Edith Wharton’s theme song “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down,” LCD Soundsystem.
Dylan Klebold, age 17
Eric Harris, age 18
James Holmes, age 20
Adam Lanza, age 20
Dzohokhar Tsarnaev, age 19
Instead of arguing about immigration and muslim extremism, we should have a community discussion about what drives young males to murder innocent people, because there is two connections between these crimes and those connections are the killers’ age and gender.
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In one of the most anticipated plays of the season, Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy, Tom Hanks stars as Mike McAlary, a writer who worked his way to stardom at three New York tabloids from 1985 through his death on Christmas Day 1998 at the age of forty-one.
I worked with McAlary at New York Newsday, the setting for early scenes of Lucky Guy. Reviewers, publicists, and Ephron herself, before her death last June, portrayed the play as a love letter to the journalism of a bygone era. But beneath its nostalgic surface—the foul-mouthed newsroom repartee, wafting cigarette smoke, and late nights at the bar—the play poses serious moral questions about journalism and its place in the quest for celebrity.
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A.) This article is sad, amazing, and revlatory.
B.) Who can get me tickets to Lucky Guy when I get back to New York?
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My hard drive is steeped in shame, and none of it’s porn. All of it is work that was due a month ago, or six months ago, or a year ago. Some of it has become hopeless. Then there’s my life. I have carried a stamped, sealed, yet unmailed letter in my bag for weeks. I owe untold thousands of dollars and cannot open a bill. After failing my driving test for “reckless endangerment” at 17, I have not once tried to get a driver’s license.
A friend recently tried to console me by saying that I’ve failed at more things than most people have ever tried. Most people, I said, try more honestly. Most people do not owe so much to those who believe in them. That is another privilege we don’t discuss: The unrelenting luxury of high expectations, and with it, the chances to fail.
"Somedays, I Hate the Internet
Yesterday I went to a meeting for an Oxford club I belong to. I sat at a pub table with other club members, people I barely know. Midway through the meeting, the boy next to me said, “That Mitchell person was just awful.”
I knew I was that Mitchell person. Ever since they discovered I talked about my life online, students here have read my Twitter and writing; last semester at least seven strangers told me I was an asshole in the middle of a night club.
I leaned in next to the stranger and laughed. “I’m that Mitchell,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way. I just didn’t agree with what you said.”
His comment didn’t hurt my feelings. It just annoyed me. Most the Oxford students who have called me an asshole in a comments section or at a bar don’t know me. I know I did this to myself. I know I wrote about my life on the internet. I know I’m one of those weirdos who copes with life by sharing my life with strangers. I know I’m not even internet famous, and Oxford is just a small town. I just wish Oxford students would have some internet comprehension skills and realize the difference between someone on the internet and someone in real life. I just wish they’d see me as another student.
(P.S. I should be asleep right now, but I can’t stop watching the news. I want to stop (it’s become immoral reality television serving no societal purpose; half the news is wrong), but I can’t look away. I’m an avid news digester, and I’m part of the problem.)
Lessons of the Week
1.) Twitter and the New York Post are entertainment, not news sources. Anyone who reads either for news is an idiot.
2.) No matter what I write, someone will always disagree and/or hate what I write.
3.) Never read the comments.
4.) Commenters are hating on their idea of the author and/or what they think the article says about the reading. They rarely are hating on the quality of the writing.
5.) America is the most violent country in the Western world.
6.) Canada has tons of guns, too; they just don’t shoot each other.
7.) Something within our culture (I don’t know what) promotes violence.
8.) But gun control would make us less violent.
9.) Living in a box of an apartment that has shitty ac for $800-$1500 a month isn’t glamorous. It’s fucking retarded, and anyone who thinks it’s glamorous is someone who bases his or her views on life on superficial shit they learned from Rent.
10.) There is no point in living in New York after graduation. I could live in Jersey City for half the price, use the money I save to open a retirement account, and still benefit from the city’s opportunities.
Wake up America
The two icons of my Catholic elementary school years.
(Source: enelojodelculo, via nickandthecandlestick)
(Image source: http://woodstockwardrobe.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/almost-famous.jpeg)
I have watched Almost Famous once a year since the third grade. As a kid, I didn’t relate to William and Penny; I loved the movie for it’s glamour. Not the glamour of rock stardom, of course, but the glamorous act of falling in love with people and then stabbing them in the name of the truth—the unglamorous act of writing.
Even back at Nativity Catholic Elementary School I obsessed over pop culture figures (Walt Disney, Madonna, Kate Hudson) and the words written about them (children’s biographies and my mother’s People Magazine). Back then, to me, William’s life looked amazing; however, one year after I started freelancing, his life is painfully relatable.
Just because I love the dude I fucked last weekend and “some silly piece of music,” as Pelexia describes Stillwater, doesn’t mean my subject will love what I write about them. If I write honestly, they should probably hate me and my writing. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad I misinterpreted Crowe’s message—I love writing. I just have to suffer the consequence of pissing off my friends and idols. And that sucks.
Should We Panic About the Deadly Strain of Meningitis Hitting the Gay Community?
Last December, my friend Michael stopped me before we left his apartment in Paris. He was moving back to Brooklyn the following week and had received an urgent message from his friend who lived there: some gay men had died from a new strain of meningitis, a nasty bug that invades your brain and spinal cord and causes headaches, neck stiffness, bouts of vomiting, and, occasionally, death. In San Francisco, the government waswarning gay men to get vaccinated if they planned to travel to New York City, especially Brooklyn.
We weren’t too worried—this wasn’t the 80s, when the authorities turned a blind eye to the AIDS epidemic and dismissed it as a “gay disease.” If the New York City Department of Health knew there was a potentially deadly plague sweeping the city, they’d surely shoot the bugger in the butt before it grew into a gay-killing monster.
Months later, the monster is still alive. Four more men have fallen ill in New York City, bringing the number of infections to 22 and death toll to seven since 2010, and similar cases have appeared in West Hollywood, California. Just last Saturday, Brett Shaad, a 33-year-old lawyer, died of meningitis after slipping into a coma—he’s one of 13 men in LA who’ve been killed by the disease in the past 15 months. (It’s unknown how many of these men were gay.)
My latest for VICE.com
Movies That Have Made Me Cry
1.) It’s a Wonderful Life 2.) Footloose 3.) The Little Mermaid 4.) Beauty and the Beast 5.) Almost Famous 6.) Bowling for Columbine
