nothing but an XL white Hanes t-shirt
decorated with a screen-printing of her own vagina. A pink sheen was added to the picture, “but no
photoshopping!” Hamilton can be seen modeling it on
Slutever—her blog, and subsequent persona, that she
started in 2007 to document life as a 21-year-old college dropout in a decrepit London squat. Over the last
two years, Slutever has evolved from a de facto diary
of Karley’s life to an investigative blog that explores
sexual trends and fetishes. Karley, in essence, has
become a tried and true sex blogger.
She now stars in the second season of VICE’s
docu-series Slutever and a monthly fictional video
series for Purple TV. As a journalist, Karley is often
tapped to interview those with sexualized public
images, like bad-girl art darling Aurel Schmidt—
famous for posing for a Purple magazine shoot
pouring a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer out from
between her legs.
“I’m not wearing underwear,” Karley announces drolly, plopping down next to me on the couch,
“but I made homemade guacamole.” Within ten
minutes she and Ally—a “very part-time” dental
hygienist who owns the apartment—are examining
an ingrown hair near her bikini line.
Karley tells me that she spent the afternoon in
midtown, doing a dominatrix session (payment:
$100). On the phone to me, the day before: “I have
$83 in my bank account right now. Yesterday I had
to buy coffee with money from my couch.”
And so goes the classic Karley anecdote, on and
off the web: unapologetic candor mediated by a tone
of dry self-deprecation.
In the September post “Being Tragic,” Karley laments “at 26” getting recognized as Slutever at the
Williamsburg Chinese restaurant where she works
part-time: “They make a facial expression which basically says, ‘Wow, I used to think you were really glamorous and cool, but now I just think you’re a tragic
noodle slave.’ And then I spend the next ten minutes
wiping up the soy sauce they spill everywhere.”
She certainly doesn’t look tragic in the photo
above the post, reclining on an antique car in the
woods, wearing plaid short-shorts, suggestively
biting a pair of glasses.
But such is the je ne sais quoi of Karley’s appeal:
the trials and tribulations of the anti-glamour babe.
Here she is on May 15, 2007, in “My Ephiphany,”
her first-ever blog post: “Goodbye hard drugs.
Goodbye mindless sex with Mexican bus boys in
back alleys. Goodbye to eating out of garbage bins.”
She’s 21 years old. The next post details an MDMAinfused mishap with an overweight lesbian’s “moon
cup”—a tampon alternative that’s basically a reus-
10
able plastic cone— in a rank club bathroom. Karley
takes her exit “covered in blood.”
Perhaps more surprising than the failure of her
life cleanse is how, two years earlier, an American
college student spending her first semester of college abroad in London ended up living in a squat
until she was deported in 2010.
She arrived at Kingston College, began studying
drama, and “immediately got a boyfriend on [her]
floor. He was in a band called Mystery Jets.” Karley
was on tour with the band when they “played one
of Matthew’s earliest squat parties.” Matthew Stone
was four years older, an artist putting on squatted
art shows in South London, and a founding member
of the artist collective/“scene” !WOWOW!. (For the
2011 Art Basel Miami Beach, Stone’s sculptures were
poolside at the Mondrian Hotel.)
By second semester, Karley was commuting regularly from Kingston to South London, crashing with
Stone after parties and gigs. Stone was squatting in
“an abandoned lift factory in southeast London” with
nine other people. “Eventually, he was just like, ‘Why
don’t you move in with me.’ So I did.” She stopped
going to school. “I didn’t take my finals. I didn’t even
check the grades.” She lived in a stairwell landing at
the “Lift Factory” for almost a year.
On Slutever, Karley remembers it as “something
between a European hippie commune and a sordid,
queer sex dungeon.” A partial catalog of roommates
attests: “a gay asylum seeker from Iran, a Russian lesbian goth with no eyebrows, a Swedish hat
designer, a leather-wearing German kid who was
apparently some sort of amazing artist (though all I
ever saw him do was sell drugs).”
