The staff of the New York Times gathered in the newsroom as publisher Arthur Sulzberger stood before his workers and announced that their new boss would be Jill Abramson, stepping up to replace Bill Keller as Executive Editor of the paper.
Keller came to the helm amidst the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal in May 2003; he saw the paper through two wars, kidnapped journalists, numerous hurricanes and other natural disasters, various rebellions, and the usual slew of local hijinks. He’s going on to write for the paper, to become a Sunday columnist, to do a job so incredibly different than that which he’s consummated with aplomb for the last eight years, it makes one wonder how he pulled those eight years off in the first place.
I’ve a friend, a very gifted writer, who was promoted a few years ago to a managerial position at his magazine. Formerly he’d lived the life of the rogue journalists, off to Cleveland or Baghdad or New Orleans, chasing whatever story needed to be chased. When he arrived at his desk, his feet wouldn’t stop moving, his mind wouldn’t stop wandering. He lasted three months before he insisted on being sent to Kabul with NATO forces.
Keller was a brilliant editor, but when he took on the job, he quickly learned that it wasn’t the job for a writer. As he told Esquire of his responsibilities as Editor:
"…there's other stuff that I sometimes think of as an in loco parentis role. You have these people who work for you, but they're also people. They have families and people in their family get cancer and die, and there's a lot of being there for people. That was not something I had anticipated."
In there lies something that we all face in the workplace: the division between employee and human. At certain companies there is no division; the "human" simply doesn’t exist. That’s how it was for Michael Lewis at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s.
"Early on Alexander taught me the importance of a strong exterior," Lewis writes in Liars Poker. "'I learned awhile ago that there was no point to showing weakness,' he said. 'When you arrive at six-thirty A.M. having had no sleep the night before and having lost your best friend in a car accident, and some Big Swinging Dick walks over to your desk, slaps you on the back and says, "How the hell are you?" you don’t say, "I’m really tired and really upset," you say, "I’m great, how the hell are you?" ' "
Lewis worked in an environment where being human meant you weren’t going to succeed.
Most industries, these days anyway it seems, don’t dock points for humanity. I know that in my office, when there is a closed door, chances are there is someone crying behind it. I’m not saying it’s to that extreme at the Times, but it seems that in that newsroom being human isn’t tantamount to being weak.
There has been a semi-large amount of fuss about Jill Abramson’s ascension to the Big Swinging Dick driver’s seat of the New York Times – all you have to do is look at the Twitter headlines (@Reuters: New York Times names Jill Abramson first woman editor; @marieclaire: Congrats to Jill Abramson, just named the first female Executive Editor of the New York Times!; @mediaguardian: New York Times names Jill Abramson as first female executive editor; @FTmedianews: NY Times names first female editor: Jill Abramson is to become the first female executive editor; it goes on) – and that may seem unjust at first.
One New York Times Senior Staff Photographer Tweeted: Congratulations to Jill Abramson a brilliant editor. Let's retire the phrase "the first women to..." That may be fair; Abramson is clearly respected by most of her staff (again, the Twitter accounts of Times employees attest), and they seem to be protective of her credibility, thinking it slighted by those who mention she’s a woman before mentioning she’s an editor.
That reaction is understandable but misplaced. Ignoring that Abramson is a woman ignores why she has the potential to be better at that job at that paper at this time than Bill Keller.
Jill Abramson is undoubtedly a Big Swinging Dick (flashbacks of Judith Regan walking down the hall of her publishing company shouting, "I have the biggest cock in the building!"), but in being a woman, she also might have a greater ability to relate to her employees on a human level than would a man.
And here’s why that might not be sexist: New York Times (what else?) columnist Nicholas Kristoff wrote in his book Half the Sky when women in developing countries were put in charge of family finances, particular families were more likely to draw themselves from destitution and poverty than when men, who were likely to profligately use money on prostitutes and candy and alcohol, handled a families spending.
Women in those situations had an innate dedication to family. It’s not out of the question to think that women across the world in, say, Midtown Manhattan, would feel that same dedication, generally on a greater level than men.
If Bill Keller’s description of the work environment at the New York Times is accurate, the paper picked the right Big Swinging Dick to run the show. Good luck, Jill.
The most ambitious aspect of the Broadway musical-slash-spectacle “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” isn’t the concussion-laceration-broken-bone-defying stunts; it isn’t a budget bigger than the GDP of Guyana; it isn’t the collaboration with a pair of rock stars who have been more focused on ruining the economies of small African nations in the last decade than they have been on making entertainment.The thing most ambitious of the heavily voodooed production is, almost tautologically, the hubris of director Julie Taymour.
