No jumping...
Did you see Dana #1HS's reaction posted here earlier to Loren Feldman's Black Tech Blogger? Old story now but it's worth reading again. Once more. Thanks. He got way more pixel time than he deserved (which on that point alone gives an asshole like him the basis to claim "victory" as if there are any "winners" in this sad mess of blogging) but he could've milked it more by setting up a meeting with Lenora Fulani to hash out the "what I said might be perceived as racist/anti-Semitic but I am not a racist/anti-Semite" thing. I mentioned before the whole episode annoyed me primarily, or exclusively, because the attempt at humor was embarrassingly stupid and lacked the slightest trace of wit or cleverness. Or was I talking about Gawker again?
(Hello segue, I like THOSE apples.)
If you're still trying to find Balk's Cock with a microscope, "Black Tech Blogger" is not unlike (but also not like like) Gawker's recent Jew-haha with The Forward. Carlos Mencia-style ethnic-baiting humor wrapped in an HTML bow. Not as much offensive as stupid. The sad thing here is not the Death of Jewish Humor (Arthur James Balfour put an end to all that), but the Death of Balk-an Humor. Here's a man, talking about Alex Balk if I must qualify, that a certain blogging community looked up to for being an original and (gasp!) intelligent voice. His MSM takedowns gave hope that a new breed of thought leaders was bubbling to the surface through blogs. Shit, he made the NY Observer's Power Punk list as an anonymous blogger! Is the Power Punk list even around anymore?? That's how cool it was! Then the cloak dropped and it revealed a squatty fake-Jew Italian with a stiff drink in one hand, stiff-arming a camera with the other. Just as well I suppose. If the failed promise of blogging must be reduced to a privileged white guy from Jersey making dick jokes while complaining about his "woe is me" $25-100K job (is that a workable range?), I guess that makes sense.
YM's The Fuzz tried to drum up the Save Balk campaign long ago. Red Sonja recently commented (btw, is that you Sac?): "I wish you would do this to Balk. He seems much more delusional than poor Elizabeth Spiers." It's true. The daily grind of writing inane, innumerable Gawker posts is probably one of the worst things for a writer's development. (See also: Choire Sicha.) It's like sucking nitrous. Might be fun in short bursts that need constant maintenance and your head will definitely chainsaw through the English language with a woodless thesaurus and Google searches, but it ultimately makes you dumb and craving more word balloons with weak pop effect.
Shit, I lost my way. How do I get back to the main stage? Here's what others said about the Gawker Jewish thing. An anonymous person (exciting!) wrote me the other day:
Izzy Grinspan: One surprising thing about the Gawker Jewish controversy is that the jokes they've been making are pretty hackneyed -- lots of Krusty-the-Clown-style material about big noses and domineering mothers and the international Jewish conspiracy. In fact, there's really been only one fresh line in their entire recent spate of Jewish posts: The one that started the controversy, in which Alex Balk made fun of Israel for being run by a bunch of religious zealots.
Joey Kurtzman: I resisted reading the story because I don't find Gawker particularly entertaining or interesting and figured that the Forward-on-Gawker would be downright excruciating.
However, if there's a story to be written here, it still hasn't been written. There are probably a lot of angles to take on Gawker's Jewish fetish--I don't know since I don't read it--but sitting around fretting about whether it's okay to make make Jewish jokes for a general audience, as the Forward did, is a totally fresh and provocative angle circa 1897. American Jews have been nervously debating that question, and writing that story, every time there's an edgy new Jewish comic (Jackie Mason), or author (IB Singer, Philip Roth, ad infinitum), and so on. It's not a story, it's a constant.
What would be interesting is if Gawker departs from the pattern in some way, i.e. that their Jewish humor represents a significant shift in the way all this has played out before, a shift that's somehow typical of the whole New Jew zeitgeist that Jewcy's a part of. For example, maybe their carefree, bitchy response to the Forward's 19th century Lower East Side anxieties is something new: it used to be that you could shame Jewish envelope-pushers into quieting down, put them on the defensive by telling them that they were providing fodder for antisemites. For the first time, the trespassers, Gawkers, just laugh and call you a jackass, think you're still on the wrong side of Delancey Street.
That's one possible angle, anyway. But tired topics are not a problem. A lot of our most successful content has been novel takes on topics that have been hit endlessly by others, but never from the angles we take (just a recent example, "The ADL sucks!" is hardly a shocking point to make, but we got it from the right angle and in the right context.). And so far most of our most successful content have been on more intellectual/political topics. If we're going to replicate that success in pop culture areas, this is the kind of stuff we've got to learn how to hit.
Whew, that sure was a lot of shit just to bury 99's JYA post. Sorry, no link!
Stay tuned for: How Much is that Blogging Network in the Window?
(Hello segue, I like THOSE apples.)