Karley had nothing to be saved from, per se,
to mistake the material for anything other than a
gold mine. A photo from the first post shows two
boys with longish black hair and skinny jeans peering through a largely punched-out sheetrock wall
onto a room littered with debris. But it’s the captions that do much to explain the “tone” of Slutever,
precisely because it isn’t there: “We have parties
and smash walls,” “The basement looks like a crack
den,” “We play loud music.”
Karley had pictures similar to those of other
famous bloggers, like Cory Kennedy—whose blog
is a photographic catalogue designed to make you
feel privy to social information—but hers were of
anonymous subjects. Yet the content of the very first
post was structured around an imagined audience
that wasn’t Karley’s housemates. This may have
been merely an amusing way to write, but it was
also a stroke of brilliance.
Each post weaved a working introduction to the
culture and activities of Squallyoaks with whatever
anecdotes had been gathered since the last post:
“[Squallyoaks] was the sort of house where it
wasn’t out of the ordinary to come home to a living
room full of naked people on DMT having ritualistic
sex, or a homeless Romanian family baking bread in
the kitchen.”
Three months after its creation, Matthew Stone
jokingly comments below a post “so that you get an
email … so that you remember that you have a blog
… so that the world continues to laugh.”
Two years later, in the summer of 2009, Karley
writes that the blog is “the bane of my existence.
Along with being the foremost reason my ex boyfriend and I broke up.”
Her sign off?
“I don’t write with the intention of hurting my
family and friends. I do it to trick strangers into
thinking my life is more interesting than it actually
is. Why does no one understand this?”
COURTESY OF MARIE CALLOWAY
but she was saved in a way. Her “boyfriend’s
manager’s girlfriend”—a staff writer at Dazed &
Confused—began hounding her at parties and gigs,
“in this rather motherly way,” asking what she
was doing in her free time. She insisted that Karley
would be a good interviewer. Karley, thinking
that the magazine culture could be cool, took an
internship at the publication. She was involved
with magazines for the rest of her time in London,
interning and later freelancing at publications like
VICE and TANK Magazine.
Karley left the Factory to squat a small room in
an apartment building. Six months later, she moved
into Squallyoaks, a new South London squat that
Stone opened. It was Squallyoaks that spawned
Slutever. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that while
she lived in the squat, Squallyoaks was Slutever.
“We were all blackout. No one had a camera,”
explains Karley. “I was writing it for our amusement. Almost.”
Almost, because it would have been impossible
Marie: Nom de Plume or Nom de Guerre?
To view photos of Marie is to look at the highly
controlled Facebook profile of any self-conscious
co-ed with bangs. (This is partly due to her never
having been posed by photographers for a magazine.) Pursed-lipped selfies and reclining-bed poses
are the standard, as are black turtlenecks. A photo
of her smoking in midtown, wearing mismatched
black and carrying a Coach purse, is charmingly
suggestive of a Midwestern having just arrived
in her city, working out an affect. Yet she sent to
me—unsolicited, in an otherwise logistical Gchat—a
photo of herself kneeling in profile, wearing nothing
but underwear, her hands tied together with rope
suspended from a fixture above. Taking the photo
in a mirror was a recognizable New York female sex
blogger. In the New York Observer, Kat Stoeffel,
writing the first definitive profile of Marie, described
her as “Anna Karina meets Wednesday Addams.” I
would add only that her breasts are larger.
“[Marie] Calloway working through her ‘expression of subjectivity’ affects people,” argued Roxane
Gay on the literary website HTMLGIANT in December. “There are consequences.”
Gay—one of many writers with an internal
barometer tuned to New York media gossip—had
learned of the college student three days prior
when the New York Observer ran Marie’s comingout profile.
“Meet Marie Calloway: The New Model for Literary Seductress is Part Feminist, Part ‘Famewhore’
and All Pseudonymous.”
In May, Marie had traveled to New York to sleep
with a 40-year-old male writer whom she had
been emailing. She left the city with a story and a
cum-shot (he took it per her request using her cell
phone). The writer knew she might post about the
weekend they spent together; he wished only that
it could not be found on Google. The story ran six
months later on her personal Tumblr, with the attached photos and the names of all bit players.
