On January 27, Mayor David Miller delivered a pretty good speech on the implication of the new “defence of responsible communication” that the Supreme Court of Canada created in order to counter the effects of libel chill. (Essentially, the burden has been shifted from having to prove the truth of a statement to only having to prove that due diligence has been taken to verify its accuracy, and that the matter is of public interest.)
Council was debating whether to reimburse the legal costs of Ward 35 Councillor Adrian Heaps who, subsequent to being elected in 2006, was sued for defamation by the second-place finisher (and wife of the area’s Liberal MPP) for having distributed an excerpt from a Globe and Mail column in which John Barber endorsed him:
I’m not singing the praises of Adrian Heaps in Scarborough Southwest just because we were classmates and fellow miscreants 30 years ago. I like him because he knows what he’s talking about and has demonstrated real commitment to his community — unlike the other leading challenger for this open seat, Michelle Berardinetti, wife of local MPP Lorenzo Berardinetti and so-called “political adviser” (read: pillow talker). Scarborough deserves better than nepotism. Mr. Heaps, a Liberal running a service-based campaign, is the bright light here.
That column, in which Barber backed candidates in ten wards, was published two days before the election. A month and a half later, the paper ran this correction:
A column prior to last month’s election unfairly demeaned Scarborough candidate Michelle Berardinetti’s political qualifications. In fact, Ms. Berardinetti has more than 10 years experience working in government.
The following March, the Ontario Press Council also (mostly) took Berardinetti’s side against the Globe.
But anyway. Although Miller’s speech was only tangentially related to the subject at hand, and although its logic actually falls apart if you really think about it, it’s still a superior example of political oratory and an interesting comment on the intersections of politics, media, law, and democracy.
Plus, “Toronto Daily Star” ftw.
I myself have been less than kind to both Miller and Heaps, and am rather grateful that neither has bothered to sue.
No, not lobbyists this time. Gangs. The ones that apparently plague ward 16, which is bordered by Yonge, Bathurst, Eglinton, and the 401. Oh, it has a waterfront, too, in case you didn’t know.
Okay, not exactly. But this past spring, when Stintz’s office was advertising for an intern from U of T’s Urban Studies program to work with her during the coming school year, the placement description explained that the student would be “researching city related matters (i.e. public transit, road tolls, transportation, gangs, waterfront development).” The whole North Toronto rainbow of public policy issues. [original Word .doc, converted PDF]
Councillors, of course, should be commended for rejecting a parochial mindset and looking beyond their own wards, but it sure also sounds like she was trying to recruit campaign staff for an impending mayoralty run that at the time seemed more likely to happen than not.
When the Post’s Peter Kuitenbrouwer sat down with her at the same pub at which a year earlier she’d had an infamous wine-and-dine with a billboard company CEO (her new nickname shall forthwith be “Ironstone”), he proposed that “her choice of a restaurant outside her ward (she represents the west side of Yonge, we ate on the east side) suggests she retains pan-Torontonian ambitions[;] she did not protest.”
I like that I can’t quite figure out which one of them is being ironic to what extent.
Kuitenbrouwer also wrote that “Ms Stintz has never forgotten who elected her to City Council: fierce and well-heeled opponents of development, who live in nice piles on leafy streets in north Toronto,” which suggests that he has never seen this:
This was a bit of NIMBY graffiti (yes) scrawled on a construction hoarding at 1066 Avenue Road, just north of Eglinton, circa early March 2008. And the houses around the corner had these signs on their front lawns:
I rather enjoyed that this odd time Stintz supported a new development in her ward (and quite correctly, too: it’s a seven-storey retirement residence), she faced a backlash from the same sort of reactionaries that got her into office in the first place. She’d appealed to people’s worst instincts to get elected, and now the sense of entitlement she helped cultivate had come back to bite her in the ass.
(A beautiful line from a letter on the site [PDF]: “We marvel at the gymnastics City staff have gone through to rationalize amendment of the OP for the sake of seniors and some idea of urban intensification. We support intensification – the City has a plan for such – elsewhere.”)
The above photo of the graffiti, however, is not my own; I plucked it from its2big.ca. My dad had spotted the vandalized boards from his car, but by the time he brought me there to photograph it for a potential Torontoist post, it had just been painted over and was literally dripping wet:
1066 Avenue Road had previously been home to the St. James-Bond United Church (est. 1928), which I desperately want to believe was an inspiration for Ian Fleming, who spent time in Toronto during WWII. Fuck that ornithologist shit.
