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California Love Story

2012-02-08T20:18:43Z

by Alexander Borinsky

Image: Kris Perry and Sandy Stier walk into a federal courthouse before closing arguments in the United States District Court proceedings challenging Proposition 8 in San Francisco, Wednesday, June 16, 2010, (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu).

In November 2008, by a narrow margin, the voters of California passed the California Marriage Protection Act, popularly known as Prop 8. The law limited the state's recognition of marriage to heterosexual couples. Six months later, two couples—Kristen Perry and Sandra Stier, and Jeffrey Zarrillo and Paul Katami—decided to challenge the law by applying for marriage licenses. Both were turned down. So the couples sued the state of California and its legal avatar, then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, arguing that denying homosexuals the ability to marry violated their constitutional rights.

In the resulting trial, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, which took place in the summer of 2010, witnesses were called to testify on a wide range of topics. Far from arguing narrow legal points, the lawyers for each side posed empirical questions about the nature of homosexuality, and considered angles economic, historical, and psychological. The Perry lawyers in particular seemed intent on rewriting the entire mythology of contemporary gay life: No more drooling fags grabbing each others' crotches in bathroom stalls; no more swaggering dykes revving their Harleys and pawing at cherry-cheeked girls in petticoats; no more melancholy boys with mirrors trying on mascara and their mothers' summer dresses. The plaintiffs' witnesses introduced the court to a New Gay: hardworking, wholesome, and unambiguously gendered; adorably installed in a long-term relationship; too busy volunteering at church and attending children's soccer games to have time for deviant behavior.

In the muggy last days of that June, while the trial was ending, I was busy wearing out the kindness of a boyfriend. When the boyfriend said affectionate things, I smiled and changed the subject. On Saturday mornings I'd slip out of his bed by nine thirty; on Saturday nights I'd return to my own bed and text him to say I was too tired to make the long subway trek back to his.

Before drifting off to sleep, I would read articles about the trial. One strategy of the prosecution was to let the plaintiffs themselves—their personalities, their histories—make a fresh case for the ability of homosexuals to form successful unions. The two halves of the male couple, Zarrillo and Katami, were affable and settled. Zarrillo had grown up in suburban New Jersey and attended the local high school. He'd worked his way up into the higher management of a movie theater chain. Katami was a fitness instructor and sold his workout videos online. In the transcripts, the two came across as sensitive and comfortably male. They wanted a family, they wanted children, but "Marriage first," they said. There was an idealistic boyishness about them. They were young.

Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, the lesbian half of the plaintiff quartet, were similarly appealing, and even more family-oriented: they had been together for ten years and were the parents of four children. Perry directed a government agency that provided "services and support" to families with kids under 5. Stier was a farm girl from Iowa who worked in health care. She spent twelve years with an unsupportive, alcoholic husband before meeting Perry and falling in love. When asked how she ended up marrying a man she would later realize she never loved, Stier explained to the court that her mother's advice about marriage had been unsentimental: "It's hard work." "And in my family," Perry added, "that seemed very true." According to the transcript, the joke went over well.

During questioning, each woman mentioned her age several times, unprompted. Statements like "I'm 47," and "I'm a 45-year-old woman," were a way to quiet skeptics and reassure uneasy listeners. Each of the women was too far along in life to change, and neither was so young as to seem dauntingly sexual. As with Zarrillo and Katami, their sexuality had to be situated just right relative to their gender: Zarrillo and Katami were the sensitive boys; Perry and Stier were the comfortable mothers.

Anti-gay discrimination was real, the plaintiffs said, but it hadn't twisted them into antisocial fiends. During the trial, Zarrillo, Katami, Perry, and Stier came across as Rosa Parkses, tired after long days at honest jobs. Most of their stories of discrimination centered on everyday awkwardness. A hotel clerk looked at Zarrillo and Katami funny andasked whether they were sure they wanted one bed, not two. A man on an airplane asked Perry whether the seat next to her was saved. Perry told him yes—for her partner. The man decided that Perry had an undue attachment to a business colleague. "Can you please move that so I can sit here?" he testily insisted. Mostly, the plaintiffs were tired of having to explain that, yes, they were in love with another man, another woman. Perry was exhausted, she said, from having to "come out every day"—"at work, at home, at PTA, at music, at soccer."

To prove a history of discrimination, the plaintiffs' lawyers might have anthologized the suicide notes of gay adolescents. They might have pointed to American evangelicals' efforts to push a death-penalty-forhomosexuals bill through the Ugandan parliament. They might have discussed the (at best) indifference and (at worst) calumny that met a generation of gay men in the 1980s and early 1990s when AIDS hit and a vast number of those men were either dying or watching their loved ones die. But the mildness of the plaintiffs' stories—their non-extremity—was precisely the point. The marrying type of homosexual, they wanted to show, lived a calm, happy domestic life; all he or she lacked was legal recognition of what he or she already had. The expert witnesses, not the plaintiffs themselves, were the ones who testified about the extremity and reality of anti-gay discrimination.

In the end, Judge Vaughn Walker found Proposition 8 unconstitutional. It violated the rights of gay Californians under both the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Walker asserted as a finding of fact that homosexuality is a "distinguishing characteristic . . . fundamental to a person's identity," like race or gender. He also asserted that same-sex couples are no different from opposite-sex couples—at least not in "the characteristics relevant to the ability to form successful marital unions." The decision was met with tears of celebration. Judge Walker had said from the bench of the Northern District Court of California what any reasonable person (including, as it happens, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had come out against Prop 8 back in 2008) might have concluded: gays are decent people; gays fall in love. They ought to be able to marry.

Of course I felt the stomach-flop of joy at Walker's decision. But in bed alone, surrounded by my books, my clothes, and a few postcards from friends, I wondered whether my habit of sleeping with men was indeed one of my distinguishing characteristics. More distinguishing, say, than my awkwardness around attractive women, my ignorance about sports, or my shameful weakness for Taylor Swift. I also wondered how many of these characteristics could prove irrelevant if it ever came time to form a "successful union."

+ + +

During a certain stretch of high school I spent a lot of time with middle-aged gays. In the evening, we would gather in a cluttered rehearsal room above one of our hometown's beloved community theaters. This was tenth grade. I was playing a prepubescent Australian kid named Colin. Colin learns the meaning of love and family through his friendship with a gay man whose partner is dying of AIDS. I don't know how many lessons I learned about love and family, but I learned a lot about Kylie Minogue. I felt the same way about this crowd of middle-aged actors as I might have felt about a group of 15-year-old teammates (had I been on a team). It was a noisy, tender fellowship. Easy and electric. Maybe there was a mild charge of sexiness to it, but I wouldn't have known that at the time.

They were nice to me. I loved being around grownups who would smile so warmly when I smiled, who would make jokes that I might or might not understand, who could be silly and take my own silliness seriously. Grownups who were not teachers, parents, uncles, or aunts. I couldn't quite manage conversation around my high school lunch table, but I felt comfortable in that rehearsal room, laughing at the banter of these men who seemed to be such good friends, who lived doors down from each other, and who were always putting on shows.

One of these men played my father. He was bald, with impish ears and a round, fleshy head. He had a ready smile and a soft, pinched, wavering voice. The play ended with a father–son reunion, and because of the way we'd staged the scene, the man held his arms around me for a long time. It wasn't the kind of hug I got from relatives, and it wasn't like the hug I imagined I might get from a girlfriend. His round belly nestled into my back. And I liked it. He seemed disconnected from the social roles (parent, teacher) that had (for me) defined the adults I'd known until then. He didn't seem to have a boyfriend or a husband, but he seemed too sweet to be sinister or sad. Feeling his arms around me and his belly against my back didn't mean anything. It was just nice.

I might interpret the giddy hum of fellowship I felt for the men in the upstairs rehearsal room in a couple of ways. Maybe I liked thembecause I liked the idea of getting along with gays. I could feel politically advanced when I made a joke and they laughed. Or maybe I liked them because it was a relief to feel relaxed in a big group of guys. Guys were usually too loud, too aggressive. Their interactions were all about mockery, about feint and challenge. It was easy to be with these gentler, smiling men.

Informal, imperfect relationships between young gays and old gays have long provided a slapdash, vital, and dignifying—if sometimes confusing—education. Did the men in the rehearsal room, the belly in the back, make me gay? Probably not. But I remember feeling a pang when I got back into my dad's car at the end of rehearsal. A sad pang, an anarchic pang—the chest-twinge of having a secret from your dad when you can't quite pin the secret down.

+ + +

I came out during my freshman year of college—first, by telling my girlfriend of two years. She cried, and then I cried, and then I walked her to the train station. Now that I was officially a homosexual, I searched for a way to mark the transition. What felt different? I frisked my thoughts for homoerotic reverie. I eyed guys coming out of the library and going into the gym and forced myself to wonder which I might most like to sleep with. I forced myself to wonder how the mechanics of that "sleeping" might work. I tried swishing my behind as I walked to the dining hall—did sashaying feel like liberation? Or affectation? I spoke aloud to myself to check if I was sibilating my s's. I flipped noncommittally through that month's Out (stored clandestinely in the bottom of a desk drawer), and inspired by its cover went to the Salvation Army to try on button-down shirts a size smaller than usual. I lingered in front of bulletin board postings for the campus LGBTQ organization, and, with warmth in my chest, silently affirmed that here I was, lingering in front of an LGBTQ bulletin-board posting. Yes. They meet Thursdays at 9 PM on Crown Street. Yes.

I never went.

If being gay was strange at first, it was largely because I had no one to be gay with. Then I started hanging out with a guy in my philosophy class. We went to a Holocaust movie, which was a dumb idea for a first date, but then we made out, which was a good way to end a second. An early romantic moment involved sneaking into a construction site; we climbed a filthy scaffolding tower and gazed out over the city's twinkling skyline. Nights when I slept alone, I buried my nose in the sheets, searching for his smell. "I miss you like England misses its Empire," he told me, our first summer apart. "Like everyone misses the dodo." Mutual friends told us we both seemed so relaxed, so ourselves, when we were together. I could not imagine being happier. The self that had been a quiet, closeted bud was growing into a lush, garrulous, comfortable flower. Here was gayness—simple and sweet.

Then things soured. By Easter, the philosopher and I had stopped talking, and I was in another country, kissing strangers on dance floors.

+ + +

Judge Vaughn Walker was a Republican. Ronald Reagan first nominated him for a federal judgeship in 1987, but Nancy Pelosi and others, who argued, among other things, that Walker was anti-gay, defeated the nomination. George Bush, Sr. renominated him in 1989, and this time Walker was confirmed. In February 2011, six months after his ruling in Perry, Walker retired, and two months later he stated publicly for the first time what many in San Francisco had known for over a decade: he was gay. The Prop 8 proponents promptly submitted a motion urging that Walker's decision be vacated. A homosexual with a partner of ten years was, they claimed, too interested in the outcome of the case to rule impartially. In June, the motion was denied. "The presumption that Judge Walker, by virtue of being in a same-sex relationship, had a desire to be married that rendered him incapable of making an impartial decision," wrote Judge James Ware, Walker's replacement, "is as warrantless as the presumption that a female judge is incapable of being impartial in a case in which women seek legal relief." It was as if Perry, et alia, had won all over again.

The thing was, gay couples still couldn't get married. Walker's ruling notwithstanding, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals told California to hold off performing same-sex marriages until it was clear that these marriages wouldn't need to be invalidated—again. Prop 8 supporters are still hoping to appeal Walker's original decision, but the appeal is stuck in limbo because of technicalities of standing: an issue, tellingly, of who has a right to speak on whose behalf. Though Perry, Stier, Zarrillo, and Katami effortlessly became the de facto spokespeople of homosexuals nationwide, the parties who paid the opposing lawyers in Perry v. Schwarzenegger can't seem to legitimize their claim to speak on behalf of state voters, since now-Governor Jerry Brown has joined his predecessor in refusing to stand behind Prop 8.

Though the legal mechanisms for enforcing Walker's ruling have stalled, the ruling and others like it have taken effect culturally. The makeover worked. In December, Congress repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell. In February, President Obama told the Justice Department to stop defending Clinton's Defense of Marriage Act, which bars federal regulation of same-sex marriage. The conservative establishment mostly shrugged. In March, a poll claimed that 53 percent of Americans now support gay marriage. And this June, New York went the way of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Washington DC in deciding to marry same-sex couples. It would seem that gays are freer now than they ever have been, and stand to become even more free. "Race restrictions on marital partners were once common in most states," Judge Walker wrote in his ruling, "but are now seen as archaic, shameful or even bizarre." It is becoming clear that someday the same will be said about restrictions on gay marriage.

Laws are supposed to protect certain individual freedoms, regardless of how individuals use those freedoms, and regardless of what a majority says is the decent, safe, or desirable thing to do. Laws aren't supposed to say anything about the character, culture, or lifestyles of the people whose rights the laws protect. Laws aren't supposed to tell stories. In a push to change the law, however, the crusaders in the Perry trial turned their case into, in part, an exercise in storytelling. With the arc of history bending their way, the Perry crusaders—like gay marriage advocates across the country—have started to reshape the stories that we tell ourselves about gay life in America. It would be a shame if the gay-marriage debate led to a narrower view of that life's history and possibilities, rather than a broader one. It's worth chiming in with what the crusaders thought prudent to leave out.

+ + +

The plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger called social psychologist Letitia Anne Peplau to testify about the similarities between gay couples and straight couples. She offered evidence that, when it comes to standard measures of love, commitment, and feelings of closeness, gay couples are, on average, indistinguishable from straight couples. She offered evidence that, when it comes to factors predicting the stability of a relationship, gay couples are, again, comparable to straight couples. She even offered evidence that, when it comes to arguments, gay couples and straight couples argue about the same things, and about as frequently.

During cross-examination, the defendants' lawyers focused on the differences. They cited some striking statistics about gay male promiscuity. Peplau herself had reviewed one study in which 71 percent of lesbians, 85 percent of married straight women, and 75 percent of married straight men reported that they believed it was important to be sexually monogamous. Only 36 percent of gay men felt the same way. Two-thirds of gay men, it seemed, didn't agree with marriage's most basic tenet.[1]

Peplau pointed out that forswearing monogamy doesn't make you an adulterer. Some couples might allow each other to see separate sexual partners on the side (or in the middle, or on top, or underneath). A few questions later, though, the defense lawyers got Peplau to acknowledge another unseemly data point, from a different study: among gay men in self-described "closed relationships" lasting longer than three years, the number who had refrained from engaging "in sex with at least one person other than their primary partner" was zero. Peplau hastened to note that the study looked at gay men in Los Angeles in the late '70s and early '80s—before AIDS—and didn't reflect the proclivities of gay men in Los Angeles, or anywhere, in the 2000s.

Peplau's point was that the apparent correlation between promiscuity and homosexuality was conditional. If gays had historically been driven to seek multiple sexual partners, this had more to do with a hostile cultural milieu than with homosexuality itself. Being gay had no deep or necessary connection to being promiscuous.

I don't know what constituted the deep or necessary parts of my self around the time things with the philosopher turned rotten. I do know that my promiscuity served a purpose. Abandoning myself to alcohol and flirtation felt like a salvific, if reckless, kind of machismo. Uncommitted sexual encounters meant self-reliance. I vividly remember leaving the house of a waifish, doe-eyed dancer from Devon who grinned and giggled and wore a ripped army jacket. It was around four thirty in the morning. The sex had been terrible, but outside was a lovely, warmish night. As I waited for the night bus I felt disappointed, embarrassed, and a little frightened. I also felt brave, dangerous, and grown. If picking this guy up earned me my gay cojones, dumping him in the middle of the night turned them to tempered steel. I was playing a role, much like the actors and activists who, during the Perry trial, reenacted courtroom scenes and posted them on the internet. A little broken-hearted and a bunch humiliated over the end of my love story with the philosopher, I reached for a long, cold draft of manly stoicism. Here was a take on homosexuality in the grand American tradition of lonesome masculinity: John Wayne wiggling his hips to Journey somewhere in London's Soho. It was good to be John Wayne. John Wayne didn't need an LGBTQ campus group. John Wayne wasn't a sissy.

The urge to prove that I could stand on my own two manly legs came, in part, from the language of helplessness that pervades most messages of gay acceptance: "It's okay that you're gay, because you were just born that way. It's no one's fault." Binging and fucking made my gayness into, yes, a "lifestyle" choice—not just a hormonal tic I couldn't help. I was a person making choices, not a sexuality unfolding itself.

At the same time, as Peplau's statistics indicate, my behavior was not exactly unique. Were the majority of promiscuous gay men doing the same thing I was? Trying, I don't know, to own their selfhoods? Or whatever?

Good postmodernists schooled in the gender studies tradition are right to point out that gender is a construct. (If males from frat house to White House, myself included, would let go of the desire to come off as manly, we'd avoid a lot of heartbreak and collateral damage. We'd also look less stupid.) But the mechanics of sex are different for men and women. In sex between men, there's a top and a bottom, roles popularly (if politically incorrectly) associated with male and female. From the meager evidence available, it's not clear whether most gay men tend to "specialize" in one position or the other, or whether partners tend to take turns. In either case, though, the working out of tophood and bottomhood leaves an emotional imprint. It shapes how gay relationships coalesce, and it shapes how communities organize themselves around those relationships.

If, for reasons biological or otherwise, the vast majority of gay men prefer to be tops—or if, as some believe, the vast majority prefer to be (embarrassed) bottoms—then gay communities have good reason for giving up on universal monogamy. Absent any evolutionary motive, there's no real reason why the distribution of tops, bottoms, and "versatiles" should be even. Where would heterosexual marriage be if the world population suddenly skewed 70 percent female and 30 percent male? Straights and, by some accounts, lesbians can pair off; to whatever extent sex preferences are lopsided among gay men, the banal calculus of libidinal mechanics might be driving those men to polyamory.

The fact is that gays haven't always paired off into happy couples. There have long been places where it was messier than that. Even in the 1980s—an era of homosexual mortality that gay-marriage supporters pay homage to but don't want to talk about—a surprisingly interconnected group of men were fucking and falling in love and arguing and sleeping in each others' arms and making art and going to work in suits and cooking meals together and reading Proust, or Baldwin, and doing drugs and going to church and dying. They improvised a network of connections erotic, emotional, familial, or what have you. A web of friends, old friends, once-friends, mentors, surrogates, lovers, almost lovers, ex-lovers, lost souls, loose cannons, patrons, pickups, dropouts, healers, strippers, gods; all contributing to a social fabric—call it tulle, or cashmere—in which a clear distinction between love and friendship, eroticism and warmth, loving and fucking, couldn't quite exist. Versions of that fabric existed long before AIDS, before Stonewall, and versions exist today.

Back in 1999, queer theorist Michael Warner wrote that gays lack "the institutions for common memory and generational transmission around which straight culture is built. . . . And since the most painfully instructed generation has been decimated by death, the queer culture of the present faces more than the usual shortfall of memory." I'd hardly propose that we use the legal record as a makeshift repository of collective queer memory. But I'd hope that a gay community trying to remake the legal record wouldn't set aside that memory, either.

I think of a clearing on a ridge in central Tennessee with a circle of memorials dedicated to queers who've passed. It's quiet there. Trinkets, photos of young faces under cracked glass, and beaded wire sculptures—all faded from rain—adorn the circle of propped stones. "What means death in this rude assault?" says one. "Deva Raj—Death Don't Take Away Our Love," says another. A third is carved with a deep, handsome, glittering "S."

In Perry, the plaintiffs argued that gayness is a biological kink that simply substitutes one gender for another within an otherwise universal mechanism of desire. The lawyers insisted with dogged humorlessness that it is possible to separate the homosexual dancer from what has been—if only historically, as Peplau maintained—the homosexual dance. Fine. But the resulting portrait, so stripped, is not a particularly useful one. Take away everything that's not foretold in my genes and you'll find me a meager specimen—all hunger, sleep, and hormone. Our histories, our habits, and our choices are as "fundamental," as "relevant to the ability to form successful marital unions," as anything else about us. I'm made by that late night on the deserted streets of South London, and I'm made by promises exchanged with people I've loved. It's no less true to say that gay individuals and communities are made by decades spent negotiating nonstandard models of love and family. In his ruling, Walker may be talking about legal status, but he's also trying to talk about history, and about love.

+ + +

In the late summer of 2010—the P. v. S. summer—I disentangled myself from job obligations, sublet my bedroom, and made plans to leave for a different city. The boyfriend, the one I'd been flighty and evasive with, had finally given up on me. In the new city, I went to museums and markets. I wandered around. One night I met up with someone I'd been introduced to by a mutual friend. He was handsome, he was gay. Four beers into the night we decided to change bars.

He walked his bike and I wobbled along beside him. Boozed into the saddle of my hobbyhorse of the moment, I tried explaining why I was so bothered by Perry v. Schwarzenegger. He'd already heard, in one form or another, a lot of my arguments. He knew his queer theory, he'd listened to the radical nonassimilationist screeds, he'd written essays about tranny performance artists. But I kept talking. I told him how I thought casual sex was a great way to begin friendships, that I'd had a handful of totally unexpected friendships begin that way, with casual sex, with some kind of unanticipated physical intimacy, and how I was really grateful for those friendships, how I felt deeply connected to those people. He locked up his bike. We went into a new place, sat down, ordered. I told him about a radical queer commune I'd visited, about the stories I'd heard and friendships I'd seen there, gorgeous and perverse and durable as hell. I didn't tell him about my parents' recent separation, but I told him that I thought the whole Find-a-Someone, Marry-Him, and Settle-Down-Till-the-End thing was a sure recipe for emotional and intellectual rot. Meaning accrues between people over time, I said—sure. Sure, it accumulates like detritus on a beach from the perpetual assault of surf on sand, time on life. Are we supposed to think that marriage is the only way that happens? What about all the other people we rub up against in life?

This new friend listened very patiently. Sometimes he'd challenge me, sometimes he'd ask me to clarify, and sometimes he'd just listen and smile.

I went on: We become who we are through connections with so many people. Herpes isn't the only thing you carry from one sexual partner to another. You can carry a way of touching, a rhythm of kiss, a habit of kindness. The transfer is unstable, and infinitely complicated. To sleep around—and here I was really on a roll—is to risk contaminating one sexual encounter with the memory of another, to endanger the sense that lovers meet soul to naked soul, in a gorgeous noncontextual vacuum for two. Maybe I'll fall hugely and gorgeously in love, here in this city, or in some other one, I said. Real love. But could a reedy-voiced promise (Never again! No one else!) ever do justice to that? Promiscuity helps us admit that people are made and remade each day by the choices they make regarding friends, strangers, and acquaintances; and that friends, strangers, and acquaintances are always making their way, somehow or another, into the exalted space between lovers. It helps us—I concluded, grandly, with a flushed look into his face—to embrace contamination as a part of being human on a crowded, messy planet.

The bar was filled with a warm, yellowish light. Couples were laughing together at the surrounding tables. It was close to four in the morning. We paid and left. My apartment was far away and the subway wasn't running anymore, so we walked back to his place, past vacant, glowing kabob stands and metal-shuttered shops. Up three flights of stairs. We stood in his kitchen and gulped water. Glasses empty, placed in the sink. A shuffle of smiles and puzzled looks and sentence fragments. Who are you, mister, and what do you want from me tonight? Two drunk twentysomethings with lots of serious thoughts. He started to say something, and I started to answer. Then he climbed into his bed and I settled down under a blanket on his couch. We slept till noon and got up blinking, smiling, uncertain what we'd agreed to the night before, and uncertain what we'd promised for the day. We put on our shoes and went to market together. We bought parsley, peaches, onions, and cinnamon.

1. It wasn’t quite fair, of course, to hold the entire population of gay men up against the more narrow pool of married straight men, though it’s not clear that an apples-to-apples comparison would have made much of a difference. As another cited study from around the same period suggests, “casual sexual affairs” were often considered “a complement to a steady relationship” rather than its undoing.

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The Finest Milled Cotton

2012-02-06T18:14:10Z

by Katherine Hill

Four days after Alissa dropped out of college, she snagged a job at the preppy clothing retailer that made sumptuous cashmere in a rainbow of farmer's market hues. Persimmon. Morel. Sage. A friend's brother had worked there the previous summer and he put her in touch with the manager, Mark, a hair-geller in herringbone who sat her down in the chairs normally reserved for customers trying on loafers to ask her a few questions about herself.

"That's a good school," he said, looking at the resume she'd printed on a piece of her mother's linen paper. Light from the mall-front window filtered through the sheet, illuminating a watermark that vaguely resembled an anchor, tilted rakishly on its end. Or maybe it was a crab. Either way, it was the sort of thing this company might embroider on a pair of green chino pants, so she figured she was set.

"I'm taking some time off," she told him, hoping he wouldn't need a reason.

He leaned forward in the chair and looked her over, resting his eyes an extra moment on her thigh. "When can you start?"

+ + +

Like most people with an ounce of talent, Mark had recognized hers right away. Alissa was beautiful. Actually, she was more than beautiful. She was tall and balletic, the perfect package, with ribbony legs making bow loops of her hips, her waist the exquisite double knot. Her eyes and mouth were large and glossy, and she didn't even have to wash her face much; it was naturally, almost ghostly, clean.

Her mother Caryn was beautiful, too. "You've just gotta fake it, baby," she'd told Alissa when she was little and didn't want to go to school. "If you can make your teachers like you, pretty soon they'll let you do whatever you want." What Caryn had wanted was a man with money. Alissa was born when her parents were still in college, and her dad Mitch, a professional football player, had a whole new family by the time Alissa was in kindergarten. Fortunately, his new wife was all about positive thinking. She wore a diamond cross around her neck, and anytime she went to a beach, which was often, she liked to march giant hearts into the sand. Alissa still got presents from her dad all the time, and Caryn still got to run her little yoga studio and wear (non-denominational) diamond jewelry of her own. So faking it, in Alissa's mind, wasn't such a bad way to live.

She faked it straight to college. The one she chose had strong programs in business and a romantic bell tower on a fleecy green. She'd always enjoyed gazing at natural fields of color. Who was she? Who would she become? The historic green, which had seen it all before, suggested that this college might have the answers. Plus the school was close to home and several guidebooks had singled it out as having particularly good-looking students.

"How 'bout that?" Mitch said when she visited him that summer in Florida, where he'd recently retired to invest in beachfront condos. Father and daughter looked out at the ocean feeling cheerful. At thirty-nine, he didn't tackle other men anymore but was still as strong as a tree. "Sounds like the perfect school for you."

Only it wasn't. Nonsense assailed her from the start. Having to write a business plan for a cookie company that would somehow empower the poor. Having her crotch prodded by shaggy prep school boys in moldering fraternity house rooms. Maybe it was just the girls who were supposed to be good-looking. "I can't believe you're real," her paramours always said, breathing festivals of bacteria in her face. As though it even mattered what was real. She once found a girl crying in the laundry room because she'd messed up a stock market simulation. The girl kept wiping her nose on a pair of cotton panties she'd just taken out of the dryer. Alissa was disgusted. Wasn't she planning on wearing those later?

"Everyone tries so hard," she told her mother on the phone. "It's kind of screwed up."

Caryn didn't tell her to fake it anymore. "Not everyone's as strong as you, sweetheart," she said instead.

After a cleansing summer on the beach, Alissa was ready to give sophomore year a chance—but the boys only got more barbaric, the girls needier and more competitive. Freshman elections were the final straw. Obnoxious signs polluted the green with bubble letters and glitter, ruining the one lovely view on campus. "You Need A Nina!" "Badr Does It Better." They depressed her because they were as desperate as the signs from the year before. In fact, the year before, she was pretty sure that Heather Did It Better. Heather, who'd won, and aside from tritely blowing half the lacrosse team, hadn't done a thing.

+ + +

So it was a comfort to return to her childhood mall, which went out of its way to celebrate nature, but never tried to be something it was not. The drive encircling it was packed with stately, peeling-bark trees, the corridors inside with oversized potted ferns, and each wing was lined with all the familiar storefronts selling just what they purported to sell. Her first day on the job she was assigned to the women's section, where she was expected to hang things that had come unhung, fold things that had come unfolded, and use her cylindrical skeleton key to let customers into dressing rooms when they asked. She quickly found that she loved folding the most. Each garment had a code: a series of faint creases she could follow to reshape it for display. The careless customers, those who left the trousers and cardigans they didn't want turned inside out on the dressing room floor, were in some ways her favorite, because they provided her the opportunity to restore order to a rumpled pile of cotton flannel, stretch merino, and heavy worsted serge. She would extend the hidden shelf on the cash wrap and set to work with a fresh stack of tissue paper, humming along with the airy store mix, and if, when she was done, the floor was quiet, she'd flip through the catalogs in the wooden tray, their fibrous fields and textured beaches quelling any feelings of uselessness that lingered from her time at school.

Her co-workers were exceptionally friendly. Nearly every shift brought new ones, both full-time personal shoppers and local college kids working for the discount, all of them eager to introduce themselves and welcome her aboard. Alissa smiled and said hello. She was beautiful, so they wanted to meet her, but sooner or later she knew they'd grow distant. People usually did. She'd seen it in their eyes a million times: something draining, like water from a bath grown cold.

"People are gonna hate you, baby," Mitch had told her as a child. "They're gonna hate you because they're jealous." He was fond of pep talks. They'd kept him from losing it when things got tough—nagging injuries, blood-thirsty reporters, being benched for no good reason—though lately, she'd begun to suspect he couldn't talk any other way. "You can't let the haters distract you," he'd told her when she first complained about college. "You just gotta keep on being you." Often, in the last few months, she'd wanted to ask him who that was.

+ + +

"I'm worried about you," her mother told her over dinner after she'd been working at the mall a few weeks.

When she'd moved back home, Caryn had made bellinis and presented her with a spa treatment, as though she'd just graduated. Alissa wasn't sure if her mom was clueless or somehow trying to be supportive, and as she watched the peach puree curl pet-like at the bottom of her flute, she wasn't even sure which one she preferred.

Now it seemed Caryn was catching on. She pressed her fingers to her temples, giving herself a momentary face lift. "Your Aunt Ellen is right when she says it's important to have a plan. People who don't have plans in this country just end up waiting around."

Alissa took a long, bored drink of water. Ellen was her mother's older sister, the humorless one who wore shoulder pads and sent so many email forwards about computer viruses, she seemed infected herself.

"Look, I have a job. I make $12 an hour and I love it." She smirked. She couldn't help it. It was exhilarating to be so unambitious, to declare without shame that she loved folding clothes in a big, clean store that sold items not everyone could afford.

"I just think your father was hoping you'd finish your degree. Like he's doing."

"Dad knows my reasons. He's cool." Which wasn't strictly true. She'd written him about her plan to take time off, somewhat disingenuously leaving open the possibility that she had a valuable alternative in mind, but he'd never responded. A week later he passed through town and it was clear he hadn't read the email. She knew he was busy with his business and classes and marriage and kids, but still.

"Shoot," he said, when she told him again, smacking his forehead harder than necessary. "You wrote me that? I don't know where my head is these days. Well, you know what I think, sweetheart. Never let anyone tell you you can't do something."

+ + +

But the folding, oh the folding—the turning in of sleeves, the flipping up of shirttails, the straightening of collars and cuffs. What did she care so long as she could fold? There were no simulations here, just real pieces of fabric made right, several of which she bought so that she could wear them to work herself.

"Oh, you got the Bonnie," someone said one afternoon. She looked up from her pile of liquidy tees to see a ponytailed blonde standing before her, twirling a skeleton key.

Alissa examined the sleeve of her olive-colored cardigan and shrugged. "It just seemed practical with the discount."

The ponytail nodded emphatically. "It's awesome. It's the best cardi. I have like five, all different colors. Some with sequins, some without. I'm Tory."

"Alissa."

"Alissa, nice. Good for you for not shortening it. Sometimes I want to shake my parents for nicknaming me before I was old enough to decide. I mean, seriously, Victoria is so much better than Tory."

"You can always change it."

Tory shook her head. "I tried once; didn't work. I never knew when people were talking to me. They'd literally be shouting my name in my face before I got it. Even my parents don't call me Victoria. Actually, not even when they're mad."

Alissa smiled, not knowing what to say next. She knew the mindlessness that so irritated her in other people was partially her fault. There was something limp and available about her that invited nonsense. Before people lost interest in her, they talked her ear off about awesome cardigans and disappointing nicknames. Some of them—and this Tory person was clearly one—even insisted on being her friend.

"So," Tory said, "I've seen you on a couple shifts now. You in school?"

Alissa nodded and told her where. "But I'm taking a little time off."

"How come?"

"Uh, the classes were a joke and the people were creeps?"

She was still staring, so Alissa elaborated. "It just wasn't for me. Not my thing."

Tory, she could see now, was beautiful too, but clearly untroubled by it. Even at that moment, she was wearing her college ring, like someone recruited to talk Alissa into line. It was engraved with her class year—she was a senior—and dozens of other indecipherable abbreviations. In the center bezel, a red gem flashed like a radio tower light as she folded her arms across her chest. "You sound just like a guy," she finally said. "Don't you know girls don't drop out of college? Not unless they're bulimic or something. You're not bulimic, are you?"

+ + +

It was Tory who told her pretty much everything about the store. How two employees had been fired for having sex in the shoe room, the only stock room you could lock from the inside, and they were so stupid they hadn't even thought to do that. How the company was unveiling a line of buttery leather handbags to compete with the high-end designer brands. How they were operating under a Loss Prevention Plan because they ranked among the top stores in the country for missing merchandise, especially men's accessories and shirts. Alissa knew some of the idiots who'd taken those shirts—just layered them on, clipped the censors, and walked right out of the store. They were friends of her friend's brother, the one who'd gotten her the job.

And it was Tory, too, who told her about the big visit, ambushing her one morning the moment she stepped through the employee entrance.

"Are you working Tuesday?" she whispered, as Alissa punched in. "If not, you have to switch."

"OK, well I am. Why?"

Tory dragged her by the wrist into the empty manager's office. "Mickey Bailey's coming."

"Who's that?"

"Jesus, Alissa, who's that? You really don't give a shit, do you?" Tory tapped her finger on the desk, as though pointing to treasure on a map. "Mickey Bailey is the CEO. He's coming to check on our progress, maybe give us an ass-whipping."

Alissa shuddered. Just when she thought things were going well. "God, why would I want to be here for that?"

"Because he's supposed to be inspiring. He was just on the cover of BusinessWeek or Time or one of those. Do I have to spell it out for you? He's famous and influential." As nitwitty as Tory could be, her information was usually correct and her instincts rarely off. She wasn't the best dresser, sticking to a reliable cycle of black slacks and Bonnies, but she'd seen even before Alissa that the new peacock pencil skirt would sell out in a matter of days.

"Well, maybe I'll read the article," Alissa said. "After all, I have time."

+ + +

There were pictures to accompany the BusinessWeek profile, which celebrated Mickey Bailey's intuition and communication style. He'd turned some little apparel store into a household name, then did it again for somebody else. Until she read the profile, Alissa had no idea how much money her company made in a year, let alone how many other little companies it had in its back pocket. On each page, Mickey Bailey's lithe, bald form leaned against white columns and country mailboxes, looking smug in jeans and a sweater vest and eerily reminiscent of his catalog models, even the black and Asian ones, as though he were their great white father as well as their ass-whipping boss. Alissa thought he looked rather kind, at least not the way she expected a CEO to look. He was fifty-three, born in New Hampshire to an auto mechanic and a nurse. He'd dropped out of college, too.

Driving to work the next morning, she looked out at the cloud cover pinned like lambswool above the trees and thought about Mickey Bailey. She wondered what he'd think of her store. He, who now spent half his life on private jets, but probably used to save up his allowance to buy the one pair of shoes that every kid had to have. Would he notice that the bath store across the way gave off a fruit-cakey aroma that often clashed with the subtle hint of furniture polish and grass that her managers strove to maintain in their space? Would he care that their biggest competitor was located in a different wing?

On Monday night, she stood in front of her closet, mentally assembling an appropriate outfit for meeting the CEO. She assumed it ought to feature company merchandise, but not too heavily, lest she appear incapable of thinking for herself. She was wiggling into her skinniest non-company jeans when her mother knocked on her open door.

"Going somewhere?" Caryn asked. Her eyes were heavily charcoaled and she was dressed in her yoga uniform of spandex under a fluttering woven wrap. It was the way she always looked, tiny biceps slightly bulging under tight sleeves, hair shining in triumphant disarray, a faint promise of fun in her eye.