Then Marie sent the story to Tao Lin—New York’s
de facto internet publisher for the alt lit crowd—and
he offered to run it online at MuuMuu House, his
small D.I.Y. publishing company. In an email to me,
Lin said that Marie “was apprehensive about [using]
the name of the person … I said she could change it
to a celebrity name.” He also capitalized the beginning of each sentence. The story was filed as fiction.
In the hands of a more self-deprecating writer,
Marie’s honesty—which takes the form of fastidious documentation of every conversation, text, and
passing emotion—could be construed as humor
or sarcasm. Instead, Marie’s writing often suggests a sort of perverse naiveté.
In an email, she expressed frustration that readers misunderstood “Losing Your Virginity,” another
Thought Catalog piece, as being a reflection of her
IS A WRITER
CHEATING BY
USING HERSELF
AS SOURCE
MATERIAL,
ESPECIALLY IF
THAT MATERIAL
CAN BE
CONSIDERED
LURID?
own feelings. In fact, she wrote it “entirely from
the perspective of me being an 18 year old … I didn’t
directly add any sort of insight or thoughts I had
about it looking back.” It is a strength of the story,
perhaps, that one has an impression of being inside
the head of the “narrator,” 18 year old or not, who
loses her virginity to an older boy she just met:
“i thought about how he seemed very nice and
gentle, but remembered hearing about how rapists
and murderers often came off like that. but i wanted
more than anything to do this very adult thing …”
Our discomfort stems from the sincerity of tone
with which Marie renders her past sexual encounters. Implicit to her narrative structure is the belief
that every thought she has is important and relevant.
But interest in Marie extends beyond this definitively youthful style. Despite coming into the public
eye for exposing others, she maintains an aura of
mystery—perhaps an indication that she is, in fact,
in control of her own image.
Her early Thought Catalog pieces reference a
troubled childhood growing up in Las Vegas and
Los Angeles. She told The Observer she’s been using “LiveJournal and Tumblr [as] her diaries” since
she was a teen. In this profile, she is introduced as
a college student in Portland. In an early story, she
writes she studied “art and design,” and moved to
Chicago mid-way through college. On Facebook,
she mentioned transferring between big state
schools, but never mentioned which ones. As of two
weeks ago, advance from Tyrant Books in hand, Marie said she was dropping out of college altogether.
And then there’s the business of the pseudonym.
When I asked about her real name, Marie emailed
me, saying, “everyone in real life has called me marie since i was nineteen. i think of myself as marie.”
A source close to Marie refused to share the
information, offering only that a Google search of
her real name elicits “almost nothing, not even a
Facebook.”
I Am Lady, Will Lady Blog
“There is a certain mechanism by which people
are turned into microfameballs, finding their lives
forever altered,” writes Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan
on Marie Calloway. Nolan goes on to compare Callo-
way to others propelled out of obscurity by “writing
about oneself or oversharing online,” arguing that
“in many cases, yes, they were practically begging
to be exploited, though often they find that they
hate this sort of fame.”
But exploitation cuts both ways. The spotlight
is not given to anyone just because they offer details of their personal lives. These women capture
our attention because they inhabit very American
poles in the imagination: the “downtown disaster,” the pin-up girl next door, and the Internet
girlfriend. That their lives are often cast as moralizing fables or, conversely, elevated to living
manifestos, speaks only to their power as mythmakers. So, again, are they playing the game, or
getting played?
In her post on Marie, Roxane Gay goes on to ask,
“What stories do we, as writers, have the right to
tell?” And then, in a not so subtle reiteration: “What
are the limits of good taste?” Implicit in Gay’s
interrogation is when a writer deserves her fame.
In other words, is she cheating by using herself as
source material, especially if that material can be
considered lurid?
Yet in an email, Jessica Coen, the current editor
in chief of Jezebel, offers up a cool reality check.