To be fair, I a) have not seen any previews of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” nor b) do I have an erudite knowledge or childhood-like passion for any of the comics or preternatural characters that pull at the imaginations of so many American men from kindergarten to retirement.However, my superficial experience should prove enough in this case.
Taymour’s plot begins (as detailed by one article) with a kind of Greek chorus in the form of teenagers “who are trying to devise The Greatest Spider-Man Story Ever Told. As they tell the story to each other, it comes alive into the musical that you see.”
The problem is that the greatest Spiderman story ever told is the first Spiderman story ever told – the one in the first comic and the first cartoon and the first movie starring Toby Maguire – where Peter Parker, a quite boy from queens, finds himself in the presence of a dying, radioactive spider at a science exhibit or large laboratory; the spider bites him; he becomes a being with all the best parts of human and spider; he then (and this is the most important part) struggles emotionally and psychologically to deal with this new superhuman greatness (told by Uncle Ben in dramatic fashion: “With great power comes great responsibility”) before a series of dramatic events force him to accept his new self and risk everything to save those he loves.
This premise, taking in its broad strokes, is the basis for every Greatest (Super)Hero Story Ever Told, not just Spiderman.The 1980 movie “Superman II” worked brilliantly and better than “Superman I” because in the film Superman rejected his greatness, temporarily becoming merely human, before coming to terms with what he must do with his abilities.Likewise, “Batman Returns” by Christopher Nolan was boat-lengths beyond its Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher predecessors because it dealt with a wayward Bruce Wayne who went to all corners of the world, eschewing his wealth and name to find out his true meaning and identity.
The stories of heroes all come back to Act 3, Scene 4 of Shakespeare’s “The Twelfth Night” where Malvolio says, “Be not afraid of greatness”: ‘twas well writ…“Some are born great…some achieve greatness…And some have greatness thrust upon them.”
Within stories we do not crave analysis, we crave evocation.We crave someone overcoming the insurmountable, but not just that; what makes superheroes irresistible is that the insurmountable problem they must face is not a villain or a natural disaster or an unrequited love – it is themselves.
It’s what’s great about the Harry Potter movies: At the beginning of each movie, Harry greets us a helpless, clueless, diffident school boy with, as the books and movies progress, an increasingly large number of friends.Each of the seven stories works because in each Harry has to become great once again.
If the reviews are correct, Taymour’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” will never work.Even with the broken wrists and broken feet and concussed, quitting actresses, the play would still never work because its writers won’t let it, because its writers make greatness exposition instead of tragedy.The pricey Broadway musical isn’t cursed because it is ambitious.It is cursed because it doesn’t know why greatness is great.
Rolling Stone, among others, slapped the terrific song "Fuck You" by Cee Lo Green right atop (or in the upper echelon of ) their Best Songs of 2010 lists. The status on the lists is deserved; it’s a tight song from start to finish with an only semi-annoying bridge and a catchy almost throwback-to-Motown riff that is glazed over by the effortless power of Cee Lo’s dulcet voice. Nevertheless, something has been bothering me about the lyrics to the song.
It begins:
I see you driving 'round town With the girl I love And I'm like, Fuck you! I guess the change in my pocket Wasn't enough I'm like, Fuck you! And fuck her too!
In this portion of the first verse, Cee Lo is vulgarly chastising some nefarious gentleman, it seems, who has stolen (unrighteously, unfairly, undeservedly stolen) Cee Lo’s girl and is tastelessly rubbing his score, as it were, in the singer’s face by driving all over (one would imagine in a convertible) some nameless town with the girl on display.
Immediately following that "And fuck her too!" we hear this:
I said, if I was richer, I’d still be with ya Now ain't that some shit? And although there's pain in my chest I still wish you the best With a...Fuck you!
At this point one naturally assumes that Cee Lo is singing his diatribe to the girl with whom he is or was in love, (we later learn in the song that it’s the former, "Why? Why? Oh! I love you! Oh! I still love you!") only to presumably change back to talking to the nefarious soul mate-stealing gentleman with the convertible, warning him that the girl, with whom we’ve established Cee Lo is still in love, is only into him because she likes his money, which is tantamount in superficiality to liking a girl solely for her perfectly formed, large breasts, which, for some reason or another, I simply assume the apple of Cee Lo’s eye has.