"Just figuring things out for the morning," Alissa said. "It's stupid."

"That's my girl. You never know what tomorrow will bring."

Some children might've been traumatized by their parents' beauty, but Alissa took it as an article of faith. Her father could lift enormous pieces of furniture and had frequently leveled punt returners on TV. When he sat down to meals with Alissa, his knees bent with the heft of a marble statue's. Her mother was like a flowering plant, filling rooms with the scent of vacation. It didn't even matter that they weren't a couple. If anything they were more powerful apart, ruling their separate but vast domains, each of them a promise that everything would work out OK.

+ + +

Tuesday morning came and Alissa showed up at the store ten minutes early, dressed in the skinny jeans, a jangly necklace, and a navy blazer over a white t-shirt that highlighted the twin peaks of her clavicles. To her relief, Mickey Bailey had not yet arrived. She deposited her handbag in the locker room and ran the lint roller down each arm before making her way to the floor.

The store opened to a surprisingly busy weekday morning. Alissa was constantly in the dressing room, holding hangers and knocking on doors—gently, since women tended to startle easily when they weren't wearing tops. She retrieved other sizes, then praised the housewives who'd requested them for looking so cute in jacquard. The armloads she brought out to fold contained nearly every piece in the store, giving her the sensation that anything was possible. She worked through lunch, barely pausing to chat with Tory when she arrived for the closing shift. There was pizza in the back, and she eventually ate a slice, then washed her hands in a full head of lather so that no trace of grease would threaten the clothes.

As her shift neared its end, at five o'clock, Mickey Bailey still hadn't arrived.

"Do you need me to stay?" she asked Mark, who never failed to give her extra hours when she asked. Over his shoulder, Tory twirled her key and winked.

The morning tide of housewives had given way to the usual evening trickle of after-school teenagers, who touched everything but bought nothing, and after-work professionals, who needed full-priced merchandise to wear that very night. Closing was now minutes away and the registers were silent, the clerks murmuring languidly to one another as they rested their elbows on the cash wrap. Alissa was crossing the floor with a pair of mary janes for a customer to try with the Cluny lace cocktail dress when she saw a man holding a feather-crystal brooch over the jewelry bin, as though trying to estimate its weight in his hand. Dressed in jeans and a navy v-neck sweater that fit him neatly, he had the unhurried manner of someone who'd shown up early for an appointment. His shorn, balding head glistened under the display lights, and he would've been completely unremarkable had he not been Mickey Bailey.

Alissa delivered the mary janes to her customer and returned to the floor, where it appeared that no one had even noticed their venerated chief. She wondered if he'd somehow been there all along, patiently examining each garment and accessory in the store while a woman friend tested the customer service in the midst of an unexpectedly busy day. It was possible he'd sent the morning housewives there himself; possible, too, that one of them was his wife, or even somehow Mickey himself. She didn't think he had whole days to waste checking up on single stores, and yet what else did a CEO do? The magazine profile made it seem as though he spent a lot of time following his intuition, which after all was just what she had done, and it had led her here.

She approached the jewelry bin and began resorting the goods on the side opposite him, not daring to make eye contact. She had realigned all the sunglasses and nearly disentangled a wad of hair elastics before she worked up the courage to speak.

"Are you finding everything all right?" she finally asked, with a slight inflection, so that he would understand that even though she was asking what she asked every customer, she knew exactly who he was.

His pale blue eyes met hers as he seemed to consider her question on several levels. Something in his cheek twitched, betraying a possible lunacy, and she wondered for a moment if he was not Mickey Bailey after all. Then he smiled. "I think I'm fine for now," he said, fully articulating each word. "But thank you."

Bewildered, she continued with her lines. "Well, let me know if you need anything. We'll be closing in fifteen minutes." He nodded and returned his attention to the brooch, like a counterfeiter trying to commit it to memory.

Alissa wandered back to the dressing room only to find that her customer had left without purchasing anything. The cocktail dress was suspended lightly on its hanger, the mary janes tucked together on the floor. She returned the items to their places and set about reordering a rack of cropped corduroys. She wasn't sure what she had been expecting, but it certainly wasn't this: this placid ordinariness, this feeling of not even having been tested. At the very least, when a powerful man paid a visit, it shouldn't feel like just another day.

The store music had stopped, and the last customer was escorted out, heels clicking, the double wooden doors double-locked in her wake, and just when Alissa thought that this was all that the day was going to be, Mark's voice came over the staticky loudspeaker. "Attention, everyone," he said, echoing across the ghost town of halted commerce. "I'd like to ask all staff to join me at the women's cash wrap for a special meeting."

Mickey Bailey stood before the counter like a professor, having solved whatever he'd been puzzling over in the brooch, which was no longer in his hand. He looked remarkably sure of something. Mark and the woman who'd asked for the mary janes stood beside him, and a few regular customers had materialized as well. Alissa gathered round with the rest of the staff, joining Tory by a display table covered with the casually draped mohair sleeves and rhinestone buttons of the must-have cardigan for fall. Who must have it? Alissa wondered, fingering a hem. She preferred the summer's more basic iteration.

Mark introduced Mickey, and if anyone hadn't known who he was or how long he'd been observing them, they didn't let on, smiling as though meetings like this were some kind of regular reward.

"What do you think went well today?" Mickey asked neutrally. "Don't be shy."

"We had a lot of foot traffic," one of the college boys finally said. "More than usual for a weekday."

"Is that right?" Mickey mused.

Hearing this, the college boy seemed to lose an inch of confidence—not much, but a perceptible amount. "I mean," he said, sliding his hands into his pockets, "I think so."

Mickey nodded. "All right. What else?"

People volunteered anecdotes. Someone had sold a customer the jacket she came in for, and the matching skirt as well. Someone else had tracked down a size from another store and was having it shipped directly to the customer's home. They'd sold a few gift cards. A favorite regular had come in for a belt.

"And what do you think didn't go so well?"

Everyone looked at their feet. Alissa tried to think of a weakness that was actually a strength, and failing that, tried to look like she was thinking at all.

"I have to tell you," Mickey said, "this is one our most under-performing stores, so I imagine a lot of things didn't go so well today. You know about the missing merchandise, of course. That's getting better. But you're still not keeping pace with other stores of this size. Why do you think that is?"

The ass-kicking was coming after all. Alissa tried to catch Tory's eye, but she was staring intently at a display niche bearing a purple leather handbag.

"Could be a question of store placement," the college boy said. Evan—that was his name. He was clearly used to speaking first.

"Could be," Mickey replied. "We're looking into it. But I have to tell you, my gut says that's not it."

Alissa was becoming aware of an ache cresting from her knees to her lower back. She had never worked twelve hours straight before, and all that standing was finally beginning to test her stamina. She shifted her weight to one side, then the other, finally coming to rest against the table of mohair cardigans, cushioning her elbows on the many-layered pile.

"What do you think?" Mickey said. Mark whispered in his ear, and Mickey added, "Alissa," and still it took her a moment to recognize that he was speaking to her.

"Well," she said, taking her time. "I think there are several issues."

"That's right," Mickey said. "And I think you know what they are. When we spoke earlier, you were a perfect model of customer service. Great tone. And your personal style is completely of the moment. Everyone look at Alissa." A dozen groomed heads turned her way, their gazes even and appraising. "This is exactly how we want our sales associates to dress. So, then, from your perspective, what needs to change around here?"

No one had ever asked Alissa such an important question before. Even the questions her college professors had posed from their faraway lecterns were clearly directed at someone else—someone who'd already obsessed over them or was looking online at that moment and would therefore have some kind of answer. Her professors knew better than to expect anything of her. But Mickey Bailey apparently did not. Here he was, an incredibly rich man, a famous CEO who'd built his success on intuition, asking her what ought to be changed in his store. His face waited expectantly across the room, cool and bright as a refrigerator.

"For one thing," she said. "Most of us are part-time, and none of us work on commission. So I don't know how invested we are in actually making sales. And there are also issues with inventory and store layout." She grazed her hand over the pile of mohair sweaters. "These have been here over a month. No one buys them. Definitely not anyone cool."

Mickey's expression brightened further. "Why not?" he asked.

"Because they're too similar to a lot of other styles, but not nearly as versatile. Like, the Bonnie?" she pointed at Tory, who had on a pink one. "It's sexy and you could wear it every day." She bit her lip, hoping she hadn't gone too far in calling the garment sexy.

"You know what?" he said. "You're absolutely right. I hated that sweater from the first moment I saw it." Someone gasped. "I hate a few pieces every season. It's the nature of the business—some styles work, some don't. But this store should've recognized the mistake when they didn't sell and moved them out of the prime position. See how many are left?" His previously calm voice rose, and continued to rise, almost precipitously. "You think the customer can't smell failure? Believe me, she can. She can smell it the moment she walks in the store. It's like that one stinking stall in the food court. The frying oil, or whatever it is. It sticks to everything! It makes it all taste wrong!"

Mickey could've been a mega-church preacher the way he ranted and flapped his arms. It was an ass-kicking all right, but she was somehow exempt. As he thundered about the cash wrap, he repeatedly singled her out for her perception and wit. Alissa felt as though she'd been wrapped in a soft cashmere cloak of immunity. Other staffers were called upon to rethink their methods. The customers in the room were called upon to make suggestions. And through it all Mickey kept looking her way. Alissa could barely listen, feeling as good as the fall catalog cover girl looked, standing atop a seaside boulder in a brilliant red toggle coat while blue ocean and green sea grass vied for her attention below.

Less than two months on the job and already she was headed for better things. He shook her hand before he left and asked her to send him her resume. A few of his trusted stylists would be back to speak with her directly. She walked out to her car in the deserted garage feeling like an astronaut touching down on a new planet of her own.

"Hey!" Tory's voice called out from behind her. Alissa stopped and waited, one foot on either side of a white parking space line.

"Way to go," Tory said, as she drew nearer. "Way to throw the rest of us under the bus." Her forehead shone and she was panting a little, as though she'd been running to catch up.

Alissa laughed and tossed her hand like it was no big deal, but Tory didn't seem in the mood to laugh. She zipped her coat as though striking a match.

"He was going to say all that anyway," Alissa said. "Hey, I used you as an example!"

"Everyone loves the Bonnie!" Tory said, not quite mad, not quite sarcastic. She looked tired. "Whatever. It's just a part-time job. I'm on again Friday. You?"

"I'm always on," Alissa said, before she realized how it sounded.

Tory grinned. "Honestly, you're nuts. You should just go back to college already. How hard can it be for Mickey's special protégé?"

Alissa thought about the girl with the panties in the dorm laundry room and the fraternity boys, some of whom, it was true, had forced things a little, pressing harder on her dry, unreceptive body while she let her mind turn off. But that wasn't the reason she left, not really. She always had a more general reason for doing whatever she did. A nagging feeling, maybe. A sense. She saw herself as a freshman, standing alone on the green that had been washed of color by weeks of winter and the lightless late afternoon, while everyone else—students, professors, whoever—hurried about in pairs and trios and packs, caressing their books, caressing their cell phones, absorbed in a game that had somehow started, and now continued, and probably would for years, without her. She saw that she'd been special for a while, once, and then all of a sudden she wasn't.

Except that now, again, she was.

+ + +

When Alissa got home, Caryn was in the great room, triangulated in downward dog. Alissa flopped down on the couch and watched her mother realign herself under the skylights, which hung, black and rectangular, like the eyes of a carnival mask.

"Long day!" Caryn exclaimed, once she was fully upright. "I was beginning to worry."

A college basketball game swung back and forth on the muted flatscreen and in flickering reflection on the windows all around, making the room seem full of people rooting for Alissa to win.

"The CEO came," she blurted. "He wants to see my resume."

"The CEO?" Caryn was instantly ecstatic. She pulled Alissa to her feet and hugged her in the middle of the sticky purple mat. Her beautiful mother, smelling of eucalyptus and talc. She hadn't always given the best advice, but there was no one in the world who cared about her more, no one in the world more elegant.

Before Alissa went to bed that night, she emailed her resume to Mickey Bailey.

Dear Mr. Bailey,
It was my great honor to meet and learn from you today at Colonial Plaza. It was definitely the highlight of my year. You asked for my resume so I'm attaching it to this email. I look forward to speaking with you about my professional career and your theories of fashion success.
Sincerely,
Alissa P. Barrows
P.S. I don't know if I should be telling you this, but I left college just like you because I didn't think the classroom could nurture my talents. Fashion is not about lectures and assigned reading. It's about knowing what makes people look good and what makes them feel good about how they look. You have to touch fabric every day to know those kinds of things. I know I have so much to offer if you'll only give me the chance.

For a moment after she hit send, she regretted the line about touching fabric. It was possible he didn't think about things metaphorically as she did, or that he'd misconstrue it as a come-on. But he didn't strike her as that kind of creep, and it really was how she felt.

She checked her email first thing the next morning. There was an alert from the college registrar and a sale announcement from a rival retailer, plus a joke forward from a high school friend with the subject line "21 Clues You're Tanked." Nothing yet from Mickey Bailey. She went to work and unpacked a shipment of three dozen v-neck sweaters. For lunch she got a cup of vegetarian minestrone, which she ate on a fern-flanked bench by herself.

There were no emails from Mickey that night, or the next day, or anytime that week. The next week, she and Caryn celebrated Thanksgiving with extended family at Ellen's house one county over, where none of the yards had trees. Caryn wouldn't shut up about Mickey Bailey. "The CEO," she kept telling Ellen as though he were a new brand of organic yogurt she wanted everyone to buy. Alissa wore her blue Bonnie sweater over the new donegal minidress, and tried not to feel humiliated.

The days dragged on through Christmas, and then the new year. Alissa bought a hooded parka with her discount and every morning watched her breath disappear while she waited for the car to warm up. She went to work. She sold alpaca sweaters and gabardine trousers and calf-skin boots with buckles. She even sold a few of the mohair sweaters, now that they were on sale.

She recognized, as she recreased the latest oxford shirts along their natural folding lines one afternoon, and swung her skeleton key on the curly cord she wore around her wrist, that nothing had happened—despite the promise in Mickey's handshake that he would take care of her, despite the energy he had directed her way. It was as though all of November had been erased, and the current hour was all there was. Even her mother had already forgotten. She felt like a team that had lost so many times, no one remembers the last time it won. Her father was on a team like that once—bad management, bad game plans—and after he'd gotten over the initial shame of being juked by really pretty average guys one Sunday after another, he'd said it wasn't so bad. "I'm still a lucky man," he'd told her. "Football has given us so much."

Designers from headquarters eventually paid a visit, and one morning when she came in all the displays had been rearranged. The jewelry case where Mickey had examined the brooch was gone, but in its place was a rack of petal-colored blouses that heralded the new season. In the center, a nylon tree plumed like an umbrella over a gathering of slick waterproof galoshes. Alissa stood beneath it in the quiet minutes before opening and felt almost exalted to see the branches disappear in the blazing lights above.

The cash wrap, of course, still stood, and during the slower periods of the day, Alissa still liked to stand beside it, flipping the pages of the latest catalog, traveling with the models from a covered bridge in Vermont to a lavender field in Provence, from a Moroccan bazaar to a zesty peel of Pacific beach. They were landscapes like the finest milled cotton. She'd wear them onward, onward into spring.

Purchase print issue »

Late Patriot Football

2012-02-06T18:05:01Z

by Stephen Squibb

The biggest mistake a sports fan can make is to imagine it could have been different. That if only such and such a player had moved such and such a way, then such and such a thing would have changed, leading to such and such--and victory. This is to radically misunderstand what makes a game a game, which is that millions of people agree about a series of random, yet specific events. It is insane to imagine that there was some other, secret metaphysics happening, that a team was destined to win when suddenly some other thing, some dropped pass or blown call, robbed you of something. The entire thing is a fiction. You were not robbed. What happened, happened. Now it's over.

Bill Belichick says there are two things a receiver has to do: get open and catch the ball. There are, he emphasizes, many ways to do this. But consider, against the vast continuum of human skills, the specificity of these two. Consider that Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals was paid over $20 million this year for his ability to get open and catch the ball. It is a travesty, some will say, that people are paid so much for something so simple. But this is wrong. It is, in fact, a glorious thing: it speaks to the power of collective belief. It is what allows a six-foot-five black kid from Rand, West Virginia, to become Randy Moss, the common denominator in two of the greatest offenses of all time. The second of these, the famed 18-1 2007 Patriots, met ignoble defeat when Moss couldn’t quite haul in a pass from Tom Brady as time wound down. Or maybe the game was over before then, but the point is, the possibility was there. It would have been absurd, but it was on the table. Moss had just completed the greatest season ever by a wide-receiver.

On Sunday night, when Tom Brady threw his last second desperation Hail Mary, the ball was batted around and, as it fell, a leaping Rob Gronkowski came close to catching it. He didn’t. He was injured. He had just completed the greatest season by a tight-end of all time, but he didn’t catch it and the Giants won, beating the Patriots in the Super Bowl for a second time in just five years. The thing about losing the Super Bowl is that it’s as much of an event, almost, as winning one. The number of articles written is similar; there is the same amount of anticipatory chatter, the same level of plans made with friends. The difference is just that the season is, if not a failure, exactly, then even more uniquely unsuccessful. Like a bad novel.

+ + +

I have been a Patriots fan for a long time, and I confess that of late it's become less easy than it seems. As any honest fan of a historically successful team will tell you, the pure joy of victory quickly gives way to a cool, aristocratic greed as winning begins to seem the natural order of things. Once this line has been crossed, the fan lives in fear of losing more than in anticipation of winning. This anxiety has actually driven a large portion of Patriot fandom insane, as the regional conversation throughout the 2011 season was relentlessly negative and critical of a team that any healthy fanbase would find absolutely delightful. Take the 2011 New England Patriots and put them in any other uniform and the fans would get tattoos of their faces on their faces. The Patriots have been so good for so long that they have almost run out of ways to win. Perhaps the fans sensed that there was no way but down. For eleven years, the Patriots victory has become the most prolific genre in the catalog of NFL storylines; like many historical genres, it's possible that it's been on a slow descent into decadence for a while now.

In the beginning, it was simply the greatest story ever told. Tom Brady, an unheralded sixth round pick had taken over for an injured Drew Bledsoe to lead a team of misfits and cast-offs to an unlikely Super Bowl victory over the heavily favored St. Louis Rams. The game climaxed with Brady’s dramatic last minute drive leading to Adam Vinatieri’s game-winning field goal. Included along the way were dramatic wins over Oakland in the swirling snow, which featured a controversial reversal on a fumble call, and over Pittsburgh, in which the three Patriots touchdowns were a punt return, a blocked field goal return, and a pass from Drew Bledsoe, who came on to relieve an injured Brady. Choosing to be introduced as a team at the Super Bowl, the Patriots become national heroes in the season following September 11. It could have ended there, and many of us would have been happy--one truly great, improbable season--but Brady and Belichick had other plans.

I know of exactly one person who had any premonition of Tom Brady being Tom Brady. It was the summer of 2000 or 2001, and I was either commuting to teach drama at a less-than-local summer camp or I was delivering pizzas. I can’t really remember, because what I was really doing was listening to a lot of Boston sports talk radio. This is not healthy. Mostly because the hosts are very good at feigning a level of ignorance that sounds reasonable enough--in that one is seized with the desire to call in and correct them--but, on reflection, is simply impossible for people who spend four hours a day surveying what is, finally, a pretty small sandbox. In any case, it’s deep into the third hour of The Big Show with Glen Ordway, and this individual, whose name I can’t remember, calls in and says: “Let me tell you. This Tom Brady has some serious biceps,” and is met with total silence. Drew Bledsoe, then the Patriots starting quarterback, had either just signed the richest contract extension in league history or was about to. He had been the first overall pick in the draft in 1993, had taken the Patriots to the Super Bowl three years later, and was generally regarded as a class act. Tom Brady had been the 199th pick in the 2000 draft, and was third or fourth on the depth chart, somewhere between immortals Damon Huard and Michael Bishop. His biceps, as best I can tell after spending a score of Sundays together for eleven years, are not large or impressive. After Bob from Weymouth or John from Brockton, whoever, had made his claim for young Tom, Ordway said quickly and quietly: “I think it is safe to say that Drew Bledsoe is going to be the quarterback of this team for a long time,” and hung up. The caller had managed to find one of the few things beneath discussion during the late afternoon wasteland that was Boston sports radio in the first summers of the young century.

When Tom Brady goes down as the greatest player in the history of the game it will be because none of us saw him coming; we had no expectations. And if you want to understand the peculiar disease that is sports fanaticism, both its glory and its tragedy, you have to understand two things. First, that watching sports is fundamentally akin to kissing or swearing in that expectations are everything. And second, that the fan’s lack of agency isn’t strange or extraneous, as many non-fans imagine—“Why do you say ‘we’?” “Why do you care about a game you can’t control?”--it’s the whole point. If life, as Oscar Wilde remarked, is much too important to be taken seriously, then sports are just meaningless enough to get really worked up about.

For my part, I came by football honestly, like a scar. Growing up, I was so athletically hopeless that it could have been a diagnosis. (Indeed, when I began taking Adderall, I remember vividly the fantasy that maybe it would cure my lack of coordination. It did not.) Fiercely competitive and strangely proud, I experienced the constant threat of athletic activity as something that loomed over me, like a dead tree. No doubt there are worse things than being young and male and unable to throw anything accurately under any circumstances, but it did not always feel that way at the time. Even my hippie father, existing at a distance of 200 miles and entirely ignorant of anything professional, sports included, looked askance at my endlessly iterated inability to ice-skate, or hit a ball, or stay upright on skis. When he presented me with a surprise basketball hoop on my eighth birthday, I remember wondering how such a simple device could be simultaneously so stupid and so cruel. Since every suburban day presented a new opportunity to demonstrate my physical infelicity, I quickly developed a negative evaluation of sport both as a culture and as a way of life--less from reflection than for survival. And since football was the king of sports and the Super Bowl the king of games, I made a point of not watching, loudly.

It wasn’t until 1995, when I was 12, that I decided that perhaps I should see what everyone was on about. So I purchased some pixie sticks and some gummy orange slices and sat down by myself to watch Super Bowl XXX between the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers. It was not a good game. Dallas won handily, and my only memorable impression was that Neil O’Donnell, the Pittsburgh quarterback, resembled a villain of some kind. The next game I saw was the AFC championship the following year, in which our very own New England Patriots were playing the Jacksonville Jaguars for a trip to the world’s biggest stage. I have one memory only: an interception in the end-zone that sealed the victory; my stomach leaping into the space below my heart.

That team would go on to lose, of course, to the Green Bay Packers, after Bill Parcells, the coach, quit during the two-week interim, over failing to secure full management powers from owner Bob Kraft. Bill Belichick was the defensive coordinator, and he left with Parcells for New York. The Patriots hired Pete Carroll, a supremely nice guy who led the team to progressively worse records in each of his three seasons. As the Pats got worse and worse, I got more and more invested. This wasn’t masochism on my part: I was getting ready to apply to college and was finding that reading about football is an ideal form of procrastination. By the time the team hired the curmudgeonly Bill Belichick, before the 2000 season, I was following every waiver wire transaction, every hiring of an assistant coach. The team’s strength and conditioning coach, Johnny Parker, came to give a talk at my school, which I monopolized by asking comically specific questions about different players.

My defining memory of Bill Belichick’s first season as coach was sitting in my car outside of a friend’s party, listening to the team lose to the Bears on the way to going 5-11. The Bears were terrible, and I couldn’t believe we were losing, but I listened to the whole game and part of the press conference afterward. Bob Kraft, the owner of the Patriots, had been warned against hiring Belichick by people sending him tapes of Belichick’s press conferences. Belichick is almost aggressively unforthcoming; this is usually chocked up to his zealous secrecy or to his being a jerk. (Both true things, actually, not relevant to this.) In fact, Belichick hates press conferences because he doesn’t see why the press should have to talk to him to do their jobs. He’s right, and it’s not entirely coincidental that the rise of the Patriots, and the Boston Sports Renaissance more generally, has been accompanied by the ascendance of the first sports writer to understand this: Bill Simmons.

Simmons’s genius lies not so much in turning his lack of access as an internet writer into an asset: understanding that access itself--the inane, endless back and forth between reporters and coaches, or reporters and athletes, which then gets reported by the reporters to other coaches and athletes, who are asked to comment on it, and on and on forever--is actually a waste of everyone's time. Instead it rests on his intuition that what everyone secretly believes is true, that their own conversations about sports were funnier and more interesting than anything you could read in the newspaper or hear on TV. While all the other sports writers were composing realist narratives, Simmons was writing dialogues and refining theories; he is both the first and the most successful sports critic. And like a good critic, Simmons knows that being a fan isn’t an ideology, it’s an identity. It makes no impact on the truth of what happened, just how you respond to it.

At the height of their powers the Patriots did something similar in creating a new blueprint for winning in an age of parity, setting an NFL record with twenty-one straight victories between back-to-back championships in 2003 and 2004. Their average margin of victory during this time was four points, as Belichick became the master of the game plan, then the in-game adjustment. Whatever kind of team you were, the Patriots would transform into a team that was built to stop you. They did just enough to win and no more, but they could do it against anybody. Unlike dominant teams of yore, who won with sustained, consistent excellent in one aspect of the game or another, the Patriots would reinvent themselves every week, and every week the other team would walk off the field, shaking their heads, unsure, exactly, of how they’d managed to lose to a team that seemed so unimpressive in so many ways. Even Brady, though no longer the ultra-conservative “game-manager” of the 2001 season, was content to do just enough to win, whether that meant throwing for 100 yards or 300. His interception in the 2003 Super Bowl seemed timed perfectly, letting the Panthers back in the game and setting his team up for another spectacular finish.

I was in college for all three of the Patriots' Super Bowl victories, which would have been a glorious thing, except that I went to Vassar. When Sunday came, instead of forcing games on friends who couldn't have cared less, I took the long walk up the hill to the Poughkeepsie Bowl-o-Rama and watched the Pats alongside the locals, who all seemed to favor Dallas.

Much of my football-watching career has taken place at various bars, often alone. This has provided ample opportunity to compare the love we have for a person we know to the love we have for a sports celebrity. The feeling I have for Tom Brady is different from what I feel for anyone I have loved in person, so to speak. I’m not sure I’d do anything for Tom Brady, whereas I would lay down in traffic for several of my exes, even ones who don’t deserve it. We love people in spite of life, and the more we do so, the more likely we are to suffer for our affection. The time I have spent with Tom Brady has been more positive than with anybody else. And before you think that this is some sort of tragedy, ask yourself honestly if what you value about your loved ones is how happy they make you. To love someone is to shape a shared dissatisfaction, in the hopes of orienting it more correctly. Tom Brady doesn’t know me, and I doubt we’d get along, but he has brought me that thin, brittle thing called happiness more often than anyone. The squirming glee of victory is like sunshine, everyone knows it is unpredictable and has nothing to do with you, but they also agree that it’s better than the alternative.

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I watched the game last night in South Boston. The Patriots won the coin toss at the beginning of the game and deferred. One of their delightfully badass tics they’ve developed in recent years. After that, the whole thing came and went very quickly.

When I say that the Patriots have become decadent since that final championship in 2004, I’m not talking about them as people, but describing the way they have continued to win without, finally, winning a championship. It’s a rare thing in sports to be champions enough times that nobody likes you, yet hang around enough to lose spectacularly season after season. It bears mentioning that if you were to subtract the three Lombardi trophies residing in Foxboro, these recent Patriots have put together one of the more devastating series of losses of any team going. They have become dominant, but in specific ways, just as the teams they used to beat were dominant in specific ways. What’s more, Belichick has taken his obsessions to new heights. He famously ran Brady’s favorite receivers out of the building after the 2005 season, determining that neither of them was worth the money they were asking for. This led to the first of the really catastrophic losses, against the Colts in the AFC championship game in 2006, when Brady had no one to throw to late in the game. Belichick compensated by acquiring Randy Moss and Wes Welker, officially turning Brady from a scrappy winner to a gaudy statistics machine who comes up just short in the end. Since he last won a Super Bowl, Brady has set the league record for touchdown passes in a season, been named MVP twice--the second time as the first unanimous choice ever--and just this year broke the record for passing yards in a season, along with two other quarterbacks who didn’t win the Super Bowl.

The mistake is to imagine that the Patriots have lost because of these things. Teams don’t lose because of, they lose alongside of, coincidently with everything that takes place on the field but not reducible to any of it. The Patriots are decadent because they are still as present as when they were winning championships, and often they are more dominant individually, they are just less successful as a team.

Last January, the morning after witnessing the Patriots playoff loss to the Jets while visiting my little sister in Providence, I was forced to disseminate the following to my friends and family. It is, sadly, entirely true:

I would like to issue a public apology to anyone who had anything to do with me between the hours of 4 pm yesterday and 11 or so this morning. Due to a combination of Jägermeister, some other drinks, and the offensive line of the New England Patriots, I was not myself. Apologies to the Squibb Family, first and foremost, whose wise indifference to the organized thuggery of American football must have made the ensuing events even more perplexing and sinister. To the crew down at Muldowney’s Pub: no amount of venue shuffling would change our luck, as it turned out, but the big fella behind the counter was quick with the shots after that situation with Santonio Holmes. It was appreciated. And though I disagree with you, Loud Guy at the End of the Bar, about the relative honesty and trustworthiness of Tom Brady, I also understand that we each have to grieve in our own way. And likewise, Large Man Sitting Next to Me, same to you. To the well-meaning drifter who wandered in at the beginning of the fourth quarter, clapped me on the shoulder and said, “There’s always next year!” please know that I meant almost nothing of what I remember saying, and none of what I don’t. Sorry, also, to anyone who texted, emailed, or called me during this difficult time. . . I clearly do not actually want you to fuck off, or die, for that matter, and I agree . . . that your essay on the political history of Milwaukee would not actually benefit from a lengthy discussion of Rex Ryan’s sexual predilections, however lurid and unholy they may be.

To the poetry slam crew at AS220, I can only say again how fantastic you all were. Truly. Far better than I deserved in the moment of my wandering in, pickled and livid. And though I am sorry about all the yelling, that hole in the bathroom wall predates me and we all know it. To the bearded bartender at that establishment, thank you for continuing to serve me. It was not the right choice, but it was the correct one. To the very sweet middle-aged Chilean couple in town to see their child perform, please know that concerns like the ones you showed for my health and sanity after my third twenty-four ounce bottle of Sierra Nevada in as many hours are not typically met with sustained accusations of Rightist sympathy. Nor are such suspicions, vocalized loudly, an “American Tradition”–that’s just me.

To the Sad Atlanta Fan Working the Desk at the Providence Marriot at 1 am, I really felt we shared something, even if four dollars is a pretty penny to charge a brother in need for a strawberry shortcake and a Fifth Avenue. To the entire customer service department at Megabus.com, while you deserve neither my thanks nor my sympathy, it was nice to have someone to be legitimately furious with at seven o'clock this AM. Those threats were idle, of course, and everybody on the “coach” made it to Manhattan in one piece, as far as I know. But you still might want to get that sound system checked out. Thanks also to Antonio Cromartie, Bart Scott, the aforementioned Ryan, and the entirety of the New York Football Jets for embodying everything that is crass and wrong in the universe with such breathtaking power and economy. For you, nothing less than a lifetime of malodorous and humiliating diseases will do. Cheers, assholes. And lastly, extra special thanks to the thirty-one owners of the National Football League, whose bottomless greed will shortly lead to a lockout canceling all or part of the 2011 season, a development which, given recent events, can only be considered a heavenly blessing for me and mine.

The 2011 season was not cancelled, as it turned out, and by the time the game ended last night, I was once again suitably impressed at how shitty the game can make you feel. Imagine arriving at the last chapter of a book, so far in the running to be an all-time favorite, and finding it inexplicably consisting of recipes for bunt cake, just one after another, with no explanation, and you can begin to grasp the stupid, empty sensation that is losing the Super Bowl. When the other team fumbles three times and recovers all three, God is not on your side.

Between the two Patriots Super Bowl defeats to the Giants I moved back to Massachusetts after five years in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and in the runup to the game I told friends that whatever happened, it would be better than last time. In 2007, I had walked around the block, stunned, while all around me New York--a city I otherwise loved--celebrated. Then I went home and was sick for three days. There was nothing so dramatic this time. Just an old friend and me driving home from Southie in silence.

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Brady vs. Eli: Superbowl Preview

2012-02-05T20:43:13Z

by Bryce Bennett

In the NFL, teams are defined by their ability to evaluate top-tier talent at quarterback. At the "combine," the league’s annual physical evaluation of incoming prospects, the distance between a QB’s thumb and pinky finger can cost him millions of dollars. His speed in the 40-yard dash--a distance he will run perhaps once in his career, and even then in fear for his life--can make the difference between the first round and the fifth. The teams have not yet started checking the prospects' teeth, but it's really just a matter of time.

Yet for all the scrutiny, a QB’s success is still largely unpredictable. Even when a quarterback is successful, we cannot really adequately explain why. Experts on ESPN will point to a quarterback’s statistics—passing yards, high completion percentage, high TD to INT ratio, etc. But statistics are only a numerical representation of success; they do not explain how it comes about. This task is much more difficult. It involves what used to be known as "intangibles." That was until there was a book by Michael Lewis called Moneyball, which explains the smarter use of statistics in baseball. The book became a bestseller, then a feel-good movie starring Brad Pitt. So now you can't use that word anymore, though intangible is still exactly what intangibles are. This is because football is a much more complex game than baseball, with many more moving parts, and because whatever statistics are out there to measure the intangibles, we haven't found them yet. It will be a long time before bespectacled Ivy League graduates are able to push old football veterans around with only the power of their fancy charts. But we can imagine.

In the meantime, the story of football intangibles goes something like this: By the time a player reaches the NFL, he either has or does not have intangibles. He owns them but cannot develop them much further. They are innate and they are especially important at the quarterback position, where athletic ability is most complexly related to a player’s success. Tom Brady serves as the most recent evidence. No one knew he was going to be Tom Brady until he stepped on the field and became Tom Brady. Perhaps Brady himself knew. But he couldn't have known for sure.

Brady is the most celebrated quarterback of his era and a lock for the Hall of Fame, but this was not always so. After a high school career in San Mateo, California, he was a highly sought-after prospect and chose Michigan, where he ran into some stiff competition for playing time. Ahead of him on the depth chart was future NFL QB Brian Griese and beside him was one of the most decorated recruits in the history of Michigan, Drew Henson, who was such a good athlete that the Yankees drafted him with their third round pick in 1998. Brady sat for two years behind Griese and then platooned with Henson for significant parts of his Junior and Senior seasons. Whenever given the chance, though, Brady performed admirably, often bringing Michigan back into the game after Henson had let the team get behind. In his final collegiate game, Brady threw for 369 yards and 4 TDs to beat Alabama in the Orange Bowl.

Brady finished his Michigan career on a strong note, but NFL coaches were still skittish of him. The logic was pretty simple, even if flawed. If he couldn't be a convincing starter in college, how could he be a starter in the NFL? At the combine, Brady only confirmed his critic’s suspicions as he turned in one of the worst combine performances in historical memory, running a 5.3 second 40-yard dash and demonstrating a 24.5-inch vertical leap--about as good as your average high school tight end. The 2000 draft was also a pretty decent year for quarterbacks—Chad Pennington, Giovanni Carmazzi, Chris Redman, Tee Martin, Marc Bulger, and Spergon Wynn would all go before Brady.

The 49ers were one of the few teams to show strong interest in Brady before the draft, but when their turn to pick arrived in the third round, Gino Carmazzi was still on the board. He had just spent four years demolishing the record books at Hofstra, then tested off the charts at the combine. He ran the 40-yard dash in 4.7 seconds and jumped 36 inches into the air from a standing position. Gino could do it all--heck, you could probably put him at linebacker, maybe, if you really needed to--whereas Brady, no matter how hard he tried, would never be able to outrun his fastest lineman. The 49ers went with Carmazzi; Brady wasn't drafted until three rounds later, behind six quarterbacks who all outperformed him at the combine. These days, Gino’s a professional yogi and Brady is considered one of the greatest QBs to ever play the game, but the 49ers did what almost all NFL teams would do—they opted for the complete player.

In any case, Brady's big, slow foot was in the door and it was exactly the right door to be in. To this day, Brady cannot do a lot of things that other QBs can do—he doesn’t evade pressure well and doesn’t always wow you with his arm—but you would never know it watching Brady play, because it is rare that Brady finds himself in situations that ask him to do anything other than what he does exceptionally well. The Patriots have developed a team--even a system--that allows Brady to be the best version of himself.