Coen explains that “the calloway story was ultimately about a girl with a blog, blogging about sex,
and blogging about sex with someone who actually
wasn’t famous—not even nyc media famous. what’s
special there? nothing.”
The morality question represented by Gay’s
analysis is rightly pushed aside in Coen’s summation. But how to explain the very real allure
of Marie? Or her ability to capture a platform
despite being the only writer in this piece who
didn’t come of age interning in the media? She’s
interesting precisely because she isn’t a ladyblogger—because she herself doesn’t exist in this “NYC
media” world.
For Cat and Karley, this is less an exclusion
from ladyblog land than a chosen departure. In
Cat’s words, “I’m not some girly blogger that’s
part of a sugar and spice and everything nice community, okay?”
Community or not, they still get page hits. a
11
20/20
STILL
STARVING?
by
If you pay any attention whatsoever to fashion
(it’s okay, this is a safe space—we don’t judge), you
may well have heard of the Vogue Health Initiative. For those unaware, this document, signed
by all 19 editors of Vogue, pledges on behalf of the
legendary magazine to uphold such lofty goals as to
“encourage designers to consider the consequences
of unrealistically small sample sizes of their clothing” and to “ask agents not to knowingly send us
underage girls and casting directors to check IDs
when casting shoots, shows and campaigns.” The
Initiative was launched in May of this year, and
with the recent conclusion of New York Fashion
Week, arguably the most visible fashion event
around, it seems a rather appropriate time to review the progress the Initiative has made—if any.
The problem with the wonderfully aspiration-
Laura Hunter-Thomas
al goals of the Initiative is that their results are
incredibly hard to quantify. It’s almost unreasonable even to suggest that it would be possible to
keep track of whether casting directors check the
ages of the models for whom they are momentarily responsible, or to identify eating disorders
in a world where “boneyard” is the buzzword—
where impossible thinness is a common and
identifying feature among the population.
Another problem with the Initiative is the
noncommittal and frankly limp language that
pervades the pledge: “We will not knowingly
work with models under the age of 16,” “We
will ask agents not to knowingly send us underage girls,” etc. There is nothing in the Initiative
that so much as hints at the urgency or concern
needed to fuel the furnace of change. There is
PROTECT
YA NECK
Chris Brown recently got a neck tattoo
featuring a woman’s face—a bruised, scarred,
disfigured woman’s face.
You’re probably doing a double-take right
now, and you’re not the only one: The moment
a photo of Brown with the new tat hit the web,
everyone had questions. Was that seriously a
battered woman on the body of a man involved
in one of the most notorious, high-profile assault cases of recent memory? Was he trolling,
or was he actually going there?
Well, never fret, because the tattoo artist responsible, Peter Koskela, is insisting that
the woman on Brown’s body is not his ex-
12
by
only a feeling similar to bestowing upon someone
a vanity title at a company: It certainly looks good
to the outsider peering in, and may even excite
hope in the recipient for a time, but in the end, it
carries no real weight or significance.
In short: Have I seen any positive changes arise
within the closeted world of Prada and its diet
devils since the Initiative’s inception? No. Even
in Anna Wintour’s editor’s letter introducing the
Initiative, stereotypes were prominent. The text
celebrated “whole issues” of Vogue Italia dedicated to “curvy girls”—surely just another reinforcement of the concept that the beauty of such
“curvy girls” must be segregated. Also, the letter
included an image of an iron-pumping Doutzen Kroes, which conformed to a very clichéd
concept of feminine beauty—she’s wearing nude
Louboutins, for Christ’s sake!—thereby totally
contradicting the whole message of the piece.
But perhaps there is one thing to take away
from this: Even a vanity title can create space for
an idea to put down its roots. One can only hope
that this is precisely what the Initiative can and
will achieve. a
Zoe Camp
girlfriend, but rather a Day of the Dead sugar
skull—allegedly inspired, by the way, by a design Brown saw at MAC Cosmetics. “I’m an artist and this is art. Dia de los Muertos,” Brown
tweeted on Sept. 11. Meanwhile, in response
to the internet backlash, Koskela insisted, “I
would never promote any kind of domestic
violence like that.”