Now this abrupt change in the object to which Cee Lo is singing bothers me more than a little, I’ll admit. But we’ve let things like Snoop Dogg using incorrect verb tense in too many songs to count slide, and I’m willing to let go Cee Lo’s impossibly fast saccadic shifts from yelling at one person to yelling at another.
What’s most bothersome is that Cee Lo goes flawlessly through the Five Stages of Grief, albeit in somewhat circular fashion, within the song.
Denial: If I was richer, I'd still be with ya.
Anger: (pretty obvious) Fuck you!
Bargaining: I guess he's an Xbox and I’m more Atari; but the way you play your game ain't fair.
Depression: (the aforementioned) Why? Why? Oh! I love you! Oh! I still love you!
Acceptance: Although there's pain in my chest, I still wish you the best.
Why this would bother me isn’t entirely obvious… until you consider that the song is a flashy three minutes and fifty-four seconds. Therefore, Cee Lo goes through five levels of emotion, berates two people that want nothing to do with him, regresses to childhood crying to his mother, and publicly hails invectives that could easily hit children or bystanders all in under four minutes. As such, it’s clear that Cee Lo Green is a dangerously emotionally unstable man who should be locked in a padded cell until he clams down just a bit more.
And now, just because I find it hilarious, Cee Lo’s altered lyrics on The Colbert Report:
The intentionally comical portmanteau "bromance" has been explored and espoused almost academically over the last (let us for the sake of roundness, pick a round number) ten years, more intensely since the arrival of candied reality TV that includes MTV shows like "The Hills," "The City," and, well, "Bromance," and joked about by late night TV hosts and awards show hosts, alike, all of whom, more or less (and perhaps again for the sake of roundness) made the same joke about the same people, the maker of the joke, for the most part, often using himself in a semi-self-deprecating position as one of the members of the "bromance," which, again almost always, straddled the comedy of homosexuality and shoe shopping with the cast of "Sex and the City."
The term popped up in various (terrible) movies (although I don’t immediately recall any specific instances, I’m sure there were more than a few that involved Matthew McConaughey movies, "The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" or "How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days," maybe, and anything involving Jason Segel who, in spite of his beady eyes, perpetually ill-formed hair cut and glaring lack of hygiene that announces itself in the form of his pallid, lumpy abdomen at every possible occasion, continues to be near the top of every "Celebrities I’d Sleep With" list of every American woman between the ages of 25 and 35 years old) and TV shows such as "Scrubs" where the characters played by Donald Faison and Zach Braff rarely let an episode slip by in which they didn’t either announce their shared love themselves or enthusiastically nod and hug when their non-sexual infatuation with one another was commented upon, derisively or not, by a supporting character.
Examples of a good, healthy "bromance" can probably traced through television from Joey and Chandler (Ross never making it a threesome) in "Friends," Larry and Balki (a slightly inbred "bromance") in "Perfect Strangers," Richie and Fonzie in "Happy Days" (when Fonzie wasn’t solipsistic ally in a "bromance" with Fonzie), and so on.
The television examples are relationships we would like to have in real life, another man by our sides who will mourn a lost girl with us over tears and tequila at the Sapphire Gentleman’s Club, but who stops short of going for a rebound hookup, grabbing our junk on the laser lighted dance floor. Of these, there was one "bromance" in the annuls of TV "bromances" that reflects a true, real life "bromance" more than all others. That is the relationship of Zack Morris and A.C. Slater for four glorious years of "Saved by the Bell."
With other TV "bromances," the pair of men in bro-love have a sort of unconditional affection for each other. Chandler and Joey had their disagreements, but they were never really at each others' throats and always missed the company of one another. Same goes for the guys in "Scrubs;" there was never an actual, heated argument between the geeky Jewish doctor and the dude he referred to as Brown Bear.
On the other hand, Zack Morris and A.C. Slater knew that they could count on one another in any situation – like when they used fake IDs to get into the club – but there was also an intense competition between the two boys that didn’t attenuate when, after season one, Slater was rewritten to be Zack’s friend, rather than just his rival for the love of Kelly Kapowski.
Gratuitous photo of Kelly Kapowski:
Zack and Slater continued to love and compete with each other over everything for all four glorious years of the show. Zach hit on Jessie Spano at The Max once, angering Slater; they fought physically when Zack was trying to help a brother out but, instead, ended up ruining Slater’s date; the competition when so far as to be a perpetual, tacit, metaphysical battle over what it means to be a "jock" or a "prep" and which of those is, in the end, better.