This doodle, by her ex-roommate Johnnie Walker, was Chandler Levack's profile picture back when I joined Facebook in November 2006.
Chandler Levack does the self-indulgent thing better than her colleague (and sometime boss?) Kate Carraway does. Though her writing is no less self-consciously self-conscious than Carraway’s, no less a part of a long-term identity-construction project in which she assumes we are all interested, what makes her a superior professional masturbator is an understanding of the emotional rhythm of writing.
Milton Berle once explained the cadence of comedy to Richard Ouzounian by “tapping at the script like Morse code: ‘Dit-dit-dit-dot, dit-dit-dit-dot, dit-dit-dit-joke.’” You could break down Chandler’s writing as irony-irony-irony-Klosterman, irony-irony-irony-Klosterman, irony-irony-irony-ohGodI’mlonely. And you know what? It works. It’s effective. It’s the approach I took when I used to write primarily about myself (though of course my allusions weren’t to Klosterman but rather my own adolescent pop heroes). The witty detachment renders the soul-baring honesty more affecting.
And so although the majority of sentences in her epic feature on Facebook elicit predictable eyerolling and the urge to utter snarky things on Twitter, they are interspersed with admissions of vulnerability that I both sympathize with and respect her for making. Maybe it’s because, unlike with Carraway, I (kind of?) know Chandler in real life and thus see her writing as the product of a concrete person rather than a shrill abstraction, but her occasional moments of sincerity come across as plausible (if deliberate) ruptures in the vocational-hipster persona.
Or maybe she’s just being emo.
I would call the following an earnest attempt to give everyone else the same context from which I benefit, but, realistically, if you’re reading this, you are or were Chandler’s friend (Facebook or otherwise), too:
I waited and waited for someone who wanted to know more about me, but nobody did…
That’s because there are few people for whom the “25 things” meme would have been more redundant. For better or worse, Chandler already lived in public, no more so than on Facebook. I now regret not having catalogued her more exhibitionist status updates, so this tweet will have to do instead.
My name is Chandler Levack, and I am a Facebook whore.
Yes.
I’ve been a member of the site since 2005, when Tiger, a member of the U of T Cinema Students Union, sent me an invitation.
In her pre–Varsity editor days, Chandler was a member (and VP!) of CINSSU, one of a handful of cohesive clubs at U of T that neither puts out a newspaper nor shares a particular devotion to Christ. That’s more or less where I first met her, and indeed she was one of my initial Facebook friends when I joined the site about a year after she did.
You see, on Facebook I have 1,223 friends (two recently deleted and five hidden), who are constantly inviting me to ’60s dance parties, Toronto public space meetings and indie-rock concerts in abandoned factories.
Well, if you date a guy who puts on weekly ’60s dance parties, then, yes, chances are good that you will be invited to a lot of them. The “Toronto public space meetings” are my own fault, of course, and though I do appreciate the mention, I really didn’t think we sent out that many invitations. (Not anymore, anyway.) As for the “indie-rock concerts in abandoned factories,” it’s good to hear — in a coded way — that Extermination Music Night is still around.
My Facebook profile was cooler than me anyway.
No. Chandler’s Facebook profile was more obnoxious than her. Not cooler, and this is the key distinction. You know that website Tweeting Too Hard? Take a look. Chandler’s profile was a bit like that. Perhaps this was her key mistake: not quite realizing that she should use Facebook to be like herself, rather than an increasingly tiresome caricature that long ago crossed into self-parody.
But while my Facebook friends may have “liked” me, they certainly didn’t understand me.
No, of course not. See above.
If Nadia Salvo and Aaron Bates knew that I had spent countless hours invested in their all-inclusive trip to the Dominican Republic, examining their tanned bodies in matching Ed Hardy t-shirts for signs of emotional rescue, they might feel like I had invaded their privacy, though the photos were proffered by them.
Nah, probably not. What may feel like an invasion of privacy is having your vacation mockingly mentioned in a magazine feature, with your real full names attached. To go the rest of the way, here’s what Nadia and Aaron look like, as per their respective current profile pics:
“the deception you’ve created… as a performance of personality in writing.”
That’s quite a nice way to put it, actually.
I wanted to offer up more of myself, so I posted a photo album of my friends, family, DJ boyfriend, adorable dog and myself in a low-cut tank top and revelled in the encouraging comments, finally understanding the power of the overshare.
