Total Eclipse of the Blog

I interviewed Alexis Neiers this weekend about sobriety, her...

Mon, 20 May 2013 07:05:51 -0400

I interviewed Alexis Neiers this weekend about sobriety, her plans to become the next Dr. Drew, and what she thinks about Emma Watson’s new movie about her and Nancy Jo Sales’s new book. Stay tuned.

Teenagers Making Out at a Holocaust Memorial

Sat, 18 May 2013 09:10:28 -0400

Midway through my trip to Berlin, I walked to the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe with my friend Amber*. She said the memorial was a maze designed to make visitors temporarily loose their friends, as Holocaust victims lost their friends and family forever. But to me the memorial just looked like rows of walls. Short walls, tall walls, medium walls; walls, walls, walls. I didn’t experience the architect’s vision till I slipped down an icy hill.

I stood up, and I slipped and fell again. I stood up, and Amber was gone. I felt anxious.“Help! Help!” someone screamed in the distance.

Is Amber hurt? Wait. Am I hallucinating? Am I traveling through time? I thought. Was the architect that good?

I heard the smash of a skull—or is it a bullet? I wondered—against a wall.

I ran after the noise, around the corner, where a teenage boy held a girl against the memorial’s grey wall. He shoved a snowball in her mouth. She leaned her cheek against the wall, to let her mouth bleed or because all those feminist columnists were right and young girls are more submissive now because porn has infiltrated our culture.

Nope. She just leaned her cheeck against the wall because she was teasing her dick thang; she punched the boy in the face, listened to him scream, slapped him on the face—and then sucked his lips for what felt like eternity but quickly ended when someone threw a snowball at both the girl and her dick thang’s faces.

I found the scene offensive—we were at a bloody fucking Holocaust memorial—but also relieving. I hadn’t traveled back to the Holocaust. The architect wasn’t that fucking good. Teenagers had simply done what teenagers do to every public space: They had turned the memorial into their sex den.

And that was beautiful. The wonderful thing about teenagers—the thing I envy about teenagers now that I’m no longer a teenager—is they rely on intuition. They give fuck-all about social morale. And that’s why this shouldn’t have been shocking, but it still was. I’m twenty-one now, and I had simply spent so much time visiting museums and monuments—seeing dead people’s houses, war torn churches, and graveyards that stored famous dude’s corpses—I forgot how today’s world works. I mistook Europe for a continent that’s nothing more than the place where a bunch of important historical shit once happened—which it is. But it’s also a contemporary society where the real world happens.

*Name changed to protect my friend’s identity.

"I’m a religious guy looking for another guy into God."

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:34:04 -0400

“I’m a religious guy looking for another guy into God.”

- Actual Grindr profile description.

I have been watching I Love Lucy and Roseanne in the last few...

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:21:37 -0400

I have been watching I Love Lucy and Roseanne in the last few month. Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is their successor, and I mean that in a good way.

bennettmadison: I’ve known Emily Gould since we were twelve. In...

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:19:20 -0400

bennettmadison:

I’ve known Emily Gould since we were twelve. In those days, she bore a striking resemblance to the movie version of Hermione Granger. We were only loosely friends at first— she disinvited me from her 7th grade YELLOW SUBMARINE viewing party because her mom said she could only have so many people and Emily had just developed a new crush, meaning that a boy (me) had to be cut from the list. I was only mildly annoyed; I felt that at least she had a good reason.

The summer after that, even though we were only warmish acquaintances, Emily surprised me by calling me on the phone just to chat. I’m pretty sure the reason for this is that she was going down the list of names in the school directory, calling everyone, and I was the first person who picked up. Most people were out of town. We had a long and probably very bitchy conversation and after that we were actual friends.

It was the year Kurt Cobain died, so she wore lots of baby-doll dresses. I was always trying to affect a grunge look, which usually ended up coming off less Evan Dando and more Gay Pigpen.