This is how we "bromance" in real life. We don’t hug and cry every week with our bros like Joey and Chandler. We don’t pine when we’re left lonely and alone while our Brown Bear goes off with his Latina fiancée. We don’t even stare at each other with silent, quizzical brows like the goons on "The Hills."
We’re men. We compete. We push each other. We measure penises and then say a big penis is a sign of impotence when ours is smaller. We’re gladiators of the halls of high schools, just as were Zack Morris and A.C. Slater, which is why they are not just televisions best multicultural "bromance" ever, not just the best worst performing "bromance" ever, but hands down the truest twosome to ever walk tandem across the small screen and say, "What up bro?"
Could Bristol Palin (could the Palin family in general) be having an exclusively positive impact, free of side effects, on the American population?
Could Bristol’s campaign for abstinence be reaching teenage girls, causing them to either demur when offered a penis or accept with the caveat the penis be wrapped in some sort of thin latex or lambskin or Reynold’s plastic wrap or, “Come on, at least put on some cheesecloth so only the smart sperm get through”?
Could the Alaskan clan of salmon-slaying, wolf-sniping, snow machine-revving, newspaper-reading (just kidding) ne’er-do-wells possibly have something to offer society beyond redemptive powers of unintentional and ironic humor?
I thought the answer was "Yes," but then I read the report out this week from the The National Center for Health Statistics, which shows that “teenagers are giving birth at the lowest rates noted in seven decades of record-keeping,” as reported by the LA Times.“The report shows that the teen birthrate fell to 39.1 births per 1,000 girls ages 15 to 19 in 2009…the lowest rate since 1940, when the government began keeping track.”
Turns out, the report “doesn't speculate on why the birthrate has fallen, but two decades of public-health initiatives to curb teenage pregnancy may be paying dividends.”
But, think about it:Are you going to credit two decades of spinning wheels or this cover of People magazine?
Another theory on the drop in teen births doesn’t involve the remarkably exploitive MTV show “16 and Pregnant.” Some experts are citing the recession as a reason for lower birthrates, which makes sense since we now know the reason China and India have had population explosions in the past 100 years is because their economies were booming under the exports of lead-based toys and Nikes made in three-dollar-a-day sweatshops.
“I'm not suggesting that teens are examining futures of [pension funds] or how the market is doing,” said Sarah Brown, chief executive of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. “But I think they are living in families that experience that stress. They are living next door to families that lost their jobs… The recession has touched us all.”
Makes sense.When I’m unemployed and stressed, I sit in my living room, ignoring calls from attractive, fertile 18-year-olds.I sit there wishing there existed some sort of physical activity that could help relieve my stress while providing me a sense of being desired and a feeling of self-worth.That’s about the time I turn on Wii Tennis.
All Palins aside, news of the large decline was a stunning and exciting surprise for advocates. “This is like a Christmas present,” Brown…uh…joked.
Joked, of course, because the chief executive of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy has a paper-cut wit and knows that the entire purpose of Christmas is to celebrate the unplanned birth of a baby boy to an unwed teenage mother.
To the best of my knowledge this is how "Dancing with the Stars" is scored: They take the total number of points of all the dancers. (Say four groups each did one dance and received combined scores of 27, 24, 23, and 18, respectively. The total number of points is 92.) Then divide your score (say you got the 24) by the total points to get a percentage. You received 26 percent of the judges’ scores. They then add that percentage to the percentage of the calls, texts and online votes you received from viewers. So, say 1 million people called in and 300,000 of them voted for you. That would make your total score 26 + 30 = 56.
Then, if you’re Bristol Palin, they burn your score and kick off the black chick.
Okay. In all likelihood, that’s not what happened. Although, it’s always possible with these sorts of shows.
On Monday, Bristol received a combined score of 53; Brandy, our eliminee, earned a 57. After all the math is done, that means that if Bristol (23.2 percent of judges scores) had just two percent more of the total call-in vote than Brandy (25 percent of judges scores), Brandy would go home instead of Bristol. That doesn’t seem grossly unreasonable, and that’s exactly what happened.
That doesn’t seem unreasonable, yet there seems to be an unreasonable level of shock circulating Twitter, blogs and three-way calls between teenage girls lying prone on their beds, flipping through new issues of OK! And In Touch while their parents get drunk downstairs. Even if there is a Tea Party "conspiracy" to help Bristol win, it doesn’t need to be a very big conspiracy; the DWTS voting system won’t allow for the game to not be close when it comes down to the end. We need to make dramatic television after all.