What Brady does better than other quarterbacks is, 1) reads defenses; 2) makes quick, accurate passes consistently; 3) never gets rattled. His consistency derives from his excellent mechanics. Brady is a natural thrower. He holds the ball lightly like an afterthought in his hands, and his shoulders almost always square fluidly to his intended target. The difficulty of making this motion fluid can be seen in Tim Tebow’s sticky mechanics. Even when Tebow is able to square his lead shoulder it appears unnatural. He has to think about it. Not Brady.

Brady says the key to his success is his long time throwing coach, Tom Martinez. Martinez's instruction is simple but effective. He emphasizes a high-throwing angle, a closed front, and a short stride. Like a good golf stroke, the trick to throwing is to find consistency in motion and Brady has done that. From short throws to long, his motion is mechanically the same. Martinez believes that any quarterback can achieve this, what he calls “good mechanics,” (even Tebow) and Martinez’ tutelage is apparent in almost every throw Brady makes and even the ones he does not make. When Brady misses it is often because his stride is too short, causing the ball to sail over the target.

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Watching football on television makes the process of finding out what's actually going on in a football game very difficult. While you can often see the grimace on the QB's face when he is sacked, you can rarely see the important part of the game—what he sees. While watching games I sometimes wish that my TV would expand just two inches on either side so that I could see the secondary defense, but then again, this is probably the last thing we need.

Some people who have only witnessed football through the TV do not understand that they are not watching actual football. They are watching the football, that is to say literally the ball itself. Watching the game live, I have the feeling that the QB throws the ball to the only possible place. The final effect is that we get more feeling but less knowledge. Some of the best commentators take this into consideration during the instant replay sections of the telecast and are able to highlight various ways the play could have gone had the quarterback chose differently.

Watching Brady against the Baltimore Ravens in the AFC Championship game two weeks ago, one could see his fluid throwing motion and most of his usual accuracy. As usual, Brady was seldom hurried when making his throws. The obvious reason for this is that the Patriots have invested heavily as an organization in their offensive line, and it's paid off: their pass protection is excellent. A slightly less obvious reason is that the "blitz," where a defensive player from the secondary--either a linebacker or safety--comes up and rushes at the quarterback, is mostly ineffective against Brady, for two reasons: He is probably the best reader of defenses in the NFL, a skill both learned through study and instinctual (being able to sense when a slight lean forward by a safety indicates that he's about to blitz), and, more important, the Patriots passing offense is very much focused on the short and short-intermediate pass. If a blitz is coming, Brady always has the option of a short outlet to Wes Welker, a small, dynamic receiver who tends to hang out near the line of scrimmage, catch anything thrown near him, and then dart forward for seven or eight yards after the catch. Brady would probably have thrown to him anyway; a blitz just means there will be one less person around to tackle Welker in the secondary.

Who has the advantage in football, the offense or the defense? In baseball, we know that a pitcher gets a batter out more often than not. In professional football, a good offense will score on about half of its possessions. But some of those scores, when they are field goals, may in a sense be victories for the defense. Let's think of it another way: On offense, in a standard pro set, there is the quarterback, five offensive linemen, a tailback, a tight end, and three wide receivers. (Or two tight ends and two receivers; or two running backs and two receivers.) That means five players can catch the ball. The receivers are fast and are covered by cornerbacks; the tight ends are big and are covered by linebackers; running backs coming out of the backfield, being neither too big nor too fast, can be covered by a safety or a linebacker. In a standard pro 4-3-4 defensive scheme, there are four down linemen, three linebackers, and four defensive backs. In other words, there are seven players in potential pass coverage to the offense's five potential receivers. If the defense wants to put more pressure on the quarterback, they can run a 5-2-4--but they will still have six people in coverage to the offense's five. In terms of passing, therefore, the defense continues to outnumber the offense by one player. But the offense has the advantage of surprise. In addition, by being in charge of where the ball is going to go, the offense can choose to focus on personnel: a weaknesses in a defense (an inexperienced cornerback, for example) or strengths in their offense: in the Patriots' case an uncommonly tall, powerful tight end in Ron Gronkowski, who is too tall for most linebackers to cover one-on-one, and an uncommonly agile tight end in Aaron Hernandez, who is too fast for most linebackers. The final offensive advantage is simply the advantage of space: Wide receivers have the entire field in which to run around and, with a professional quarterback throwing, they only need to be open momentarily for him to deliver the ball to them.

No offensive team is more cognizant of the possibilities of space than the New England Patriots. Instead of attacking between the tackles or down the field vertically, the Patriots rely on playing underneath the defense and across the field. Brady will occasionally hit one of his tight ends for a thirty-yard strike down the middle of the field (the "seam" in between the linebacker and the safety), but the Patriots' more typical pass play involves Brady stepping back from center, turning right, and whipping the ball twenty yards along the line of scrimmage to tiny, diminutive Wes Welker, and then letting Welker slide and tumble and slip forward for eight or nine yards. The remarkable success of Welker--who is not fast by NFL standards but is quick, agile, and very difficult to tackle within a box--has led the Patriots to start looking for Welker clones. One is Edelman; another is Woodhead. It is difficult to imagine any of these players experiencing a similar level of success with another team. The Patriots' celebrated tight ends are also in the Welker mode: they are flexible, multi-dimensional players rather than players who dominate at one aspect of the game. This flexibility is perhaps the one necessary complement to their immobile quarterback.

When Brady and the Patriots faced the Baltimore Ravens, one of the best defensive teams in football, the defense they saw most often was the Cover 1, where all secondary players and linebackers have man-to-man responsibilities except for the safety, who in the case of the Ravens is the talented Ed Reed. It is a great defense if the linebackers are athletic enough to cover the tight ends and wide receivers, and while the Ravens’ linebackers are talented, it was the play of Reed, with his knack for jumping down in the seam just when the Patriots receivers looked like they might be coming open, that caused much of the turmoil for the Patriots. The Ravens’ linebackers, while not agile enough to cover Gronkowski and Hernandez across the field or underneath were fast enough in tandem with the Ravens’ secondary to create a tight window in the seam and a largely frustrating day for Brady. Sometimes, the Ravens even dropped a defensive end into pass coverage, indicative of their commitment to making Brady complete passes in front of them. The Patriots didn't necessarily mind. The space in the short distance meant the basics of their offense could be executed with relative ease but the more difficult aspects would become even more difficult. The Patriots like to get the ball to their receivers in space against a 1-on-1 defender. They are allowed so many 1-on-1 opportunities because Brady throws to so many receivers and is good at making pre-snap reads as to which receiver will likely receive 1-on-1 coverage. Their main receivers—Welker, Edelman, Gronkowski, Hernandez, Branch—are quick but not fast by NFL standards. Relying on the intermediate passing attack where Brady thrives, the Patriots found themselves often in the red zone, but the strategy that got them there is also the one that made it difficult for them to score. The Patriots seemed constantly to run out of space. They scored two touchdowns but had to kick three easy field goals, a ratio they no doubt wish could have been reversed.

As for Brady, he wasn't particularly good. He missed a wide-open Gronkowski in the first quarter on what would have been an easy touchdown, and threw behind several receivers. He threw one interception directly into the chest of a Ravens safety, and another into double coverage deep down the field--an almost hopeless pass. What was remarkable about Brady's performance against the Ravens was his stubborn consistency despite all this. He peppered the short hitch routes and underneath crossing patterns with the ease of playing front-yard catch. After several drives stalled and Brady threw an interception by forcing the ball vertically into the seam, the quarterback refused to change his game plan. He continued throwing the ball where he thought it ought to go until, finally, it did.

On Brady’s best drive of the day, he executed the seam pass that troubled him all day, finding Gronkowski for a long gain on second down. On this play, he threw the ball deftly into the soft spot of the Ravens’ defense, sailing it inches over the defender’s outstretched hands. This throw is sometimes called “the one inch throw,” because to be successful, the ball should travel one inch over the linebacker’s hands. This ensures that the linebacker does not knock the ball down and also that the safety does not knock the receiver’s head off. It requires both finesse and confidence. Given his previous ineptitude with the throw, Brady had no reason to be confident--except that Brady always throws with confidence. The one-inch throw to Gronkowski put the ball into Ravens territory. The drive ended when Brady scored a touchdown on a QB sneak on 4 & Goal inside the Ravens’ one yard line. Taking a quick snap, he jumped up and over the Ravens’ defensive line, and interestingly, the play did not look to be from design, but Brady saw something and sent his gangly limbs flailing into the air. The play was his only touchdown of the day and the highlight of his performance. 23-20 New England.

With the Patriots’ receiving core structured how it is, the Patriots offense requires a more patient Brady than ever before. In the intermediate passing game, there are few ways to stop Brady because he is so accurate, but without a true deep threat, the Patriots run a lot of plays and this creates more room for error. Brady's two interceptions show what can happen when defenses successfully play a bend-but-don’t-break style against the Patriots and cause Brady to become impatient.

In the AFC championship, Brady was just good enough to win. While achieving victory, Brady never established comfort against the Ravens’ defense, but it is also hard to see what he could have done differently. The Ravens allowed Brady to play like Brady. The quarterback completed all of the passes that he usually completes, but the Ravens’ defense forced him to do what is difficult for him this year—running with the football and scoring quickly without a significant deep threat.

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Brady's game is accuracy, quick decision-making, controlling the ball and throwing few interceptions. For Eli Manning, interceptions are a mark of his authenticity.

The last time the Giants faced the Patriots in the Super Bowl, Manning was a figure of frustration for Giants fans. During the 2007 regular season, he’d led the league in interceptions, despite the advantage of a strong running game, and New Yorkers were aching to run the whiny, flakey quarterback out of town. Then he led the Giants on an improbable playoff run, threw an impossible fourth-down bomb late in the Superbowl that became known as “The Catch,” leading to the the Giants’ upset of the unbeaten Pats—and suddenly Eli was the MVP of Super Bowl XLII.

And yet he still seemed on shaky ground. It wasn’t until this year that Eli established himself as a no-doubt top-flight quarterback. While he still throws plenty of interceptions, the Giants, and their fans, have come to rely on him as their offense’s main provider. This season, he was third in the league with 308 passing yards per game—a hundred yards more than in 2007.

Eli’s progress reflects a much broader trend in the league, in which league-wide passing numbers are up, way up. And while passing has been made easier by athletic receivers, rules to protect QBs, stricter calls against defensive backs, and so on, this is only part of the story. Manly NFL coaches would prefer to run the ball—they would prefer to jam it down the throats of their opponents. But with the increased size and agility of defensive linemen, the running game in recent years has become much more difficult. Innovations here have consisted of entertaining wrinkles (the Dolphins’ Wildcat, the Broncos’ Tebow), not legitimate, sustainable commitments to running the ball. The Giants look like a team molded to run the football, and have historically been so, but in fact they have increasingly relied on Eli to put up large numbers. In the NFC Championship game gainst San Francisco, the league’s best defense, he threw a team record fifty-two passes. And that was in the rain.

+ + +

The quarterback Eli may most resemble is the legendary recent retiree Brett Favre. Eli is not a gunslinger in the way of Favre, but like Favre he is not afraid to throw the ball into traffic, having led the league in picks as recently as 2010. Though he has played almost scot-free football in this year’s playoffs (1 INT thus far), he still can’t fight his urge to throw the ball up for grabs from time to time.

Eli’s mishaps are of a particular sort. He’s too savvy for defensive secondaries to take him by surprise and so his mistakes are miscalculations; but he is always calculating. Where Favre was overconfident in his arm strength, Eli is overconfident in his predictive abilities. Statistically, the late Eli is very similar to Favre—both are elite quarterbacks who throw a lot of interceptions. However, their playing styles are vastly different. Where Favre was an immediate fan favorite, Eli is more of an acquired taste.

Much time has passed since the 2004 draft, when Eli refused to play for the Chargers, who drafted him with the first pick, effectively forcing a trade to New York. Before taking a snap in the NFL, he willfully encouraged fans to think of him as entitled and whiny. Very few players’ reputations are determined by what happens off the field; on the field, though, Eli did not quickly win over Giants’ fans, because he was still kind of whiny. It was the look on his face more than anything, really, as if he were always about to cry. The fact that he was the younger, physically smaller brother of Peyton Manning, the statistically dominant Colts’ quarterback, didn’t help. If he had blood on his jersey, it looked out place—like a school bully had just snapped his bifocals. That being said, his sometimes languid, sometimes bratty style of play had a way of disguising one of his best qualities, which were on ample display against the 49ers: he’s a tough son-of-a-bitch. His ability to withstand hit after hit was exactly the attribute that propelled the Giants to victory. And the sole reason he did not want to go to San Diego? He wanted to win. Good move.

While Eli increased his stock throughout the NFC championship game, the most endearing Eli-play of all came on second and eight at midfield with less than a minute to go in the fourth quarter. Facing heavy pressure, Eli turned almost 360 degrees and contorted his body awkwardly to get a pass to Ahmad Bradshaw in the flat, just as the Niners’ Aldon Smith leveled him. It would be rare to see Brady make a play like this, but Eli makes a living of it. Smith’s vicious hit left Eli’s chinstrap somewhere around his forehead and his shoulder pads sticking out of his jersey, up by his helmet. His head had apparently been pushed down into his neck, and yet he stayed cogent and composed enough to be aware of clock management and signal a timeout. Eli’s toughness is somehow akin to his aloofness—it’s as if his game were too cerebral to even admit the notion of physical pain.

In overtime, the game ended with a Kyle Williams fumble that set up Lawrence Tynes for the winning field goal, but it was because of Eli that the Giants won the game. He diversified his targets (thirty-two completions to eight receivers), made deep throws, and bought time with his feet.

+ + +

Today, the two QBs will play. Brady looks for his fourth Superbowl ring. Eli looks for his second, and perhaps once again, a momentary usurpation of Brady's throne.

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***

2012-02-03T18:11:46Z

by Kirill Medvedev

The wife of an activist who died under strange circumstances,
though more likely than not it was an accident,
says to me that she literally finds herself shaking
from everything that's going on, the arrests and the interrogations of activists . . .
I'm sure you know the story of N, she says.
A labor activist, they planted drugs on him, he got five years.
International campaigns have proved useless.
Yes, I said, I know, of course.
So what can we do, she says, what sort of action can we plan,
so that everyone finds out? What should we do?
And I say, we have two choices. Either we patiently build the
labor unions . . . or we have to do something really ugly,
because no radical art actions are going to help here,
are going to get through.
And she says, yes, and then what? We commit a terrorist act? That's the same thing
right now,
as sticking your head out of the trench,
and getting it blown off . . .
And as for labor unions, she says,
I know the labor activists,
they're wonderful people, but
it's all
so slow . . .
How long will it take,
although, it's true, it's the only way.
In the end it's the labor unions
that are the true workshop of communism.
Yes, I say, right now that's the situation,
no matter what anyone says,
and who knows what the future may bring, but for the moment
the progressive labor activists have a higher political consciousness
than the intellectuals,
than the professors,
it's just too bad there are so few of them.
But strategically that's the most important thing.
She says, You're right, I'm disappointed I wasn't able to unionize
the supervisors,
they're too dependent on their private interests . . .
Night comes on
the cold streams in, streams in, streams in,
and enters
through the gates, through our sleeves
through our skin
enters our blood,
and somewhere in a warm room
on a soft bed on white
sheets
a pretty young mother
is stroking her little child
sleep sleep sleep my little one
sleep my baby child
sleep sleep don't listen
to the wind howling
the cars rustling
sleep tighter my little one
gather strength
you'll need lots of strength
the working class needs brave strong tough fighters
there are difficult times ahead.

—Translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen

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Close to Me

2012-02-02T17:36:53Z

by Naomi Fry

In a scene about halfway through Alan Hollinghurst's excellent novel The Stranger's Child, Paul Bryant, a bashful bank clerk in his early twenties, spends a solitary Friday evening in his rented Wiltshire bedroom reading a copy of Films and Filming magazine he'd hidden in his wardrobe. That the virginal, homosexual Paul is squirreling away not gay pornography, but merely a popular publication with mildly risqué photos of movie stars, seems a pointed comment on life in the closet in the mid-'60s, and its modestly subversive spirit of "making do." This, however, is just one detail of several Hollinghurst employs to set the scene. With its close description of Paul's "lonely ritual"—performed in a room filled with "things not wanted elsewhere in the house, the scratchy armchair, the wrought-iron lamp, the souvenir ashtrays, the brown wool rug made by [the landlord] Mr. Marsh himself, at what must have been a low moment"—this tragicomic passage informs us of the socio-sexual practices of a certain era, and also draws out our readerly sympathies towards Paul in this specific historical context by granting him, as well as his little routines, a tactile distinctiveness.

In George Eliot's 1859 novel Adam Bede, the author suggests that realism should work to depict not abstractions, but rather "the few in the foreground of the great multitudes, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch." This "faithful representing of commonplace things," Eliot continues, should serve to arouse a "deep human sympathy" in readers, creating a bond that would then continue beyond the textual and into the social lives of real men, forming a connection among them.

Eliot's words are relevant both to our early reaction to Paul as well as to Paul's own initial reaction towards Films and Filming. As he gazes at the publication's cover, which features a still from the 1967 film Privilege, he experiences a surge of recognition and longing:

Jean Shrimpton's pale profile hovered over Paul Jones, whose eyes were closed, and his lips, and teeth, slightly parted. At first Paul had thought she must be watching him sleep . . . Then he'd guessed, with a strange prickly rush, that they must be making love, and that the pop-star's open mouth wasn't snoring but gasping in surrender.

The "strange prickly rush" aroused in Paul (Bryant) by Paul (Jones's) gasping mouth implies an especially corporeal version of Eliot's "knowing" and "touching"—one in which sympathy tips over into sensation, enabling Paul to happily wedge himself into the heterosexual dyad before him.

But is Jones really gasping? Or is he, in the end, only snoring? As Paul almost immediately realizes, "actually, you couldn't be sure." And once this preliminary trust in the particularities of representation collapses, more difficulties follow. Although "there was a suggestion of (Jones's) naked shoulder and chest, and thus of other things you might get to see if you went to the film,

It wouldn't come here, of course, he'd have to go to Swindon or Oxford on the bus
. . . In the grey and white close-up Paul Jones' puppyish neck looked fleshy and pitted. Also he had no earlobes, a weird thing you couldn't entirely overlook once you've noticed it.

The neck's uninvitingly rough skin; the movie that "wouldn't come here," but would require a bus ride to Swindon; the oddly missing earlobes—a series of increasingly ridiculous obstructions comes between Paul's desire and its fulfillment. Although he wants "to kiss Paul Jones," Paul Bryant still concedes that he "wasn't sure" about him. "His mother had fancied him quite openly once, on Top of the Pops, and you couldn't very easily share a fantasy with your mother."

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No sharing, and so, no caring. If for Eliot, aesthetic representation is what enables the creation of actual ties between people, in Hollinghurst's novel such a process is always doomed to failure, and Paul's case is emblematic in this respect. Even if a body is represented carefully, whether in a TV show or on a magazine cover, in a poem or a diary, obstacles will inevitably come up, nullifying the imagined connection to that body and, following that, the possibility of a real bond. Paradoxically, then, although its characters are probably Hollinghurst's most sympathetic ever—which is to say, his most rounded and realistically rendered, if not necessarily his most likeable—The Stranger's Child is the author's loneliest novel yet.

And Hollinghurst knows from lonely: The Line of Beauty's young striver, Nick Guest, whose need to belong to the moneyed, high-Tory world of Thatcher's London could be taken as completely mercenary if it weren't also paralleled by his longing for the love and recognition of men more naturally of that world than he; The Folding Star's Edward Manners, whose Villette-like cultural dislocation as an English tutor in Belgium is compounded by the weight of his solitary pining for his teenage student; and, perhaps most notably, The Swimming Pool Library's famously lascivious gay protagonist, the posh Will Beckwith, whose multiple anonymous sexual encounters correspond to his mostly successful attempts to "keep (his) life clear of interference from the demands and misery of other people."

Nevertheless, what these books have that The Stranger's Child palpably does not are explicit sex scenes. Indeed, much of the critical conversation about the novel so far has focused on this surprising—and for Hollinghurst, unprecedented—erasure. If part of The Swimming Pool Library's point was to rub the reader's face in as many encounters between cocks and assholes as possible, forcing him to recognize these acts as both visible and tenable, The Stranger's Child's almost complete elision of these same acts has appeared to some critics as a sudden and inexplicable loss of ideological nerve.

So, indeed, "not enough filthy sex," as a colleague of mine griped after reading the book. But even though The Stranger's Child is less titillating than Hollinghurst's earlier novels, I don't think this has anything to do with an ideological softening. In fact, for all the playful narrative possibilities of Hollinghurst's other books, with their non-traditional, non-futural, anti-marriage-plot-like couplings—where central love-interest characters sometimes slip out for a quick metaphorical pee mid-plot, only to return, seemingly randomly and with scant comment, literally hundreds of pages later—I'd venture that The Stranger's Child is oddly more uncompromising in its vision. Because in forgoing the sexual, this gorgeously written, crushingly poignant book also gives up what for Hollinghurst was the final and only domain of interpersonal connection, and so alerts us to the radically arid vision of human relationships the author is interested in forwarding.

+ + +

On the face of it, The Stranger's Child appears to promise something very different, and more traditional, than Hollinghurst's previous work. The novel is his first attempt at a historical saga: it stretches from 1913 to 2008, and centers on the figure of bisexual poet Cecil Valance, who, once felled in the Great War, leaves behind a complicated legacy that his family, lovers, and biographers attempt to untangle over the course of the book. The fairly convoluted storyline, mediated by multiple points of view, also implicitly traces the trajectory of homosexual identity in England—from 1910s and 1920s aristocratic libertinism (and its flipside, middle-class repression); to 1960s closeted cautiousness, on the eve of the '67 Sexual Offenses Act; to early 1980s single gay life; to late aughts civil partnerships. The novel, then, delineates the evolution of 20th-century gay experience as a kind of marriage plot writ large—Victorian narrative device wed to a liberal historical trajectory.

It would stand to reason that the possibilities of sympathetic engagement between the novel's subjects would grow less rather than more fraught over the narrative's course; that increasing visibility and representation would lead to easier community formation—from closeted aloneness à la Paul Bryant to out gay unions. And certainly, it's true that by the end of the novel, even the once lonely Paul, who reappears briefly, is married to "a handsome young Chinese man." However, I'd argue that this reciprocal model is not the one that ends up animating the plot. Instead, a more vernacular, and certainly more frustrated one does: that of the unrequited crush.

The aristocratic Cecil—whom we meet in the book's first section when he visits Two Acres, his school friend and lover George Sawle's middle-class family home—keeps himself busy in Cambridge and beyond trying to "fuck anyone," as an elderly, senile George notes tartly in a later section of the book. At Two Acres, Cecil's noncommittal profligacy manifests itself in his seduction not only of George, but also of Daphne, George's teenage sister, even though she is disappointed to find his kiss "idiotic and unpleasant." And truly, sex—of both the homo- and hetero- variety—turns out to be a bit beside the point here. Cecil and George's lovemaking resides somewhere in the unexplored novelistic silence beyond the former "reach(ing) out his arms impatiently" to the latter, while Daphne's grapple with Cecil comes to nothing more than getting "hurt by the hard shape of the cigar case in his trouser pocket thrusting against her stomach." She ends up unsatisfied, just as George, too, remains always "longing for (Cecil's) patient touch and simple smile of shared knowledge."

While Hollinghurst has dealt extensively with this sort of non-mutual model before (in unevenly stacked love matches between such characters as The Swimming Pool Library's Will and Arthur, The Folding Star's Edward and Luc, and The Line of Beauty's Nick and Wani), these earlier crushes weren't nearly as unrequited as the one that dominates The Stranger's Child. If in the previous books longing was momentarily relieved by concentrated bouts of sex (whether with a crush's object or otherwise), or at least a productive spot of reciprocal cruising, here the desire for connection remains so insatiable that it structures the book not only literally but metaphorically as well, as its characters attempt and fail to grasp the meaning of Cecil's confounding poetic and biographical legacy. It's not just Cecil's body, but his corpus as well that proves a total tease, once again giving the lie to Eliot's realist premise. Or as George notes while looking at his dead lover's marble effigy, laid out at his ancestral estate "in dress uniform, with rich attention to detail," "Cecil had been much photographed and doubtless much described . . . yet all these depictions were in a sense failures."

During his early visit to Two Acres, Cecil pens a poem that he names after the Sawle home in Daphne's autograph book. After his death in the war, this work is taken up as a depiction of a modest gemeinschaft Englishness ("Two blessed acres of English ground"), meant to unify the social and national body; as such, it is cited by Churchill, memorized by schoolchildren, and provides the impetus for the writing of a late 1920s biography of Cecil, which whitewashes his homosexual tendencies. This approach, in which a text is able to form a community only at the price of excluding some of its members, is seemingly revised later in The Stranger's Child, when Paul Bryant decides to write a biography of Cecil as a proto-queer poet, whose work offers a chance to examine the hidden history of homosexual bonds. In a section that takes place in 1980, Paul—no longer a bank clerk who sits "half the time . . . [with] a half-erection, seen by no one, caused by no one, under the counter," but now an out writer for the TLS—becomes intent on piecing together the real story behind "Two Acres."

When Bryant meets with the by now out-of-it, doddering George to question him about his relationship with Cecil, he does receive some acknowledgment of their shared sexual past ("he had an enormous cock")—probably the most directly stated admission of the sort that The Stranger's Child provides. What's more, George makes a pass at Paul, "looking me in the eye with who knows what memories and conjectures, his hand appreciatively cupping my backside," as the would-be biographer later writes in his diary. Paul continues,

for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me, and wondered how I would take it—I almost wanted him to, in a way—but he looked down, and as he did so I thought suddenly, well, this is a history I'm going to write.

This is affecting not just as a recurrence of wanting and not getting—of each side's inability to tally its desires with the other's—but also because we later come to learn that the "history" the mercenary Paul proceeds to write (England Trembles) only gets it half right in the end. While the biography reveals that Cecil did indeed share his "enormous cock" with many, both women and men, Hollinghurst presents this late outing as still not truly indicative of its subjects' sympathies and interpersonal commitments. According to Paul's book, Cecil not only had affairs with George and Daphne, he also illegitimately fathered Daphne's daughter; Daphne's husband Dudley, Cecil's younger brother, was also gay, and so was Revel Ralph, Daphne's second husband, who was not the real father of Daphne's son. The sheer hyperbolic juiciness of all this—and the fact that apart from Cecil's earlier dalliances with George and Daphne, and, possibly, Revel's homosexual tendencies, The Stranger's Child doesn't fully reveal which of Paul's claims are true and which aren't—suggests that Paul's biography is simply the flip side of its 1920s predecessor, another representation that can't be trusted.

Paul Bryant is clearly presented as a hack, but his impulse, specific to his historical moment—to deal with what his TLS editor calls "gay things," to comb conventional appearances against the grain in order to represent what lies beneath them—very much dovetails with Hollinghurst's own political schema in his earlier books, especially in The Swimming Pool Library. But if in that first novel a hard-on is seen to undergird every single human interaction represented, from baby dandling to skinhead baiting, in The Stranger's Child this is decidedly not the case. Hollinghurst makes Paul ridiculous, and one character's airy comment to another that "outing gay writers was all the rage then, of course," seems to align, on the whole, with The Stranger's Child's own take. The once hot urge has now cooled, and the possibility for connection, however brief, wanes right along with it.

And so the book ends not with a bang, but a whimper. Its final section is focalized through the eyes of an antique books dealer named Rob, whom Hollinghurst uses as something of a device to tie up the book's loose narrative ends. During a memorial service for a onetime lover he shared with Paul Bryant, Rob cruises a good-looking blond man, but, in line with the rest of the book, his efforts are unsuccessful (he admits to himself that he "felt almost relieved" at this failure). Then he pays a visit to a North London antique shop, where the owner suggests he purchase a letter book belonging to Harry Hewitt—a wealthy businessman who was a neighbor of the Sawles in the 1910s, and got to know Cecil Valance briefly on his famous 1913 visit to Two Acres.

In the letter book, Rob finds evidence pointing not only to the fact that Hewitt was secretly and hopelessly in love with Hubert Sawle—Daphne and George's older brother—but also that Cecil apparently sent Hewitt some poems ("for your eyes only"), which the latter then kept hidden in a strong room in his house. Realizing that the house is just in the process of being demolished, Rob rushes there, only to find the strong room empty, and its papers ("rubbish, no use to anyone," in the words of the woman who cleared it), smoldering in a "dense, half-digested fire."

As George notes early on in the book, Cecil has "a way of distancing himself at once," promising reciprocity but then immediately pulling back. And this stays true to the end. George's desire to fully engage with Cecil remains forever unrequited, just as readers, both within and without the world of The Stranger's Child, will never be able to read Cecil's explicit poems (or as Cecil teasingly writes Hewitt "you will see that they are not publishable in my life-time—or England's!"). The fact that Hollinghurst chooses to finish his novel with a sudden onslaught of minor characters from different historical moments in the novel—Rob, Harry Hewitt, Hubert Sawle, the man Rob has "a date at seven with . . . for a moment he couldn't think of his name"—suggests in the context of the rest of the novel not busyness or plot overload, but rather a pointed comment on the radical impenetrability of character as such. For all the distinctive thickness Hollinghurst grants him, a major figure like Cecil Valance, it turns out, isn't that different from a bit player like Harry Hewitt. Both, in the end, remain unknowable.

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Episode 6: The Book is Good

2012-02-01T17:21:39Z

by Daniel Smith, Keith Gessen

Download this episode.

In this episode, Daniel Smith interviews n+1 editor Keith Gessen. They reminisce about old times and dish about Keith's cameo appearance on Gossip Girl. Then, they get down to business and discuss Keith's most recent article for Vanity Fair, titled "The Book on Publishing" (October 2011). This article uses Chad Harbach's book The Art of Fielding as a lens to examine developments in print and electronic publishing. Keith and Daniel discuss what these changes mean for the industry, the authors, and the reading public.

Produced in collaboration with WNSR by Hethre Contant. Production Assistance by Karen Noyes and Greg Thornberg.

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So Many Feelings

2012-01-31T17:01:30Z

by Molly Fischer

Image: From yaymicro.com.

Issue 13 is out now. Subscribe.

jezebel.com
thehairpin.com
xojane.com
rookiemag.com

Blog empire Gawker Media, like its magazine counterparts Conde Nast and Hearst, asks readers to sort themselves by advertising demographic. One might be interested in sports, and read Deadspin. One might be interested in gadgets, and read Gizmodo. Or one might be interested in being a woman, and read Jezebel. When Jezebel launched in spring 2007, I myself was keenly interested in being a woman. I was 20 years old: being a woman was a relatively recent development, and I was curious about the ways it could be done. And I had always enjoyed reading about being a girl.

Fortunately, I had magazines. From ages 6 to 10 or so there was American Girl, bright and clean and dorky, full of historical fiction and craft projects; New Moon, proto-feminist and printed in single color; and Girls’ Life, precocious, with advice about boys. In late elementary and early middle school I read back issues of Teen and Seventeen at the library. In eighth grade my girls’ school classmates and I hoarded copies of Cosmopolitan because we were nothing if not good students, and if there was a textbook for sex we would find it and study it, and ignore its terrible writing and style. “Like an aunt who wears high-waisted jeans but says really shocking things,” my best friend said about Cosmo, at a time when high-waisted jeans were unacceptable. By high school it was clear to us that women’s magazines were a dead end. We would not be snapping up Vogue’s must-have statement shoe for spring. We would not be blowing his mind with Glamour’s kinky new move. We would not be the women women’s magazines proposed, and by college, nor did we wish to be.

But when Jezebel came along, it was hard to resist. Gawker Media’s new blog was also about being a woman, and how to be a woman, but from the start it defined itself against the dubious suggestions of women’s magazines. An introductory manifesto listed the glossies’ “Five Great Lies.” The magazines peddled affirmation while cultivating insecurity. They doctored photos beyond anatomical possibility. Writers created the illusion of celebrity access while revealing only publicist-approved platitudes. Editors recommended products they themselves had received for free. “The Big Meta Lie,” Jezebel concluded, was “that this is one big postmodern joke on which we are all in . . . And though we've found women's magazines to be a fairly trusty engine of hilarious tidbits, it is not all one big joke.” This was the exasperation of insiders, women who’d worked at these places and couldn’t quite believe that anyone bought what they sold. Jezebel’s first team of editors had previously reported on celebrities (Anna Holmes), fashion (Jennifer Gerson), and business (Moe Tkacik); they were soon joined by a sex blogger who wrote under the name Slut Machine (Tracie Egan). As an opening gambit, Jezebel offered a $10,000 reward for before and after evidence of cover retouching. The site’s slogan was “Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women. Without Airbrushing.”

The editors tackled the same material as women’s magazines, but they did it their own way, and with a different idea of their readers. They incorporated both high and low culture in their coverage of the usual middlebrow subjects, and they cultivated distinct voices rather than a generic house style. Egan’s omnivorous viewing habits meant massive amounts of reality TV coverage; Tkacik’s unabashed Obama advocacy determined Jezebel’s take on the election cycle. A review of the movie A Mighty Heart, based on Mariane Pearl’s story of her husband Daniel’s abduction, included an account of being a reporter on September 11, a memory of desiring to give inappropriate blowjobs, and earnest appraisals of Angelina Jolie, Glamour magazine, and Mariane Pearl’s memoir. (Verdict: it was bad, “like reading some very precocious teenage girl's diary.”) Whenever the Jezebel editors found evidence of insincerity, they pounced, with the support of a growing commenter community. A reader answered the call for Photoshop dirty work with a pre-touch-up Redbook cover photo of Faith Hill, and Jezebel rode the story through more than a million pageviews and a cascade of posts that ranged from an explanation of “Why We’re Pissed” to self-congratulatory fascination with the press they received. When the New York Times Style section took notice of Jezebel shortly before its first birthday, the angle of the story was niceness. Jezebel was “a website that set out to be—dare one say it?—nice.” Unlike its sister site, Gawker, where both the editors and commenters had lately grown cruel to their subjects, Jezebel discouraged making negative remarks about women's bodies. It was “a digital-era upgrade of Sassy.”

But “sassy” is not an obvious synonym for “nice,” and Jezebel’s appeal had as much to do with exuberant provocation as it did with inclusion. “It was thick and brown and foul,” Tkacik wrote of the liquid that issued from a ten-day-old tampon. “I wanted to say it smelled sort of like Vegemite tastes, but that’s too kind.” Egan got high and filmed herself answering readers’ questions in a recurrent feature called “Pot Psychology.” Such antics may not have been mean, but this did not make them nice. In their assault on the standards of mainstream women’s magazines, Jezebel’s editors seemed determined to prove their aptitude for bad behavior—and not bad meaning titillating, but meaning reckless, abrasive, or just disgusting. Jezebel’s readers were a savvy bunch; too-skinny models and Photoshop falsehoods were familiar grievances. But Moe Tkacik comparing her menses to the Cantonese snack “stinky tofu”—that was something new.

The site’s two ideals—high-minded inclusivity and cool-girl daring—made for an uneasy balance. A few months after the Times story, Egan and Tkacik joined the comedian Lizz Winstead for a discussion called “Thinking and Drinking.” In front of a live audience in New York (and later, endlessly, on YouTube), they proceeded to get trashed and joke about rape. Egan said she had never been sexually assaulted because she was “smart” and lived in Williamsburg. Tkacik said that she didn’t report her own date rape because she “had better things to do, like drinking more.” Egan called pulling out “the most fun way not to get pregnant.” “If any of you guys use the pullout method, but you read, you know, anything I wrote about Ben Bernanke,” Tkacik told the crowd, “at least you'll go to the grave with your syphilis slightly informed.” Winstead chastised them. They fumbled with Solo cups, slouched, and shouted down hissing audience members.

Afterward, Winstead took to the Huffington Post to call the conversation “deeply disturbing.” Jezebel Editor-in-Chief Anna Holmes wrote that she was “unhappy and frustrated” and called the incident “a fucking shame.” Egan and Tkacik made some efforts to defend themselves: they were drunk, they were caught off guard. Basically, they wanted to be women and speak without necessarily speaking for women. Their online bravado had looked like it might be some brash new face of feminism. After a certain point, though, their rebellion seemed to be demanding the right not to be taken seriously.