Granted, it’s Chris Brown’s body, and at
the end of the day, if he wants to cover himself
with graphics designed by the company that
makes Lady Gaga lipstick, that’s his prerogative. Hey, maybe he just really likes sugar
skulls. But if O.J. Simpson got a glove tattooed
on his neck and insisted it was just “art,”
there’d be some raised eyebrows. And Brown’s
choice of design, no matter what the personal
context, is still an image indicative of a crime
that most of the world hasn’t forgotten.
According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest
National Network, 207,754 women are domestically abused every year. For many of those
women, the pain lasts for a lifetime—unlike
the ink of a tattoo, it doesn’t fade. Chris Brown
may have the right to cover his body in clipart, but we also have the right to call him out
on it—especially when it causes such a gutpunch reaction. a
LAW & ORDER AND LINGUISTICS
by Monica Carty
photo courtesy of
EYE TO EYE
CROSS-EXAMINING PROFESSOR ROBERT LEONARD
Robert Leonard
Professor Robert Leonard solves crimes using his Ph.D. in linguistics. Leonard’s analyses of
stalker, serial-killer, and bomb-threat letters have
provided key insights into high profile cases such
as the McGuire “suitcase murder” and the JonBenét
Ramsey case. Now a professor of linguistics at
Hofstra University, Leonard received four degrees,
including his Ph.D., from Columbia University. Last
month at Hofstra, he inaugurated the first graduate
forensic linguistic program in the country. Leonard
is also a retired member of Sha Na Na, a rock band
that opened for Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. The
Eye talked to Leonard about working as a forensic
linguist, advancing the cause of justice, and taking
tequila shots with Jimi Hendrix.
Could you just generally explain what the job of a
forensic linguist is?
I have to explain this on the stand often. Most
people don’t know what linguistics is either. In
science, a linguist is someone who systematically
observes language behavior and creates hypotheses
and theories to explain language behavior. How we
create meaning, how we understand, how we recognize who people are based on geography, class, based
on language. Forensic linguistics has come to mean
the application of the science of linguistics to any
evidence that is language.
My specialty is language as evidence. If you think
about it, so much of what we do in the law is language. We testify, we confess, we answer questions,
we don’t answer questions, we raise questions, we
write threatening letters, we write suicide notes.
There are a variety of things that I typically do, but the
one that is most reported about is authorship.
I testified in two separate murder trials where
a man was accused of killing in one, his wife, and
in another, his wife and two little kids. And both of
these cases, the man, or the family had received death
threats over a period of time and the police hypothesized that this was a cover to get suspicion off of
them [the men]. I testified the similarities between
the known writing of the defendant and the death
threats. I was able to link the death threat and the
writing of the defendant. Both were found guilty.
Didn’t the men try to change their writing style?
Well, what happens is that when people change
their speech patterns, unless they are professional
research-level linguists, they don’t do it systematically. So they’ll change some things, but they won’t
change other things. It’s not systematic.
Are there any particularly strange pieces of writing
that you had to analyze for a case?
Sometimes, I’m asked how many variables and
“AT NIGHT, I WAS A GLITTERING
ANGEL IN A TIGHT GOLD LAMÉ SUIT
PLAYING AT ALL THESE COLLEGES.”
how many features do I need to get an analysis. I
always give the example of a case that the Department
of Justice brought to me: three letters that had to do
with bombs. The question was if they could have had
a common author. In these letters, each of the three
letters, they described three different bombs. So far
the balance is toward different authors. But next to
each of the names of the bombs, there was an asterisk,
and at the bottom of the letter was an asterisk explaining how to build that bomb.
What are the odds that three different authors
putting an asterisk next to the name of the bomb
and then having an explanation at the bottom of the
page? All the letters were in the same dialect, showed
the same educational level. Now with this asterisk, it
looked like the best hypothesis that they shared the
same authorship.
So what is cross-examination like?