There is an aspect of this season’s "Dancing with the Stars" that deserves all the attention Bristol’s weight and surprising success are getting. Although I still don’t really know who the fuck Kyle Massey is, I can name every professional dancer in the pool. As of Season 11, the DWTS dancers have become more celebrated than the celebrities they instruct.
The brooding Maksim Chmerkovskiy is a glaring example of this shift of fame. Last season (meaning three months ago) he splashed the aisles of your grocery checkout lines on the covers of gossip rags. Maks and Erin Andrews Together! That attention has transferred to this season where his brief spanking and spat with judge Carrie Ann Inaba was the most intriguing part of the show since Michael Bolton squirmed from out a doghouse.
While Brandy had little to say after her elimination this week, check out what Maks had to say for himself: "One thing that I love, for my family, the choice they made to come to this country is the fact that people vote and their voices count. And I love the fact that the show represents that and it’s the people’s choice. You know, I don’t regret a second about the last five years of my life being on this show and definitely not a second being on this season. It’s been an amazing journey."
Not a word about Brandy. Not a syllable about how well she did. While he said the previous week, during his back and forth with Carrie Ann, that the judges should be judging the "stars," his concession speech (I don’t know what else to call it) indication that, clearly, he was the one who was kicked off.
It wasn’t until later that night that he Tweeted: "WOW! What can I say? If this is a test, I'm failing it... Was raised in a very 'justice driven' household & see no justice in 'DWTS'.... Sorry @4everBrandy if I failed US. You were AMAZING tonight and always!"
That’s quite a flip from "I love people voting" to "people voting is unfair." The only way to explain it is if the contestant I spoke with two or three seasons ago wasn’t fucking with me as much as I thought he was fucking with me when he said, "They told me I was going to go off third."Conspiracy or not, cover-up or otherwise, I think we’ve all learned something from season 11 of "Dancing with the Stars." Sarah Palin was right when she told Barbara Walters she believes she could be Barack Obama in 2012, if she ran for President of the United States.
Before he sat down to interview Eminem on last week’s “60 Minutes,” Anderson Cooper introduced the rapper and his story.Cooper described Eminem’s songs having “lyrics that are as profane as they are poetic.”During these eight hundred and seventy seven words, we will see why that claim is not as simple as it seems.
I remember the first Eminem song I heard, "My Fault," the story of a guy who gives a young woman psilocybin mushrooms at a house party and ends up killing her. The song includes lyrics like these: "Susan stop crying; I don't hate ya/ The world’s not against you. I'm sorry your father raped ya/ So what, you had your little coochie in your dad's mouth/ That’s no reason to start wiggin and spaz out."
I was in the University of Minnesota men’s swimming locker room and the song was playing over the stereo system. I was shocked. I was shocked because I didn’t understand that a) the song is pretty damn funny and b) if I wasn’t shocked, the song would have lost all purpose.
Throughout his life, Eminem explained to Anderson Cooper, he has been a slave to words, to the sounds of words, to a vocabulary that could never grow large enough fast enough.
Eminem explains his relationship with the sounds of words: "People think that the word orange doesn’t rhyme with anything and that kinda pisses me off because I can think of a lot of words that rhyme with orange. Let along how great it is that people saying nothing rhymes with orange pisses him off, and how great it is that he takes that so personally.
He’s absolutely right that there are things that rhyme with orange. The example he uses in the "60 Minutes" interview goes: "If you…make it more than one syllable…you can say: ‘I put my orange, for inch door hinge in storage and ate porridge with George.’"
Rhyme doesn’t depend on the written word; it insists upon the spoken or sung word. Eminem’s poetry is a poetry exactly like Robert Frost’s or W.B. Yeats. On paper, often, the words are beautiful. But the words to Yeat’s astounding work, "The Second Coming," don’t dance until you speak them aloud.
The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Eminem’s poetry is like that of Yeats and Frost in another way. Where the formidable poets were inspired by nature or anthropology or social change, details of their environments, Eminem’s inspiration comes from his environment, too, and often that environment is profane.
"You say, ‘My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge that’ll stab you in the head whether you’re a fag or lez…Hate fags? The answer’s yes,’" Anderson Cooper accuses Eminem.
Eminem goes on to defend his lyrics as an effect of the environment in which he was raised. Not a great defense; growing up in a household with a grandfather that referred to all Asians as "chinks" doesn’t make it acceptable for a New York Times op-ed writer to claim, "The chinks are intentionally devaluing their currency."