As a hobby, Emily was making a comprehensive list of all the pop songs in the world that had the word love in the title. This was before the internet, you understand; you couldn’t just Google it. I don’t think she ever made it to the end of the list, but she did get pretty far.

In high school, Emily started a proto-blog called The Notebook. By this point the internet had finally come along but there were definitely no such things as blogs. The Notebook was an actual notebook. The way it worked was that Emily would write down her thoughts and pass it around during class and everyone else would add their comments. Eventually this got us all in big trouble, but in an uncharacteristic act of largesse, the school administration at least let her keep the book. She still has it and it’s always shocking to look at it and see how smart and funny and articulate she was even then, not to mention what idiots the rest of us all were in comparison.

It’s sad that we never took gym together, because gym is where high school really happened. But Emily was very committed to her Artistic Movement class and there was no way I was giving up Trampoline, so that was that. We had most of our other classes together anyway.

She was always trying to find me a boyfriend. When she masterminded a blind date between me and her Hebrew School classmate Dan Fishback, she had to tag along with us to White Flint Mall (which no longer exists) because we didn’t have cars and Dan and I didn’t want to try to explain to our parents where we were going. Emily was our cover.

Later she arranged a match between me and a friend of a friend from swim team. This time we went on a date by ourselves. We took the Metro to see BEAUTIFUL THING at a movie theater in Dupont Circle that no longer exists and then went to Burger King because we were teenage boys and thought Burger King was a great restaurant. Needless to say, this wasn’t much of a love connection. Emily has never had a great feel for the vagaries of homosexual chemistry, but I will always be grateful that she tried.

The first time I got drunk, it was with Emily. Her parents were out of town and she served a beverage she called Long Island Iced Tea. Really it was just vodka and Country Time tea mix. I know it sounds toxic, but I think we were basically just pretending to be drunk.

When Emily found herself embroiled in all sorts of romantic drama a few months before the prom, we resolved to go together. I would have preferred to bring a dude, but the White House travel staffer I was semi-seeing at the time would not have been an appropriate choice. I helped Emily pick out her prom dress at the Betsey Johnson store in Georgetown, which no longer exists. She wrote an article about it for the school newspaper.

On the way to the dance, we got in a huge fight over the issue of where to park. (We had foolishly judged ourselves too cool to take a limousine with the rest of our friends, and so we were in my dad’s Honda Civic.) On top of that controversy, Emily’s love life was still very complicated and she had other boys to think about.

So she ditched me for the last dance in favor of one of her various boyfriends or ex-boyfriends; I can’t remember who exactly. I stood in the corner alone feeling sad. Luckily, another friend was in the bathroom holding a puking girl’s hair and her date— this really hot swimmer named David— was alone too. He asked me to dance. I said no because I was too flustered by the whole situation, which I still regret. Instead, we ended up just standing there watching everyone else and feeling a sense of strange fraternity. It was nice. Emily and I made up later that night.

Emily went to college in Ohio and I went to school in the suburbs of New York, but after a couple years she got bored of the country and transferred to the New School. She shared a tiny apartment in the East Village on the Hell’s Angels block with a performance artist who had also been a middle school classmate and a girl who played pool and loved iceberg lettuce. The apartment was very glamorous and always filled with smoke. Emily and her roommates had a hobby making miniature food out of Sculpey; they briefly got the notion to turn this into a business but all the boutiques to which they tried to sell their wares already had all the doll food they needed.

One night I smoked this really crazy weed and thought I might have to check myself into a mental institution. My roommate at the time, the artist Lee Relvas, cradled me in her arms on a mattress on the floor and fed me pretzels and water until I fell asleep. The next day I was still feeling pretty out of my mind so I took the Metro-North to Emily’s place in the city. She made me lasagna and I finally felt better. That apartment no longer exists; the building was torn down and replaced by a fancy condo.

After college (and a brief stint living with my parents), I moved in with Emily in Greenpoint. I got dumped by my boyfriend of several years and was trying to write my first book and pretty much became a monster. Emily was working her first 9 to 5 job and wasn’t at her best either. The highlight of this period is that I taught Emily how to blog. But there wasn’t much for her to learn— The Notebook had been good preparation— and she quickly surpassed me in this department.