It’s roughly the equivalent of being beaten over the
head with a baseball bat for a while. The interesting
thing about being cross-examined is that one becomes aware that a question may seem like it’s asking
for information, but it’s not what the person wants.
The person only wants to undo your testimony. They
do it many different ways, and you have to keep your
wits about you. You have to have a coherent and
transparent analysis. It’s stressful.
And you still do it anyway. Is there any particular
reason why?
Somebody has to do it! We have the opportunity
to advance the cause of justice. Look at the difference,
now people can establish time of death. Or DNA. We
really have a responsibility to bring this to the courts.
Another interesting fact is that you played in a band at
Columbia…
The band was Sha Na Na, which was a Columbia
band that played at Woodstock. We opened for Jimi
Hendrix, and not all Columbia students got to do that!
How did you get that opportunity?
It was pretty amazing because we were just normal Columbia guys and we were in the Kingsmen.We
were more or less an a cappella group that got the opportunity to play for a record agent. In those days, we
had a very sparse performance schedule. We didn’t
have a lot of the songs so we added songs; doo-wop
songs, which we were too young for, but our brothers
and sisters taught us. We went [to the record agent],
and everyone went crazy.
My brother had the idea to do a full-out 50s doowop, highly choreographed, and highly costumed band.
My brother looked at all of us and said, “Boys, I’m going
to make you rock-n’-roll stars.” Five months later, I’m
sitting in the most insider nightclub in New York where
the biggest rock stars go to hang out when they have
nothing to do. We were taught how to do tequila shots
by Jimi Hendrix, who’s telling me how fantastic we are.
It was an amazing thing. During the day, I was schlepping to classes. At night, I was a glittering angel in a tight
gold lamé suit playing at all these colleges. a
13
METAL FOR MANIACS
MUSIC
NYC’S BURGEONING BLACK METAL SCENE
by Maria Castex
illustration by Suzanna
Buck
I’ve never considered myself to be particularly bold
in my choice of music. The hardest band on my iPod
right now is probably Rage Against the Machine. Questionable iTunes purchases aside, my exposure to black
metal is limited to a few songs I was forced to listen to by
a good friend from high school. My reaction was always
the same: “I don’t get it.”
Black is the night, metal we fight/Power amps set
to explode./Energy screams, magic and dreams/Satan
records the first note./We chime the bell, chaos and
hell/Metal for maniacs pure./Fast melting steel, fortune
on wheels/Brain hemorrhage is the cure.
These lyrics, taken from Venom’s 1982 album, Black
Metal, encapsulate what I (and, I would imagine, many
others) understand of the genre. When I think of black
metal, I think of people dressed in black leather, of
frontmen whose voices are distorted and often unintelligible, and last, but probably not least, I think of Satan.
This impression describes well what the genre has
come to stand for in recent years. The history of black
metal, however, is complicated—inextricable as it is
from the dense, somewhat confusing web of subtly
divergent “metal” genres and subgenres.
Although it is difficult to specify any singular point
as a beginning, there seems to be a consensus that the
chronicle of metal begins with the music of bands like
Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple in the late
sixties and seventies. The influences of Black Sabbath
and Led Zeppelin shine through in the black metal bands
of today—Ozzy’s penchant for the lurid and theatrical,
Jimmy Page’s interest in the occult.
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In the grand scheme of the genre—from proto- and
heavy metal bands to power metal and thrash—black
metal seems to stand at the frontier of metal music, a
place where metal is taken to an extreme, pushed farther
and farther past the limits of conventional mainstream
culture. As Liturgy frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix
describes in his manifesto, “Transcendental Black
Metal,” black metal is “governed by a dimly understood
but acutely felt ideal, or a final cause. This final cause is
named the Haptic Void. The Haptic Void is a hypothetical
total of maximal level of intensity.” The intensity is both
audible and visible: Musicians push against the confines
of technical convention, as instruments are taken to
their physical limits, voices included.