This is a defense for Eminem. The lyrics Anderson Cooper (my apologies for continuing to use his full name; I seem to be incapable of writing just Anderson or just Cooper) were taken out of context, as, of course, they had to be for a 15 minute interview. The lyrics come from the song "Criminal," which is the final song on Eminem’s second album, "The Marshall Mathers LP." The end of that song explains the beginning. Eminem raps, "You motherfucking chickens ain't brave enough/ to say the stuff I say, so just tape it shut/ Shit, half the shit I say, I just make it up/ To make you mad so kiss my white naked ass/ And if it's not a rapper that I make it as/ I'ma be a fucking rapist in a Jason mask."
No longer will you find that level of derogatory lyric in Eminem songs. But on that second album, his anger – and Eminem’s anger has always been the inspiration for his best work – lay with critics, not only professional critics, but those who were critical that his words were misogynistic, homophobic and hurtful to children.
With Eminem’s first album his inspiration came from his anger with his youth. The second, as mentioned, was anger with critics. His third album was anger with politics, whether those politics were in Washington or Hollywood. His fourth and fifth albums were void of anger, and, therefore, void of inspiration and, therefore, not good. On his sixth and latest album, released this summer, Eminem’s anger was directed at himself – for those previous two albums, for his weakness and allowing himself to become addicted to drugs, for taking the death of his friend Proof all upon himself.
Without anger, Eminem is without inspiration and, without inspiration, Em’s lyrics are devoid of passion and poetry and substance.
The claim that Eminem’s lyrics "are as profane as they are poetic," then, is a gross understatement. Without profanity in one form or another, Eminem quite basically does not exist.
Sunday’s episode of “Mad Men,” the penultimate of the season, concluded with mass lay-offs at the fictitious Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce advertising firm.As the contrary, enigmatic Don Draper ushered employees into his office, one at a time, it seemed less like a high-rise in Manhattan than like a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Cleveland; an employee entered, the door closed, the employee was routinely strung up and gutted and released again into the appropriately-titled office bullpen.
The actual carnage in Don’s office was never on display during the episode.It didn’t have to be because there were no outbursts, there were no You-Can-Take-This-Job-And-Shove-It’s.There were only apologies and severances, and most of us have been on one or both ends of that and, unless you’re vocationally sadistic or masochistic or both, it’s uncomfortable on either end.
Which is why, I suppose, UK mobile phone company, (the pompously named) Everything Everywhere decided to be everywhere but the meetings where over 1,200 of their employees were told they might be fired.
The Daily Telegraph explains that the employees were brought out into a public area, between 30 and 60 at a time, they were they brought up individually and “were shown a red light and told they were ‘at risk.’ Other staff saw the light go yellow, which meant they must re-apply for their existing job… A blue light indicated [they] were being kept on. A green light showed the creation of a limited number of new roles.
“One employee said: ‘Some of the people got up and walked straight out of the room, others sat there crying, others were absolutely dumbstruck.’”
The company defended itself in a statement that said: “Ahead of any team briefings, individuals whose roles have been proposed to be put at risk in the new organisational structure were seen on a one-to-one basis, where the full implications of these changes were explained to them personally by either their line manager or director.”
Which is, more or less, like saying, We’re gonna play a little game where, if you win, you might get to keep your job.
The worst part about the light system used by Everything Everywhere isn’t the public humiliation.It’s the absence of why.
The first time I was fired, it was because I was bouncing a ball off of a wall when I should have been watching kids in a pool that were each engaged in one on one private lessons with qualified instructors.As much as I didn’t care about losing this job, I still appreciated that the reason for my dismissal was explained.The second time, I got nothing.I asked and was told that those in charge “didn’t need a reason.”That was infuriating enough, but to be fired by a stop light…
You can bet Don Draper was bigger than to let his cattle be slaughtered in such a manner.You can bet he took the blame like a good girlfriend does when she tells you that it’s her, not you.
People have lost their minds when fired my humans.I’m surprised that light at Everything Everwhere made it through three redundancies without getting it’s ass kicked.
Taylor Lautner didn’t get his RV on time to film his latest movie. By now, we get it: "In a suit filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Lautner claims his dad, Dan Lautner, negotiated with the Irvine, Calif.-based McMahon's RV dealership to deliver a $300,000 customized 2006 Affinity Country Coach RV by a June deadline so the star wouldn't have to rough it on the set of the thriller ‘Abduction.’"
I’m tempted to agree; that is annoying. When you pay for a new 80-inch flat-screen to arrive in time for the UVA-USC football game, you would prefer that 80-inch flat-screen was delivered at least by the morning of game day. If it doesn’t arrive, it ruins everything. The chips are soggy, the beer is flat, no one shows up, and, because you have no portal on which to watch the match du foot, you’re preferred team more likely than not loses. If that kind of personal trauma doesn’t scream for a lawsuit, the only thing that does is a baby named "Lindsay" in a Super Bowl commercial.