There were no immediate repercussions from the incident, but over time the site’s voice changed. Tkacik briefly moved to Gawker before returning to print journalism. Egan remained at Jezebel but retreated into TV recaps. Jezebel began to take itself more seriously, but its seriousness took the form of ardent inoffensiveness. Rather than attracting attention with outrageous statements and big personalities, the site courted pageviews with a blend of easy indignation and broad pop culture coverage. The editors came out against Youth Lingerie Football, girls’ T-shirts with anti-homework slogans, and the sexual abuse of children. An ideal subject was one that could not possibly hurt the feelings of any conceivable reader. Linking to an illustration of “Ponytail Angle of Attack vs. Intelligence,” Dodai Stewart allowed that the image was “ostensibly humorous,” but assured readers that “obviously how you wear your hair has nothing to do with your intelligence.” Anna North began a post on “How to Brighten Your Mood When It’s Raining” with the disclaimer, “If you’re suffering from clinical depression, it’s a good idea to seek medical treatment if at all possible.” She went on to recommend chores, fun music, and good deeds.

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Jezebel believed the glossies were dangerous. Its successor, The Hairpin, regarded them as obviously absurd.

While Nick Denton took his web properties bigger and broader, former Gawker editors founded a new site, The Awl, that laid claim to the distinct voice and media provincialism that once were part of Gawker’s appeal. Seemingly out of obligation, in fall 2010 the Awl editors introduced a sister site, The Hairpin. The Hairpin would be “a women's website . . . insofar as it is run by women, will feature writing by women (although guys should absolutely feel free to get in touch, too), and will mostly be read by women.” There was none of the self-conscious agenda that Jezebel had brought to the project of running a women's website. In fact, there seemed to be no agenda at all, just a niche to fill. If the Awl appealed to readers disappointed by the new Gawker, then The Hairpin would be a home for women who used to like Jezebel.

The Hairpin was sort of about women, but really it was about editor Edith Zimmerman’s sensibility: internet-fluent and self-consciously eccentric, with a nostalgic streak for both childhood and history. There were photographs of brightly colored items organized by color, a list of “Things to Name Your Oregon Trail Family,” and a discussion of 17th-century dildo pranks. Creepy dolls were objects of ongoing fascination, and Steve Buscemi was included in a game of Fuck/Marry/Kill. This was cute performed for an audience that disliked Zooey Deschanel but still liked reading about eco-friendly cat bonnets. It was cute that was always also a joke about being cute, with hyperbole or alcohol or icky things thrown in to make sure everyone got the joke. Accompanying some posts were Zimmerman’s own shaky little line drawings of a dolphin, a birthday cake, a disembodied smile.

The Hairpin’s media criticism tended toward the observational, peculiar, and irrefutable. (In what must have been her most popular post of all time, Zimmerman presented “Women Laughing Alone With Salad,” a collection of stock photos, without commentary.) The exception was posts by Liz Colville, who at first sat below Zimmerman on the masthead. Seemingly there to legitimize The Hairpin’s status as a “women’s website,” Colville dealt straightforwardly with gender and politics; many of her posts wouldn’t have been out of place on early Jezebel. Last January, Colville posted “How Lady Magazines Fared in 2010,” an earnest breakdown of 2010 circulation figures and cover subjects for women’s magazines. “The data suggests that in a lot of cases women just aren’t getting what they want from a magazine,” she concluded. Her post appeared back-to-back with Zimmerman’s “Oo-ooh, Someone’s Mad at the New Yorker,” about a woman who was demanding a refund because the vast majority of the magazine’s writers were men. “Does this bother you?” Zimmerman wrote. “This doesn’t bother me. If you like a magazine, read it; if you don’t, don’t. Also, if you’re mad at a magazine, sounding like a total drag can’t be the best way to get what you want.” By January, Colville had left the website.

Meanwhile, advice columns proliferated. The Hairpin offered readers the chance to Ask a Dude; before long one could also Ask a Married Dude, A Lady, A Clean Person, or A Handy Femme. “There are times when a question comes in and I die a weeny bit of joy because it’s just so Hairpin,” wrote Clean Person Jolie Kerr, in response to a query about spilled leg wax. “Usually when this happens I forward them to The Lady Edith and we sort of go ‘ALKSHjfhaiakhSLKasfHLSKHFsh’ because it’s our way of expressing how much we love you. I think it’s nice for you to know that!” The advice columns sometimes involved shame (“Nipple hairs: do you notice?”) but more often showed childlike delight in adult activities: you too could caulk a bathtub or host a potluck. The site had reclaimed the service-journalism staples of women’s magazines. With wittier execution and more explicit material, it turned out they were still fun.

In January, Jane Marie Feltes started writing the “How to Be a Girl” column. She was a producer for This American Life, not a beauty editor, which gave her credibility: if she recommended wearing highlighter on your cheekbones all the time, perhaps this was not an outlandish idea. Feltes enumerated “Reasons Why You Need a Winter Pedicure” and advised airbrush body foundation for bruised legs. She posted shopping lists of “What To Do With Your Allowance This Week” (buy a cuff bracelet and a cotton romper). The flight from women’s mag territory had come full circle, except that beauty editors had never sounded this excited about their jobs. “AHHHHH this has been so fun!” Feltes started one of her columns. “Every time I see an email from one of you I go ‘EEEEEEEE!!! YAH-YAH-YAAA-YAH!’” In September, she took the spot below Zimmerman’s on the masthead.

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Looming over all the new women’s sites was Sassy, the early-’90s teen magazine that yoked indie rock and pop feminism, thrift-store fashion and first-person journalism. Short-lived and beloved, it was the object of reverent nostalgia, at least among the former teenage girls who’d grown up to work at magazines and post comments on blogs like Jezebel and The Hairpin. For them “Sassy” was shorthand for a certain set of female media ideals—smart but not self-serious, stylish but skeptical—and expectations were high when founding editor Jane Pratt announced plans for a new website, xojane.

But when her site went up in May 2011, the readers who’d been prepared to adore xojane weren’t sure what to make of it. “Yes, I’m Exactly Twice as Old as When I Started Sassy,” read the title of Pratt’s first post, as if she already knew her situation was impossible. Her fans were disappointed that she’d changed but embarrassed to watch her try to stay the same, and worst of all, starting to wonder if she’d ever been that great at all. Pratt would have seemed an ideal voice of savvy adult womanhood, one with both years of media experience and an intimate sense of her readers. But with xojane, Sassy had soured into the self-proclaimed place “where women go when they are being selfish, and where their selfishness is applauded.” The cool big sister who relished sharing her expertise had grown up into a woman who feuded with salon receptionists she overheard calling her old. Fearless honesty was hard to applaud when it yielded headlines like “I Obsessively Monitor My Husband’s Lube Bottle.”

“Ladyblog horrorcore!” was one Hairpin commenter’s verdict on the new site. This appeared to be the general consensus. Thenceforth, the internet noticed xojane only when it perpetrated something really egregious, like an inaccuracy-filled column by “health critic” Cat Marnell about contraception. “Ranting Lady Blogger Hates Birth Control, Only Uses Plan B,” wrote Gawker of the “bizarre 1000-word treatise.” Faced with more high-minded criticism—that the site was spreading misinformation to impressionable youth—xojane posted “An Open Letter to ‘Teenage Girls’” telling them to get off the site and “leave us at xojane to our lentil soup and our crafts and our footie pajamas and our ’90s nostalgia.” Apparently this was a no-kids-allowed slumber party.

But Pratt had a protégée, one who shared her reverence for Sassy but remained in the original Sassy demographic: Tavi Gevinson, the 15-year-old Illinois style blogger who had become a sprite-like mascot of the fashion industry. Gevinson had written on her blog that she “like many, would like another Sassy,” and Pratt got in touch with her. “We're going to start a magazine for an audience of teenage girls,” Gevinson wrote afterward. “(I am trying so hard to be cool and professional right now.)”

Despite that initial excitement, the partnership dissolved—no hard feelings, Gevinson said, she just wanted full creative control. A few months after xojane’s appearance, she introduced Rookie, “an online publication for teenage girls.” Pratt was credited on the staff page as the site’s “fairy godmother,” while The Awl’s editors and Gevinson’s dad were “guardian angels.” Instead of Pratt’s Say Media, Tavi was working with New York parent company New York Media.

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When Rookie made its debut in September 2011, it was met with the same delight as Jezebel and The Hairpin before it, the same perennial surprise that a women’s site could casually combine serious matters and style. The theme for its first month was “Beginnings,” which allowed Gevinson to approach her audience in a way that was weirdly, persistently general: she assumed that teenage girls were mostly interested in the fact of being a teenage girl. Posts addressed this topic in broad and direct terms. Here is a post about teen girl characters in movies and on TV. Here is a post about another type of teen girl characters in movies and on TV. Here are ways that you, as a teenage girl, can dress up like the idea of a teenage girl, in short pleated skirts and knee socks. Here is a post that begins “I am a 23-year-old heterosexual male, but I often feel like a 16-year-old girl.” The author goes on to explain what he believes this involves.

But, if I recall correctly, as a teenage girl, one spends a lot of time imagining what life will be like when one is no longer a teenage girl. That rapt anxiety of anticipation is constant: adulthood is so close you can smell it and yet the transformation of you, teenager, into you, adult, seems fundamentally impossible. How will it happen? When? The idea of being an adult is totally fascinating to teenagers. The idea of being a teenager is interesting primarily to preadolescents and adults.

Gevinson repeatedly mentions The Virgin Suicides (both the book and movie) as an inspiration. But The Virgin Suicides is not an empowering document of teen girlhood. It’s a book about men’s mythmaking fixation on boyhood fantasies. Its fractured nostalgia is an odd way for a teen to think about being a teen—but it’s a perfectly reasonable way for an adult to think about being a teen, and adults are some of Gevinson’s biggest fans. Her vocabulary, which includes My So-Called Life, Daria, Clueless, and of course Sassy, belongs to an adult cohort that came of age in the nineties. For these women, ostensibly wised-up to pop culture’s fixation on youth, a precocious adolescent made an awkward media savant. Gevinson has a right to her tastes, but the eagerness of adult women to share them was disconcerting. “I am 30 years old and still very proud to be a sticker collector,” a reader commented on a post about stickers. “STICKERS 4 EVER WOO.”

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The appeal of women’s magazines was that they could tell you how you ought to behave—how you should look and whom you should date and what you should buy. How to be a woman is a notoriously slippery, mysterious business, and the women’s magazines offered to pin it down, to make it manageable. All you had to do was buy a skirt, take a quiz, learn six confidence boosters and seventy-five sex tricks. For the most part, the search function has usurped this role (no contemporary eighth grader thinks Cosmo is the best place to learn about sex). But with regard to the subtler sensibilities of adult life, women’s magazines—or more accurately their successors, the blogs—still have an important purpose: they tell us how to be by showing us how we, as women, should talk.

Behold the ladyblogosphere, for these are not women’s blogs but ladyblogs, and “lady” is their endemic verbal tic. Here genitals are ladyparts or lady business (or worse, ladyflowers); here there are single ladies, of course, but also fancy ladies and lady squatters, lady politicians as well as lady doctors and lady writers. “Lady Eats 183 Chicken Wings,” says one Jezebel headline. Here’s another: “For the Lady Who Has Everything, How About Some Blinged-Out Pepper Spray?” The Hairpin has “Ask a Lady” and also a “League of Ordinary Ladies” comic, about going to the movies and eating cookies and taking up needlepoint. “Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility as ‘A Lady,’” reads one post on The Hairpin, “because she predicted this website.” Lady: a child’s categorical noun for non-mother adults.

My own mother went to college in the early ‘70s. She started a women’s resource center with a newsletter; it was called The Bimonthly Period. She retains a second-wave feminist’s fondness for the very deliberate use of the word “woman.” She is a doctor, though, and occasionally she says “lady” when discussing gynecological matters. (“Sometimes ladies need a few stitches after labor.”) The word allows a certain decorous remove from discomfort--it is a polite way to acknowledge the listener’s presumed squeamishness or embarrassment about anything particular to her sex.

On the ladyblogs, adult womanhood is a source of discomfort, and so when we write posts or comments, we tend to call ourselves ladies. We also might be tempted, at slightly braver moments, to call ourselves feminists. Indeed, each ladyblog’s approach appears intended to counter a particular brand of easy misogyny. Women are not mindless consumers, declares Jezebel; women are funny, proclaims The Hairpin.

But the ladyblogs are not feminist simply by virtue of offering women an alternative to traditional female media—feminist blogs are of a different genre, with a specific and explicitly political project. The ladyblogs are fundamentally mainstream general interest outlets, even if a façade of superiority to the mainstream (edginess, quirkiness, knowingness) constitutes part of their appeal. Neither Jezebel or the Hairpin concerns itself with the harder to articulate, more insidious expectations about women’s behavior. Neither knows how to write for and about women without almost embarrassing itself in its eagerness to please. Jezebel is too painstakingly inoffensive to hurt anyone’s feelings. The Hairpin is too charmingly self-effacing to take itself seriously, too tirelessly entertaining to ever bore a visitor. They bake pies with low-hanging fruit: they are helpful, agreeable, relatable, and above all likable.

Surely one can’t, and shouldn’t, strive to like and be liked all the time. But how else can one be? This is not a likable enough question for the ladyblogs to entertain. In the end, they tell us less about how to be than about how to belong, and they are better at this than Sassy ever was, because no place is better for performing inclusion than the internet. Readers write to The Hairpin’s advice columns in painful imitations of the house style. (“SO MANY FEELINGS.”) Commenters squeal over plans for real-life meet-ups in bars. (“I registered just so I could RSVP YES to this!”) The internet, it turned out, was a place to make people like you: the world’s biggest slumber party, and the best place to trade tokens of slumber party intimacy—makeup tips, girl crushes, endless inside jokes. The notion that women might share some fundamental experience and interests, a notion on which women’s websites would seem to depend—“sisterhood,” let’s call it—has curdled into BFF-ship.

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Issue Number 13

2012-01-30T22:05:38Z

Machine Politics

by The Editors

To read the print issue, subscribe today.

THE INTELLECTUAL SITUATION

Song for Occupations
A text message the day after the eviction read: “We need bodies down here.” We got dressed, on the train, off the train. The Brooklyn Bridge rose high against the blue sky. We went down Broadway. In front of us was the guy who balances a cat on his head; today the cat was wearing an American flag. We followed the movement toward familiar Liberty Plaza, which was now surrounded with police barricades and had been hosed clean, like a driveway.

A Left Populism
Whether the eviction amounted to a triumph or blunder for the plutocracy was hard, at first, to say. Protests, actions, and arrests continued through the fall, and then the ambiguity of winter hung over the movement: was this the end or just a preparation for spring? In the months and years ahead, we'll learn whether Occupy can lead to what might be called the active recreation of American democracy.

Song for Occupations (Reprise)
We watched the kids beaten at Berkeley, the footage of the students pepper-sprayed at Davis. We watched the silent protest, hundreds of Davis students sitting still and observing the university chancellor on her endless walk to her car, like a funeral for her administration's dignity. We compared American cities to pictures of Athens, Madrid, Lisbon. We watched London, Frankfurt, Toronto, Vancouver.

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POLITICS

Christopher Glazek
Raise the Crime Rate
The nation’s prisons now contain more inhabitants than any American city save New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. And yet there is no “prison correspondent” at any of the nation’s major newspapers. This isn’t entirely the papers’ fault. Even if reporters were sent to the prisons, they could be denied entry: the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment does not prevent prison authorities from barring the press.

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PSYCHODRAMA

Benjamin Kunkel
Buzz: A Play
"It’s always plausible when the woman’s too good for the man. (beat) And does the heroine show her love for the man she loves—sorry, redundant—but does she like, manifest her—?"

James Franco and Deenah Vollmer
Preparation
I really liked Tyrese. Tyrese ended up not liking me very much. I can understand why. I was being too intense. I was the idiot who didn’t realize this was a light movie, this was a PG-13 movie from Touchstone Pictures. I didn’t need to breathe and think like Muhammad Ali.

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INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY

Kirill Medvedev
Dmitry Kuzmin
When I read a poet who is truly new, I find myself seeing not only the words on the page but, behind the page as it were, a new group of people. This is the poet’s imagined audience, to some extent; every poet has one; the new poet is one who in the process of imagining this audience also brings it into being.

Astra Taylor
Unschooling
The first day at Brown, the administrators assembled the entire freshman class in a large auditorium. You all are the smartest and most capable of your generation, they told us. This is the best place to be, and you are here because you are the best. My heart sank. Obviously that wasn’t true. We were there because we were darlings of the system, willing to accept its terms in exchange for its rewards.

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RISE OF THE MACHINES

Sarah Allison, Ryan Heuser, Matthew Jockers, Franco Moretti, and Michael Witmore
Quantitative Formalism: An Experiment
Not only were genre signals quite strong—they were equally strong at wholly different textual levels. The convergence was so clear, it was almost spooky: it suggested that the logic of genre reached a depth that no one had imagined and no one really knew how to explain.

David Auerbach
The Stupidity of Computers
In signals intelligence nowadays, there isn’t enough human intelligence to process all the signals. Computers pick up the slack, with all their deficient understanding. We see it in health insurance, where claims are questioned or denied through partly automated processes that determine what treatment is “reasonable” and what premiums people should pay. At a certain scale, the quantitative must take over.

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REVIEWS

Elizabeth Gumport
On Chris Kraus
For so long, so many lives refused to be lived like books! Because the books, in turn, were not truly like lives. One way in which they failed to account for female experience was by not acknowledging that failure to account for female experience—that constant feeling of being told, you are telling your life the wrong way. You are taking your life personally, which is to say: not like an artist.

Alice Gregory
On Sotheby's, Inc.
The entire atmosphere is flirtatious. The very cadence of a good auctioneer is teasing: coy with one bidder, forward with the other, pitting the two against each other in a charged battle of tiny tics (paddle up, paddle down). He’ll dangle an index finger at a phone bidder on one side of the room, while leaning his bespoke-suited body toward an in-house bidder on the other. He pauses theatrically, repeating a price again and again until someone tops it.

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Raise the Crime Rate

2012-01-26T19:35:30Z

by Christopher Glazek

Image: Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX), Florence, Colorado.

This piece appears in Issue 13, out today. Subscribe now.

Is it true that living in America has become riskier? In 2006, the political scientist Jacob Hacker published The Great Risk Shift, a progressive tract that appropriated the vocabulary of wealth management to show how thirty years of privatization and deregulation had abraded the security of the American family. Risks once borne by corporations and the government, Hacker noted, like unplanned health costs, are now the responsibility of Mom and Pop. Transferring risk from the collective to the individual, though, ends badly for everyone. Family affliction, like banker “contagion,” is tricky to sequester: if Larry and Terry get bankrupted by bad luck, their misfortune cascades, dragging down creditors, neighbors, and especially their children. The reason liberals like insurance is that it helps diffuse risk throughout society. Pooling risk, one might say, is the essence of the progressive social contract.

Hacker focuses on hazards like cancer and credit exposure, but these are not the only perils we face. Every time we leave the house—and more often, actually, if we remain within it—we run the risk of getting stabbed, shot, raped, or robbed. But while financial risks have crested in recent decades, the risk of suffering personal violence has receded. According to government statistics, Americans are safer today than at any time in the last forty years. In 1990, there were 2,245 homicides in New York City. In 2010, there were 536, only 123 of which involved people who didn’t already know each other. The fear, once common, that walking around city parks late at night could get you mugged or murdered has been relegated to grandmothers; random murders, with few exceptions, simply don’t happen anymore.

When it comes to rape, the numbers look even better: from 1980 to 2005, the estimated number of sexual assaults in the US fell by 85 percent. Scholars attribute this stunning collapse to various factors, including advances in gender equality, the abortion of unwanted children, and the spread of internet pornography.

It shouldn’t surprise us that the country was more dangerous in 1990, at the height of the crack epidemic, than in 2006, at the height of the real estate bubble. What’s strange is that crime has continued to fall during the recession. On May 23, in what has become an annual ritual, the New York Times celebrated the latest such finding: in 2010, as America’s army of unemployed grew to 14 million, violent crime fell for the fourth year in a row, sinking to a level not seen since the early ’70s. This seemed odd. Crime and unemployment were supposed to rise in tandem—progressives have been harping on this point for centuries. Where had all the criminals gone?

Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.

Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.

From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or parole. What Ayn Rand once called the “freest, noblest country in the history of the world” is now the most incarcerated, and the second-most incarcerated country in history, just barely edged out by Stalin’s Soviet Union. We’re used to hearing about the widening chasm between the haves and have-nots; we’re less accustomed to contemplating a more fundamental gap: the abyss that separates the fortunate majority, who control their own bodies, from the luckless minority, whose bodies are controlled, and defiled, by the state.

Before last year, the federal government had never bothered to estimate the actual number of rapes that occur in prisons. Its data relied on official complaints filed by prisoners, which in recent years have averaged around 800. One such complaint was filed in 1995 by Rodney Hulin, a boy from Amarillo, Texas, who had been arrested as a 15-year-old after throwing a Molotov cocktail into a pile of garbage. The trash burned, causing about $500 worth of damage to the exterior of an adjacent house. Hulin’s prank was unimpressive, but Texas in the mid-’90s had little tolerance for teenage ruffianism; in 1994, George W. Bush had become governor, defeating Ann Richards, a popular incumbent, by depicting her as soft on crime. Hulin was charged with two counts of second-degree arson. He was a small guy—just five feet tall and 125 pounds—but he got a big sentence: eight years in adult prison.

Within a month of arriving at Clemens Unit, a temporary holding facility outside Houston for juveniles on their way to adult prison, Hulin was raped by another inmate. He asked to be moved out of harm’s way, but his request was denied, and the rapes continued. In a letter to prison authorities, he wrote, “I might die at any minute. Please sir, help me.” Help was not forthcoming: getting raped was not deemed urgent enough to meet the requirements of the prison’s emergency grievance criteria. When Hulin got his mother to complain to the prison’s warden, she was told that Hulin needed to “grow up” and “learn to deal with it.”

Hulin’s method for dealing with it was to kill himself. Ten weeks after his arrival, he was discovered dangling from the ceiling of his cell.

Hulin’s case was unusual: most prisoners who get raped do not write letters to the warden. It isn’t hard to see why: resisting an inmate who claims your body as his own, or, worse, acquiring a reputation as a “snitch,” can turn an isolated incident into months of serial gang rape. Just ask Roderick Johnson, a petty thief who was attacked by his roommate shortly after arriving at a Texas prison. Johnson asked to be transferred to a different section of the facility, and got his wish. But news of Johnson’s physical availability had spread throughout the complex—after you’re raped once, you’re marked—and he was soon enslaved by a gang. In addition to passing Johnson around among themselves, Johnson’s new overseers sold his ass and mouth to a variety of clients for $3 to $7, a competitive enough price that it resulted in multiple rapes every day for the eighteen months that Johnson spent in prison. When he went to the authorities, they laughed and told him to “fight or fuck.”

Bringing criminal charges against prison officials for failing to protect inmates is virtually impossible in the United States, but civil actions can be filed. After Johnson got out, he lodged a civil suit against six guards who he said refused to help him. In 2005, a Wichita Falls jury found in favor of the guards. In 2007, after passing a note to a clerk at a gas station that read, “I have 9 mm. Put the money in the bag,” Johnson was arrested again. This time, since Johnson was a repeat offender, he got nineteen years.

Victims in juvenile facilities, or facilities for women, have an even tougher time: usually it’s the guards, rather than the inmates, who coerce them into sex. The guards tell their victims that no one will believe them, and that complaining will only make things worse. This is sound advice: even on the rare occasions when juvenile complaints are taken seriously and allegations are substantiated, only half of confirmed abusers are referred for prosecution, only a quarter are arrested, and only 3 percent end up getting charged with a crime.

In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

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America’s prison system is a moral catastrophe. The eerie sense of security that prevails on the streets of lower Manhattan obscures, and depends upon, a system of state-sponsored suffering as vicious and widespread as any in human history. Dismantling the system of American gulags, and holding accountable those responsible for their operation, presents the most urgent humanitarian imperative of our time.

Progressives lament the growth of private prisons (prisons for profit). But it’s sadism, not avarice, that fuels the country’s prison crisis. Prisoners are not the victims of poor planning (as other progressive reformers have argued)—they are the victims of an ideological system that dehumanizes an entire class of human being and permits nearly infinite violence against it. As much as a physical space, prisons denote an ethical space, or, more precisely, a space where ordinary ethics are suspended. Bunk beds, in and of themselves, are not cruel and unusual. University dorms have bunk beds, too. What matters is what happens in those beds. In the dorm room, sex, typically consensual. In prisons, also sex, but often violent rape. The prisons are “overcrowded,” we are told (and, in fact, courts have ruled). “Overcrowding” is a euphemism for an authoritarian nightmare.

As sites of governmental authority, prisons destabilize Weber’s definition of the state as the monopolist of violence. In prisons, the monopoly is suspended: anybody is free to commit rape and be reasonably assured that no state official will notice or care (barring those instances when the management knowingly encourages rape, unleashing favored inmates on troublemakers as a strategy for administrative control). The prison staff is above the law; the prison inmates, below it. Far from embodying the model of Bentham/Foucault’s panopticon— that is, one of total surveillance—America’s prisons are its blind spots, places where complaints cannot be heard and abuses cannot be seen. Though important symbols of bureaucratic authority, they are spaces that lie beyond our system of bureaucratic oversight. As far as the outside world is concerned, every American prison functions as a black site.

The media mostly honors the government’s preference for leaving prisoners in the shadows. The nation’s prisons now contain more inhabitants than any American city save New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. And yet there is no “prison correspondent” at any of the nation’s major newspapers. This isn’t entirely the papers’ fault. Even if reporters were sent to the prisons, they could be denied entry: the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment does not prevent prison authorities from barring the press.

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It’s impossible to tell the story of American incarceration without also telling the story of American racism. Unlike most leftwing stories about racism, though, this one isn’t about the South, and it isn’t even really about American conservatism. After slavery and Jim Crow came the Great Migration, urban riots, and the war on drugs. The history of the prison crisis is largely a story about progressive politicians—liberal Republicans and centrist Democrats—supporting “tough on crime” policies to protect their right flank, both for self-preservation and to propel other progressive priorities. The prison crisis was something that we ourselves created, law by law, decision by decision, state by state.

One of the original flash points was Detroit. In 1967, riots broke out after city police arrested eighty-four revelers at a party given for a pair of African American veterans who had just returned from Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson sent in an army division to pacify the city, resulting in forty-three deaths and the destruction of 2,000 buildings. In the following months, tens of thousands of residents from the city’s Caucasian enclaves hurtled across 8 Mile Road to the suburbs; they never came back. The following year, as the war in Vietnam escalated, Johnson declared he would not seek reelection, throwing the Democratic nomination to the cheerful but ineffectual Hubert Humphrey. That November, after a bitter campaign fueled by racial antagonism, the country elected Richard Nixon. For the first time in history, the Democratic candidate had failed to secure a majority of votes from the old Confederacy.

There followed a thirty-five-year period of “tough” crime laws. They began in New York State, with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberalish governor who, having failed three times to secure the Republican presidential nomination, decided he would make drug policy his peace offering to the party’s right wing. Previously an advocate of treatment programs and community supervision, Rockefeller abruptly changed course in 1973, innovating harsh mandatory minimum sentences for both the sale and possession of illegal drugs. In the next thirty years, New York’s prison population sextupled, climbing from 13,400 prisoners in 1973 to 71,500 prisoners in 2000.

The pattern soon repeated itself across the country. As whites abandoned the cities, their governors and legislatures enacted increasingly tough sentencing laws for the minorities left behind. In 1978, in what he would later call the biggest mistake of his life, Michigan’s governor, William Milliken, an embattled moderate Republican from the state’s desolate north, signed the 650-lifer law, a Rockefeller-inspired provision mandating life sentences for anyone caught in possession of 650 or more grams of cocaine or heroin. Only 200 people have served the life term, apparently because most big cases get transferred to federal court. (It’s still terrible, though: 85 percent of those sentenced under the provision had no prior criminal record.)

The new sentencing policies did little to discourage criminals. The same summer that Milliken signed his life-sentence law, an ambitious group of teenagers met on the playground of Birney Elementary, on Detroit’s west side, and founded Young Boys Inc., the first professionalized multicity drug-dealing ring in the United States. Within two years, YBI was pulling in $300,000 a day selling heroin in Detroit and other cities. Many of their clients were Vietnam veterans, tens of thousands of whom had become addicted to opium overseas. YBI’s crucial innovation was to distribute their product through a network of hard-to-prosecute juveniles, “corner boys” as young as 12 years old. They were also among the first to use limitless violence to terrorize and execute rivals. As the auto industry collapsed, the market for heroin grew more and more robust. By the mid-’80s, police activity had loosened the grip of YBI’s founders; by that time, though, the corner-boy and murder-the-competition model had spread to every major city in the United States.

And then came crack. Crack democratized the consumption of cocaine by providing a cheap and easy delivery system—smoking—for a highly addictive, high-demand product. Economists have labeled crack a “technological shock,” comparing the dislocations it triggered to the impact of computer chips, or mechanized agriculture. Unlike computer chips and mechanized agriculture, however, crack’s impact was entirely negative. This was not so much because crack was physically harmful—though it was—but more because it was illegal, and highly profitable. Within years of its introduction, the homicide rate for young black males had doubled. The inner city experienced a spike in weapons arrests, fetal deaths, low-birth-weight babies, and children in foster care. Between 1984 and 1994, the death rate for young black males reached 1 percent—double the rate of soldiers fighting in Iraq. A small part of this was caused by crack overdoses. A very large part was caused by a homicidal dialectic of black-market violence and state-sponsored reprisal, a dynamic sustained by popular hysteria and irresponsible media.

The media had never met a story they liked as much as crack, which involved gangs, guns, scary minorities, urban poverty, addiction, and, crucially, babies. Fetuses incubated in crack-exposed wombs were supposed to furnish a generation of “superpredators”—brain-damaged reprobates who wouldn’t be able to tell right from wrong. Although we now know the “crack baby” is a mythical creature—children of crack addicts do not exhibit developmental problems above and beyond those normally experienced by children whose fathers are dead or in prison—the image set off a moral panic in the 1980s, leading the country to begin the unusual practice of incarcerating large numbers of women. In 1986, two months after college basketball star and number two NBA draft pick Len Bias died of an ordinary cocaine overdose erroneously pinned on crack, Newsweek declared crack the biggest story since Watergate and Vietnam. Nancy Reagan was interested in crack, too, and the White House spent $2 billion on equipment and personnel to fight the epidemic, including staff hired to amp up anxiety about the drug among the press.

In the 1990s, the action shifted to the states, twenty-four of which enacted some version of a “habitual offender law,” more colloquially known as a “three strikes” provision. Even more than mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, three strikes laws have been responsible for geometric growth in the prison population. Though details vary depending on where you look, the vengeful theory underpinning the laws is universal: repeat offenders need to be removed from society. As a result, defendants have been given life sentences, which cost taxpayers as much as $1 million, for crimes as minor as stealing golf clubs from a sporting goods store or videotapes from Walmart. By 2003, 127,677 Americans were serving life sentences, an 83 percent jump in eleven years.

As of 2005, the last time a census was taken, there were 1,821 prisons in the country. Maine had just seven, while Texas had 132. Of these 1,821 prisons, 347 were maximum security. Most countries don’t have “supermax” prison facilities like we have in the US, where Alcatraz model of remote, nightmare fortress has become increasingly popular with the passage of time. Inmates in maximum security facilities are more vulnerable to rape, which may seem counterintuitive. The risk of rape, though, increases as prisoners lose control over freedom of movement. In minimum security prisons, it’s easier to find protection in a crowd. On the other hand, maximum security prisons are also distinguished by their willingness to put inmates into solitary confinement for extended periods of time, sometimes decades. Many psychologists now believe that such a long period in solitary inevitably leads to insanity. On the plus side, those prisoners will not get raped, or at least not by inmates.

Meanwhile, back on the battlefield of the war on drugs, crack continues to be consumed in nearly the same quantities as in 1990. But a huge price drop destroyed the handsome margins of the crack trade and virtually eliminated the violence associated with it. The crack-crime epidemic is gone, but the incarceration complex it fomented lives on. As a result, one in three black baby boys can expect to spend part of his life in prison.

+ + +

Once you go to prison, you never really come back. Beyond incarceration’s immediate physical and mental horrors, after being convicted of a felony, your public life is functionally over. In many states, you won’t be able to vote or sit on a jury. You won’t be eligible for public housing or food stamps. You’ll find it very difficult to attend a college, and may find it nearly impossible to get a job—like everyone else, educators and employers discriminate against ex-cons.

Finding a job is a particular problem, not only because criminals often leave prison with a large amount of debt—from court fees, conviction penalties, probation fines, and especially from child support bills, which continue to accumulate while convicts are in prison—but also because steady employment is itself often a condition of parole: a diabolical catch-22. As scholars have noted, the situation calls to mind the “vagrancy” laws passed in the South in the wake of reconstruction, which made it illegal to be unemployed while black vagrantswere arrested and forced back onto plantations, this time as convicts rather than slaves. An ex-con who fails to land a job may end up back in prison for violating parole. Since service-oriented occupations are usually out of the question, ex-cons are often forced to seek industrial and construction jobs far from urban centers. This puts a large number of people in the position of having to take long, expensive taxi rides to show up for low-wage jobs that don’t even cover transportation costs.

The United States now spends some $200 billion on the correctional system each year, a sum that exceeds the gross domestic product of twenty-five US states and 140 foreign countries. An ever-increasing share of domestic discretionary spending, it would seem, is devoted to building and staffing earthly hells filled with able-bodied young men who have been removed from the labor force. If we added up all the money federal, state, and local governments invest in the poorest zip codes through credits and transfer payments—food stamps, Medicaid, teacher salaries, et cetera—and balanced that against all the value the government extracts from those zip codes through sin taxes, lotteries, and the incarceration complex, we might well conclude that the disinvestment outweighs the investment. Any apparent gains made in the last thirty years in narrowing the employment and education gap between African Americans and whites vanishes once you include the incarcerated population. Before asking the government to spend a fortune improving student-to-teacher ratios, it may be prudent to first ask the government to stop devoting public resources to ripping the heart out of inner-city economies.

Of course, not everyone has made out badly from the country’s prison-construction binge. Telephone companies run up impressive profits from prisoners forced to call collect. Defense contractors have signed lucrative contracts selling paramilitary equipment to local law enforcement agencies. Rural communities have benefited most of all. Not only does the criminal justice sector employ 2 million people, including more than 500,000 correctional officers, most of them in rural areas, it also helps to inflate the local population of prison zones for the purposes of congressional districting and social spending. Schoolchildren learn that in 1787, slave-holding states reached a compromise with free states that allowed nonvoting slaves to count as three-fifths of a human for the purposes of apportioning congressional seats. Counting a slave as a fraction of a man seems like a vivid manifestation of the way the United States dehumanized Africans. Today, thousands of people are removed from urban districts, where public money is urgently needed, and shipped upstate, where each counts for a full person. In this way, prisoners bolster the voting power of rural districts, while being unable to vote themselves. Perhaps this is the reason why, as criminal justice surveys indicate, rural whites form by far the most punitive demographic.

Certain breeds of urban dwellers benefit, too. In gentrifying sections of Brooklyn, for example, steep drops in crime, combined with the virtual depopulation of entire city blocks, has underwritten a real estate boom. In neighborhoods like Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, wealthy people with children have reaped the benefits of climbing land values from apartments they never would have bought had it not been for the removal of tens of thousands of locals from adjacent areas. Neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant show the population exchange in its purest form. As African American Brooklynites are exported upstate for involvement in petty drug crimes, twenty-somethings reared in prison towns migrate south and reoccupy the same areas vacated by prisoners. Often, of course, the new inhabitants proceed to consume and sell the very same drugs that got the previous tenants into trouble. Since they’re white, they do so with impunity.

+ + +

What would it mean to “reform” the prison system? Despite the best efforts of the moneyed elite and its institutional avatar, the Republican Party, the credentialed elite that controls the White House has succeeded in making progress on multiple reformable domains, including credit markets, the health care system, and public education. These are important, high-stakes achievements, and, as we have seen, no good deed goes unpunished. But America’s incarceration crisis is not a reformable problem. It cannot be addressed by a hectoring Rahm Emmanuel, or a priggish Olympia Snowe; it will not be solved by a supercommittee, or a gang of six.