Friends: nice. Family: swell. DJ boyfriend: cute. Adorable dog: adorable. Tank top: sexy. All appropriate for “The Last Photo Album Ever,” as she named it. Earnest, straightforward, making me rediscover my affection for her. But then Chandler also included a closeup photo of an envelope from the Village Voice, addressed to her and clearly containing a cheque. The photo album sort of became the inverse of her better writing, taking a pattern of aww-aww-aww-ohyou’vegottobefuckingkiddingme.
Last year, Toronto writer Hal Niedzviecki famously recounted an experience to the New York Times that left him unsure of Facebook’s social utility, when he invited his 700-member friends list to a “Hal Needs New Friends!” meet-up. Fifteen people said they would attend, 60 said maybe and the rest were M.I.A. As Hal drank alone at The Rhino in Parkdale, one person — a stranger he had never met before — showed up.
At the time, my first reaction to Niedzviecki’s article was, well, I’m glad to hear that he’s still a pariah. My second response was that I have limited sympathy for someone who can successfully spin an unsuccessful (and poorly-conceived) social experiment into a self-pitying piece for the New York Times: contrived loneliness, for fun and profit!
Of course, proclaiming your self-imposed exile from Facebook on the cover of 114 000 copies of Eye isn’t exactly unironic either. The concept of the hipster nebbish has been one of the great paradoxes of the ’00s: cool derived from neuroses, neuroses derived from cool — or at least that’s what they’re trying for. I have to respect such futile efforts to reconcile these mutually exclusive states of being, but that doesn’t mean I can’t also resent the appropriation of the archetypal schtick by people who want to have it both ways.
[A new life] where people… weren’t always bragging about making soup from scratch all the time.
I logged out of the site and looked at my blue-and-white burial ground, feeling resolved to spend more time communicating with my friends. Had I just killed myself to live? I’m not sure yet. Follow me on Twitter and I’ll let you know how it’s going.
OhGodI’mlonely. Klosterman. Irony. Irony.
We love you, Chandler. But, yes, staying away from Facebook is probably the right move for you at this time; you’ve now got Eyebook instead, and in there you seem to be much more content at playing yourself.
How The Globe and Mail uncovered their own blogger’s conflict of interest and then took a month to acknowledge it. Oh, and Torontoist got mixed up in this, too.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009: A group of investors calling themselves Ink Truck Media assume ownership of Torontoist, having struck what amounts to a long-term lease with Torontoist’s original parent, Gothamist LLC. The owners of Ink Truck Media are software developer turned ROB reporter (and onetime Torontoist contributor) Ken Hunt; ad executive Amanda Alvaro; and Liberal backroom boy / “energy consultant” / Globe political blogger Rob Silver.
Thursday, April 9: Silver, who blogs as the ostensibly Liberal half of the Liberal-Conservative duo Silver-Powers, writes that “Toronto desperately needs a new mayor. David Miller has been an unmitigated disaster for the city. The only way those of us who feel that Toronto needs new leadership is to get behind one, strong, credible candidate. Good on Karen Stintz – a councilor who would make a fantastic mayor – for proposing a ‘convention’ to select the candidate to oppose Miller.”
Friday, April 10: Silver, writes that “Stintz has been one of the most effective critics of the fiscal irresponsibility at City Hall and the general incompetence of our current mayor – but that’s of course just a coincidence in [her billing of public-speaking lessons to her office budget] being front page Toronto Star news. I have no doubt that Stintz being rumoured as a likely (and very credible) opponent of David Miller is also just a coincidence here.”
Saturday, June 13: Globe City Hall reporter (and one of the most awesome people ever) Jeff Gray reveals that Silver is currently a driving force behind Stintz’s mayoral bid. (As a matter of law, an actual campaign can’t begin, nor can any money be spent, until a candidate is registered, which can’t happen until the first business day of an election year.) Stintz, Gray writes, “Has started assembling a team that includes Liberal operator Robert Silver, a lawyer who has worked for both Gerard Kennedy and Dalton McGuinty, to see if it is ‘feasible to launch a bid.’” No mention of Silver’s associations with The Globe and Mail or Torontoist is made. Virtually no one draws this connection.
Quick Google searches turnupseveralmoreinstances of Silver bashing Miller on his Globe blog this spring. (Due to what appears to be some back-end confusion in moving over to their new web layout, the date stamps on the Globe posts are suspect, and thus an accurate timeline of Silver’s writings is difficult to establish.)
Thursday, July 9: Silver takes some especially cheap shots in a post that calls Toronto “David Miller’s socialist paradise.” He admits, however, that “yes, I am biased.”