Taylor Lautner is suing, not because he is over reacting, but because his party was ruined. Unfortunately for Taylor, a lawsuit is tantamount to going back to the electronics store where you purchased your 80-inch flat-screen and threatening to burn it down if you don’t get your 80-inch flat-screen right now for 60 percent off. If that seems a little over the top obnoxious, it’s because it is a little over the top obnoxious.
The damage is already done. The game is already over. You can either quietly threaten to break the legs of the store manager’s 9-year-old tabby or you can wait until you get your TV and move on. Needlessly drawing more attention, especially when you just were the most naked star in the (um) third biggest film (used for lack of a better) of the summer is not even the third best decision in that situation. (The makers of Toy Story 3 would have picked the best.)
What’s worse is the suit has given Brent McMahon, owner of the Irvine-based McMahon's RV, the opportunity for more press out of this – and the opportunity to pay Lautner exactly shit for the tardy RV.
This morning, McMahon challenged Lautner to a push-up contest. The winner of the contest gets the $40,000 demanded in the suit donated to charity. The Hollywood Reporter (er) reports: "If Lautner shows up and wins the push-up contest, McMahon will pay him and his Shark Kid Entertainment the $40,000 to settle the case. If McMahon wins, he'll donate the $40,000 to Children's Hospital of Orange County."
Who feels like an asshole now? What are the possible outcomes?
Lautner says no to the push-up contest; Launter hates needy children.
Lautner says yes to the push-up contest and wins and keeps the money; Lautner hates needy children.
Lautner says yes to the push-up contest and loses; Lautner lost a push-up contest to a 47-year-old car salesman who steals a solid 15 minutes and a number of RV sales and a shit-load of essentially free publicity (dependant on the tax laws in California.)
No matter what the outcome, one thing is certain. Taylor Lautner’s next movie, "Abduction," is gonna suck because he didn’t have his goddam $300,000 RV on time. The children lose again.
From the back of the audience, lost beneath angled lights and slightly shifting bodies, I listened to the comedian without laughing. A band was on the stage beside him and he referenced each member individually. That’s Hector Castro on the keyboard; he says he’s from Miami but everyone knows your last name, Hector, and everyone knows that 20 years ago you were on a Goodyear tire in the middle of the Caribbean, praying not to float to Cancun. The comedian did a pantomime of Hector praying on his defection raft. Our front man, Willy Jones; Willy is African American; move into the light Willy, no one can see you. Willy convulsed silently with laughter, his huge mouth opened and huge teeth glimmered. I expected the comedian to comment on the apparition-like appearance of Willy’s smile – but he moves on. And way back there on the drums and saxophone, we got Joe Miller and Tommy Hatsfield, the white guys. This band is like a dyslexic bus in 1961 Alabama.
I sat silently because everyone else was laughing. And not the uncomfortable, I-can’t-believe-he-said-that laughter, but genuine laughter. I wasn’t laughing because I was paying attention to why these jokes were funny and how they worked with this audience. (The comedian was astute, to be sure, but I think it’s worth mentioning, for my own critical reputation if for no other reason, that this guy wasn’t that funny or edgy; the jokes he had were, comparatively, incredibly tame.) Racism has been something of a style or a device of comedy forever, seen in two forms: the actual racism of blackface and minstrel shows and rants of Michael Richards that serves only hatred; and the friendly, ironic racism that serves equally to point out differences as it does to edify that those differences are petty.
One of the clearest and most recent examples of this took place during the appearance of the cast of the film "Grown Ups" on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Kimmel adroitly takes a racial thought and flips it soundly on its ear around the 1:30 mark of this clip:
In the last ten years, the friendly, ironic form of racism in comedy has lead the way in cautiously brining us closer together while undermining the litigious decades of political correctness that began sometime around "where's the beef?" At a delicate pace, even the backlash against political correctness has become passé – try creating a show called "Politically Incorrect" today and you’ll be met with, "Yes, but what makes it different?"
This begs the question: What is next for political correctness?, which I’ve wondered, inappropriately and aloud at times. While Kimmel and Chris Rock seem to be able to banter comfortably about black and white, Jon Stewart can take the same dry tone with Judaism, Ellen DeGeneres with homosexuality, Ricky Gervais with obesity and the mentally handicapped, and Sarah Silverman with just about anything she can get her greedy, JAP-y, whore-ish mouth on when it isn't replete with Asian cock, none of them seem capable of defining what the next step is in the fight against fear and political correctness.