The US prison system doesn’t need reform—it needs to be abolished. Like slavery in the 19th century, and civil rights in the 20th century, prison abolition in the 21st century can only be accomplished by a popular movement as radical and uncompromising as the movement that set up the prison regime in the first place.

We can start by reevaluating our priorities. There’s no use saying that progressive goals aren’t in competition with one another. They very surely are, and criminals have lost that competition again and again, with tragic results. For decades, politicians from Nelson Rockefeller to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama have sold out criminals in order to win concessions on health care, abortion, gay rights, early education, progressive taxation, and any number of other worthy objectives. Prison abolitionists must now perform the reverse procedure—we must be ready to sacrifice the traditional progressive agenda on the altar of criminal justice. Morality, like politics, starts at the edge of Ockham’s razor: the bad can no longer be allowed to obscure the evil.

The movement to abolish the death penalty is venerable and well-funded. Although it wasn’t successful in preventing the execution of Troy Davis, it’s helped a number of inmates get off death row through DNA evidence, and has arguably had decent success in the last fifteen years in shifting public opinion away from state-led killing. Hundreds of highly qualified, well-educated people devote their lives to trying to eradicate an unethical practice and a national embarrassment.

Compared with the horrors of garden variety American incarceration, though, the death penalty can be viewed only as a distraction. An extremely small number of people are executed in the United States—fewer than thirty a year, on average, in the last three decades. But at any given moment, a full 7 million people are under some form of regular surveillance from the correctional system. More African Americans are in prison today than were enslaved in the 1850s. Back in the early ’70s, before things got really bad, the United States had a decently large and energetic prison abolition movement. Why this movement has nearly disappeared—Angela Davis, a University of California professor and former imprisoned Black Panther, is virtually the only abolitionist left—even as the prison crisis has become more severe, is difficult to answer. The timing, though, suggests that the death penalty may have something to do with it—after execution was reinstated in 1976, many activists who might have spent their lives focusing on prisons switched their attention to a narratively vivid but politically minor bugaboo.

And yet the death penalty does offer one interesting benefit, from the point of view of prison abolition, because the first question any prison abolitionist needs to answer is what we’re supposed to do with violent criminals. An important part of that answer has to be that we must simply put up with an increased level of risk in our daily lives. But what about Charles Manson? Surely something must be done to prevent Charles Manson from chopping up celebrities.

If, in the popular imagination, the primary purpose of prisons is to keep us safe from (the vanishingly small number of) people like Charles Manson, then we should simply kill Charles Manson. Prison abolitionists should be ready to advocate a massive expansion of the death penalty if that’s what it takes to move the discussion forward. A prisonless society where murderers were systematically executed and rapists were automatically castrated wouldn’t be the most humane society imaginable, but it would be light-years ahead of the status quo. (Interestingly, unlike rape, homicide has one of the lowest recidivism rates of any crime—you can only murder your wife once—suggesting that death row inmates may pose less of a security risk than other categories of offenders.)

Gun control is another area where progressive energies have been wasteful and counterproductive. “Centrists” of any persuasion will try to tell you that most people don’t actually want their fellow citizens running around with guns, but gun control appears to be one area that really has cost the Democratic Party a large number of one-issue voters over the years. In any case, you’ll have a hard time convincing anybody that we should abolish prisons and take away the community’s ability to defend itself. Even on its own terms, gun control is not a straightforwardly progressive matter. The war on guns bears important similarities to the war on drugs—both are used as pretexts for searching, arresting, and imprisoning ethnic minorities. Gun control, like drug control, doesn’t do much to restrict supply—instead, it creates a black market for the product regulated through violence. In many states, obtaining a gun license is expensive and complex: we’ve essentially made it legal to own a gun if you’re wealthy and white, and illegal to own a gun if you’re poor and black. Years are added onto criminal sentences because unregistered guns are spotted on the premises, even if the guns have never been used. The only way to sustainably curb the supply of guns is to reduce demand for guns, and the easiest way to do that would be to legalize narcotics.

+ + +

On May 23, 2011—the same day the morning papers rejoiced over another year of crime reduction—the Supreme Court ordered the State of California to release 45,000 prisoners. In a 5-to-4 decision written by Anthony Kennedy, the Court declared that overcrowding in the state’s penitentiaries had become so severe that simply existing in the system violated a prisoner’s Eighth Amendment right of freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.

As a news story, the ruling generated surprisingly little attention—a good deal less than the Court’s 2008 decision banning the death penalty for child rapists— but in legal circles it caused a panic. Antonin Scalia, in a fiery dissent, called it “the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” Samuel Alito predicted the ruling would generate a “grim roster of victims,” anxiously noting that the quantity of prisoners mandated for release added up to “two army battalions.” In the early ’90s, Alito pointed out, a similar order issued by a federal judge in Philadelphia liberated some 10,000 prisoners: within 18 months, 2,748 of the prisoners had been rearrested for theft, 2,215 for drugs, 1,113 for assault, 959 for robbery, 751 for burglary, 90 for rape, and 79 for murder. California, Alito suggested, should gear up for an enemy invasion.

As the prison population has expanded, the ex-prisoner population has expanded, too, rising from 1.8 million in 1980 to 4.3 million in the year 2000. Every year, 650,000 prisoners are released from American prisons. Just as new prisoners tend to come from poor, urban neighborhoods—in New York, 75 percent of inmates come from just seven neighborhoods: Harlem, Brownsville, East New York, South Bronx, South Jamaica, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the Lower East Side—released prisoners cluster in a limited set of urban enclaves. This isn’t to say that everyone goes back to where they came from—many ex-cons, especially those who lack supportive families, specifically avoid their home neighborhoods. According to surveys, many believe they’ll be less likely to engage in renewed criminal activity with a change of scenery.

Within three years, 70 percent of released prisoners are rearrested, and half are back in prison. A large portion of these “recidivists” haven’t committed new felonies—they’ve simply violated the terms of their parole. California, which is especially adept at throwing parole violators back in prison, ends up reincarcerating two thirds of released prisoners within three years.

Of course, many released prisoners do commit new felonies, and the evidence is clear that releasing prisoners raises the crime rate, just as imprisoning criminals lowers it. The impact in both directions is relatively small, though. One study showed that during any given year in the ’90s, the net increase in the number of ex-offenders circulating in the general population accounted for 2 percent of property crimes and 2.5 percent of violent crimes. The effect was higher for murder and robbery, though. Fourteen percent of murders and 7 percent of robberies were attributable to prisoner releases in 1994. And that’s only the new releases—the fraction of murders committed by the entire ex-offender population was much higher. On the other hand, released prisoners are subject to considerably more state surveillance than most people, and while it’s safe to assume that ex-cons commit crimes at a higher rate than those who have never seen the inside of a prison, they are also more likely to be investigated and rearrested than someone who was never on the police’s radar to begin with. Released prisoners also have fewer noncrime options: getting a job without family or social connections is virtually impossible for them.

The prospects for California’s released prisoners, therefore, are not good. Neither are the prospects for the state. The likelihood is high that most of these released prisoners will be back in jail within three years, and California may very well be back in court for overcrowding its prisons. (The state is hoping to preempt the issue by transferring inmates to county jails in lieu of early release, but it isn’t clear that crowded jails are any more likely to survive judicial scrutiny than crowded prisons.) To reduce its prison population, California will have to do more than release prisoners—it will have to stop creating new ones.

+ + +

When evaluating the impact of the war on drugs on the country’s incarceration crisis, it helps to keep in mind a statistical nuance: a large fraction of prison sentences are for nonviolent drug offenses, but a small fraction of the prison population is in for a nonviolent drug crime. This is because, despite the harshness of mandatory minimum sentences, drug criminals don’t spend nearly as much time in prison as other kinds of criminals.

It’s tempting to believe that we could free most of the prison population simply by liberating nonviolent drug offenders. Nonviolent drug offenders are “innocent”; they haven’t hurt anybody. Advocating on behalf of criminals is much easier when they haven’t committed any violent crime. And yet this misses the point of the prison crisis: you cannot relieve the suffering of the prison population without increasing safety risks for the rest of us.

And increasing those risks, from a moral standpoint, is the right thing to do.

What would happen to California’s criminal community, once freed from the ping-pong of prison and parole? They would continue being criminals, in all likelihood, breaking and entering, stealing cars, selling drugs, and—very occasionally—taking lives. This would be difficult and painful, both on the individual level for the victims and on a social level more broadly; economic and cultural shocks accompany any kind of population exchange, and a massive jailbreak will likely result in a period of strain and disorganization for inner cities. Over time, though, things will settle. There will be more fathers around, and more state money for things like education and health care.

The incarceration complex, like a civil war or foreign occupation, institutionalizes economic dislocation, making chaos and uncertainty a defining feature of the life cycle. Crime, on the other hand, causes disruptions that are smaller and more manageable. Despite the near-infinite capacity of the human spirit to deal with routine desperation, the residents of East Harlem will never “adapt” to a community life structured around prisons, because uprooting communities is the very function and purpose of incarceration. The capacity of New York residents to absorb higher levels of crime in daily life, on the other hand, is nowhere near its limit.

In all likelihood, dismantling or sharply contracting America’s prison system would make the country feel more like the United Kingdom. In the UK, only 3 percent of crimes result in a prison sentence. In the United States, the figure is closer to 18 percent. London is a more dangerous city than New York. Your likelihood of getting robbed or assaulted is higher there. For educated, middle-class whites unlikely to get in trouble with the police, London is, in some ways, a tougher place to raise children.

On the other hand, life spans are longer in the UK; social mobility is more fluid; racial disparities are smaller; the AIDS crisis is better-controlled; and neighborhoods are more cohesive. Despite some slippage in the last decade, the UK never had the prison boom we experienced in the US—Margaret Thatcher didn’t allow it. Confronted with a crime and drug abuse rate that is high by European standards, London attacked the problem on the front end, installing thousands of CCTV security cameras and hiring thousands of bobbies to discourage lawbreaking. Compared to the United States, they do little in the way of punishment.

Abolishing prisons and releasing all the prisoners would amount to a deregulation of criminal punishment. It would mean letting the private sector determine how best to prevent ourselves from getting robbed. In high finance, the laissez-faire approach has proved to be a disaster; for petty crime, it would be a boon.

If ever there were a time to launch a coordinated assault on the prison-industrial complex, the time is now. Budgets are strained, voters are angry, and crime is low. The Tea Party is in the midst of convincing everyone that government is the enemy— and so it is, in the field of criminal justice.

Popular resentment against an authoritarian state shouldn’t be denied or pooh-poohed— it should be seized and marshaled toward progressive ends. The prison crisis was created by centrists. Limited reforms and immoral moderation will not end the crisis. Prisoners and ex-cons, the most abused population in United States, will have to rely on political extremists, on both the left and the right, to turn the page on what will one day be recalled as one of American history’s darkest chapters.

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Issue 13 Launch, Jan. 26

2012-01-25T16:54:39Z

New York readers,

Please join us to celebrate Issue 13.

Issue 13 Launch and Reading
7 PM, Thursday, January 26
192 Books
190 Tenth Ave., NY, NY

Astra Taylor will read from her essay on the unschooling movement, and editors and contributors will read a scene from Benjamin Kunkel's new play. We'll have wine on hand from our friends at Dandelion Wine in Greenpoint, and the very first copies of the issue will be arriving at 192 Books just in time!

We hope to see you there.

The Editors

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5.4

2012-01-19T19:52:14Z

Pitchfork, 1995–present

by Richard Beck

Image: Raekwon fans at the Pitchfork Music Festival, 2010. Via kate.gardiner.

In anticipation of Issue 13, "Machine Politics," we've decided to fork over the full text of Richard Beck's review of Pitchfork from Issue 12. Today is also the last day to subscribe and receive the issue straight from the printer, so whether you're a new reader or a reluctant renewer, today's your day. In the meantime, enjoy. —Eds.

One day in early 2010, the internet message board I Love Music began discussing the Pazz and Jop poll, which the Village Voice had recently published on its website. The Voice has conducted Pazz and Jop annually since 1971. Hundreds of music critics submit lists ranking their favorite albums and singles, and the Voice compiles two master lists identifying the year's best music. It is the main event in American popular music criticism. On I Love Music, the Pazz and Jop thread chugged slowly along for a few hours. Then Scott Plagenhoef, editor-in- chief of the music website Pitchfork, began posting under the name "scottpl," and things picked up speed. "11 of the top 13 LPs and five of the top six singles are shared between this and the Pitchfork list," Plagenhoef wrote. "For what it's worth."

The suggestion that the nation's music critics had copied their end-of-the-year charts from a website just over a decade old was a clear provocation, and twenty-four hours and hundreds of posts later the conversation was no longer about Pazz and Jop. "Man, Pitchfork circa 2000 and 2001 vs now is night and day," Plagenhoef wrote. "The size of the site now utterly dwarfs the site then, and certainly the way it's run and decisions are made are different." Plagenhoef did his best to maintain a modest pose ("I don't beg for credit or claim to be responsible for things"), but in the end it was hard to resist a triumphal note. "We've succeeded at a time when nobody else has," he wrote. "We reach more people right now than Spin or Vibe ever did, even if you use the bs print mag idea that 'every copy is read by 2.5 people' . . . hell, I should stop caring, get back to work, and let people keep underestimating us." Then he posted two more times. Then he wrote, "Alright, I will get out of this thread." Then he posted eighteen more times.

He may have been bragging, but Plagenhoef was right. In the last decade, no organ of music criticism has wielded as much influence as Pitchfork. It is the only publication, online or print, that can have a decisive effect on a musician or band's career. This has something to do with the site's diligently cultivated readership: no genre's fans are more vulnerable to music criticism than the educated, culturally anxious young people who pay close attention to indie rock. Other magazines and websites compete for these readers' attention, of course, but they come and go, one dissolving into the next, while Pitchfork keeps on gathering strength. Everyone acknowledges this. And yet everyone also acknowledges something else: whatever attracts people to Pitchfork, it isn't the writing. Even writers who admire the site's reviews almost always feel obliged to describe the prose as "uneven," and that's charitable. Pitchfork has a very specific scoring system that grades albums on a scale from 0.0 to 10.0, and that accounts for some of the site's appeal, but it can't just be the scores. I could start a website with scores right now, and nobody would care. So what is it? How has Pitchfork succeeded where so many other websites and magazines have not? And why is that success depressing?

+ + +

Ryan Schreiber launched Pitchfork in November 1995 from his parents' house in a suburb of Minneapolis. Because the domain name www.pitchfork.com belonged to a company selling livestock out of Butte Falls, Oregon, Schreiber had to settle for www.pitchforkmedia.com. The name, he told BusinessWeek in 2008, was meant to suggest "an angry mob mentality" toward the music industry. He was 19, a recent high school graduate working part-time jobs and going to indie rock concerts in downtown Minneapolis. Hindsight makes it easy to see Schreiber as a 1990s digital visionary, but the truth is more prosaic: he wanted to write about music, and money was scarce. "I thought it would be really cool to meet the people in bands I liked and talk to them," he told an interviewer. "I loved reading print fanzines . . . but at the same time, their distribution was limited and there was a lot of overhead to cover . . . so it was a case of publish on the internet or don't publish at all." In its earliest days, Pitchfork was written almost entirely by Schreiber—reviews, a little news, and interviews with groups passing through Minneapolis. His parents, Schreiber says, got angry about the phone bills he racked up contacting record labels in New York, but as the free CDs began to roll in, Schreiber realized that he had found his calling: "Once I heard about the promos, I was like, 'Oh my God, unbelievable! Unbelievable!'"

Schreiber's youthful enthusiasm is everywhere in Pitchfork's early reviews. (Although most of them have been taken down from the site, some can still be found on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.) Today, as a matter of practice if not explicit principle, Pitchfork grants the vast majority of its perfect scores—10.0—to reissues, albums that have weathered the storms of popular taste for a decade or two. Before 2000 the site allowed its writers far more license, awarding 10.0s to Walt Mink's El Producto, 12 Rods' Gay?, and Amon Tobin's Bricolage, albums that almost nobody remembers today. The writing that accompanied these scores was sweet and hyperbolic. Opening his 10.0 review of Bonnie "Prince" Billy's I See A Darkness (1999), Samir Khan, one of the site's early reviewers, wrote, "Music is a wounded, corrupted, vile, half-breed mutt that begs for attention as it scratches at your door." I don't know what that sentence means, but the sentiment is clear enough. Untroubled by knowledge, wide-eyed, drunk on enthusiasm: this is what hearing pop music as a teenager feels like.

Even Pitchfork's obsession with numbers, which eventually came to seem pedantic and sometimes cruel, was initially more like an adolescent game. Since Pitchfork's writers had just graduated from high school, a place where the difference between an 89 and a 91 could not have been more consequential, they were well positioned to distinguish between an 8.3 album and an 8.7. The pseudoscientific precision—101 possible ratings instead of the usual four or five stars—was a large part of the appeal.

In order for Pitchfork to justify the proliferation of ratings, the reviews were going to need to proliferate as well. Although Schreiber initially chose a web format because it was cheaper than photocopying, one of the internet's advantages over print media soon began to reveal itself: its archival potential. Old reviews didn't go anywhere (at least not until Pitchfork began to airbrush its history); they accumulated. Schreiber counted the number of albums Pitchfork had covered, and by early 1999 he could announce, at the bottom of the site's front page, "1,512 REVIEWS SINCE TH.FEB.01.96."

In addition to removing the overhead costs associated with print publishing, the internet, in a happy coincidence, had also solved the problems of information that plagued zine culture. The bands you liked—or, rather, the bands you might potentially like, if you ever managed to hear about them—were not on the radio. They would come to your local indie rock venue eventually (in Minneapolis the main one was First Avenue), but usually you had to be 18 to get in, and anyway what were you going to do, hang out at First Avenue every night of the week? It wasn't going to be cheap. Zines helped to keep people informed by publishing interviews, concert write-ups, and an enormous number of record reviews; but they were also hard to find, hard to keep track of, and, even if you hoarded the issues, hard to search through. As Schreiber began publishing writers other than himself, and as the archive grew, Pitchfork began to look like something other than a collection of off-the-cuff record reviews by teenagers. It began to look like a project with a mission, however accidental: an encyclopedia of contemporary tastes in rock and roll, accessible to everyone, everywhere.[1]

Early Pitchfork's narrow focus on indie rock wasn't a conscious decision—indie rock just happened to be the kind of music that most of Ryan Schreiber's friends liked. Even as the site began poking around in other genres, it was not hard to figure out where the writers had come from. Reading through the archive, watching Pitchfork begin to discover thoughtful, politically liberal rap groups like A Tribe Called Quest and Jurassic 5, I felt a shock of white suburban recognition. In 1998, Lang Whitaker gave a 7.1 to the Black Eyed Peas, speculating that with "a line-up that looks straight out of a Benetton ad," maybe the group could "assume their mantle as hip-hop's street saviors." One year later, in a review of The Roots' Things Fall Apart, Samir Khan congratulated the group on featuring "an intelligent rapper." Other genres were treated with the same endearing bewilderment. Schreiber, in particular, fell head over heels in love with 1960s jazz. On Thelonious Monk: "The man could play a piano like it was a goddamn video game." And on John Coltrane, recorded live at the Village Vanguard: "'Trane takes it to heaven and back with some style, man. Some richness, daddy. It's a sad thing his life was cut short by them jaws o' death." It's easy to complain about this kind of thing, but it isn't racist. It isn't even insensitive, really. It's just oblivious. What could be less anxious, less self-conscious, than a white 21-year-old writing about John Coltrane in the voice of an old black man? It must have been nice to write on the internet and feel that the only people paying attention were your friends. This initial three-year period was Pitchfork's Edenic phase, and it came to an end in June 1999, when Shawn Fanning, a student at Northeastern University, launched Napster.

People think that Napster liberated recorded music by making it available at no monetary cost, but that is not exactly right. Napster allowed you to keep your money, but it also told you there was something shameful in keeping your musical tastes to yourself. In its default setting, the service made each user's collection available for everyone's perusal. Fanning spent his teenage years immersed in the open-source culture of internet message boards, where circulating your own hacks and helping to improve the work of others was just good citizenship, and this collaborative ethos migrated smoothly into the realm of digital music. You could change Napster's default setting and keep your own files hidden, but then everyone would resent you—it was called file sharing for a reason. Although Napster was shut down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in July 2001, its ethic lives on in the language of music downloading. On sites using the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, someone who makes a torrent available to others is called a "seeder." Someone who only downloads material made available by others, on the other hand, is a "leech."

Back when people still had to pay for music, money served to limit and define consumption. You could only afford so many records, so you bought what you could, listened to the radio or watched MTV, and ignored everything else. Those select few who did manage to hear everything—record store clerks, DJs, nerds with personal warehouses—could use this rare knowledge to terrorize their social or sexual betters, as in the pre-internet-era film High Fidelity. Napster made all of that obsolete. Today, almost every person I know has more music on his computer than he could ever know what to do with. You don't need to care about music to end up like this—the accumulation occurs naturally and unconsciously. My iTunes library, for example, contains forty-seven days of music. According to the column that counts the number of times I've played each song, roughly a sixth of that music has never been listened to at all. In the 21st century, we are all record store clerks.

Music began to register the overabundance of supply almost immediately by inventing a new subgenre of dance song that made it possible to listen to your whole music library at once: the mashup. In 2001, a DJ called Freelance Hellraiser laid the vocals from Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" over the instrumental from "Hard to Explain" by The Strokes. What distinguished the mashup was precisely how obvious it was, how celebratory and stupid. You recognized both songs (usually a warm, classic-rock instrumental and a raunchy rap lyric) and appreciated the faux-unlikeliness of their juxtaposition. In the years following Napster's heyday, dozens of other mashup albums and mixtapes arrived: Uneasy Listening Vol. 1 by DJ Z-Trip and DJ P, Never Scared by Hollertronix, and most famously, Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, which coupled songs from Jay-Z's The Black Album with The Beatles' White Album. The biggest misconception about the mashup was that it was meant for dancing. But the mashup's ideal listener is seated at his desk, bathed in the computer screen's aquarium glow, Googling any songs he didn't pick up the first time around.

Most mashups are quite crudely put together. What made the mashup DJ impressive was the breadth of his iTunes library, his mastery of it, and his taste. This made him an ironically heroic figure, because while using Napster for the first time was exciting, it also forced you to confront your own inadequacy. Everyone on the internet had better music than you did, or at least more of it. You could spend whole evenings downloading to close the gap, but what were you actually supposed to do with all these new songs? Listen to them? That could take years, and all the while you'd be downloading more music.

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In the middle of 2000, having raised a few thousand dollars selling records on eBay, Schreiber moved Pitchfork to an office in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago. His stable of writers—people willing to produce long reviews for very little money and a CD—was growing, and on the site's Staff page, these writers posted irreverent profiles of themselves. Matt LeMay, who still works for the site as a senior contributor, put up a picture of a cactus instead of his face, and wrote, "Matt LeMay wasn't like the other cacti." On the Advertising page, the site bragged about a readership that had "tripled since January, 2000! Pitchfork is now receiving over 130,000 visits every month, more than any of our print competitors." This looks like a dubious claim—Rolling Stone's circulation was well over one million—but Pitchfork wasn't thinking that big yet. They meant other indie rock zines, none of which survive today. "[Our writers] genuinely care about music," the pitch read, "unlike some of the big time playaz that're just in the business for the bling bling." Charging $300 per month for a banner ad, Pitchfork attracted indie bands with new releases, upstart record labels, and online music stores like InSound, eMusic, and Spun.com. One good reason to advertise with Pitchfork was that Schreiber was now publishing four reviews a day, five days a week, and thus gradually turning his small audience into a loyal one. Best of all, though, was the fact that Pitchfork had a five-year head start on rating all the music that Napster had recently made available for free: "Our massive record review archive is one of the most comprehensive indie-based review archives on the web with more than 3,000 reviews spanning the past five years."

In the same month that Schreiber established Pitchfork in Chicago, Radiohead released their fourth album, Kid A. In the past, record reviews were for helping people decide whether to buy something. They were shunted to the back of the magazine, they were frequently brief, and they were secondary to the illustrated profiles and interviews that moved issues off the newsstand. For years, America's most intelligent rock critic, Robert Christgau, wrote a weekly review column for the Voice with the not-quite-tongue-in-cheek title "Christgau's Consumer Guide." If a record clocked in at less than half an hour, he mentioned it, the idea being that you needed value for your money. But when Kid A was released that October, it had been online for three weeks, for free, and readers clicking on Brent DiCrescenzo's Pitchfork review were not looking for a consumer guide. So what were they looking for? Because Kid A was the best album Pitchfork had ever reviewed, and because Radiohead was one of the first bands to build up an internet fan apparatus, DiCrescenzo's answer to that question would have important consequences for Pitchfork's future.

The strategy DiCrescenzo decided on had two parts. First, he pushed Pitchfork's fondness for rhetorical extravagance as far as possible. "The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax," he wrote. "Comparing this to other albums is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper." This, in itself, was no major innovation: rhetorical excess had long been one of the hallmarks of rock writing, a natural if usually doomed attempt to translate the music's depraved energies into prose. The next move—giving the record a 10.0—didn't seem like an innovation either. The site had awarded perfect scores before, including a 10.0 for Radiohead's previous album, OK Computer. But these prior scores were in the spirit of nerdy fun: if a record was awesome, you gave it a 10.0, and you didn't think too hard about it. In Kid A, by contrast, it was clear that Pitchfork saw an important event in pop music history. The 10.0 meant they were trying to be equal to it. Pitchfork, having built up credibility by making minute distinctions between one album (7.4) and another (7.3), had begun to understand that one of the things you can do with cultural capital is spend it on something extravagant (10.0). And since a well-placed 10.0 would elicit sustained bursts of praise and criticism from different corners of the internet, the expenditure was an investment in the site's own future.

Faced with an album this new and this great, DiCrescenzo paid it the highest compliment he could think of: he made a list of Radiohead's influences. In just over 1,200 words, he managed to mention the John Coltrane album Olé, C. S. Lewis, the Warp Records label, Terry Gilliam's animations for Monty Python, David Bowie and Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, Björk, and, finally, the White Album. "It's clear that Radiohead must be the greatest band alive," he wrote, "if not the best since you know who." (He means the Beatles.) "It was a watershed moment for us," Schreiber later said of the Kid A review. "We got linked from all the Radiohead fan sites, which were really big. We got this huge flood of traffic, like five thousand people in a day checking out that one review. We had never seen anything like that. Web boards were talking about our review." Of course, the review told you little about Radiohead's music that you couldn't have heard on your own, but it told you everything about what kind of cultural company Radiohead was meant to keep. This technique became Pitchfork's signature style.

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Although the term "indie rock" didn't gain widespread use until the early '90s, the music began to emerge from the wreckage of punk rock in the mid-'80s, and was variously referred to as "college rock," "post-punk," and "DIY" (for Do It Yourself). "Indie" referred specifically to the independent record labels that cropped up around the country in that decade: Dischord in Washington DC; SubPop in Seattle; Matador in New York; Merge in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and Touch and Go in Chicago. The music these labels released was diverse, to be sure, but at the core was a dominant strain of direct, hard-edged, bitterly sarcastic music by bands like Minor Threat, Black Flag, Dinosaur Jr., Fugazi, The Butthole Surfers, and The Pixies. What held these bands together—however loosely—was a belief in the cynicism and greed of the major labels, which would not have signed them anyway. It is worth noticing that "indie rock" is one of the few musical genre names that doesn't refer to a musical aesthetic: the genre was founded on an ethic of production.

This ethic got complicated in 1991, when Nirvana, a three-man band out of Aberdeen, Washington, became one of the most popular musical acts in the world. Nirvana started out on SubPop, but in 1990 the group signed with the major label DGC Records. By 1992, Nirvana's second album, Nevermind, had landed at number one on the Billboard chart, beating out new albums by Garth Brooks and Michael Jackson. In 1994, Kurt Cobain killed himself with a shotgun.

It is not an exaggeration to say this changed everything for indie music. While opportunistic rock bands spent the 1990s doing their best to follow in Nirvana's musical and commercial footsteps, more serious indie bands took a different course. After Nirvana, they made music with the knowledge that although mainstream success and adoration remained on balance unlikely, they were not impossible. This knowledge took on an ominous quality in light of Cobain's suicide, and some indie musicians went looking for ways to inoculate themselves against the potential consequences of fame. For years, a certain strain of indie rock had taken a nearly perverse satisfaction in making inscrutable jigsaw puzzles out of the old verse-chorus song form. Now, with "alternative music" at the top of the charts, obscure lyrics and scrambled song structures came to the fore. It wasn't long before Stephen Malkmus, who fronted the now-famous Pavement, was telling Spin that he wrote lyrics from "the perspective of a guy who, inebriated at a party, is saying a great many things he doesn't mean." Groups like Sebadoh and The Mountain Goats began recording on cheap, low-fidelity equipment (think: a boombox), as though to make sure that even if some slick record executive took a shine to their music, it wouldn't sound good enough for radio. It is not hard to see these as defensive gestures. Even as the mainstream was beginning to pretend to embrace something other than itself, bands like Pavement could wear their inscrutability like armor. They would remain, at least temporarily, unconsumed and uncorrupted by the industry that had begun to accept them, and that they, warily, had begun to accept in turn.

Then that industry began to collapse. In 2000, the pop group 'N Sync sold 2.42 million copies of No Strings Attached in its first week of release. Six years later, it took Lil Wayne six months to sell the same number of copies of Tha Carter III. Each was the best-selling album of its respective year. The period in between amounted to a Napster-induced, industry-wide panic. One of the music industry's first efforts to address this crisis emerged in the music itself. In the first years of the decade, a number of rock bands trading in blatant formal nostalgia became both commercial and critical favorites: The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Hives, and The Vines all played direct, sexy versions of by-the-book rock and roll, and were relatively untroubled by the ethical concerns that had dogged successful indie bands. Some of this music was pretty good, but Rolling Stone's impulse to refer to The Strokes as "saviors of rock" had more to do with denying the existence of a new world. Pitchfork, appropriately, was more skeptical of this new music, but eventually they decided to like it, and it's hard to blame them—it was so likable! "It's Christ and Prometheus," Ryan Schreiber and Dan Kilian wrote in a review of The White Stripes' White Blood Cells, "eternally dying and rising again. . . . They don't innovate rock; they embody it." The frightening implications of this—whether the body of rock was really a corpse, for one—were not addressed.

Most of these bands began to fade within a year or two, and as indie bands watched the industry's collapse, the envy and contempt they had traditionally felt toward major labels stopped making sense. What was there to envy anymore? Wasn't it obvious that indie bands, with their devoted networks of fans, critics, and performance venues, had it better? Not only were the major labels soul-sucking money machines, they couldn't even make you rich! This made early indie's militancy and paranoia look silly, and the hard lines began to soften. In 2001, The Shins, a band from Albuquerque, New Mexico, released a gentle, nostalgic song called "New Slang," and within a year it could be heard not only on college radio stations but also in a McDonald's commercial, and eventually in the movie Garden State. The Shins were on SubPop, and when the Seattle Times asked one of the label's creative directors about the band's reaction to the McDonald's offer, he recalled, "They were like, well we don't really think this is compromising, someone wants to pay us to do what we do." This turned the usual critique of selling out precisely on its head. "It's a way for a band that doesn't get signed for huge advances to be able to quit their day jobs for a while," the creative director continued, "and concentrate on making music." By 2003, Fox was making indie rock a staple on the soundtrack to The O.C., its biggest hit at the time. In an early episode Seth, one of the show's main characters, even went so far as to name-check the Seattle band Death Cab for Cutie.

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Pitchfork, too, began to shift from "angry mob" to kingmaker. In 2003, the site introduced a "Best New Music" designation to its review scheme, and the following year Ryan Schreiber took his first trip to New York City. "Ryan spent a whole day in Times Square," one contributor recalled. "He was so happy." Schreiber's trip had musical justifications as well. Amid a wave of nostalgia for the 1980s, New York's last decade of musical excitement, the city's indie musicians had taken an interest in post-punk and dance music, and Schreiber was paying close attention. A group called LCD Soundsystem had recently released the song "Losing My Edge," in which an aging James Murphy lamented how much cooler those younger than him were becoming: "I'm losing my edge to the internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978," Murphy sang. "I'm losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered Eighties." ("I hear you have a compilation of every good song ever made by anybody.") For Schreiber, ascendant king of the "internet seekers," this was like a dance-music gateway drug. In fall 2003, another dance-punk band called The Rapture released Echoes, and Schreiber was addicted for good. "Finally," Schreiber wrote, in a 9.0 Best New Music review, "we are shaking off the coma of the stillborn slacker '90s and now there is movement. Arms uncross, faces snap to attention, and clarity hits like religion." Schreiber praised the new indie rock for "cultivating a new loathing and defiance for tired hipster poses." It was time to dance:

You people at shows who don't dance, who don't know a good time, who can't have fun, who sneer and scoff at the supposed inferior—it's you this music strikes a blow against. We hope you die bored.

Pitchfork, of course, did not become a site that promoted only dance music, but it had begun to move away from the detached skepticism that characterized so much of '90s indie rock. More and more, it found itself promoting music that celebrated a certain kind of emotionalism. Earlier that year, Schreiber had written about diving into boxes of promotional records and coming to the surface with a Toronto band called Broken Social Scene between his teeth. Broken Social Scene was in perfect keeping with indie's developing emphasis on nostalgia, collaboration, and empathy. One popular track on You Forgot It In People, for example, was called "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl." Played in a warm major key, the song featured a small harmonic circle that endlessly repeated as the instruments swelled, as though the group were playing not a pop song but a round or lullaby. The band's members, ranging from six to nearly twenty in number, referred to themselves as a "collective," and they highlighted their own cooperative largeness by playing, in addition to the standard rock instruments, woodwinds, horns, and strings. But in his 1,100-word rave, Schreiber spent more time listing influences, DiCrescenzo-style: he compared the group to five other bands from Toronto, as well as Dinosaur Jr., Jeff Buckley, Spoon, Electric Light Orchestra, electronic musician Ekkehard Ehlers, The Notwist, and (here they come again) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. "You just have to hear it for yourself," Schreiber concluded. "Oh my god, you do. You just really, really do." Schreiber gave the album a 9.2, and suddenly Broken Social Scene, whose record had essentially disappeared from stores between its 2002 release and Pitchfork's review, began selling out concerts. The idea that Pitchfork could wield the kind of influence that causes money to circulate—in other words, the kind of influence that still matters, even in our file-sharing times—started to take hold.

One year later, the debut album by a Montreal band called Arcade Fire received a 9.7. David Moore began his review with a historical excursus:

How did we get here? Ours is a generation overwhelmed by frustration, unrest, dread, and tragedy. Fear is wholly pervasive in American society, but we manage nonetheless to build our defenses in subtle ways—we scoff at arbitrary, color-coded "threat" levels; we receive our information from comedians and politicians. Upon the turn of the 21st century, we have come to know our isolation well. . . . In our buying and selling of personal pain, or the cynical approximation of it, we feel nothing.

Like Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire was an enormous band—at some concerts they would put as many as fifteen musicians on stage. Members played antiquated instruments like the accordion and the hurdy-gurdy, and singer Régine Chassagne would perform wearing lace gloves. But if the instrumentation and stage costumes suggested a Victorian, semi-handmade aesthetic, the music itself embraced unembarrassed emotionalism. Lead singer Win Butler yelled his lyrics as often as he sang them—these were often laments for a damaged childhood—and he relished the moments when his voice would crack from the strain. The band also infused its music with a sense of spiritual grandeur by using a pedal point, a sustained bass tone that's usually provided by an organ in church music. (The band recorded its second album, Neon Bible, in an actual church.) Expressiveness and sentimentality are what Moore liked best about Arcade Fire. Near the end of his review, he credited Funeral with "completely and successfully restoring the tainted phrase 'emotional' to its true origin," as strong an endorsement of indie rock's sincerity as Pitchfork would ever make. By the end of the following year, Arcade Fire had appeared on the Late Show With David Letterman and performed in Central Park.