Friday, July 10: Silver’s editor, Adam Radwanski, pens a rebuttal to Silver’s post from the day before. We can also infer that he gives Silver a stern talking-to, as Silver’s next post suddenly includes the following caveats:
Before I get into Adam’s flawed argument, let me disclose two conflicts here so no clever commenter has an “aha” moment:
1. I own a house in Toronto. I own and run a business in Toronto. Earlier this year, I spent some of my own money buying a website all about Toronto so it wouldn’t be shut down. I care about Toronto, have put my money where my mouth is in that regard and I am distressed about the decline I have seen in the city over the last six-years.
2. If Karen Stintz runs for Mayor, as has been disclosed publicly previously, I will volunteer hundreds, more likely thousands of hours to help ensure she wins. I have never been paid to work on a political campaign before and won’t be this time but I want to make sure everyone knows exactly where my bias lies.
I am doing number two – helping Karen if she decides to run – because of number one (my concern about the city’s decline) and because I am convinced she is the only potential candidate who can bring real change to the city.
That’s my bias, for better or worse.
Can’t you just hear him groaning as he types that? ”Ugh. Must I be held to ethical standards?”
Saturday, August 1:The Globe’s Joe Friesen writes a column about Miller’s political “loneliness” and interviews “RobSilver, an organizer for Ms. Stintz.” No mention of Silver’s Globe affiliation. (The Google cache breaks up the piece into chunks.)
Friday, August 7: Torontoist publishes its interview with John Barber and is forced to acknowledge its semi-tenuous Stintz link for the first time. (Although Torontoist had almost never mentioned Stintz by name prior to that in 2009, as a respectable and engaged city blog, there had necessarily been allusions to her.) Torontoist repeated the disclaimer in a couple of subsequent newsroundups.
Wednesday, September 24:Now Associate News Editor Enzo DiMatteo takes over City Hall duties from the recently laid-off Mike Smith, and proceeds to taunt Torontoist regarding the Stintz affiliation. It’s funny, but also — as Stintz is no longer a likely mayoral challenger — a couple months too late to really be trenchant.
Thursday, September 25:blogTO also shows up fashionably late.
What’s been lost in all this, though, is the fact that Silver has about as much interest and involvement in Torontoist’s content as Torstar has in Eye Weekly’s.
And in the off-chance that Stintz does run, Silver will, God willing, just do for her career what he did for Gerard Kennedy’s.
From December 2006–June 2009, I was a contributor and then a contributing editor to Torontoist. In one of the first things I wrote for the site, I named Stintz as the very worst city councillor, though I’ve since come to regret that and believe I was much too harsh; she’s more in the middle of the pack.
Any film or theatre festival of medium size or greater is bound to have at least a couple of offerings with similar titles that can easily be mistaken for each other. TIFF, on the other hand and being the beast that it is, is presenting all of the following at this year’s edition, inevitably leading to many difficult questions:
Ahead of Time
The Time That Remains
Timetrip: The Curse of the Viking Witch
How do you view your situation in history, and is a viking involved?
Backstory
Backyard
Which is more likely to contain buried secrets?
BAND
The Band That Wouldn’t Die
Do you prefer your musical ensembles bold or immortal?
Big Dig
Big Eyes
Big Head
With which things does size matter more than others?
At The Globe and Mail's request, Toronto and East York Community Council is set to approve a taxi stand outside their building. There is absolutely nothing improper about this; I just think it's interesting.
If, at some moment in the future, both of these things simultaneously hold true:
1) That the top editors, writers, and managers at The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the CBC actually retire; and
2) Those outlets remain popular, relevant, and influential
there is the potential for quite a shakeup of public discourse. It’s occurred to me that the gang I referred to in my previous post as “the complete Eye Weekly/Spacing/National Post/The Varsity axis” (though you might as well throw in Torontoist and Now) constitutes quite a shadow cabinet: a parallel, self-contained mediascape full of people trying to embrace and make the best of their status as “alternative” opinionators while at the same time longing — for reasons variously virtuous and narcissistic — to have their voices become the dominant ones.
This is neither good nor bad. To paraphrase myself, you may reasonably be either inspired (by the rise of a new media class) or depressed (by the rise of a new media class).
You certainly don’t need me to list the ways that the above-named MSM outlets would be the same or different. And I don’t pretend to have a real understanding of the very specific institutional barriers to change — most of which are probably neatly summarized in internal emails that (partly for lack of a Torontawker) don’t always make it beyond the office walls.