There were some other nice moments in the year or so when we were living together, many of which Emily covered in her collection of essays, AND THE HEART SAYS WHATEVER. But overall the whole thing was sort of a disaster and it was extremely kind of her to leave the most damning stories of my bad behavior and our huge fights out of the book.

I moved out and we didn’t really speak to each other for a long time, but it didn’t last. Years later, when I broke up with yet another boyfriend and had no apartment, no money and no prospects, Emily let me crash with her in her new place for weeks at a time. I was miserable, but the apartment was sunny, plus I got to hang out with Raffles, her cat who had also once been mine.

That summer her family took me along to the beach with them. Emily’s parents gave me relationship advice. Her father seemed concerned when I confessed that I’d gotten into a phase of listening to Astral Weeks on repeat while I sobbed every night. I was having a hard time finishing the novel I was working on, which would become SEPTEMBER GIRLS, but I got huge chunks of it done on that vacation, sitting on the balcony next to Emily as she wrote her own book. The next year I went on another vacation with the Goulds and wrote some more. Eventually I was done.

Emily’s first novel, FRIENDSHIP, will be published next year by FSG. She also co-owns the feminist e-bookstore EMILY BOOKS. (You should become a subscriber.) September Girls comes out next week. Emily and I will be talking about it at McNally Jackson on Tuesday, May 28th. I’m hoping she’ll read a little from Friendship too, even though it won’t be out for awhile.

I feel incredibly lucky that I get to do this with someone I’ve known and loved for so long and that we’ve both (sort of) accomplished what we set out to. I left a lot of things out of this.

I probably should have put this part at the top, considering it was originally the point:

Bennett Madison in conversation with Emily Gould

Tuesday, May 28th, 7pm

McNally Jackson 52 Prince Street, NYC

I really hope you come.

THIS IS THE BEST PERSONAL ESSAY ABOUT THE STRAIGHT-GIRL-GAY-GUY-BEST-FRIENDSHIP/FAG-AND-HAG-DYNAMIC/WHATEVER-YOU-WANT-TO-CALL-IT I HAVE EVER READ. READ THIS. READ THIS. READ THIS.

My Livejournal Sucks: Miami

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:55:01 -0400

My Livejournal Sucks: Miami:

mylivejournalsucks:

I never meant to go to Miami. As a vacation destination, it never interested me much. It seemed like Las Vegas on an island which, quite frankly, sounds disgusting. But an opportunity presented itself when one of my close friends told me that she was going to be in Fort Lauderdale visiting…

Throw some drugged out parents and child abuse in here and you have a vivid description of the first eighteen years of my life, as told by Ryan O’Connell.

shehashadit: Kweens!!!!! It’s moments like this when you just...

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:53:40 -0400

shehashadit:

Kweens!!!!! It’s moments like this when you just KNOWWW, this GRINDR hookup isn’t going to end well!!! No matter how cute this apparent Dom.Masc.Top is, guuurrrllll something is off!!!! HE COULD KILL YOU!!! Throw your iPhone away, run home, put on some Yolanda Adams and thank the Lordt you weren’t that stupid!!! Halleloo!!!! #shehashadit #dontgointhere #grindr #deviltop #needybottom #saintspray #hotmess #living #notdying #kween (at She Has Had It)

LOL LOL LOL

"The more I wrote, the more I understood the choices I made, and that was the real jackpot."

Mon, 13 May 2013 17:25:55 -0400

“The more I wrote, the more I understood the choices I made, and that was the real jackpot.”

- Roseanne Barr as Roseanne Conner, “Into That Good Night (Part 2),” Roseanne, 1997.

"Tears are not common."

Mon, 13 May 2013 09:38:27 -0400

“Tears are not common.”

- Mary Maclane.

Roseanne!

Sun, 12 May 2013 19:15:28 -0400

Roseanne!