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Arcade Fire ended debates about whether Pitchfork mattered. The site's job now was to learn how to handle its influence. As late as 2004, a journalist writing for the East Bay Express could accurately remark that many of Pitchfork's reviewers "have no prior rock crit experience or interest in making a career out of this." This wasn't sloppy hiring on Pitchfork's part; it had a lot to do with what the site thought (and continues to think) about the value of an individual writer. Although Pitchfork advertised its reviews as personal and idiosyncratic, it refused to let a writer get so good or so famous that he could have any kind of a following. Writers who didn't like it were eventually shown the door, or found it themselves. Brent DiCrescenzo, easily the site's best-known critic in the early days, quit Pitchfork in a 2004 Beastie Boys review. "The little number at the top of this piece"—it was a 7.9—"reflects little of my personal relation to the record," he wrote. "It's an arbitrary guide." He went on: "This process has become unexciting and routine, which is why I bid the world of music writing farewell." In the final paragraph, he came very close to giving away the great secret of Pitchfork's signature brand of spasmodic reviewing. "I could continue to crank out divisive pieces of writing here until I go gray," he wrote, and of course he could. Anyone could. Today, DiCrescenzo edits the music section at Time Out Chicago.

He left just in time. Pitchfork was taking major steps toward professionalization, and DiCrescenzo's writing would have had more and more trouble fitting in. In 2004, Schreiber hired Chris Kaskie away from the Onion to handle business operations, and Scott Plagenhoef, who had worked as a music and sports writer in Chicago, signed on to oversee editorial content. For years the site had gotten along just fine publishing hopeless, funny teenagers; now it began to publish writers who had worked paid jobs at other publications (Tom Breihan, Village Voice), or whose tone made them well-suited for future professionalization (Nitsuh Abebe, New York). Over the next year or two, the site would introduce a number of columns, providing longer articles on particular genres as well as more abstract meditations on topics like talking about music with your friends or using Last.fm for the first time. With these changes, plus an attractive professional redesign in 2005—the first time anyone but Schreiber had designed the site—Pitchfork began to read less like an elaborate blog and more like an online glossy magazine.

This makeover had a number of consequences for the site's reviewing practices. It meant no more reviewing albums by inventing a dialogue between a venue manager and a band, as Nick Sylvester did in a 2003 review of Jet's Get Born: "Fuck you, we're Jet!" says Jet. "Wherever we play people sleep with us." (The album got a 3.7.) Also out of the question was reviewing a Tool album via a made-up essay by a teenage Tool fan: "I feel like this record was made just for me by super-smart aliens or something." (A humiliating 1.9 for Lateralus.) But as the writing took on a more formal tone, and the site began to submit itself to a more rigorous editorial process, Schreiber maintained that Pitchfork's animating principles had not changed. "You have to be completely honest in a review," he told a reporter. "If it gets sacrificed or tempered at all for the sake of not offending somebody . . . that's so the opposite of what criticism is supposed to be."

Pitchfork's grandest experiment in unfiltered honesty took place in 2004. In the 1990s, one of Pitchfork's favorite bands had been the Washington DC rock group The Dismemberment Plan. But when the lead singer, Travis Morrison, released his first solo album, Travistan, Chris Dahlen gave it a 0.0. "I've never heard a record more angry, frustrated, and even defensive about its own weaknesses," he wrote, "or more determined to slug those flaws right down your throat." The record sold terribly as a result, and Morrison's concerts, when they weren't empty, became awkward. "I don't think it occurred to [Pitchfork] that the review could have a catastrophic effect," Morrison told a reporter. "Up until the day of the review, I'd play a solo show, and people would be like 'That's our boy.' . . . Literally, the view changed overnight." As Morrison's career went into a tailspin, the opening line of Dahlen's review, "Travis Morrison got his ass kicked," began to sound self-congratulatory, as though Dahlen enjoyed being the one who did the kicking. Travis Morrison subsequently retired from music, returning only for a scattered batch of Dismemberment Plan reunion concerts in 2011. Today, the front page of Morrison's website is dominated by the word "RETIRED!" in an enormous font, with a smaller note below: "Befriend me on Facebook. I'm so nice!"

Like all rock nerds, Pitchfork's writers had always come off as snobs, but the Travistan review in particular struck bloggers and critics as an abuse of the site's ever expanding power. Further evidence of snobbery was seen in Pitchfork's refusal to allow comments—which really was unusual, given that Spin, Rolling Stone, and other magazines were rushing to let readers append their own record reviews to the professional ones. Perhaps Schreiber sensed that because Pitchfork's reviewers were themselves amateurs—in another context, commenters—a commenting feature would have threatened the fragile suspension of disbelief that powered the Pitchfork machine.

Pitchfork was commonly accused at this time of "hipster cynicism," but the charge was hard to square with the music Pitchfork liked. One of the site's favorite musicians around 2005 was Sufjan Stevens, a sensitive young composer and songwriter from Detroit. After announcing his plan to make an album about each of the fifty states, Stevens went on to release Seven Swans, an album of mellow, explicitly Christian folk-pop. When he finally got back to the Fifty States Project and released Illinois, Pitchfork made it their Album of the Year. Amanda Petrusich's review declared that Stevens's beautifully orchestrated music (he really did use a small orchestra) made it hard to know "whether it's best to grab your party shoes or a box of tissues," and she approvingly quoted this lyric, from the song "Chicago": "If I was crying / In the van with my friend / It was for freedom / From myself and from the land." "At its best," Petrusich wrote, "the album makes America feel very small and very real." This new interest in pastoral nationalism seemed like a strange fit for indie rock; or at least it made plain that indie rock was in the hands of a new and different generation of fans. At the height of the Iraq war, college graduates poured into cities and took internships at magazines, nonprofits, and internet startup firms. They found themselves drawn, for some reason, to adorable music that openly celebrated our national heritage. They dressed like stylish lumberjacks and watched Sufjan perform dressed as a Boy Scout, and they remembered a disappeared world of the small and the tangible.

Around this time, Pitchfork also began championing a woman who wasn't an indie rocker at all, and who would go on to become one of the decade's most important musicians. As Sufjan Stevens was doing his best to imagine a time when the internet didn't exist, British rapper M.I.A. seemed to pull her entire aesthetic off her wifi connection. Originally a designer and visual artist, M.I.A. dressed like a Myspace page, overlaying brightly patterned neon spandex with piles of fake bling. She designed her website to look like websites from the '90s, and on an album cover she obscured her face with the bars that show how much of a video has played on YouTube. In her music, she translated the musical ideas behind mashups into a vague but appealing third-world cultural militancy. Her first mixtape was called Piracy Funds Terrorism Vol. 1, as in online music piracy. Mashup DJs like Girl Talk had begun redeeming mainstream pop songs by playing them all at the same time, a perfect party soundtrack for the listener who, though he didn't actually like Fall Out Boy or Gwen Stefani, needed at least to know about them. M.I.A.'s politics worked in the same way, making the particular brutalities of oppression in Liberia or Sri Lanka danceable by lumping them into a vague condition of sexy global distress. "She's not exploring subcultures so much as visiting them," Scott Plagenhoef wrote in a review of her first album, Arular, "grabbing souvenirs and laying them out on acetate." Plagenhoef didn't see anything wrong with this, although in true Pitchfork style, he made sure to let you know that some people might object: "An in-depth examination of demonizing The Other, the relationship between the West and developing nations, or the need to empathize with one's enemies would likely make for a pretty crappy pop song." Around the same time, a contributor reviewing M.I.A.'s live concert defended her politics in a similar vein. "Maybe that's how brilliantly innocuous Arular actually is," he wrote. "It subtly imprints manifestoes in the brain, inspiring the masses to pull up the poor, without ever really teaching how or why." Reading these strained, convoluted efforts to justify the cultural exploitation of global violence, I began to wonder why Pitchfork's writers had such trouble saying the things they knew to be true.[2] Maybe it was because they felt the truth would make for crappy pop songs, and that therefore the best thing would be to ignore it.

In 2007, Ryan Schreiber moved to Brooklyn, which had become one of indie music's vital hubs. Just as the internet had weakened the major labels and the music magazines that Pitchfork would eventually see as its competition, so did it decimate the weekly newspapers that had supported indie rock throughout the 1990s. As the alt-weeklies went into decline, regional music scenes began to weaken, and indie bands began gravitating toward New York, the city with the greatest hype-generating media apparatus in the world. Priced out of lower Manhattan by the '90s real estate boom, these bands lived in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, where promoters like Todd Patrick—better known as Todd P—had begun to organize DIY concerts in 2001 for acts like Yeasayer, the Dirty Projectors, and Dan Deacon. Although the main body of Pitchfork's editorial operations stayed behind in Chicago, Schreiber almost immediately became a fixture at concerts. In that same year, the site also finally managed to buy its rightful URL from the livestock company. Pitchfork has made a home at www.pitchfork.com ever since.

One Brooklyn band that Pitchfork began investing serious energy in praising was Animal Collective. The four musicians comprising Animal Collective had grown up and met around Baltimore, but they didn't start making a career out of music until after college, in New York. Between 2003 and 2009, Animal Collective released five full-length albums, each receiving a higher score on Pitchfork than the last (with a cumulative average of 9.1). If Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire reminisced about childhood and adolescence in their lyrics, Animal Collective went further. They sounded like actual children. Pitchfork's writers immediately latched onto the band's blend of sonic eccentricity and emotional innocence. An early review referred to the group's work as "fairy-tale music." Another imagined the band's members "dancing like children around the crackling fire among the pines." Another: "It's a child's lack of self-conscience and 'common sense' that makes them holy. . . . Wisdom is wasted on the old." Another: "There's a romantic sense of longing, an air of celebration, but also tinges of doubt, loss, and acceptance." In 2009, Pitchfork consummated its love affair with Animal Collective by giving Merriweather Post Pavilion the highest score the site had awarded to new music since Arcade Fire's Funeral. "It's of the moment and feels new," Mark Richardson wrote, "but it's also striking in its immediacy and comes across as friendly and welcoming." In that album's first single, "My Girls," Noah Lennox sang, "I don't mean to seem like I care about material things / Like our social stats." You can call this inventive and complicated music many derogatory things, if you're in the mood. The band's signature is the combination of simple musical forms—the kinds you learn singing nursery rhymes as a child—and harsh, lacerating bouts of electronic noise. It is the kind of music, in other words, that is "not for everyone." But you cannot call Animal Collective's music insincere. One reason Pitchfork liked that line about social stats so much was that they saw their own project's ambivalence reflected in it.

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Did these bands suck? Was there something that Pitchfork had missed? Although Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, M.I.A., and Animal Collective all produced sophisticated, intelligent music, it's also true that they focused their sophistication and intelligence on those areas where the stakes were lowest. Instead of striking out in pursuit of new musical forms, they tweaked or remixed the sounds of earlier music, secure in the knowledge that pedantic blog writers would magnify these changes and make them seem daring. Instead of producing music that challenged and responded to that of other bands, they complimented one another in interviews, each group "doing its own thing" and appreciating the efforts of others. So long as they practiced effective management of the hype cycle, they were given a free pass by their listeners to lionize childhood, imitate their predecessors, and respond to the Iraq war with dancing. The general mood was a mostly benign form of cultural decadence. It would be nice to say that Pitchfork missed something important, that some undiscovered radical alternative was out there waiting to be found. But Pitchfork's writers are nothing if not diligent. They had it pretty much covered.

By 2010, by almost any metric, Pitchfork was a tremendous success. In addition to its enormous daily output—five record reviews, a dozen or so news items, and frequent interviews with musicians and other celebrities—the site was publishing fourteen columns, from a regular report on the techno scene to "Why We Fight," in which Nitsuh Abebe discussed the discussions that surround popular music. Pitchfork hosts music and video clips, and on Pitchfork.tv you can watch recordings of live concerts from any of six camera angles. The company remains wholly owned by Ryan Schreiber (official title: Founder/CEO), and still occupies its Chicago office in Wicker Park. Advertising is Pitchfork's sole source of revenue, and if the flashy animated ads for Toyota, Apple, and American Apparel are any indication, the revenue is flowing. "We've succeeded at a time when nobody else has," Scott Plagenhoef wrote in 2010. As Nick Denton competed with Conde Nast by running Gawker like a high-end magazine (albeit one with almost no publishing costs), Ryan Schreiber defeated print magazines by moving the whole operation online. By keeping user-generated comments off the site, Pitchfork has behaved more like a magazine than the magazines have. The only major modification Schreiber made to the print template—putting reviews, not interviews or features, at the center—was an ingenious adaptation to the dynamics of internet buzz: interviews may sell the rock and roll lifestyle, but reviews are what blogs will link to and argue about. Finally, of course, there is the archive. By constantly updating and adjusting its archive—whether by deleting early reviews or by writing up a reissued album for a second time—Pitchfork has become the only music publication to attempt an account of what it felt like to be a music fan in the last fifteen years. You cannot write the history of contemporary rock without acknowledging Pitchfork's contribution.

And yet not all contributions are positive. The strangest thing about Pitchfork is that, for all its success, it hasn't produced a single significant critic in fifteen years. Brent DiCrescenzo was a bit of a star for a while, but even with him the entertainment value almost always exceeded the insight. There are other magazines that subordinate the writer's individual voice to an institutional voice—the New Yorker, for starters—but it's strange for a rock magazine to do so, and even the New Yorker occasionally lets writers sound like themselves. Pitchfork couldn't develop intelligence on the individual level because the site's success depended largely on its function as a kind of opinion barometer: a steady, reliable, unsurprising accretion of taste judgments. Fully developed critics have a tendency to surprise themselves, and also to argue with one another, and not just over matters of taste—they fight about the real stuff. This would have undermined Pitchfork's project.

That project—an ever evolving, uncontroversial portrait of contemporary tastes in popular music—addressed one problem surrounding music in the file-sharing era to the exclusion of all others. Faced with readers who wanted to know how to be fans in the internet age, Pitchfork's writers became the greatest, most pedantic fans of all, reconfiguring criticism as an exercise in perfect cultural consumption. Pitchfork's endless "Best Of" lists should not be read as acts of criticism, but as fantasy versions of the Billboard sales charts. Over the years, these lists have (ominously) expanded, from fifty songs to 100 or 200, and in 2008 the site published a book called The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present. Similarly, Pitchfork's obsession with identifying bands' influences seems historical, but isn't. When a pop critic talks about influences, he's almost never talking about the historical development of musical forms. Instead, he's talking about his record collection, his CD-filled binders, his external hard drive—he is congratulating himself, like James Murphy in "Losing My Edge," on being a good fan. While Pitchfork may be invaluable as an archive, it is worse than useless as a forum for insight and argument.

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What did we do to deserve Pitchfork?  The answer lies in indie rock itself.

In the last thirty years, no artistic form has made cultural capital so central to its identity, and no musical genre has better understood how cultural capital works. Disdaining the reserves of actual capital that were available to them through the major labels, indie musicians sought a competitive advantage in acquiring cultural capital instead. As indie's successes began following one another in increasingly rapid succession, musicians working in other genres began to take notice. Hip-hop is an illustrative foil. As indie bands in the '90s did everything they could to avoid the appearance of selling out, rappers tried to get as rich as possible. The really successful ones stopped rapping—or at least outsourced the work of writing lyrics—and opened clothing lines and record labels. But for all their corporate success, rappers knew where the real cultural capital lay. When Jay-Z decided, as an obscenely wealthy entertainment mogul, that he wanted finally to leave his drug-dealer persona behind, he got himself seen at a Grizzly Bear concert in Williamsburg. "What the indie rock movement is doing right now is very inspiring," he said to a reporter. One year later, his memoirs were published by Spiegel & Grau.

Pitchfork has fully absorbed and adopted indie rock's ideas about the uses of cultural capital, and the results have been disastrous. Indie rock is based on the premise that it's possible to disdain commercial popularity while continuing to make rock and roll, the last half century's most popular kind of commercial music. Sustaining this premise has almost always involved suppressing or avoiding certain kinds of knowledge. For indie bands, this meant talking circles around the fact that eventual success was not actually improbable or surprising. For indie rock's critics, it meant refusing to acknowledge that writing criticism is an exercise in power. In 2006, two years after Arcade Fire should have made this kind of claim implausible, Schreiber tried to downplay Pitchfork's importance in a newspaper interview: "So I think we maybe have this sort of snobbish reputation. But we're just really honest, opinionated music fans." Four years later, he said the same thing to the New York Times: "I don't think that we see ourselves as anointers." Nine months after that, Arcade Fire won the Grammy for Album of the Year—the first indie band to be so honored.

Indie's self-deception has had consequences for fans as well. One kind of fan, at least originally, was the lower-middle-class white person, frequently a college dropout, who got by on bartending or other menial work and tried to save enough money to move out of his parents' house. This kind of person got involved in indie rock to acquire cultural capital that he'd otherwise lack. A pretty good example of this kind of indie rock fan is Ryan Schreiber. In the last decade, however, indie rock has classed up, steadily abandoning these lower-class fans (along with the midsized cities they live in) for the young, college-educated white people who now populate America's major cities and media centers. For these people, indie rock has offered a way to ignore the fact that part of what makes your dead-end internship or bartending job tolerable is the fact that you can leave and go to law school whenever you like. A pretty good example of this kind of indie rock fan is me. In the two years since I graduated from college, I've had a pretty good time being "broke" in New York and drinking "cheap" beer with my friends. But sometimes I remind myself that the beer I'm drinking is not actually cheap, and that furthermore I am not actually broke: if I married someone who made the same salary I make, our household income would be slightly above the national median, which is also true of almost every person I spend my free time with. The truth is that I inherited expensive tastes and moved to an expensive city, and sometimes I get cranky about not being able to buy what I want. But when I don't feel like reminding myself of these things, I can listen to indie music. In Sufjan Stevens, indie adopted precious, pastoral nationalism at the Bush Administration's exact midpoint. In M.I.A., indie rock celebrated a musician whose greatest accomplishment has been to turn the world's various catastrophes into remixed pop songs. This is a kind of music, in other words, that's very good at avoiding uncomfortable conversations. Pitchfork has imitated, inspired, and encouraged indie rock in this respect. It has incorporated a perfect awareness of cultural capital into its basic architecture. A Pitchfork review may ignore history, aesthetics, or the basic technical aspects of tonal music, but it will almost never fail to include a detailed taxonomy of the current hype cycle and media environment. This is a small, petty way of thinking about a large art, and as indie bands have both absorbed and refined the culture's obsession with who is over- and underhyped, their musical ambitions have been winnowed down to almost nothing at all.

It's usually a waste of time to close-read rock lyrics; a lot of great rock musicians just aren't that good with words. What you can do with a rock lyric, though, is note the kinds of phrasing that come to mind when a musician is trying to fill a particular rhythmic space with words. You can see what kind of language comes naturally, and some of the habits and beliefs that the language reveals. This makes it worth pausing, just for a moment, over Animal Collective's most famous lyric: "I don't mean to seem like I care about material things." The ethical lyric to sing would be, "I don't want to be someone who cares about material things," but in indie rock today the worst thing would be just to seem like a materialistic person. You can learn a lot about indie rock, its fans, and Pitchfork from the words "mean to seem like."

I sometimes have the utopian thought that in a better world, pop music criticism simply wouldn't exist. What justification could there be for separating the criticism of popular music from the criticism of all other kinds? Nobody thinks it's weird that the New York Review of Books doesn't include an insert called the New York Review of Popular Books. One of pop music criticism's most important functions today is to perpetuate pop music's favorite myth about itself—that it has no history, that it was born from nothing but drugs and "revolution" sometime in the middle of the 20th century. But the story of The Beatles doesn't begin with John, Paul, George, and Ringo deplaning at JFK. It begins with Jean-Philippe Rameau's 1722 Treatise on Harmony, which began to theorize the tonal system that still furnishes the building blocks for almost all pop music. Or, if you like, it goes back to the 16th century, when composers began to explore the idea that a song's music could be more than just a setting for the lyrical text—that it could actually help to express the words as well. Our very recent predecessors have done many important and wonderful things with their lives, but they did not invent the musical universe all by themselves. The abolition of pop criticism as a separate genre would help pop writers to see the wider world they inhabit.

Most of all, though, we need new musical forms. We need a form that doesn't think of itself as a collection of influences. We need musicians who know that music can take inspiration not only from other music but from the whole experience of life. Pitchfork and indie rock are currently run by people who behave as though the endless effort to perfect the habits of cultural consumption is the whole experience of life. We should leave these things behind, and instead pursue and invent a musical culture more worth our time.

1. Pitchfork was not the only music archive emerging on the internet at this time. In 1992, an ex–folk musician named Michael Erlewine began publishing a print volume called the All Music Guide, and in 1995 he took the Guide online. Where Pitchfork's coverage was limited by the relatively narrow tastes of its tiny staff, Allmusic.com aspired to true comprehensiveness, with separate sections dedicated to Pop/Rock, Country, Latin, Reggae, Classical, R&B, Jazz, and other genres. The site rated albums on a five-star scale, and accompanied reviews with bulleted lists identifying a record's "Moods" ("Austere," "Suffocating," "Intense," "Nocturnal") and "Themes" ("Feeling Blue," "Late Night," "The Creative Side"). With a three-year head start and funding that Schreiber could only dream about, Allmusic initially seemed on its way to internet dominance, but the site's rather bland comprehensiveness would turn out, somewhat counterintuitively, to be limiting. Erlewine's error can be found in the assumption that what people wanted was an encyclopedic survey of music itself. Pitchfork knew that what people actually wanted was an encyclopedia of musical taste. 2. Lynn Hirschberg, writing for the New York Times Magazine in May 2010, finally made some of these points in a profile called "M.I.A's Agitprop Pop," but the best critique of M.I.A. wasn't made by a critic. It appeared in the lyrics to a song by Vampire Weekend, in which frontman Ezra Koenig sings about a young woman attending what it seems obvious to me is an M.I.A. concert: "A vegetarian since the invasion / She'd never seen the word 'Bombs' / She'd never seen the word 'Bombs' / blown up to ninety-six-point Futura / She'd never seen an A.K. / In a yellowy DayGlo display / A T-shirt so lovely it turned all the history books gray." This article has been corrected since its publication to reflect that Merge Records was based in Chapel Hill, not Durham in the 1990s and that Ralph's Corner was in Fargo-Moorhead, not Minneapolis.

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Two Daughters

2012-01-19T17:00:00Z

by David Auerbach

Post-2011 but pre-apocalypse, here's a late-breaking Year in Review from David Auerbach, the author of "The Stupidity of Computers," forthcoming in Issue 13. (Subscribe today and get Issue 13 straight from the printer.)

Two daughters bookended my year. One is Pilar Donoso, daughter of the great Chilean writer Jose Donoso (1924–1996). Fellow Chilean Roberto Bolaño called Donoso easily the greatest Chilean novelist of the century. I have long thought Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night (1970) to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, besting the better-known novels of the Latin American Boom. It is a phantasmagoric, surreal, and narratively unstable book that combines folklore, horror, and political and familial corruption to create an allegory of artistic creation, which is embodied by the central figure of the imbunche, a troll-like monster in Chilote mythology whose body is folded in on itself, with all its orifices sewn shut.

While researching an article on Donoso, I discovered that his daughter Pilar had written a book called Correr el tupido velo (Drawing the Veil), which was published in 2009. A sort of posthumous collaboration with her father, it tells the story of his life by drawing on her own memories as well as her father's diaries, released only after his death in 1996. A chronicle of her father's torment, paranoia, self-hatred, and mistreatment of his family, as well as his deeply closeted homosexuality, Drawing the Veil is all the more uncanny for its echoes of the blatantly anti-realistic The Obscene Bird of Night, in which boys try to take revenge on their fathers by writing their biographies: a central theme of the book is the conceptual and emotional prisons made for us by our parents. Donoso later wrote, "This novel, which took me about eight years to write, is one and the same in my memory with the experience of pain and disease."

The book was not Pilar Donoso's idea; her father asked her to be his biographer. It took her seven years to write, and after publication, her marriage fell apart and her children went with their father rather than her. Pilar Donoso said the book destroyed her family, but that writing it was a necessary catharsis. She also said that she did not consider herself a victim. In November, after I finished the article, Pilar Donoso was found dead by her own hand. The obituaries mentioned a passage late in her father's diaries in which he sketched out a story about the daughter of a deceased writer who reads and publishes her father's diaries and then commits suicide.

The second daughter is my own, born at the beginning of the year. The next decades of my life have now been partly written: I have and will always be this child's father. As I've grown attuned to this new being who changes, inexorably, far faster than anything else around me, I've crossed from the Brooklyn world of professionals, artists, and hipsters into the separate but consubstantial world of parents and children. I now feel the constant presence of her and other inchoate creatures who unconsciously absorb every hidden meaning and motive of those around them.

I am writing my daughter's life, knowing I must make room for her to do so herself when she is able—knowing I must be careful. Pilar Donoso wrote, "One should not know the intimate thoughts of anyone. Least of all those of one's own parents." I wonder what thoughts I may need to hide from her so that she will be able to expand out into the world and not fold up into a void. I hope I will be able to do so.

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"I Had an Abortion" Screening with n+1 at Bluestockings

2012-01-17T21:17:10Z

Dear New York Readers,

Please join us at Bluestockings bookstore tomorrow, Wednesday the 18th, to celebrate the n+1 radical feminist research team's collaboration with Soapbox, Inc. to revive their notoriously provocative—and powerful—"I Had An Abortion" campaign. Created in 2004 to encourage women (and men) to "come out" about their procedures, the "I Had an Abortion" campaign includes a line of infamous T-shirts (you can guess what they say) and a film documenting women's abortion stories. After years of being sold out, the T-shirts will return tomorrow night at Bluestockings after a screening of the film.

Never have we needed this revival more; women have only continued to disappear from the debate surrounding abortion since 2004. Last year, state legislators enacted a record-breaking number of provisions restricting women’s access to abortion; now, in five states, abortion is illegal after twenty weeks of pregnancy. A new Texas law requires women seeking abortions to undergo a vaginal sonogram, look at the image produced by this medically unnecessary procedure, hear a recording of "fetal heartbeat," and listen to a doctor’s description of what it is that she is seeing.

Texas Governor Rick Perry has heralded this bill as a “victory for all who stand in defense of life." He, like every Republican candidate for president, favors a near-universal ban on abortion, and officially supports “personhood” measures—such as a Constitutional amendment granting fertilized eggs the legal status of living people. Such legislation denies all women their most basic Constitutional rights: their citizenship is contingent on their reproductive freedom. As soon as women are forced to become pregnant, any claims to bodily autonomy, to self-determination, to the freedom to exercise both the mandates of conscience and the liberty guaranteed to them as Americans, would cease to be valid.

In this new era of anti-abortion legislation, the state makes laws in order to make use our bodies without our consent. Roughly 40 percent of American women have had abortions, and most of us don't regret it. The time has come to speak up: abortion is not by definition a tragedy, women are not victims, our bodies do not belong to the government, and a real defense of life is one that defends our right to live it.

Fed up with increasingly hateful rhetoric and the misleading abstractions that had ever-more-severe consequences for women, n+1 research and Soapbox, Inc. agree: now, more than ever, words need to be restored their proper meaning. The truth needs telling.

Bluestockings, 1/18/2012

Screening of "I Had an Abortion" begins at 7 PM. Reception to follow.

172 Allen Street. Get Directions.

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Eviction Memories

2012-01-17T20:44:50Z

by Molly Osberg, Tim Fitzgerald

Image: The morning after the eviction on November 15, 2011. Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/shankbone.

Just over two months ago, on November 15, Zuccotti Park (a.k.a. Liberty Square) was emptied by the NYPD. Since then Occupy Wall Street has continued, but without its original home. For many of us, the most reliable and friendly way to follow NYC General Assemblies and Spokes Councils from afar—especially with the physical locus of the movement gone—has been through the live-tweeting of Dicey Troop and the [at]LibertySqGA team. On the two month anniversary of the eviction (also Martin Luther King, Jr. day, our only US holiday that commemorates dissent and nonviolent social change) we’re glad to have Dicey’s and Molly’s record of that night and morning, from both sides of the barricades. —Ed.

DICEY (A.K.A. TIM): The first sign of trouble was a tweet:

[at]mcduh: [at]questlove sayin he saw hundreds of riot cops on South St, Manhattan bout 1hr ago. #occupywallst [at]DiceyTroop are yall aware of anything?

I immediately crossed Broadway on the south side of Liberty, side-stepping dormant traces of ongoing street maintenance and responding: [at]mcduh [at]questlove all quiet at the Park. What did you see questo? Maybe Batman stuff?

As I neared Pearl Street, bad omens rounded the corner, driving back the way I came and toward Liberty Square: ten NYPD trucks towing the kind of lighting rigs often seen illuminating nocturnal construction projects. I'd been thinking about the Spokes Council meeting I'd just left, and my heart and mind bickered the way they do when confronted by disruptive truths. I was far from ready to admit that everything was about to change.

MOLLY: Tim's text woke me.

Before I got into bed I had checked my phone and scrolled through what was later dubbed Questlove's "Paul Revere Moment." I'd thought: another false alarm. We'd rushed down to the park maybe two weeks before, practically jumping up and down on the 4 train platform, only to find our friends at Zuccotti shrugging and bedding down for another night. It was a testament to how routine the extremes of life in the park had become. That night, we had found the comfort station sorting blankets, had helped a friend carry jail support supplies to the crosstown subway, had planned a half-baked theatrical action somewhere along the way, and had enjoyed a short—and really, shockingly civil—argument with a twentysomething far to the right of us politically . . . Normalcy. That night, it had been enough to soothe all our fears.

DICEY: As I reached Water Street, the whole police phalanx suddenly emerged from the flat block between Water and South Street. NYPD van after NYPD van rolled through the intersection in a single-file bumper-to-bumper line. Running up Pine to Nassau to Cedar, I recognized several members of Liberty Square's non-activist homeless population moving away from the park. Well, that's a bad sign. At Cedar and Broadway, fifty riot police were already assembled next to the red cube, backed by those enormous and shockingly bright klieg lights.

On the other side of the street, I pulled out my phone and snapped a shot of an equally large and well-lit deployment staring into our park from the top of the steps. I tweeted it with the words: Red alert at Liberty Square!

The biggest group of our people was at the kitchen. I reached them and realized I wasn't sure what to do with myself. What was my role here, right now? I went with what I knew and managed to assemble 140 characters of coherent thought: NOT A DRILL. SHIT IS GOING DOWN. PARK DEFENSE IN PROGRESS. If you want to save #occupywallstreet, come to park NOW.

MOLLY: Tim wrote: Eviction happening. Sound the Alarm. But what alarm did we have? I woke my roommates. We turned on the Livestream around the same time the second text came in from Occupy's emergency alert system. My laptop was still on the bed, and the three of us stood around it in various states of undress, staring.

DICEY: The moment was stressful, between the NYPD's announcements, the searing bright lights, and people packing up tents in a frantic attempt to get out before the wave of police hit. Someone banged a kettle with a utensil, much too loudly, until a man with a U-lock around his neck stopped trying to be heard in a pleasant tone and screamed, "Stop making that fucking noise!" Folks with me at the kitchen split up cloth for scarves so we could protect our noses and mouths against chemical attacks. When the bolt ran out just before I was able to make one, a woman named Sarah Harper handed me hers. "The unions are coming right now," someone said.

MOLLY: "What should we do?" asked one of my roommates.

"It's probably already blocked off," said the other. "Tim's there? I don't think we can do anything at this point."

We stood and stared a while longer. It was true.

I had a very familiar feeling. The bright lights, the shouting, all contained in that little Livestream box with the text scrolling down the margin—how very inappropriate. It doesn't even go full screen. It was the same feeling I'd had sitting with my laptop on the couch weeks ago, watching Oakland get raided. All I could do is watch myself watching the Livestream. The curse of the all-access class. When I'm at work I refresh my various feeds every few minutes to see what's going on with the hashtag, but it doesn't help get my work done any faster, and it certainly doesn't get me any closer to OWS.

DICEY: The police entered the park, dismantling tents and making arrests. There aren't enough people to hold the stairs. We're located around the kitchen. Some occupiers formed a barricade with shelves, racks, bags, and bodies, around those who were U-locked together at the kitchen's nucleus. The rest of us formed a human wall around the perimeter. I found my perch for the evening: a spot near the south side of the kitchen, which was finally beginning to settle down. We were ready. The human barricades facing the police lines started mic-checking, shouting our #whyweoccupy stories to the line of officers. I love the smell of vinegar in the morning! Mood is festive.

The lights made every tent in the park luminescent. It was hard to see beyond the kitchen. Only as the police neared us did it become clear what they were doing: hauling tents full of people's belongings across the square and heaving them into trash trucks. They began on the east side and worked their way in. An industrious squadron of Sanitation workers followed, power-washing as if to scrub away all traces of Liberty Square, leaving nothing but the unblemished stone of Zuccotti Park.

On Twitter, folks were losing their shit. During the whole ordeal, I never lost the sense that I was directly connected to occupiers outside my physical reach. I knew that people were having a difficult time accessing the park, but that they were looking for a way to sneak in—that our friends were with us a few block away. I KNOW Y'ALL CAN SAVE US!, I tweeted. Come in the west side maybe.

MOLLY: I rode my bike over, rehearsing the program. You see, I work early each morning, and usually all weekend. My soft, guilty, stomach-clenching mantra for almost every Occupy Wall Street action loops around a single directive: Don't get arrested. You have to go to work. I tend to calm the anxiety these situations inspire in me by considering myself simply a warm body; a fraction of a crowd-sized statistic someone may find quotable in the morning. Naively, I imagined there would be a place for observers in the raid on Liberty Plaza.

The next few hours proved me wrong. When I came to the foot of the bridge I found myself flanked by similarly desperate-looking kids on bikes; the cavalry was arriving. Police vans had already blocked the road almost up to Fulton; they stretched up to City Hall Park.

DICEY: Some of the stories I heard from the perimeter were far more brutal than the rough treatment I saw in Liberty Square itself. People were arrested for politely asking questions. Press were penned in and assaulted if they attempted to reach the park. Pepper spray and batons were used liberally. I can only imagine that the police on the perimeter thought that protecting the invisibility of their colleagues' actions in the park was of the utmost importance. But their treatment of the people who came to see and document the destruction ended up documented itself, becoming just as—if not more—scandalous.

MOLLY: I locked my bike to some scaffolding on Broadway and approached the first line of chanting people I saw: a knot of bodies I assumed were there, like me, to show their nonviolent support. I walked up, craned my neck to see past them, and immediately caught some pepper spray in the face. I reeled back; someone helped me rinse my eyes. The guy in front of me got it much worse. I saw him later, face pink and screwed up, being escorted northwards, an occupier on each arm. To my left an older gentleman leaned out of a glimmering black SUV, his video-capable iPad planted firmly between his face and the action.

I crossed Broadway with the blurry idea of trying to find a way into the park. I knew that Tim, along with the others still inside, had taken to the kitchen. I knew the park was being dismantled. A police van pulled up and deployed even more police officers in riot gear, their batons out. I started texting everyone I knew.

DICEY: By 2 AM I accepted the strong odds that we'd be riding this one out pretty much on our own. Without notice, we'd had no chance to warn the (ideally several thousand) people that we, like Mayor Bloomberg, knew would join our park defense efforts. And the speed and ardor with which the police were throwing our belongings into trash trucks sent a clear message to those who dared to stay: Be with you in a minute, hippies. We knew the police had barricaded all access to the park within a two-block radius. Whether there were forty or 400 of us who stayed inside instead of going out willingly, it wasn't going to be enough.

But it wasn't even a decision I needed to make. Liberty Square was the closest thing to a free public space I'd ever experienced. We were exercising our constitutional rights to speech and assembly, and calling upon the freedom of the press. And in our assembly, we had begun to test, refine, and demonstrate new ideas of community and of real democracy. Now the NYPD was just going to roll in and take us from our work?

Naw. We began using the people's mic to remind the cops that they'd sworn to uphold the First Amendment, along with the rest of the Constitution. We spotted an LRAD mounted in the flatbed of a police truck.

MOLLY: The streets east of Liberty Square felt as if they'd had the wind knocked out of them. It's a pretty well-insulated neighborhood. A block and a half away from the action you couldn't hear anything—maybe the choppers. It's not all rich people. The first place I lived in New York was only a few blocks away on Williams Street, right across from the Fed. The police presence there had been overbearing, but unanimously lazy. I used to walk those streets a lot; the neighborhood around Wall Street stops being New York around 8 PM. It's eerie even on the best night. The delis—already sparse for Manhattan—shut their doors and pedestrian traffic ceases. I walked south, still dazed, glancing down each alley towards the inevitable set of barricades and flashing lights. I passed fluorescent lobbies, and building numbers set in gold. The complete and morbid stillness was broken only by the sound of people running on those gray, clean cobblestones; they passed in ones and twos, shouting directions to each other, and disappeared again.