At times answers sail from the oddest windows and mug you around the most surprising corners. This one came from Thomas "The Moustache" Friedman in today’s New York Times. The Moustache’s column was on the firing of CNN senior editor of Middle East affairs, Octavia Nasr after she Tweeted her condolences for the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a Shiite spiritual leader involved in the founding of Hezbollah.
"Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah," Nasr wrote. She was subsequently dismissed from CNN, a move that proves only that CNN is racist.
Freidman’s moustache noted, and rightly so, that a journalist should lose her job for "misreporting, for misquoting, for fabricating, for plagiarizing, for systemic bias," not for an innocuous text barely mourning the passing of a man whose life was complex enough to warrant defense by numerous American journalists for his stance on women’s rights and his repudiation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Friedman continued:
"What signal are we sending young people? Trim your sails, be politically correct, don’t say anything that will get you flamed by one constituency or another. And if you ever want a job in government, national journalism or as president of Harvard, play it safe and don’t take any intellectual chances that might offend someone. In the age of Google, when everything you say is forever searchable, the future belongs to those who leave no footprints."
The Moustache’s words (whether or not he meant them in this way) suggest that political correctness is not just passé, it is detrimental to our society. If we hide behind good manners, pretending there is nothing odd or different or interesting about each other, we run the risk of vitriolic internal attrition that will wear away at the guts of our culture until it implodes, probably violently.
The next step is an active fight against political correctness, while keeping up the conscious fight against prejudice, racism and all things Gibsonian. The next step is not trusting people who have no dissenting opinions nor appreciation for the comedic. The next step, my American friends, is boarding the dyslexic bus.
While most late night television programming urinates carelessly near the electrical fence of ethics and good taste, late night programming on Fox News blatantly, sardonically shits directly in the ears of viewers before whipping its ass on their cotton blend sheets. The worst of all these shows is called "Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld." It’s described on Wikipedia as "Comedy/Satire/News parody" – problem is, it isn’t funny, satirical and calling it news parody is like calling the Ku Klux Klan civil rights parody.
Mercifully, "Red Eye" airs at 3am, which serves minimal viewers. However, the show still manages to reach an astounding 350,000 people each time it sullies the stratosphere en route to satellites – there are even those who Tivo the show, an egregious act that should be punished, in the words of Ignatius J. Reilly, with sever lashings.
Last night, beneath a haze of alcohol and various greasy substances that pain me today (well into the afternoon) I caught a good 10 minutes of the show as I flipped back and forth with a Rachel Maddow rerun. I remember nothing, not a word, of what was said on either show. Besides my alcohol-slicked retention, there is a reason for this.
A few years ago, the problem was that no one gave the news Murrow-style anymore; everyone editorialized, spun each story around and around, proved that every occurrence was simultaneously good, bad and irrelevant. Today that’s still prevalent, but we seem to have run into a new problem.
No one simply editorializes anymore. To get the news across today you must be outraged, indignant, beside yourself with disbelief at how abjectly stupid every single other person is, particularly those whose opinions run contrary to yours. Gutfeld, Maddow, Olbermann, Beck, O’Reilly. The only one not yelling at the rain is Larry King and that’s because a) he doesn’t know it’s raining and b) he’d bust a ventricle if his voice rose above mild bemusement.
I’m quite aware that most of the aforementioned shows are "entertainment" (those are heavy quotes), but they are not comedy and they are not scripted drama. Each show is certainly sanctioned in the personality of the host and that host’s ability to deliver news. Therefore, they might consider delivering the news in a way that allows an audience to actually comprehend their point, their words without overwhelming the point with indignation.
All I can think of while I stare at Greg Gutfeld is the increasingly deeper ravine between his squinty little eyes. I figure if he would lighten up a little, take a breath between paragraphs, the crease would clear up and I’d be able to understand why he thinks it’s humorous to use Sen. Robert Byrd for a joke the day he died.
As it stands, I have no idea what happened in the world yesterday because I was busy drinking and late night programming on Fox News is like the back page ads in a pornographic magazine – numbers for hookers, bargain blow jobs, grow your penis drugs – there is no way either leads to anything good.
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The Moustache’s column was on the firing of CNN senior editor of Middle East affairs, Octavia Nasr after she Tweeted her condolences for the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a Shiite spiritual leader involved in the founding of Hezbollah.