Birthed in the harsh landscapes of Norway, the music is aggressive and violent. Brandon Stosuy, an editor at
Pitchfork, described it in The Believer as: “Black metal’s
gone through various shifts, but generally speaking, the
guitars buzz, the drums are quick, the vocals shrieking,
ghostly, and anguished. The early work had a particularly eerie, lo-fi sound. As the scene developed, and
younger musicians mastered their instruments, the
structures grew more complex. Black metal is generally
not as straight-up technical as death; it’s usually more
classically symphonic.”
In addition to variance in style and technique, each
subgenre operates within a distinct set of thematic
concerns. The veneration of a pre-Christian past and
anti-Christian tendencies have become almost synonymous with Scandinavian black metal, a subgenre
that is becoming increasingly separate from diverging
American styles. In his 2009 manifesto, delivered at the
Hideous Gnosis symposium, a six hour event held at
Brooklyn’s Public Assembly, Hunt-Hendrix defined a
new set of principles and goals for American
black metal, or “USBM” as it is often abbreviated: “USBM stands in the shadow of Hyperborean black metal”—aka, Scandinavian black
metal. “The time has come for a decisive break
with the European tradition and the establishment of a truly American black metal. And we
should say ‘American’ rather than ‘US’: the US
is a declining empire, American is an eternal
ideal representing human dignity, hybridization and creative evolution,” he continued.
Despite metal fans’ anti-systemic stance,
the genre and those who follow it remain extremely rigid and elitist. Hunt-Hendrix’s push
for hybridization is, for some purists, problematic. In spite of their emphatic rejection of the
mainstream, certain black metal enthusiasts,
particularly in the Nordic countries, have very
little interest in seeing the genre change. The
rift that Hunt-Hendrix calls for is one that, as
is mentioned in the quote, rests in geography.
Bands like Liturgy and Krallice, both New Yorkbased—as well as Nachtmystium, Xasthur,
Leviathan, and Krohm—have become leaders in
the cultivation of an American black metal.
The difference between the Scandina-
vians and the Americans is marked. Both technique
and theme are decidedly toned down by American
bands. Gone are the blood-smeared performers and
speared, rotting animal carcasses in live shows (see:
Watain), as well as the off-stage violence that surround their European counterparts (several Norwegian musicians have been implicated in the murders
of rival musicians).
In its departure from misanthropic and Pagan
themes, USBM seems much more self-aware, with
events like Hideous Gnosis seeking to create a space
where theorizing and open discussion about the direction of the genre could take place. It seems somewhat
counter-intuitive to theorize about a genre that seems
so intent on negating convention and, according to Ben
Ratliff’s article in the New York Times, “talking about
black metal in certain quarters seems deeply lame.”
Still, events like Hideous Gnosis expose the growth
of an American audience for black metal, one that is
increasingly mainstream. Several taste-making publications—including the New York Times, Slate, and
Pitchfork, to name a few—have published features on
“THE TIME HAS COME FOR A
DECISIVE BREAK WITH THE
EUROPEAN TRADITION AND THE
ESTABLISHMENT OF A TRULY
AMERICAN BLACK METAL.”
the nascent New York scene. The fact that the symposium was held in Brooklyn is testament to New York’s
growing role in the rise of USBM. ­­
If the arctic cold in isolated parts of Norway, Sweden,
and Finland foment a music that is rigidly aggressive
and anti-social, it makes sense that a place like New
York City, in all its crowded heterogeneity, would foster
bands that seek to break the mold of the past and question convention. “It’s a dirty, crowded place,” Stosuy
says. “In early black metal, you get people focused on a
more rural, wooded atmosphere. In recent years, urban
black metal’s become a much bigger deal.” Also, there’s
history to consider: Hubs such as CBGB and Max’s
Kansas City acted as principal forces in the formation of a
New York punk scene.