I completed my lap having found nothing but more cops. As I was making my way back north a girl my age and I passed each other. "Wait!" she yelled, frantic and wide-eyed. "Are you [at]blogdiva?"

I took a second to answer. "Uhm, no."

The humor of that exchange would come to me much later. [at]blogdiva, a prominent tweeter who participates in OWS, looks nothing like me. But my glasses are similar to the ones worn by her online avatar. If I'd told that girl yes—that I was [at]blogdiva—what would she have asked me? Where would we have gone? She kept running.

DICEY: The NYPD began pointing their sound cannon into the kitchen. GET ON THE HORN TO BROOKFIELD AND MAKE THEM CALL IT OFF. I posted an update from Sarah Harper. And then, once the police had finished removing all of the tents and structures between the kitchen and the east side of the park, they stopped their advance and waited before moving any further. I shot and posted video after video, showing confusion, resolve, indignation, and then rough arrests. No way in hell Ray Kelly is gonna be Mayor, I tweeted. Another Sarah Harper update. Another video. "So, how about those union guys?" someone asked. Other people just shook their heads. We sang "The Star-Spangled Banner," and then the NYPD moved in. They tore down the kitchen tent, destroyed shelves of food, smashing pickle jars and mayo jars all over the place. They cursed, irritated. I hope they got it on their boots. I hope their boots still smell like brine.

Zip-tied and face-down on the granite tiles of Zuccotti Park, I felt calm.

MOLLY: Back on the west side of Broadway a compact knot of occupiers and riot cops were wrestling their way down the street, empty space on all sides. I stood for a moment transfixed by this cross-section, the hard blue swath of uniform propelling a churning mass of protesters northwards. They chanted and screamed while my side of the street remained conspicuously silent. Whether we were members of the media, or passers-by with an itch for spectacle, it was hard to tell. But the thirty-odd people on our side of Broadway were all watching through viewfinders: phones, video cameras, iPads.

I texted Tim, "Be careful."

DICEY: Central Booking was full. The bus had to turn around awkwardly while we sang "This Land is Your Land" and "Redemption Song." We caught an officer singing along, and when we called him out his face turned red and he stopped. Finally, the bus started moving again, this time in the direction of Foley Square, which happened to be the backup meeting place for the crowd blocked out of Zuccotti. A few minutes later, we were circling a plaza full of hundreds of our allies, cheering. It felt like a victory lap.

Our arresting officer was a member of something called the Staten Island Task Force, called to service that night in Manhattan's First Precinct, I had to think, because he'd never seen #OWS before. I remembered the stares of those fresh blue-shirted police standing in formation, facing the park from Broadway, waiting to destroy it. It wasn't that they were staring us down; they'd just never seen anything like Liberty Square before. To the extent that the First Precinct's finest grew accustomed to us—even sympathetic to us—over those three months of peaceful protest, the police administration was right, I think, to fear for the loyalty of the New York Police Department's rank-and-file when it came to busting up the encampments of their fellow citizens.

MOLLY: My roommates arrived with a second wave of supporters with black bandannas around their necks. We stood milling in a crowd further north. People gazed at their phones, stared vacantly down Broadway towards the blue lights. Someone started a chant and it quickly died down. Medics rushed by, ushering the injured through. I ran into a few people I knew, also powerless, bewildered by the lights and the noise. Someone announced a march. We watched fifteen or so police vans round the corner of City Hall Park, lights blazing, interrupting a gathering of mourners. At Foley, the people's mic devolved into disarray as cops formed a line across the south side of the square. Mic-checking each other back and forth, the crowd felt nearly unhinged. We should leave. We should keep the park. They're closing in. Do you know what precinct they're going to?

DICEY: Our so-called "arresting officer" wasn't jovial, he wasn't mean, he wasn't condescending, and he wasn't supportive. He reminded me of myself working some of the less interesting jobs I've had in life. He seemed to have no personal investment in the situation.

They marched us into a gated yard to be photographed; while we waited in line I realized that we were surrounded by officers—and they were joking, laughing, messing around. It was bizarre; these folks had just committed a massive violation of civil rights on the orders of their superiors, sure to spawn court actions and create headlines well into the future. The weight of the events didn't seem to affect them.

We began to converse about non-controversial topics with our arresting officer. One of his other arrestees asked him why he was a cop. "Well, I was in the military. Then I finished my service, came home, and now I'm a cop." I asked him what led him to decide to serve, and he told me that for him it was a choice between going to college, which he didn't feel ready for, or didn't want to do, and joining the military. I asked him if it upset him at all that those were his only two choices. He didn't see it that way. "Even when I was in high school, I was in ROTC. Like, when I was a kid, I'd want to play soldiers."

MOLLY: I returned to Broadway to find that barricades had been set up further north; police in full, wide-hipped cop stance guarded the gates. My bike was a lost cause. A friend paid for the cab home, which took three times as long as it would have on a regular night. Streets were jammed up with blue-and-white buses, barricades, frowning men in uniforms. Splintered mobs appeared and receded, shouting and raising their fists as they crossed the streets against traffic. They were going north, east, to Washington Square, to the precinct. My friend and I didn't say much.

Our cab driver was an older, bespectacled gentleman with a rounded bald head. His English was very broken. He seemed bewildered.

"Excuse me . . . one question?"

"Yes, of course." My friend leaned forward in her seat.

"What is happening?"

"Occupy Wall Street," we said. "The protest. The police removed it."

DICEY: Someone else asked the officer what he thought of Occupy. He said he really didn't know anything about it, having never seen it and only vaguely aware of it. We tried to explain it to him. He told us we'd be breaking the law by being in the park. We told him that the park rules made our presence legal. Dropping a sanitation order with no notice, while blocking the press, was obviously not a neutral action to do some cleaning and upkeep on your property. "It's nice to have rights, but if there's no place in society where you can use them without someone having the power to supersede them, what's the point?"

He seemed unsure how to answer that, and I tuned back out.

The next afternoon our arresting officer was the one to walk us out, back the way the bus had entered. He stopped at the gates. I shook his hand and thanked him for talking to me. He shook loosely and nodded, clearly bored.

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Announcing Issue 13

2012-01-17T18:44:26Z

Dear Readers,

We're pleased to announce that lucky Issue 13, "Machine Politics," made it to the printer last week and will be released on Thursday, January 26. It's one of our best and most surprising issues yet.

The issue features an outstanding essay by Russian poet and activist Kirill Medvedev on a prominent Russian literary publisher and the fate of progressive culture. Medvedev, whose poetry appeared in Issue 6, has a collection of poetry and essays, It's No Good, translated by Keith Gessen and Cory Merrill, coming out from Ugly Duckling Presse and n+1 this spring. It will be the first English-language edition of his work.

Also in the issue is an essay by filmmaker Astra Taylor on her education outside the school system and the ongoing free school movement. In place of fiction, we have the first three scenes of a very funny new play by Benjamin Kunkel. Our "States of the Arts" series continues with an essay by James Franco and Deenah Vollmer on the problem of over-preparing for acting roles. And we're putting the machine in Machine Politics with a short history of artificial intelligence (or the persistent stupidity of computers) and a report from Franco Moretti's famed Literary Lab on trying to get a program to recognize novelistic genres.

The Intellectual Situation includes first-person accounts of the Occupy movements and an analysis of the early development of a left populism. In the politics section, Christopher Glazek presents a rigorous condemnation of the American prison system. Finally, in reviews, Elizabeth Gumport looks at the work of Chris Kraus and the Semiotext(e) Native Agents Series and Alice Gregory considers a year at Sotheby's, Inc.

We'll celebrate the launch on January 26 with readings at 7 PM at 192 Books in Manhattan from Astra Taylor's "Unschooling" and Benjamin Kunkel's Buzz. We hope you can join us, and please write to us with any questions about the issue at editors [at] nplusonemag.com.

—The Editors

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Protest Morning-After Pill Restriction, Jan. 12

2012-01-12T16:49:41Z

n+1 readers, American citizens and sympathizers, and those who believe that our movement doesn't end with Occupy:

In December 2011, after years of restricting over-the-counter access to the Morning-After pill to women over 17, the FDA finally deemed the Morning-After Pill safe for women of all ages. Based on this determination, the FDA recommended the pill be accessible over-the-counter to everyone. In an unprecedented move, the Department of Health and Human Services proceeded to block the FDA’s recommendation, upholding the prescription requirement for women under 17. Despite his promise to promote policy based on sciences and not morality, President Obama has supported this obstruction.

National Women's Liberation has put together a protest and speak-out in New York today, January 12th, to demand that Health and Human Services reverse this decision, and to demand that the Obama Administration stop giving in to right-wing extremists. The Radical Feminist branch of n+1's research division is trying to help get as many of us as possible to turn out. It's time to wake this administration up.

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Elegy for Christopher Hitchens, Whom I Only Met Twice

2012-01-12T16:20:44Z

by Mary Karr

I say mystery is the only certainty
That embracing nothingness
as hard as you did those big
bear arms around the dissipating void
so all the stars squeezed out the sides
you made Nietzsche look
like the crybaby punk
he actually was infected with syphilis
and so forth who said god
is dead and remains dead and we
killed him talk about
Oedipal guilt, which you
spat out like an apple's
arsenic pit

                The time I met you first
in London on a green lawn
under a tent with a crowd of swells
you snarled were a bunch of tits
I swear you made me want to start
drinking again and hissing
dragon-smoke from my throat

        You were one of the big
right-wing boys who wore scorn
like a deb does a designer scent
and I hung on the edge of your small clutch
a newly baptized Catholic antique
come from a candlelit chapel an hour
spent talking to dolls since I never
was a child and must be now, must

                for a time remain
on this side of the grass and you
that and ergo I speak free of your smart
smackdown: If you got to claim
you entered the Great Nothing
I hereby announce you went to live
with sweet baby Jesus
or else no punk gets to say
nothing though what anybody says
matters not one whit next to what
actually IS which is eternal
as you now are Nietzsche Eliot
old Philip Larkin--you now
know what they knew
and I know naught but loss
and its multiples the only
other certainty being mystery.

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Joe Paterno's Aeneid

2012-01-10T19:46:08Z

by John Lessingham

Joe Paterno, football coach, liked to talk about the Aeneid. For him Virgil's epic poem provided in the stolid and long-suffering Aeneas the great object lessons of honor, duty, and courage. Paterno gave speeches about heroism and the Aeneid as early as the 1970s. It's a central motif of his autobiography, Paterno: By the Book (1989), in which we learn that "Aeneas cannot choose not to found Rome; he's destined to create it. But he has to wrestle with himself, inch by inch, hour by hour—play by play!—to figure out how to endure the struggle and torment of doing it, and take all the bad breaks along the way." As recently as 2007, Paterno told GQ that the Aeneid has "probably had as much influence on me as anything in my life."

Paterno's fate brought him many decades of success: he won more bowls than any other coach and two national championships. He also occupied a niche as the self-styled patron saint of collegiate football integrity in an era of essentially legitimized corruption. Whenever the press expressed doubts about Division I college football and basketball, Paterno could be pointed to as an icon of fidelity to the scholar-athlete ideal. And although it's true that the graduation rate of Paterno's athletes remains higher than that of almost all their competition, he's a plaster saint now, smashed beyond all recognition now that the public learned that he chose to put the reputation of his program before the safety of young children.

While it's always easy to cry hypocrisy and turn our backs on a ruined idol, it might be more worthwhile to sift the ruins of the Paterno cult of football warriors to see if we can find the tragic flaw in how he understood his model hero, Aeneas.

+ + +

The commitment to learning is central to Paterno's self-mythology. According to Paterno he is "an educator who happens to be a big-league football coach," a visionary who dubbed his insistence that his players take both school and football seriously a "Grand Experiment." He gives his legend a fitting back story: he is "Angelo Paterno's first son: tutored by Jesuits in Latin and Homer and Virgil, four Ivy League years burying my nose in English literature." The wizard figure in the Paterno Bildungsroman is a Jesuit high school teacher named Thomas Bermingham; the future coach is guided by "destiny" to Bermingham's third-year Latin class.

The young teacher sees something in the scrawny kid and proposes almost immediately that they work through the Aeneid together. (Father Bermingham's other claim to fame? Technical advisor on The Exorcist. You can't make this up, but you can confirm it on IMDB.) It's worth noting that the Jesuit relationship with Virgil goes back to the beginning of the order. Although the emphasis on Virgil in Jesuit education had everything to do with Latin and little to do with religion—Virgil after all was a pagan who celebrated the rule of Rome and its gods—Paterno seems to be under the impression that the Aeneid has been read as an anticipation of Christianity. It hasn't, really (that's Virgil's Fourth Eclogue), although for various reasons Virgil has been a favorite author of Christian writers since at least the fourth century.

Paterno contains many evocations of the great book's impact on an impressionable youth. It "seeped into far corners" of his mind, where "the size and scope of it last as a memory forever." Noting both the show of semi-divine strength and the human uncertainties that characterize Aeneas, Paterno writes, "His secret places were like mine." Yet we also have the first intimations that this play might be a fumble: the Aeneid is 400 pages long and young Paterno wonders how he and Bermingham could possibly finish it. Bermingham responds:

"What's important . . . is not how much we cover . . . It's not how much we do, but the excellence of what we do."

Excellence. The way he pronounced that word made it shine with a golden light. I'll never forget the majestic ring of the opening lines . . . It made me hear cymbals and trumpets, and I envisioned a procession of gallant gladiators . . . I still feel the spell of that young robed cleric's eyes searing into me . . .

Never mind the echoes of early Dungeons and Dragons prose: our young hero found his inspiration. And while Paterno has never claimed to be a Virgil scholar, he has been declaring his love for the Latin language, and for the Aeneid, for decades. Surely he's finished it? It's unclear, but he does want us to know he's still reading. Here's Paterno foisting the Aeneid on his GQ interviewer: "This is Bob Fagles's translation. I have this at home. I try to read ten, twelve pages before I go to bed, but it's tough. It's tough."

+ + +

As any Aeneid reader could tell you, its twelve books follow the journey of Aeneas, "an exile driven on by Fate," from the ruins of Troy to Italy, where he must found the community that will become Rome. Because he obeys divine guidance and because he shepherds his people, famously carrying his father on his back and safeguarding his son, he exemplifies Roman pietas, meaning, roughly, "devotion to duty." And although he gets a number of "bad breaks"—storm and shipwreck, the deaths of his wife and father, divine prodding to seduce, then abandon a lover—in the end he lands in Italy, makes an alliance and marries, and kills the biggest of the bad guys.

Paterno's central fixation is with Aeneas and how he responds to adversity, as they say. In Paterno he writes: "Aeneas has to struggle and suffer--and make his own decisions. How he acts is not determined by fate. . . he must act out of free will." Paterno is basically right about some important things: the ancient idea of fate allows a fixed divine plan to coexist with individual choice in its constituent events; Virgil consciously Romanized the Homeric hero by giving Aeneas the responsibility of founding a nation; we see Aeneas struggle and become, through bitterly won experience, a better leader. Like many Catholics before him, Paterno sees Aeneas as a pagan guide through the difficult problem of divine providence, free will, and a world full of woe.

He's also fundamentally wrong about the text. Paterno claims that, "Aeneas is not a grandstanding superstar . . . His first commitment is not to himself, but to others . . . Aeneas is the ultimate team man." While it's true that Pius Aeneas is at first glance an exemplary "no-I-in-Rome" sort of leader, any serious contemplation of his actions in battle—and battle is, of course, the crux of the football analogy—reveals a much more troubled and troubling Aeneas. Open to almost any part of book ten: there is no teamwork, no description of formations or battle strategy. Aeneas doesn't run plays or call audibles because he is an epic hero, not a quarterback. Paterno claims that "a hero of Aeneas's kind doesn't wear his name on the back of his uniform . . . He doesn't wear Nittany Lions on his helmet to claim star credit for touchdowns and tackles that were enabled by everybody doing his job." In fact Aeneas wears armor—commissioned by his mother, Venus, and forged by Vulcan—that includes a "terrible crested helmet plumed and shooting fire" and a shield decorated with a pictorial future-history of "Rome in all her triumphs."

More like a lone predator than a quarterback, Aeneas goes out alone looking for people to kill. He cuts short the pleas of a helpless enemy, kneeling and praying for mercy, by yanking back his head and driving his sword through his throat. He runs down a robed priest, and "rearing over him as he stumbles, slaughters him." Unnecessary roughness! He pins another victim's shield to his chest, then decapitates him as he too begs for his life. And he grandstands like a real epic hero, too:

and rolling the man's warm trunk along and looming

over him vaunts with all the hatred in his heart:

"Now lie there, you great horrific sight!

No loving mother will bury you in the ground

Or weight your body down with your fathers' tomb.

You'll be abandoned now to carrion birds or plunged

in the deep sea and swept away by the waves and

Ravening fish will dart and lick your wounds!

Later, he knocks another outmatched opponent from his chariot and then leans over, talking trash, to finish him off: "Lucagus, no panicked pair has let your chariot down / . . . it's you, tumbling off your chariot, you desert your team!" This goes on and on, and after all of the beautiful talk of fate and pietas and a divine plan we are eye-deep in gore, wondering, as the literary scholar Denis Feeney put it in a 1999 essay, "What kind of readers is this poem trying to turn us into?"

+ + +

Paterno is not alone in emphasizing the Odyssey–like first half of the Aeneid, which includes the sack of Troy, the Dido interlude, and Aeneas's visit to the underworld. Nothing nearly as famous happens in the Iliad–like rest of the poem, but in literature, as in football, important things happen in the second half. Paterno has completely missed a major theme: in the second half of the poem, the Trojans become like Greeks, Aeneas like Achilles. The coach—who is so enamored of classical heroism as a moral compass that he changed the general football jargon term for a specific type of roving safety from "monster" to "hero"—seems not to realize that Virgil spent an entire book turning his hero into a monster.

The poem's original monster is Mezentius, a torture-loving tyrant and one of the Trojans' principle enemies. Late in book ten, Mezentius is wounded, and his son, Lausus, rushes out to cover his father's withdrawal. Aeneas taunts him for his folly, then "drives his tempered sword through the youth, / plunging it home hilt-deep. The point impaled his shield, / . . . and the shirt his mother wove him of soft gold mesh, / and his lap filled up with blood"

As he looks upon the dying face of his victim, Aeneas's rage breaks. "He groaned from his depths in pity, reached out his hand / as this picture of love for a father pierced his heart." Aeneas has done a terrible thing, and he knows it. In a sense, he's killed the part of himself that once carried his own father away from Troy, that saved his son from the triumphantly slaughtering Achaeans. One way to harmonize the two registers of the poem is to see that Aeneas understands both the role of rage on the battlefield and the pain and suffering it causes. His fate isn't just to endure all the tough breaks: it's also to do the things you do when you are winning a war, like watch the boys you've killed die and think of their mothers.

This is the point in the epic where Virgil begins to turn our fascination with violence against us. When Mezentius returns, in a futile effort to avenge his son, he shows dignity, humanity, and philosophical calm, and asks only for a decent burial. Aeneas kills him and mutilates his body, then later sets up his punctured armor as a trophy. Paterno, who describes Achilles as "rotting at the end into a kind of monster," has misread both the Iliad—which ends after Achilles, weeping and taking the hand of the father of the hero he killed, makes what amends he can—and his own master text. Pietas, which includes the duty of defending or avenging relatives and allies, motivates winners and losers, aggressors and victims. It turns out, Virgil teaches us, that pietas can legitimize savagery.

If Paterno just made the kind of clichéd war/football metaphors we've come to expect, pumping up his players with a classier brand of exhortation, well, fine. But Paterno claims that Aeneas is a moral exemplar, that he always does the right thing. This is true only if you accept Aeneas's total subordination to fate: Jupiter calls the plays, and Aeneas executes. Aeneas's savagery is actually legitimated, then, by his divine coach. What Paterno doesn't realize is that he's taken himself to be Jupiter and confused fate with his own honor. Worse, his boyish take on the nature of war in epic—the cymbals, the allure of "success with honor"—has never matured. He has either never understood—or understands all too well—what Aeneas knows at the beginning of the poem (the famous sunt lacrimae rerum, rendered by Fagles as "the world is a world of tears," is in book one): that some kinds of success preclude honor, that choosing to put the success of the program first means you might have to do—or countenance—something truly monstrous.

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Marco Roth and Emily Carter, Jan. 10

2012-01-10T16:26:03Z

A 7 PM this Tuesday, January 10 at WORD in Brooklyn, Emily Carter, author of Glory Goes and Gets Some, will make a rare New York appearance, in conversation with her cousin, n+1 editor Marco Roth. Carter's short story collection is a December pick for Emily Books, the host of the event. Roth's memoir, The Scientists: A Family Memoir, is forthcoming from FSG this year. We hope to see you there!

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Occupy and Space

2012-01-05T19:03:42Z

by Astra Taylor

Image: Duarte Square, New York, December 17.

This piece first appeared in the third issue of the Occupy! Gazette, published December 14, 2011.

Even before Liberty Plaza was raided, many of us were asking what was next for Occupy Wall Street. The movement, we said, was about more than holding a space, even one in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district. Occupation, I often heard, was a means, not an end; a tactic, not a target. The goal, from the beginning, was to do more than build an outdoor urban commune supported by donations solicited over the internet. We wanted to discomfit the one percent, to interrupt their good times and impact their pocketbooks—or overthrow them entirely.

The dual threat of eviction and inclement weather meant next steps were never far from people’s minds. The camp can’t last forever, we’d say knowingly, while friends nodded in agreement. And yet, when the raid actually happened—when Bloomberg sent one thousand police officers dressed in riot gear, and paramilitary helicopters hovered overhead; when the entire encampment was hauled off to the garbage dump and half-asleep occupiers were dragged to jail, it was a shock. As I circled the police barricades that night, many of the faces I saw looked stunned; some people crumpled on the sidewalk and wept. The loss of Liberty Plaza was experienced as just that—a real loss, and possibly a profound one. By dawn photos began to circulate of the park, freshly power-washed, empty, and gleaming, almost as though we had never been there, though the police ringing the periphery and the newly-installed private security guards gave the scene away.

+ + +

No one can really say what unique coincidence of events and factors caused OWS to break into mainstream consciousness when so many well-intentioned and smartly planned protests with similar messages fell flat in the months leading up to it, but certainly the encampments were crucial (crucial though not sufficient, since one protest that took place shortly before OWS also involved camping). By taking space and holding it, OWS has captivated America like no protest movement in recent memory. Yet the crackdowns on occupations across the country have shown it will be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain these bastions of resistance moving forward: we are simply outnumbered, outfunded, and outgunned. While some groups, like Occupy Oakland, have heroically, repeatedly attempted to reclaim the space from which they were ousted, they have been rebuffed each time by overwhelming force. (The authorities have used more wily tactics, too: at Oscar Grant Plaza, the original site of the Oakland camp, they reportedly kept the sprinklers on, turning the lawn into a soggy mess unfit for sleeping.)

Here in New York, the raid on Liberty Plaza was the moment we had been waiting for, but we were still caught off guard. Most of us had no ready or clear answer to the question of how to move forward without the park. It turned out, though, that a small group had been secretly devising a plan to occupy a second space. They jumped into action, weaving through the crowd, instructing everyone to meet at Canal Street and Sixth Avenue. A few hours later, a couple hundred people amassed at a site called Duarte Square, a giant, empty lot not far from the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, owned by Trinity Church. Activists cut a hole in the fence surrounding the space and moved in, carrying large yellow signs, some attached to basic wooden frames alluding to shelter. OCCUPY. LIBERATE. The church had been, and still claims to be, supportive of OWS, offering office and meeting space and bathroom access to occupiers before and after the raid, but it did not appreciate the sudden invasion of property. By noon the police had been called, and clergy members watched impassively as protesters were beaten and dragged away.

Since that morning, Duarte Square has become a flashpoint of sorts, the quixotic focus of one of OWS’s most disciplined organizing campaigns. On the night of November 20th, I joined a candlelight procession following a small fleet of illuminated tents stenciled with the movement’s new slogan: “You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.” These tents, carried high on sticks, playfully reminded everyone we passed that Occupy was not over. Waiters smoking near staff entrances cheered us on as we paraded by, drivers honked their horns in support, and an angry woman outside a bar made the “loser” signal at us, her eyes locking briefly with mine. The march arrived at Duarte Square, where we covered long sheets of paper with pleas directed at church officials, and I felt conflicted. I have no doubt the space could be put to good use by the movement (right now it’s waiting to be developed into a 429 foot tall “residential tower”), but there was something odd about our appeals for sanctuary. If, by some miracle, the church granted us permission to stay there, would it even be an occupation?

In the weeks that followed, Trinity Church did not budge, and a core group of organizers showed no signs of relenting in their efforts to take the space, promising another attempt to “liberate” Duarte Square on December 17th. They imagine a new kind of occupation, better organized, more cohesive, and in some ways more exclusive, than the one at Liberty Plaza, and there is much to admire about their vision. In pursuit of it, they have circulated petitions, solicited op-eds, and rallied faith leaders to their cause, consistently highlighting the contradictions between Trinity Church’s scriptural duties and its status as New York City’s third-largest landholder. “In terms of them being a real estate company, their stance makes sense,” the reverend at Church of the Ascension in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, told the press. “In terms of them being a church, it makes no sense. The question is, where are their obligations?” Raising the stakes, a group of three young men, former occupiers, declared a hunger strike, demanding access to the vacant lot, which they sat down next to. The church quickly had them arrested for trespassing and, when they returned, had them arrested again, underscoring its inflexibility on the issue. Meanwhile, many movement sympathizers looked on in confusion. Given the various elements and issues at play—the eviction from Liberty Plaza, the lack of open space in which to peacefully protest in our city, the inequities of property ownership, the church’s ostensible sympathy towards OWS, the presence of hunger strikers, and the entreaties to religious figures who are also ruthless real estate moguls—the thread was getting hard to follow. Still, I signed the group’s latest petition, not wanting to lose faith.

+ + +

So far, in New York at least, energy for protest has not waned. The movement can appear anywhere at any time. There are inventive demonstrations every day, too many for any one person to keep up with, and more in the works. Yet attempts to occupy and hold space beyond Liberty Plaza have has missed the mark more than they have hit it, from the ridiculous and ridiculed takeover of the nonprofit gallery Artists Space to the failed occupation of a student center at the New School, which initially had enormous promise but quickly devolved, despite the fact the building was secured with support from sympathetic faculty and administrators. Without a doubt, the most successful attempt to expand the concept of occupation so far was a national day of action on December 6. Occupy Our Homes was an attempt to refocus attention and outrage on the mortgage crisis, a crisis experts say is only half over: around six million homes have been seized since 2007, and over the next four years an estimated eight million more are predicted go into foreclosure. In Chicago, a homeless woman and her baby moved into a foreclosed home with the blessing of the previous owner and the help of more than forty supporters; in Atlanta, protesters made an appearance at foreclosure auctions in three counties; in Denver, activists collected garbage from abandoned properties and delivered it to the mayor; in Oakland, a mother of three reclaimed the townhouse she lost after becoming unemployed while another group held a barbecue at a property owned by Fannie Mae. “To occupy a house owned by Bank of America is to occupy Wall Street,” one activist told me. “We are literally occupying Wall Street in our own communities.”

In New York, Occupy worked with a variety of community organizations and allies to host a foreclosure tour and coordinate the reoccupation and renovation of a vacant, bank-owned property. When we reached our destination, a small house at 702 Vermont Street in Brooklyn, the new residents, a previously homeless family of four, were already inside, along with a veritable army of activists coordinating the event and scheduling rotating teams to guard against eviction. Tasha Glasgow, the mother, was almost too shy to speak but managed to express her sincere thanks to everyone assembled. Alfredo Carrasquillo, the father of her two children, including a 9-year-old daughter who is severely autistic, held back emotion as he addressed the crowd, making sure to acknowledge the NYPD who dotted the sidewalks and could be seen on the roofs of nearby buildings. “I’m just hoping they don’t wake me up in my bed at 2 AM,” he joked. As of this writing, almost a week later, the NYPD has not made any arrests at the house, though they have repeatedly intimidated the people staying there. The neighbors, by contrast, have welcomed the occupiers with open arms, inviting them over for tea and to baby showers. One woman, who lives a few doors down, said they could use her kitchen a few nights a week since the utilities in the occupied house aren’t hooked up.

Not only does the occupation of abandoned foreclosed homes connect the dots between Wall Street and Main Street, it also leads to swift and tangible victories, something movements desperately need to maintain their momentum. The banks, it seems, are softer targets than one might expect because so many foreclosure cases are rife with legal irregularities and outright criminality. It’s not uncommon for customers to be misled, crucial paperwork lost, and documents robo-signed. While the mortgage crisis involved credit default swaps and securities and other complex financial instruments, one thing that clued investigators in to the systemic fraud now known to have taken place at Countrywide (right before it merged with Bank Of America) was the extra Wite-Out on brokers’ desks, the tool of choice for low-fi chicanery: signatures were forged, paperwork faked, and numbers fudged, leaving countless people with subprime mortgages when they qualified for better ones. This duplicity is why banks often change their tune when threatened with serious scrutiny; they count on cases to go uncontested, as the vast majority do, because they often lose if actually taken to court. In Rochester, one bank called off an eviction when they got wind that a protest—a blockade and a press conference—was being planned.

It’s worth noting, given the glowing media coverage Occupy Our Homes received, that the action—billed as Occupy’s big leap forward—was not exactly innovative. Take Back the Land, which started in Miami, has been rehousing people in foreclosed properties since the mortgage crisis began. Going further back, the same techniques and rhetoric can be traced to the squatters campaigns that took off in New York City in the late seventies (indeed, some of the squatting pioneers are now mentoring a new generation of activists) and the largely forgotten poor people’s movements of the late eighties and early nineties. On May 1, 1990, in an effort remarkably similar to Occupy Our Homes, homeless activists in eight cities reclaimed dozens of government-owned properties, gaining control of many for good. Occupy, in other words, is not breaking new ground, but it is bringing public attention to the kind of civil disobedience that typically goes under the radar.

But what’s clear, and terrifying, looking back on the occupation efforts of decades past, is that the potential base of support today is far broader than previous generations of activists could ever have dreamed. With one in five homes facing foreclosure, and filings showing no sign of slowing down in the next few years, the number of people touched by the mortgage crisis—whether because they lost their homes or because their mortgages are underwater—truly boggles the mind.

+ + +

Occupy Wall Street’s battle is nothing compared to what early civil rights advocates faced. Our predecessors had to convince their opponents to radically shift their worldview and abandon deeply held prejudices. Today, in contrast, public sentiment on economic issues broadly aligns with Occupy Wall Street. Americans are angry at the banks; they are angry about inequality; they are angry at politicians’ servility to corporate interests. The challenge, then, is convincing people that their anger is worth acting on, that something can be done. The path forward isn’t obvious. It’s difficult to organize against something as abstract as finance capital. How do you occupy something that is everywhere and nowhere?

Organizing around the mortgage crisis is a good step, because not only does it link seemingly arcane issues, like deregulation, to daily life and connect direct grassroots and legislative actions (like the state attorney generals stepping up their inquiries into illegal home seizures and other mortgage misdeeds), but it also promises small successes along the way, like offering shelter to a family that would otherwise be on the street. But not everyone is a struggling homeowner or already homeless; not everyone will identify with this particular struggle enough to join it.

Indeed, one problem facing many of Occupy’s early adopters is that, given high rates of student debt and unemployment, they may never have a chance to achieve that version of the American dream. As one of the big yellow signs at Duarte Square the morning after the eviction of Liberty Plaza put it: “I will never own a home in my life.” For these people, questions of space and where and how to occupy take a different shape. For individuals who are not part of a student body, or rooted in neighborhood, or part of a union, the need, first of all, is to make a community from scratch, to cohere with a group around a common identity and find common cause. A community in formation was part of what the experiment at Liberty Plaza promised. Liberty Plaza was a space to be together, a space to struggle in and over—a space that grounded and oriented the movement, however imperfectly at times.

Space matters for Occupy. But when we seize it—and whether it’s a sidewalk, street, park, plaza, port, house, or workplace—we must also claim the moral high ground so that others can be enticed to come and join us there. Occupy Our Homes made clear the connections between the domestic sphere and the financial sector: the occupation of abandoned, bank-owned properties is actually a reclamation, a taking back of what has been taken away, a recouping of something already paid for through other means (by unfairly ballooning monthly payments and the still-indeterminate government bailout, for example). The focus on Duarte Square, I fear, fails to draw the same kind of obvious, unswerving link to the urgent issues that Occupy Wall Street emerged to address. At a direct action meeting a few weeks ago a young man spoke up. “We just need to occupy something,” he said impatiently. “Anything!” But if Occupy Wall Street takes the wrong space—or fails to clearly articulate the reasons why it is taking the right one—it may end up as lost as if it had none at all.

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Year in Review (2011 Edition)

2012-01-03T16:40:38Z

by The Editors

Image: Brooklyn Bridge arrests, October 1. From watergatesummer.blogspot.com.

The year 2011 saw a surge in negligible coincidences. But since it’s hard to know what to make of negligible coincidences, they were quickly forgotten. After years of crawling along the El, knowing you weren’t making good time or getting ahead of anybody, the renovations of utterly unnecessary subway stops such as Avenue H and Neck Road wrapped up, and the B train resumed its express route. Hurrah! No longer would it take thirty-three excruciating minutes to get from Brighton Beach to Canal Street, but twenty-six-and-a-half. In a similar vein, the Coney Island Avenue ramp onto the Belt Parkway, after having been obstructed for millennia, unexpectedly opened for business, making the owners of a certain wine-colored Honda Accord very glad, though also a bit sad, because they had grown accustomed to that particular frustration. One of the year’s themes, it would follow, was that it become easier for borough-buried folk to make the schlepp to Manhattan, and to highlight the necessity of that schlepp, because no matter how much you protest, Manhattan is still where life is.

This year marked the tenth anniversary of the launch of Wikipedia, a milestone that was not easy to cope with, especially for people who spend vast amounts of time trying to deny the passage of time, or that the outside world has any effect on them at all, and who are horrified by the words “milestone” and “cope.” Especially for those who were downtown that day. The Arab countries were allowed to have only one season, and they probably made the right choice, though not if you look at it from a south Brooklynite’s wind-hating perspective. There were tsunamis, bombings, mudslides, nuclear disasters, but surprisingly few airplane crashes. I cross the Atlantic on Monday. On the East Coast of the United States, it was neither the hottest nor the coldest anything, but the cleanup effort continues after Hurricane Irene’s psychological destruction. A baby named Wolfgang was born in Kansas. Preparations began for the end of the world, due the following year.

—Yelena Akhtiorskaya

+ + +

For those of us in our late twenties living pretty well in New York, it was another year of personal enhancement. We added a few supplements, extended our yoga practice, met our boyfriends, stayed with our boyfriends, maybe even married our boyfriends in repurposed industrial or rural spaces that looked like corollaries to our relatively new apartments. We bought each other wedding presents. We even took a few cabs because we knew—we just knew, we could see ourselves five years before spending all those tired, vaguely alarmed minutes in the cold, miserable embrace of one of those subway bench seats—what it would be like to take the G train home after midnight.

We walked over the Brooklyn Bridge one time, two times, maybe even three times partly just for the pleasure of it but also because there was something new to see in the world. There were protests—we hadn't been to one since college—with people who looked like people we knew shouting and singing and demanding things it had never occurred to us to demand. When we were 19, everyone was angry about the war; then they mostly stopped being angry about the war. Then we were lucky enough to graduate at a time when someone would give us a job. They gave just about all of us jobs, and most of us have even been getting promotions. And although we worry about the costs of the supplements and the cabs and the rent and our everlasting loans and what on earth will happen to our younger siblings and our parents, we also have been feeling, with a mix of relief and something less like regret than a leftover bit of discomfort, that maybe we're already old.

—Carla Blumenkranz

+ + +

In Riga last summer, at the Theatre Bar Restaurant, I got into a conversation about the census. I wanted numbers, but the guy had to go. Not to the bathroom, to the UK. After dessert the waitress emigrated, too. Latvia was losing Latvians. Its citizens, newly allowed to move west for jobs in Germany and France, moved west for jobs in Germany and France. I decided to follow but got waylaid in Lithuania.

When I was in America the newspapers said America was failing, when I was in Europe the newspapers said Europe was failing—and when I was on the airplane back I read a newspaper whose culture section said newspapers were failing and whose business section said airlines were failing.