If you're still trying to find Balk's Cock with a microscope, "Black Tech Blogger" is not unlike (but also not like like) Gawker's recent Jew-haha with The Forward. Carlos Mencia-style ethnic-baiting humor wrapped in an HTML bow. Not as much offensive as stupid. The sad thing here is not the Death of Jewish Humor (Arthur James Balfour put an end to all that), but the Death of Balk-an Humor. Here's a man, talking about Alex Balk if I must qualify, that a certain blogging community looked up to for being an original and (gasp!) intelligent voice. His MSM takedowns gave hope that a new breed of thought leaders was bubbling to the surface through blogs. Shit, he made the NY Observer's Power Punk list as an anonymous blogger! Is the Power Punk list even around anymore?? That's how cool it was! Then the cloak dropped and it revealed a squatty fake-Jew Italian with a stiff drink in one hand, stiff-arming a camera with the other. Just as well I suppose. If the failed promise of blogging must be reduced to a privileged white guy from Jersey making dick jokes while complaining about his "woe is me" $25-100K job (is that a workable range?), I guess that makes sense.
YM's The Fuzz tried to drum up the Save Balk campaign long ago. Red Sonja recently commented (btw, is that you Sac?): "I wish you would do this to Balk. He seems much more delusional than poor Elizabeth Spiers." It's true. The daily grind of writing inane, innumerable Gawker posts is probably one of the worst things for a writer's development. (See also: Choire Sicha.) It's like sucking nitrous. Might be fun in short bursts that need constant maintenance and your head will definitely chainsaw through the English language with a woodless thesaurus and Google searches, but it ultimately makes you dumb and craving more word balloons with weak pop effect.
Shit, I lost my way. How do I get back to the main stage? Here's what others said about the Gawker Jewish thing. An anonymous person (exciting!) wrote me the other day:
Do you not give the Gawker links in your post b/c all your readers are savvy enough to know what you're referencing? I followed (as much as I could without falling asleep) the original Gawker fracas and Forward follow-up when they happened. Here are my thoughts, for what they're worth:Jewcy folks weighed in with an email exchange. Tahl, the editor-in-chief, has some oddly hilarious takes like calling the old Elaine's "a virtual brick-and-mortar equivalent of Gawker in its heady days" - which is a nice ploy for someone looking for linkage, but you never know if blowing or bashing Gawker will do the trick. (Both work.) Other Jewcy staff are less generous:
*The original Gawker posts were so moronic, so unintelligent, and so 20-steps-behind-the-culture -- especially that "chart" they had, which I can't seem to find now -- they reminded me of [name redacted] -- and that's pretty f'ing awful.
*The Forward article was surprisingly idiotic too, largely b/c they decided to run a piece about such insipid Gawker posts and pretend this was a sign of Gawker's intelligence. I was surprised by this, b/c I think Gabriel Sanders, the writer, is otherwise a smart and with-it guy.
Izzy Grinspan: One surprising thing about the Gawker Jewish controversy is that the jokes they've been making are pretty hackneyed -- lots of Krusty-the-Clown-style material about big noses and domineering mothers and the international Jewish conspiracy. In fact, there's really been only one fresh line in their entire recent spate of Jewish posts: The one that started the controversy, in which Alex Balk made fun of Israel for being run by a bunch of religious zealots.
Joey Kurtzman: I resisted reading the story because I don't find Gawker particularly entertaining or interesting and figured that the Forward-on-Gawker would be downright excruciating.
However, if there's a story to be written here, it still hasn't been written. There are probably a lot of angles to take on Gawker's Jewish fetish--I don't know since I don't read it--but sitting around fretting about whether it's okay to make make Jewish jokes for a general audience, as the Forward did, is a totally fresh and provocative angle circa 1897. American Jews have been nervously debating that question, and writing that story, every time there's an edgy new Jewish comic (Jackie Mason), or author (IB Singer, Philip Roth, ad infinitum), and so on. It's not a story, it's a constant.
What would be interesting is if Gawker departs from the pattern in some way, i.e. that their Jewish humor represents a significant shift in the way all this has played out before, a shift that's somehow typical of the whole New Jew zeitgeist that Jewcy's a part of. For example, maybe their carefree, bitchy response to the Forward's 19th century Lower East Side anxieties is something new: it used to be that you could shame Jewish envelope-pushers into quieting down, put them on the defensive by telling them that they were providing fodder for antisemites. For the first time, the trespassers, Gawkers, just laugh and call you a jackass, think you're still on the wrong side of Delancey Street.
That's one possible angle, anyway. But tired topics are not a problem. A lot of our most successful content has been novel takes on topics that have been hit endlessly by others, but never from the angles we take (just a recent example, "The ADL sucks!" is hardly a shocking point to make, but we got it from the right angle and in the right context.). And so far most of our most successful content have been on more intellectual/political topics. If we're going to replicate that success in pop culture areas, this is the kind of stuff we've got to learn how to hit.
Whew, that sure was a lot of shit just to bury 99's JYA post. Sorry, no link!
Stay tuned for: How Much is that Blogging Network in the Window?
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