To me, black metal is about alienation—about seeking a place to experience rage in all its intensity. What
makes the growing black metal scene in New York so
interesting, however, is that with all its misanthropic
tendencies, a traditionalist black metal scene would be
hard-pressed to thrive or become fully engaged with
the city. The aggressive nature of the music, on the other
hand, seems like the perfect outlet for this densely-populated, angry metropolis. a
WHAT A GEM
VIEW FROM HERE
SELLING BEADS IN SANTA FE
by David Salazar
illustration by Tenaya Izu
I thought I would get an internship: one that looked good on a
résumé, one that paid well. None
of the plans I had made in my head
involved strapping on a fanny pack
every morning and selling beads for
nine hours. Bees? No, beads.
It wasn’t the first summer I had
donned the fanny pack. I had first
started peddling beads in Santa Fe the
summer before my senior year of high
school, and I wasn’t keen on returning to it.
Friends reminded me that it could be worse.
The job really had only one requirement: that I
not lose the fanny pack, which was where we
kept the money. After I left it in a bathroom
during my first go-round at bead salesmanship,
the fact that my boss considered employing me
again was a miracle. Despite this, I was unhappy:
unhappy that I had to be friendly to people who
had no idea how to pronounce the overwhelmingly Spanish road names in Santa Fe; unhappy
that I had to pretend to care about turquoise; and
unhappy that I had to listen to my boss when he
started to preach about his business philosophy
and how it was applicable to life.
Thankfully, I got to know my co-workers.
A 14-year-old high school freshman named
Brass I worked with knew calculus and could
play four instruments (none of them brass,
interestingly enough). His age and unbridled
enthusiasm to learn everything about the gems
and stones we sold ensured that he was a better
salesman than I, though I think people started
buying things just to get him to stop talking. My other co-worker was the ghost of David
future, although his situation is one I never really want to find myself in. Having graduated in
May from college with a degree in architecture,
Sam returned to his parent’s home and to the
bead stand, where he had worked almost every
summer since he was 13. Sam taught me what it
means to be underemployed—though perhaps
he doesn’t see it that way—given that he ran his
own bead business a couple years ago, working different flea markets in California for a few
months. At any rate, I know he wasn’t thrilled
to be living at home, given his penchant for
marijuana and his parent’s dislike of it.
And while, at first, it was my co-workers
who got me through the summer, after a while,
my job stopped feeling like work. As the summer
wore on and the heat subsided, it became a lot
easier to talk to customers. My initial awkwardness was due to my own inability to imitate the
faux-friendless that is crucial to retail. After
some time, though, the awkwardness disap-
peared, and my motivation for talking to people
changed. After speaking with people who were
genuinely interesting, I was no longer primarily concerned with selling someone a pendant
or a bracelet, but with finding out what kind of
stories the people around me had to tell, some of
NONE OF THE PLANS I HAD
MADE IN MY HEAD INVOLVED
STRAPPING ON A FANNY PACK
EVERY MORNING AND SELLING
BEADS FOR NINE HOURS.
which they communicated, and others I observed for myself.
There was the girl from Denver who lost
a friend in the Aurora movie theater shooting. She was eager to talk about her newfound
resolve to live mindful of how short life is.
There was the old woman who was wearing a
silver bracelet that I recognized as a militaryissue bracelet engraved with the name of a man
I took to be her son or grandson who died in
Afghanistan or Iraq.
One of the people who particularly interested me was a man in the compound of the bead
booth who worked lifting and carrying the pots
and fountains. After nine hours in the heat at
the compound, he would go to work at his second job until 7 a.m. Four days out of the week,
he didn’t sleep. In retrospect, it was probably
a bad idea for the management to let him drive
the forklift. But now I know that I could have
it worse than forcing myself to stay awake in
lecture after pulling an all-nighter.
So no, a job selling beads while wearing a
fanny pack isn’t the worst thing in the world.
It’s nowhere close to the worst thing in the
world. I got paid and while, admittedly, an internship might have looked better on a résumé,
at least I can spin it as “great people skills.”
Still if I never see another room filled with
beads again, it’ll be too soon.
My lone lingering question about this
summer is why my boss, in all the years that
he has inexplicably stayed in business, never
bought a fucking cash register. I’m just saying:
It would be really hard to leave a cash register
in a bathroom. a
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