But if being elected to government is a fundamental way to bring about change (or at least have the opportunity to do so), then so is moving in at the Globe, Star, or Ceeb. The infiltration of 100 Queen West is a frequentsubject of discussion, and yet 1 Yonge and 250 and 444 Front are rarely talked about in this way — there’s more than a bit of veneration, awe, and fear that seems to inform the degree of openness of the plots to lay siege to the castles. Quite rightly, of course; institutions are institutions precisely because of their apprehension toward change, and so anyone seeking to subvert them from the inside goes about their business quietly (or holds a massive conference patting themselves on the back, either way).
I keep naming these three particular entities because they are the ones that, more than others, local policymakers read, watch, listen to, and generally trust. Which is not to minimize the often superior work done elsewhere… or the inherent problem of three entities (two private, one public) wielding so much power, even in the face of the growing segmentation of, blah, blah, blah.
But come on. There are forty-four city councillors and one mayor in Toronto, nearly all of whom are — due to an archaic electoral system that bestows astounding advantages upon incumbents — hopelessly entrenched. Surely, and in spite of recent cuts, the collective editorial staff of these outlets works out to a greater number than that. And, sometimes, they even hire more frequently than every four years.
In the course of writing this, I had to consistently resist the urge to interject “Fucking air show!” into many sentences.
Photo taken at the January 2008 Track Meet by Jamie Bradburn, used under a CC license.
Ah, Track Meet. The punnily named monthly dance night DJed by Eye Weekly editors, writers, and friends is always a delicate balancing act: stuff a hundred hipsters (the term here being used not in the pejorative sense but rather to describe the particular subculture) and a couple dozen journalists into a sweaty bar, while thirty-something alt-weekly types play the most populist music they can find, and hope for the best. And, more often than not, it actually works. The DJs’ get-this-party-started posturing comes off as sincere, and the crowd generally abides.
Back in 1999, I blasted my grade nine dance in the school’s paper: “If I had wanted to hear Destiny’s Child twice in five minutes, I would have been at home listening to Kiss 92.” It’s interesting to consider that in the decade since, pop radio has become so irrelevant in so many ways that a dance night self-consciously mimicking the format could thrive among people who would not be caught dead in the Club District — sort of a post-(post-post-post-post-)ironic compromise between slumming condescension and genuine appreciation of the magnificence of, say, Lady Gaga. Or, I dunno — there are more than enough music critics in regular attendance whose actual day jobs involve pontificating on precisely such paradoxes.
All that said, things can go wrong. Usually the hipsters and the journos dilute each other’s less welcoming qualities, but last month the two groups ended up sufficiently stratified such that the main floor was predominantly populated by people who had all interviewed / been interviewed by / edited / been edited by each other: the complete Eye Weekly/Spacing/National Post/The Varsity axis, if you will. There was something dispiriting about such a gathering, though not through the fault of the individuals involved. (Nor do I consider myself independent of this clique.) I’m still trying to pin down exactly why that was, as “incestuousness,” in and of itself, seems far too lazy an answer.
• Adam Vaughan – In some ways, this would make perfect sense. In other ways, it would be supremely ironic.
• Michael Hollett – No, not really. He’s surely too busy on a beach in the south of France. But I would love to see anyone from Now come out, and Hollett’s the one most likely to get in a fistfight…. mmmaybe Errett.
No. That’s not what this post is going to be about at all. Not really.
I love Gawker. There are few websites that so consistently exhilarate and inspire me.
But I generally forget the actual implication of that statement and thus rarely remember to qualify it. Gawker is first and foremost an outlet that concerns itself with celebrity gossip, an aspect of the site that I conveniently ignore; what attracts me is the other kind of celebrity gossip: that which focuses on leaders in media, politics, and business, the people whose decisions and hang-ups and petty squabbles and class and race biases actually shape the structures of our society. We live with the consequences of their personalities whether we like it or not.