A Very Lohan Mother’s Day Special

Sun, 12 May 2013 14:12:33 -0400

A Very Lohan Mother’s Day Special

rookiemag: Don’t Blink Video games that require your full...

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:15:31 -0400

rookiemag:

Don’t Blink

Video games that require your full attention.

Hey y’all, I’m on ROOKIE today talking about MORTAL KOMBAT and BOYZZZZ!

"It wasn’t until I started reading and found books they wouldn’t let us read in school that I..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 09:42:51 -0400

“It wasn’t until I started reading and found books they wouldn’t let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.”

- John Waters (via perfect)

The white pants. The floral shirt. The Heat. The middle finger....

Thu, 09 May 2013 09:37:34 -0400

The white pants. The floral shirt. The Heat. The middle finger. This women is Miami incarnate. Sucks to be Noah!

Guys, I forgot home much I love Roseanne, and now I’m...

Wed, 08 May 2013 15:33:18 -0400

Guys, I forgot home much I love Roseanne, and now I’m really homesick for Hollywood, Fl white trash.

ATTENTION NEW YORK PEOPLE

Wed, 08 May 2013 12:05:00 -0400

Does anyone want to see Courtney Love with me June 27th?!?! She’s playing in Westchester. My brother has a car in Brooklyn. I can drive us! Someone come with meh!

BRITTICISMS: Something about how I have been called “white” because I am a writer....

Wed, 08 May 2013 12:02:00 -0400

BRITTICISMS: Something about how I have been called “white” because I am a writer....:

britticisms:

Something about how I have been called “white” because I am a writer. Something about how I have been called “white” because of what I write about, because I write about race in weird ways and because I will also not write about race at all. There is a photo of me attached to my stories. This does…

In a single paragraph, Brittany Julious can say more than most writers say in 3,000 words. If you’re not following her blog or reading her freelance stuff, you are missing out. READ HER WRITING. READ HER WRITING. READ HER WRITING.

2000, New York, New York. Me age eight with my Aunt Mubby, who...

Tue, 07 May 2013 19:01:35 -0400

2000, New York, New York. Me age eight with my Aunt Mubby, who designed book covers and lived in a tiny apartment in the East Village with three girls at the time, at Mars 2012, a Mars themed restaurant. I’m wearing blue tinted glasses, because my mom believed I had “Irlen Syndrome,” a made up learning disability some quack told her I had. The glasses are a long semi-traumatic story, but we still look fabulous!

Notes on Returning to the Interweb

Fri, 03 May 2013 19:24:21 -0400

I took a 48 hour break from the internet. I went with other students to this resort on the Isle of White for a night. When I returned tonight, I was quickly reminded why I hate and love the internet. On the negative side of the spectrum someone tweeted me asking me to jump off a bridge. But on the plus side:

1.) A high school friend messaged me to tell me one of our friends sprained her ankle while skinny dipping.

2.) I used tips from Lean In, and they worked!

3.) I found a place interested in the longish-read I’m working on.

4.) An invitation ignited some passive aggressive, campy text message sparring with someone I have a love/hate friendship with (if you want to call it a friendship).

5.) I read some great articles about Amanda Bynes, Lindsay Lohan’s apparent heir.

When the internet’s bad, she’s bad. She’s life at an extreme level, where good is great and bad is awful, but her greatness makes all the trolling and hate worth while. When she’s great, she’s better than IRL.

"Some people never get beyond the stupid part, but you can see the real me inside, and I’m..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 16:58:22 -0400

“Some people never get beyond the stupid part, but you can see the real me inside, and I’m satisfied. Oh no! Even though the guys are crazy, even though the stars are blind, if you show me real love baby, I’ll show you mine.”

- Paris Hilton, 2006. I just returned from my forty-eight hour internet vacation. I’m exhausted from traveling and spending my Friday night listening to Paris while reading Elizabeth Wurtzel, which is as American as listening to Bruce Springsteen while eating McDonalds chicken nuggets.