In New York, word was that Brooklyn and Queens were over. The next neighborhood was Wall Street. Friends, acquaintances, and people I’d only read about online were all relocating to a nice park with nice sleeping bags and tents, but they never had time for me, they never wanted to go to the movies or grab a drink, they were Occupied. The weather remained Arab Spring into fall. The cops showed restraint. The cops showed no restraint. A woman I know brought sandwiches to the park. A man I know wrote a magazine article about the woman bringing sandwiches. Another man I know wrote a blog post about the magazine article. This will be the harshest and/or mildest winter on record. I don’t like the idea of having a practicing Mormon for President, but I’m not sure I’d admit that in print.

—Joshua Cohen

+ + +

This was the year that I noticed—finally, belatedly—that the university has fallen silent. Just like with the gradual increase of noise, the cognitive threshold for perceiving silence seems to lag behind any objective measure. Worried about my possible solipsism, or perhaps just some early-middle-age hearing loss, I began asking academic colleagues at other places if they’d also found themselves wondering where the noise (of conversations, shouted hellos, the rustle of small crowds) had gone. Turns out I wasn’t alone, at least in believing two premises: never, in the history of American higher education, has the coffee on campuses been better. And never in living memory— although I think here of photographs of just-founded 19th-century colleges, mostly of brick buildings set starkly in open fields, no doubt taken in early morning to allow for long exposure times, and characteristically empty of people— have campuses seemed so quiet.

No mystery about the reason: everyone is in front of screens, tapping, while large swaths of undergraduates are sent abroad to save on operating costs and dorm space at home. Department offices are almost always empty of students, who have no need to visit in person now that all transactions are online. The doleful racks of faculty publications hear only the clicking of keyboards. But if silences have qualities, this one is less monastic and engrossed than tentative and embarrassed—not a library but a subway car.

From one angle, collegiate silence seems tinged with sweetness: everyone quite genuinely wants to avoid offending by puncturing the calm; your right to your cone of quiet is maintained with touching concern. (Even in New York!) But the sweetness also seems placatory. Students have become wary enough to worry about who overhears any noise. Even the token gesture of a faculty petition in support of OWS was greeted with sudden panic by student comments on blogs: Won’t this insult the donors who keep the ship afloat? In between wondering where everybody spends their time, and missing some lost and possibly mythical boisterousness, I remember the instinctive response of those who think there’s a gun pointed at their head: shut the hell up.

—Nick Dames

+ + +

New Years brings out the worst in me. The fresh starts, the resolutions, the general merriment—these things couldn’t be further from my mind when the countdown gets underway and the glass ball begins its ominous descent. Instead all I can think of is my thinning hair, my heavy legs, my terrible vision getting every day more terrible.

So imagine my joy when I heard about Kobe Bryant’s trip to Dusseldorf this summer. He was there to see a doctor, a man named Peter Wehling, who claims to have found a cure for arthritis. In June Kobe submitted himself to Dr. Wehling’s ministrations, hoping to repair a damaged knee. Skeptics will find Dr. Wehling’s techniques a little unorthodox. He extracts the patient’s blood; the blood’s growth factors are isolated and cultured with chemicals to increase their potency; then the blood is re-injected into the patient. It sounds sort of crazy, I know. But for Kobe the risk is worth taking. Success could add new life to his basketball career--a few more years to play, and the chance for a sixth championship ring, which would put him on par with Michael Jordan. And let’s not forget: many doctors in the 18th century had public relations problems, too, as they needed to rob graves for their anatomy experiments. We need to keep an open mind about this stuff.

When he returned from Germany, Kobe reported a positive experience. He believes the transfusion worked and has recommended Dr. Wehling to his good friend, Yankee third basemen Alex Rodriguez. Pope John Paul II has also sought treatment from the good doctor. I for one am excited about Peter Wehling’s advances in medical science. I predict that by 2015 we will all be walking around with the knees of men and women half our age. Decripitude will be so 20th century. The future is bright.

—Edward Morgan Day Frank

+ + +

Here in Bogotá, today's paper heralds the national economy's strongest quarter in five years. Meanwhile, Colombia recently surpassed Brazil on the Gini Coefficient, making it the country with the highest levels of wealth inequality in Latin America. This is why I hope, unrealistically, in the wake of this year's passing of the US-Colombia free trade agreement, that analysts casting their eyes southward don't take the nation's growth as proof of the success of its neoliberal policies. This would be too much like hearing, as we often have, that Colombia's ruinous internal conflict has actually been a victory for US-sponsored counterinsurgency tactics, despite the unbelievable costs: the highest number of internally displaced people in the world, for one.

The year ended with the most successful and visible social movement Colombia has seen in a long time: students took to the streets in massive numbers across the country to protests a proposed reform that, by most accounts, would have severely underfunded and made inroads toward privatizing the country's public higher education system. After the mobilizations gained widespread public sympathy, the government caved and withdrew the proposed reform. Now the nationwide student assembly finds itself in a position unknown to any of the movements that have cropped up around the world since the Arab Spring: having obtained a major initial concession, they have to figure out what exactly to bring to the bargaining table. Triumphalism, combined with the depth and complexity of Colombia's problems, create any number of risks. The negotiations in 2012 will be a high-wire act. The world would do well to pay attention.

—David Noriega

+ + +

I am not in love, and was not for the whole of 2011. Rihanna, perhaps sensing a similar lack nationwide, magnanimously supplied the first person plural in her latest disquisition on the topic. Yet here in New York, “We Found Love in a Hopeless Place” served only to refract metaphysical and spatial constraints.

“All of us were drunk to some degree.” Perhaps that’s a better point for refraction. I underlined it in a book last month (indulging, for the last time, my worst inner annotater). But isn’t that how we wade through our relationships? These past few months dissolve in a fog of dating and not dating, kissing and not kissing, drinking and not drinking. Mostly drinking though, while reading, for that’s where our love lives get real exercise--we work through the last boyfriend, quietly refuse the present one, and imagine living up to promises made to the next.

I wish I meant novels--and really I do--but it’s the tabloids that spew fodder capable of distracting us, if only for the hours spent hunched in front of the computer, from our own failings. This December Candace Bushnell filed for divorce, but not before Elizabeth Taylor, the reigning queen of said activities, died (from congestive heart failure, no less). I swear it took more than a few parties after Kate Bolick’s “All the Single Ladies” to stop mapping her story of thwarted coupledom onto any unsuspecting 30 year old with a champagne flute (the Atlantic article received 48,000 likes on Facebook).

Not that the times didn’t proffer up a sufficient amount of “matrimania”--I too was captivated by Pippa’s eerily buoyant bottom, pretended to be disgusted by Kim Kardashian’s seventy-two-day whack at the institution, and cheerily celebrated the legalization of gay marriage in the city that saw the Stonewall riots. But, to be perfectly honest, the best bit of news I read was of a 40 percent increase, since 1986, in men dwarfed by taller brides.

Here in South Dakota--a hopeless place save a great barren beauty--I can report only that marriages are occurring at an alarming rate. “Wedding fever!” to steal a line from my 81-year-old grandmother (she celebrated her sixtieth anniversary in October). Getting hitched this weekend, at a nubile 21 years old, are a cousin and her farmer groom (they will soon move into the farmhouse adjacent to his parents’). A fellow bridesmaid--her college roommate--is engaged to yet another high school sweetheart. I have not one of those, and I can promise only a certain degree of drunkenness in my near future (one as near as tomorrow, thanks to a flask well hid beneath two generous layers of tulle).

I await the day I am drunk with love. Or at least the day I get back to New York--the best of all possible hopeless places--where the horizon is but a magnificent fog, obscuring both potential loved ones and the aisle.

—Kaitlin Phillips

+ + +

In late August, I moved from San Francisco to Philadelphia, and it feels like I spent most of the fall on the bus between my new home and New York. Mostly the Bolt Bus, which offers relatively comfortable seating and wireless internet; twice, the Megabus, which doesn't really offer either; and once, perilously, a Chinatown bus, which I had sworn to avoid after a New York to Boston trip many years ago ended midway with the bus engine spewing smoke.

The trip from Philly to New York is supposed to take about two hours, but it almost never does. When I say I’ve spent the fall on the bus, I really mean I’ve wasted most of the last few months idling outside the Lincoln Tunnel, listening to other people’s thudding music as it trudges out of their headphones (after sitting in traffic for four hours, even a metronome would start to sound slow). Twice, in moments of weakness, I splurged on train tickets ($71 each way). The trip is an hour and fifteen minutes, and--those two times--it took exactly that long. For this reason those train rides linger in my mind as the happiest times I had in 2011.

During a two-month stint in China this summer, I took some buses, but mostly I took the fastest trains and cleanest subways in the world. I had a splendid overnight sleeper from Yunnan to Sichuan, but the best was a high-speed rail from Beijing to Shanghai that took five hours (as opposed to the usual twelve). A television monitor on the train continually advertised the train I was already on. The seats were remarkably easy to come by. Just a few days earlier, there had been a horrific crash in Zhejiang province. The death toll was . . . well, nobody knows, exactly, because the Party swooped in to hush up the press, who were questioning corruption in the railway ministry. A journalist I know who was covering the crash had her story pulled from a magazine. The censors replaced it with a story about how watching the Harry Potter movies could make you a better person. The Chinese government has just announced that it will invest less in railway spending in 2012.

—Nikil Saval

+ + +

An impassioned debate among some recent college graduates living in a city: is it “wrong” to be on food stamps if you don’t really need to be? And then, of course, confusion about what constitutes need.

“It’s just stupid to be on food stamps if your parents will give you money to buy groceries.”

“Why is it stupid? It’s not like me getting food stamps means other people can’t. That’s not how it works.”

“Such typical rich kid behavior—anything you can get you think you deserve.”

“I’m a socialist. I think the government should give everyone food stamps. Plus, I stood in line for like three days to get my food stamps. I do deserve them.”

As of September 2011, 46.3 million Americans (about 15 percent of citizens) were receiving federal aid for food, meaning that this fiscal year, SNAP (The USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) gave them about $75.3 billion.

More than one irony-inclined internet personality farted out the same mock insight this fall: the best part of going to Zuccotti Park is the free food. Indeed, feeding everyone for free was one of the more successful of Occupy Wall Street’s various utopian initiatives; people dining at OWS were not asked to demonstrate their need through pay stubs or tax returns. It seemed to work OK.

At the grocery store with the foodstamper a week after I witnessed the above debate, and his food stamp card didn’t work. (In case you didn't know, so-called food stamps come on swipe cards now). He had forgotten to fill out some ancillary piece of paperwork. He looked at his $200 of groceries, now all in bags at the foot of the conveyor belt. He glanced at me, then pulled out his actual debit card and paid for them himself.

“Is this the difference between you and people who really need food stamps?” I asked, “that you can pay if your food stamps don’t go through?”

“Shut up” he said.

But the question was not rhetorical.

—Eli Schmitt

This year I betrayed my country. Or at least that's how it felt, even if, from what I've been able to learn, the US tolerates dual citizenship by means of something like a "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. There I was, after eight years of paperwork, of interrogations by the Délégation du Québec about my knowledge of that province's charming folkways, of counting every day outside of Canada lest I go beyond my limit and find my permanent resident status revoked: there I was, I say, in July, in Montreal, before an immigration judge, some Mme. Robichaud or Tremblay, swearing, along with seventy-two other soon-to-be-Canadians from thirty-eight different countries, my allegiance to Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada (a different person, by the way, than Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, even if the two persons inhabit the same physical body). This part was not so hard, as she looks like a kind old lady. But then came the line about "her successors," and I thought about what it would mean to actually be loyal to that lad William, say, whose birth I remember as if it were yesterday, and I confess I began to mumble my lines. We did the recitation in English and French, and the French part was a good deal easier for me. Hell, I'll swear anything in a language that resides only in my head and not in my heart. Behind me, by contrast, a man from somewhere in Francophone Africa bellowed out the French part directly from his heart. There were tears in his eyes and his voice quivered. I thought of the Ontario politician Garth Turner, who denounced the "Canadians of convenience," that is, those who swoop through just long enough to get the passport before moving on. The African behind me was no Canadian of convenience, whereas I, I understood, might very well turn out to be one. In the end my principle motivation to become Canadian was that I might thereby be free to leave the place without having to count the days. I am now at liberty to abscond until 2040, if I feel like it, just in time for a bit of free palliative medicine in my final days. The man behind me believed in the idea of Canada, whereas I, whatever the current reality, cannot deny that it is the United States I believe in, that I carry in my heart, if I may be permitted to put it sentimentally, and that my association with the monarchy to the north will always remain rather more circumstantial. The US is a bloated and aggressive empire populated by snake-charming enemies of Enlightenment, Canada is a decent and sober social democracy, et cetera. But heavens, one is who one is, and in my shiny new Canadian passport, just after Lieu de naissance it says "Reno, USA": surely the most significant bit of information in that document. It is a question of habitus, which is something so deep that the matter is already more or less settled even before we are begat. Mine in particular took shape in the late 18th century, and hates kings and queens, especially the ones no one believes in anyway. I am proud of my new status: I got 100 percent on the citizenship exam (what does A mari usque ad mare mean? Which province is the leading producer of wood pulp?), and I show off my passport like a fetish. But the taint of the betrayer is not going to go away.

—Justin E. H. Smith

+ + +

Washington, DC remained the country’s only major real estate market to appreciate every year since 2007 and one of its fastest growing metropolitan areas. In May Richard Florida, the herald of the creative class, ranked the DC area the “#1 city for recent grads” and, for good measure, the second fittest city in the country. Our nation’s capital, as my boyfriend never fails to point out, has long been one of the epicenters of the “single women jogging with dog” movement. But this year the dogs were larger and more conservative—golden retrievers and black labs—and the women ran faster. With the specter of federal cutbacks looming, sales tax collections started to drop noticeably in the second half of the year, but the return on lobbying costs continued its steady rise to $220 for each dollar spent. On New Year’s Eve, the Plaza Hotel hosted the tenth annual James Bond Gala--“Hot Gold girls! Gold guns souvenirs! For YOUR Eyes ONLY!” A few blocks away the Occupy DC movement marked its ninety-third day in McPherson Square; fortified by a favorable permit decision from the National Park Service and a fresh infusion of protestors from New York, they were planning to settle in for the winter.

—Namara Smith

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Occupy Wilmington

2011-12-29T18:34:06Z

by Peter C. Baker

Image: Signs at Occupy Wilmington.

For the first five weeks, the Wilmington, North Carolina General Assembly met on benches under a pavilion in Greenfield Lake Park, a public property just south of downtown where signs warn passersby not to feed or tease the alligators. I’d heard that at least 100 people had attended the first GA on October 8, organized via Facebook by a man from Hampstead, a coastal town a half-hour drive northwest. But when I showed up on a Saturday afternoon in late October, there were only six or seven people present (no human mic needed). They seemed in good spirits, though, and more showed up as the meeting progressed. A few trial run marches against banks had gone well. Drummers had shown up. Earlier in the week the GA had voted to pitch camp somewhere by November 12, regardless of whether they’d reached an agreement with the city government or a private property owner. The three candidates were the lawn in front of City Hall; a grassy plot owned by a nearby liberal church; and, distant third, Hugh MacRae Park, which sits far from downtown, amid the traffic-clogged sprawl of car dealerships, fast food joints, and strip malls.

As the 12th approached, questions piled up at GA meetings. Most nights, the group was older than the crowd we saw on the Zuccotti Park livestream, and many of us worked long hours, sometimes at multiple jobs, or had children at home (one couple had seven). Plus it was getting colder, at least by North Carolina standards: more than once, in the poorly lit pavilion, the facilitator misread the rubbing together of cold palms as one of the Occupy movement’s hand signals. With winter approaching, how many people were truly willing to camp out, and for how long? Who was willing to be arrested, and for what? Did we have to rent a port-a-potty? What would happen when the homeless showed up? How, exactly, does a bail bond work? The police can hold you for how long? And, occasionally, wait, we’re camping? Since not everyone could attend every evening’s GA, and the minutes didn’t always get posted to the internet, showing up often meant learning about momentous-sounding decisions made in your absence.

Occasionally someone would tentatively voice concern that the group had attracted almost no black Wilmingtonians. One fifth of the city’s population (in total, just over 100,000 people) is black, but you wouldn’t know it from its Occupiers, just as you wouldn’t know it on the streets of its historic preservation district (one of the largest in the country), or on the campus of UNC-Wilmington. Put simply, the city is segregated. When I moved here, I used Craigslist to contact a young man who supplemented his income helping people unload trucks. I am white, and was moving into an apartment in the preservation district, but our phone connection was fuzzy, and he misheard my address. “Oh,” he said, clearly puzzled. “In Blacktown?”

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It’s worth noting that this is not the first time Wilmington has been occupied by citizens fed up with the status quo and unsatisfied with electoral politics. At the end of the 19th century, the city was over half black and had a thriving black middle class. African-American and white Republicans worked side by side in municipal government. This state of affairs was intolerable to the white Democratic elite, which in fall 1898 organized a campaign of violent intimidation designed to scare the sitting city government into resigning. The shooting started on November 10, in the then mixed race neighborhood of Brooklyn. By the time it ended scores of black men had died––conservative estimates say around twenty-five––and hundreds, maybe thousands, more had fled. Almost all Republicans resigned, and the city was governed by unelected white Democrats who straightaway instituted prohibitions on black voting, made it difficult for blacks to hold middle-class jobs, slashed funding for black schools, and most of all stood as a constant reminder of the violence white Wilmington was capable of inflicting.

My impression after living in Wilmington for sixteen months is that a significant proportion of white residents know little about the 1898 coup, let alone its deep connection to the current character of the city. At a GA the week before the encampment was supposed to start, someone raised the possibility of using the city’s one memorial to the massacre––a practically invisible monument in Brooklyn––as the starting point for the march on City Hall. (The liberal church had said no, and Hugh MacRae Park was never really a serious contender). The proposal was met with more than one blank stare. What monument? What’s 1898?

In the end, the march started at the federal courthouse. I missed it but walked to City Hall that night. I was greeted by as many Occupiers as I’d ever seen in one place––at least twenty!––standing on the sidewalk. The cops had come by in the afternoon and said they’d arrest anyone who pitched a tent on the lawn, so the Occupiers decided to attempt a continuous sidewalk picket. I stayed until late that night, drinking hot chocolate and listening to people tell stories about their mortgages (foreclosures have tripled in Wilmington since 2006, leading to drops in property value, drops in property tax revenue, and so drastic cuts in public services) and pay cuts; someone told a story about having to ask her son for two dollars so she could buy a gallon of gas to drive to work.

In the days that followed, Occupy Wilmington took on a new life. City Hall receives a decent amount of traffic, both by car and foot, and for the first time Occupiers began to talk about their grievances with people other than themselves. As time went on, the most dedicated campers got better at talking. Many of the pedestrian visitors were sympathetic, and some left money. Local business and community groups brought by water, coffee, and food, as did non-encamped Occupiers––and everyone who showed up as was able to eat well, including the homeless. Drivers were more of a mixed bag. Some honked and waved, some looked confused, some didn't notice, and some shouted insults. One young man in the backseat of a blue BMW stuck his head and most of his torso out the window, pounded the roof of the car, and screamed, "GET A FUCKING JOB MOTHERFUCKERS!"

I don’t mean to suggest the City Hall encampment was sustainable. The same small group of people––sometimes just three of them––were sleeping in tents pitched on concrete most every night, and they were getting burnt out. The logistics working group drafted a field manual of best practices, but it was followed only sporadically. We’d agreed that a member of the de-escalation working group should be present at all times; this rarely came to pass. When the rain came, there was no plan to deal with it. No one knew who was supposed to watch the donation box, or where the cash was ultimately to go. Still, for a week it felt good to be having the conversation outside, good for the group to be looking after itself, and good to be holding open assemblies in the shadow of City Hall.

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On the encampment’s sixth day, November 17, two days after Mayor Bloomberg’s eviction of Zuccotti Park, a policeman came by to deliver new rules from, in his words, “the very top”: no tents, no chairs, no information table, no furniture, no sidewalk chalk, and handheld signs only, no wider than twenty-four inches. A local lawyer working pro bono for the group filed an appeal, but the city, citing among other things “safety,” didn’t budge. This was disheartening, but also in a way felt convenient. The encampment almost surely would have petered out on its own. Getting shut down by the city renewed its sense of purpose. We’d learned to have a new sort of encounter, and we walked away excited to figure out how to keep having them.

GA is just three days a week now, in hopes of encouraging attendance and limiting burnout. It’s still held at City Hall, sometimes on the steps, sometimes on the lawn, and attendance hovers around a dozen people. On the agenda lately: whether to incorporate as a 501(c)3 for the purpose of handling donations; whether to move GA inside for the winter; how to support Shelby (a teenage occupier who got arrested for refusing to leave City Hall lawn after hours one night); and, always, how to draw in more people and more energy. At times it seems to me like the group is about to fade out––but it seemed that way to me some nights by Greenfield Lake, too, and I was wrong. Planning is underway for an anti-eviction occupation; often, when it comes up, someone says something like: “That’s something I’d go to jail for,” and a healthy proportion of the assembly wiggles its hands in assent.

Recently the GA was visited by a black union leader from Durham, Angaza Laughinghouse. He’d been working with both Occupy Durham and Occupy the Hood, and he was encouraging but blunt: You must reach out more to the black community, starting now. We were sitting by Thalian Hall, where 113 years prior Alfred Moore Waddell, a former Confederate officer and congressman who played a central role in Wilmington’s 1898 white supremacist coup, stood before a group of perhaps 1,000 white men and proclaimed, “Let them understand once and for all that we will have no more of the intolerable conditions under which we live. We are resolved to change them if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses.” Sixteen days later Waddell addressed a similar gathering, this time at the courthouse, with seven resolutions now known as the White Declaration of Independence. By the end of the next day he was the mayor of Wilmington.

After Laughinghouse finished speaking, everyone’s hands went up in instant approval, the clearest such display I’d seen in my entire time with the group. Laughinghouse was telling us something I believe all have known from the start, but that can be hard to say and harder still to reckon with. Without more of our neighbors––more of America––involved, what’s the point? We may all be part of the 99 percent, but––in Wilmington as elsewhere––becoming We in any sense but the most abstract takes work, work that for all the effort expended has only just begun.

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The New School in Exile, Revisited

2011-12-26T17:00:00Z

by Rachel Signer

Image: The New School in Exile, December 2008. From justseeds.com.

This piece first appeared in the third issue of our OWS-inspired Gazette.

I arrived at the New School in the fall of 2008 to do a master's degree in anthropology. Tuition was $23,000 per year—this did not include room or board—but the opportunity to be in a great intellectual community eased my anxiety about the cost. A little bit.

Tuition was high for a reason: the school, I soon learned, was on shaky financial footing. Founded in 1919 in part by Columbia professors disgusted by their university's support of World War I, then expanded in 1933 as a refuge for scholars fleeing Fascism and Nazism in Europe, it wasn't the sort of place that produced the sort of people who turned around and gave their alma mater millions of dollars. The endowment was meager, and the school relied on tuition for revenue.

The New School needed to improve its financial situation and its status, and it was going to do it, like any New York institution, through real estate. It owned an old two-story building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street--a former department store whose slogan had been "Fifth Avenue Values at 14th Street Prices"--that it was going to tear down and replace it with a state-of-the-art gleaming sixteen-story tower, home to studios for designers and artists studying at the New School's profitable design institute, Parsons, and laboratories (for whom, no one could tell you; the New School offers no courses in hard sciences), retail food vendors, apartments, and—most insulting of all, I think, to the symbolic heirs, as we liked to consider ourselves, of refugees from fascism—a fitness center. At the time, the building, at 65 Fifth Avenue, was a multi-purpose meeting place where graduate students could read quietly, have lunch in the café, or find books in the basement library. There had been classrooms upstairs, but at that point they had already been relocated to the Minimalist-style building a few blocks away where my department, Anthropology, was crammed together with Sociology.

Nobody liked the idea of a new building; we thought the old building was perfectly fine, for one thing, and for another we thought the money could be better spent on fellowships for debt-saddled students (like me!). The campus was in an uproar already after the faculty senate, enraged that the university's president, Bob Kerrey, had, after his fifth successive provost left the job, simply assumed the post himself, passed a unanimous no-confidence vote against him. Shortly after news got around about the faculty vote, an unofficial student meeting was called. There were fliers posted around campus by the Radical Student Union. About fifty of us gathered in the basement of the new graduate building on 16th Street. A piece of butcher paper was thrown up on the wall, and a list of demands was produced: we wanted Kerrey and his vice-president, Jim Murtha, to resign; a new provost selected by the student body; a transparent academic budget; and, later, we added one demand that propelled us to action: that the demolishing and "capital improvement" of 65 Fifth be cancelled.

Most of the meeting's attendees were graduate students in the Social Research division, notably more interested in radical politics than, say, students at Parsons. The meeting was led by a tall, skinny Philosophy graduate named Jacob, and a chain-smoking Politics student with deep bags under her eyes named Fatuma. Before the meeting started, Jacob passed around a pamphlet he'd written about direct action as he munched, ostentatiously, on some dumpster-dived bananas. "I think it's time," he said, as we convened in the basement, "for an action." Another of the leaders was Tim, a gruff, shaggy-haired guy from the Poli-Sci department, who sneered a bit when people's comments seemed too moderate.

At this meeting, two actions were proposed. The first was directed at an upcoming meeting Kerrey had convened with the faculty, presumably to try to convince them to reverse the no-confidence vote. We, the students, had not been invited, and our plan was to show up wearing duct tape over our mouths. The next action would be some kind of sit-in, or occupation. We wrote down our emails and walked back out into the night—revolutionaries.

The duct-tape action was a smashing success; many of our faculty members threw their fists up at us, and a buzz went around campus. Meanwhile, our planning meetings for the occupation continued, as quietly as possible—which later would be cause for our fellow students to accuse us of exclusivity. The truth is we didn't want to get busted. Then, late in the afternoon on December 17th, about sixty of us gathered in the cafeteria at 65 Fifth, a room with glass walls on three sides and, in the back, a little deli that sold terrible sandwiches and coffee. Round tables and chairs were strewn throughout the room. We lounged casually, as if having coffee with friends, as we knew that the administration had, through some whistleblower, caught wind of our scheme. Then, at a designated time, I think around 6 PM, we stood up on the tables, taped banners with "NEW SCHOOL OCCUPIED" to the walls, pushed chairs against the main entrance, and probably began chanting something, or cheering.

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I'm not sure at what point we came up with the name "New School in Exile," but it stuck. It was, of course, a reference to the proud history of the institution, its birth as a place of exile. And not only that. When I'd told my parents that I was planning to go do a master's at The New School, I learned that my grandparents had taken continuing education courses there, and my grandmother had also been a secretary for one of the deans.

They were both mostly self-educated. My grandfather had been expelled from City College in the nineteen-thirties for protesting against Fascism in Europe, then gone on to become a journalist for the Daily Worker; my grandmother, who knew Italian and Spanish, had been a union organizer. In Specters of Marx, which I read in my second year of graduate school (by which point I was about $30,000 in the hole), Derrida talks about the ghostly nature of politics, how it moves in cycles. That night, as hundreds of New School, CUNY, and NYU students gathered outside the building, on Fifth Avenue, sending us tweets and text messages of solidarity, and as we huddled inside, writing our list of demands, I felt my grandparents' ghosts inside me, in that building, likely the very same one where they had read philosophy and sociology and tried to channel those ideas into creating a better world.

That night we put up our new "New School in Exile" banners, and a blog was created in that name by a politics student named Scott. Scott, it must be said, was a Leninist, which pissed everybody off and made us worried, because he was our media guy. But for the moment, things were great. Someone from the New York Times came in to report on us—at this point the administration was letting people enter and leave the building at will—and an organization from Harlem sent food. Jim Murtha, our vice-president, showed up, with alcohol on his breath, and we booed him. Some NYPD entered and hovered in the lobby near the front door, chatting with the security guards. As the morning hours approached, we played music on our laptops, made signs about neoliberalism and student debt, and worked on our final papers, which were due that week, and most of which were probably about Marx. Some of us slept, a little, on the floor.

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The next day, people began coming from all over campus and other universities to show their support or just check us out. A sign saying "New School: OCCUPIED" had miraculously appeared on the outside of our building, a couple of stories up; people sent us photos via cell phone. I also learned that many of my fellow students in the Anthropology department were unsure what to think. There was a sense that our faculty were not enthusiastic about the occupation, and grad students concerned about keeping good relations with them (who wasn't, really?) were hesitant to align themselves with the New School in Exile. Regardless, some of my colleagues, and students from other departments and the undergraduate divisions, showed up at 65 Fifth for the afternoon meeting on the second day.

We proved to be totally unprepared for this. As a large group of students gathered chairs in a circle, expecting to learn our plan for getting the administration to cave in to our demands, I looked around and realized that I was the only organizer in sight. Where were Jacob, Fatuma, Tim, and Scott the Leninist? Gone. I looked at the gaggle of bright-eyed but uncertain students, threw up some butcher paper on the wall, ripped off my sweater as I began to sweat profusely with anxiety, grabbed a marker, and began to solicit agenda items from the crowd.

Thankfully, someone sensed my confusion and stepped in to help: it was the anthropologist David Graeber. Many New School students knew him through his previous work with the New York Direct Action Network, and they had called him in to help. He gave us a brief workshop on democratic consensus-building, and then stepped aside. And then we were doing it. I facilitated, and people wiggled their fingers, and we moved through our agenda items. We talked about the cafeteria workers, who we wanted to make sure were not losing a day's wages because of our protest, and decided this should be high on the list of our demands. We discussed other things. It was exhilarating to be using this new language, with our hands, to hold a discussion. Soon, meetings were popping up throughout the day in that room, all using the consensus procedures. Graeber moved in and out silently, hardly making his presence known.

Finally, the missing organizers from earlier returned to join the rest of us. They told us they'd learned that, all over the city, anarchist networks had mobilized and were ready, were near the school even, waiting, to join us. They wanted to come in that night. We discussed it; I remember not liking the idea, but I can't remember why. Eventually we voted it down. It didn't matter. At around 1 AM on the second night of the occupation, about one hundred and fifty people, with Mohawks and patched-together cargo pants and Doc Martens, came pouring into the building. Graeber had found a side entrance unguarded by the security guards. As the students ran in, the guards attempted to stop them, throwing them up against the wall or grabbing at their limbs, but the anarchists pushed through and nearly every single one of them made it into the cafeteria, where we were cheering. We hadn't liked the idea, but now, we felt, we were stronger. There were over two hundred of us. The negotiations were continuing with the administration. We felt that it was possible we would succeed.

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Eventually the security guards in the lobby, outside the cafeteria, stopped letting people enter and leave the building. We had enough food and water to last us awhile, and we were energized by our recent growth in numbers. Negotiations were going on in a reading room off the cafeteria between, on our side, Fatuma and some of the other main organizers, and a few selected representatives from the administration and the faculty. Even as the police grew stricter, though, we were still fairly casual about venturing out of the cafeteria to the bathrooms, which were located right outside the cafeteria doors. Then, on the third night of the occupation, the police walked over to the bathrooms, and planted themselves in front of them. There would be no more free pass to the bathrooms. This had not occurred to us. They'd found our blind spot.

People immediately began talking about building a compost toilet with paper walls in the back of the cafeteria. Hey, it was more eco-friendly, anyway! Other people, however, looked sick at the thought. We still had lots of food, donated by supporters, but everyone immediately stopped drinking and eating. It got tense. People grew quiet.

As the negotiations continued in the next room, little by little news came in: they were granting the student government the power to e-mail the entire student body, something they hadn't previously been able to do; a socially-responsible investment committee would be formed; no one who had occupied would be expelled. We were mostly getting what we wanted, except a few things, such as the opening of the university's accounting books, the immediate resignation of Kerrey and Murtha, and, most importantly, the building. There would be no compromise. The building was going down. And we, too, were on the verge of going down. Standing in front of the glass windows, peeking out from behind the butcher paper that read "NEW SCHOOL IN EXILE" and "EDUCATION IS NOT ABOUT PROFIT" at the numerous police officers and large-bellied security guards prohibiting our access to the toilets, we knew that our occupation was over.

The administration did, however, offer to create of an interim study space for students (which became the site of the recent, also brief, New School occupation in November of this year). They also said that a group of students would be allowed to be on the committee that was planning the new building.

So it was that I found myself a few weeks later, drinking bad coffee at nine in the morning next to our new provost, Tim Marshall, alongside architects and administrators—who nervously eyed the other student representatives and me—looking over various blueprints that the venerable architectural firm SOM had prepared for the "University Center" that would replace the building we had occupied. I blinked at the designs, which I knew would be realized long after I'd left the New School, and felt the gloom of compromise. I offered the suggestion that a rooftop garden might make the building more sustainable, and its residents could eat from it, too; I received weird, patronizing looks in response. A rooftop garden was not entered into the SOM design.

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On October 5, 2011, when Occupy Wall Street called for a Day of Action for students and unions, many New School faculty signed their names to an online pledge in support of OWS. They walked out of the university and marched, alongside thousands of students from The New School and NYU, down to Zuccotti Park (or, to Foley Square, where the police boxed them in and let them trickle out little-by-little). Atop the ledge surrounding Zuccotti Park on its north side, as the march went by, people were holding an enormous banner that read, "ARAB SPRING, EUROPEAN SUMMER, AMERICAN FALL." In the bottom corner, it said, "NEW SCHOOL IN EXILE." It had been resurrected.

Our December 2008 occupation received letters of support from Greek labor unions, from the Chicago factory workers who were striking, and from students everywhere, particularly UC Berkeley, where students were gearing up for their own occupation in protest against a 33 percent tuition hike. We received emails from people like Clemson University philosophy professor and anarchist Todd May, who wrote: "Too often, in our world, we are told that politics is dead, that resistance is useless, and that public action is nothing more than an exercise in nostalgia. We are told that we live in a post-political world, where we must compromise with those who would oppress us and must subordinate ourselves to those who would manage our lives for us. These past few days you have shown, as others in Europe, in Latin America, in Asia and Africa seek to show, that politics is not dead, that resistance is not useless, and that public action is precisely what our world requires and demands."

The letter made us proud to be students of the New School, and confirmed our belief that we were not merely complaining about our particular, isolated situation—we were participating in a broader critique of neoliberalism, of which our corporatized university was just one instance.

But, for the most part, The New School in Exile did not have the support of our own faculty and fellow students. Only two faculty members, Tim Pachirat and Simon Critchley, publicly announced their support of the occupation and visited it. In my department, people accused me of participating in an "elitist" and "exclusionary" movement—too secretive for all to have been involved, too time-demanding for students with jobs to participate. Our department chair, Hugh Raffles, read a statement to us expressing his belief that direct action was not the way to go in this situation. Students nodded in agreement. The New School in Exile had also, during the occupation, been associated with some fairly questionable acts: a group of students literally chased Bob Kerrey down the street in the West Village, near his home, screaming at him as he ran. Kerrey, a Vietnam War veteran, had had part of his leg taken off by a grenade in the Nha Trang Bay. When we inside the occupation heard this had happened, some people cheered, and our blogger, Scott, condoned it in a blog post titled "See Bob Run." Others wondered if it was ever really okay to chase and threaten a late-middle-aged, hobbling man.

What was it three years later that suddenly made it okay to Occupy? Was it the occupation itself—more dramatic, more clearly connected to the broad impact of the economic crisis beyond the context of our private university? Was it that people had become angrier about the inability of Congress to deal with the recession? Was it that radical politics finally seemed justified in a situation where no other form of politics was effective? Perhaps, if we want to be self-congratulatory, our New School in Exile movement shook things up a bit and created the space for that radicalism. Or maybe it just has to do with the simple fact that, thanks to the convenient location of a 24-hour McDonald's down the street on Broadway, the occupiers of Zuccotti Park had the one crucial element that our movement never possessed: a bathroom. Having finished my master's, I'm no longer at The New School, so I don't know what prompted my faculty to support this occupation, when the previous one had seemed out of bounds. Maybe it's just easier to accept criticism when it isn't in your own backyard.

The original version of this article incorrectly stated that the New School was founded in 1933 rather than 1919, and misstated the time at which the New School was given the building at 65 Fifth Avenue. (It was in the 1960s rather than 1930s; as one history of the New School tells us, "When Jurgen Habermas saw the shabby facilities, he was shocked, though he always made the most of it.") The article also overstated the proportion of New School faculty who had signed an online petition in support of OWS.

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