Discussing the behind-the-scenes of Hollywood rarely amounts to anything more than empty schadenfreude; discussing the behind-the-scenes of Washington, Silicon Valley, and certain segments of New York, on the other hand, amounts to meaningful schadenfreude. As described by Walter Kirn in his New York Times evisceration of David Denby’s Snark, a certain kind of intelligent, focused derision can be an effective political tool:
…what really bugs Denby’s mandarin side is a much subtler species of expression: humor that celebrates “the power to ridicule” and is indulged in by semi-sophisticates who seek to sound clued-in and hip so as to soothe their feelings of “dispossession” and elevate their wounded self-esteem by sneering at folks like — get ready to be outraged! — the convicted insider trader Ivan Boesky, whose notorious taste in gaudy baubles was once satirized in the late Spy magazine….What [Denby] views as outbreaks of unacknowledged envy for the extremely wealthy and conspicuous by the comparatively poor and plain (masquerading as people of taste and virtue when, in fact, they’re merely climbers) is positively intolerable to him….Snickering at power has it uses, whatever Denby imagines drives the snickerers, and however he belittles their spitting prose. Playing polite, though, exacts a higher price…
Exactly: throwing rocks at the rich and powerful is not only fun, it’s healthy. You just have to make sure the targets genuinely warrant it, and avoid the trap of asserting the superiority of your own societal bubble just because you have a platform to do so; reinforcing your own values and choices is certainly assuring, but chances are that it doesn’t really help anyone.
Gawker is at its strongest when it engages in class warfare. I get a rush whenever they utilize the sarcastic term “poors” (a noun, originating here). I love when they call out the Times on its institutional elitism. I adore their exposés of nepotism. And I feel that a measure of justice has taken place when they republish idiotic memos from management.
But it’s also useful when it merely provides context: there’s a story behind every story; behind every business decision; behind every bit of political posturing. Something that does distinguish New York from Toronto is that down south those stories are told on Gawker and in other public forums; “I really shouldn’t have to get my media gossip via email or Facebook,” Carraway wrote, and she’s right. The comments on Chandler Levack’s Facebook notes have sometimes proven to be livelier discussions than anything going on out in the open.
There’s a bigger picture, and everyone deserves access to it.
"It is entirely necessary that Toronto's media owns up to the collective sensibility of tepid inadequacy, a common editorial agenda that talks guns and drugs and sex without any blood or high or come," Carraway declared in the manifesto that announced her arrival.
It’s been one year since Kate Carraway penned her (in)famous“Bonfire of Inanities” essay for Eye. And although I still believe that it was confusingly written and sprung from a handful of mistaken premises (that gossip is a barometer of what a society considers important; that we should strive to be such good journalists that we ourselves become subjects of gossip), the intervening period has served as an education that the thrust of her argument, the one that Josh Errett later clarified, was essentially correct.
One of the fundamental problems with media in Toronto is that the community is necessarily so small and incestuous that people are reluctant to rock the boat for fear of jeopardizing future employment opportunities. Now, the same could certainly be said of theatre in Toronto, film in Toronto, literature in Toronto, art in Toronto, etc. But journalism is closer to academia in this respect: both are institutions that, in theory, primarily exist for the purpose of stirring up shit, yet those who attempt to fulfill that mandate do so at their own peril. The twin requirements of food and rent are arguably among the most stifling forces in a democracy.
Carraway did everyone a favour with her challenge to Toronto media to do better. But as a manifesto for the most recent incarnation of Eye Weekly, it was also an ambitious mission statement, if an ultimatelyunfulfilled one. Sort of.
The central paradox of Carraway is also her greatest triumph: authoring a regular column that is more discussed than it is actually read is definitely an achievement of some kind. And so her larger project seems to have been all about disproving her own argument; she is discussed, she is gossiped about, and she would certainly be a star attraction on a Torontocentric Gawker, but… does her work amount to strong journalism? Going by the letters published in Eye, there seems to be a segment of the population for whom her writings genuinely resonate, and I respect that. It would be stupid and presumptuous of me to declare what other people should and should not like.
Especially when here I am giving her what she wants. It’s kind of like with advertising: the very act of making it a subject of discussion renders it a success (and so the best way to frustrate it is simply through ignoring). Maybe it’s just me, but I would hope that a writer would have a higher standard for him or herself, and would not mistake micro-celebrity status for respect. Though I appreciate having a lightning rod for bitchiness that is literally asking for it.
On the one hand, I’m a year late to this discussion. On the other, no publication’s been able to consistently strike the correct balance between something that gets read and something that’s worth reading (though the Star, of all things, has been doing alright as of late).
This blog is of course not going to be that thing. But it would be fun to try to create it, either from scratch or out of something else. Let’s see what happens.
Indeed, the runner-up title for this site was The Bridge Burner. But as much as I like pushing buttons, I can’t really afford to burn bridges as often as that name would imply I should. After all, you can burn a lot of bridges but only get to commit suicide once.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009: A group of investors calling themselves Ink Truck Media 
