MEDIA & POLITICS

Best Op-Ed Carnage
Brooks vs. Krugman, Tuesdays in the New York Times

Enter the cage. The right has been flapping and bleating about Paul Krugman ever since the 2000 election. It was then that the Princeton economist turned his sights away from anti-globalization protestors and dug in behind a howitzer, flipped the safety switch off and started raining hellfire onto the Bush administration and everything it stands for. Almost three years on, his knuckles are still white from trigger-grip.

As Krugman’s profile has risen, his critics have rallied and are currently led by the National Review’s feisty little "Krugman truth squad," which does its best to pick apart the bearded professor’s twice-weekly, clinical and vicious 700-word deconstructions of everything White House.

Meanwhile, neither Tom Friedman nor William Safire have defended Bush’s fiscal and foreign policies with anything near the focus, expertise and pure rage with which Krugman has attacked them, and the result is that Krugman is now the Times op-ed star emitting the most heat. One of the GOP’s biggest thorns going into the 2004 campaign, Krugman damn near burns a hole in the page twice a week, blasting administration claims and logic with titanium-tipped columns. Never in our lives have we seen a columnist go after an administration so hard and so ruthlessly.

In response to Krugman’s ever-more violent grip on his victim’s neck, the Times this month felt compelled to offer the other side a regular space to meet the challenge. And so, to the sound of Survivor’s "Eye of the Tiger," the Weekly Standard’s David Brooks now enters the ring with Krugman every Tuesday. The question is: Can the witty, even-keeled conservative defend the Bush administration with enough force to neutralize Krugman’s journalistic napalm?

Not likely. If their debut Sept. 9 face-off was any indication, Brooks doesn’t own war paints and hates to mess up his shoes. The morning after Bush’s televised request for $87 billion and plea for U.N. help, Brooks meekly praised the administration’s ability to learn from experience while feigning frustration over its inability to "admit mistakes." As standard op-ed gruel it was fine, but next to Krugman’s sword-wielding Samurai wrath, it flickered and died on the page.

Next.

Best Reason to Recall Bloomberg

He’s right, we’re wrong. We don’t believe in recall elections, and any rational person who’s followed the current California Cartoon would agree. When voters elect a candidate, they ought to be stuck with that person for the duration of his or her term unless criminal activity is proven. Otherwise, elections have no real meaning.

So this is purely a hypothetical exercise in explaining why, if such a legislative provision existed in New York, Mayor Mike ought to be sent packing.

Let’s start with this absurd statement, published in the Sept. 9 New York Times, from the press secretary of the city’s Nanny-in-Chief. Edward Skyler said: "Mayor Bloomberg was elected to lead New York through a crisis… Because of his leadership, the best days for New York are yet to come."

This fantasy was contained in an article focusing on a Times poll that showed Bloomberg has a 32 percent approval rating from his constituents. Even Rudy Giuliani, in the month before he became a national hero two years ago, registered a 55 percent mark; and this was when Giuliani’s popularity was melting down.

Mike Bloomberg was elected not to "lead New York through a crisis," but through a fluke of history. Had the terrorist attacks of 9/11 occurred three months later, Democrat Mark Green would now be mayor. Trying to buy an election is a 50-50 proposition: New Jersey Sen. Jon Corzine was successful; Ron Lauder was not. Sen. John Edwards hit the jackpot in ’98; Steve Forbes blew much of his family’s fortune in two futile presidential bids. Bloomberg’s moolah was the deciding factor in the ’01 election because he could dominate the airwaves with commercials starring Giuliani as his patron. It also helped that the Yankees-Diamondbacks World Series that year lasted seven games: more prime time for Mike’s ads.

While it may be true that New York’s "best days" are "yet to come," it’s unlikely they’ll be during Bloomberg’s short, accidental tenure.

Bloomberg, of course, is a fake Republican—he ran in the GOP primary because it was easier to win—who believes that Sen. Hillary Clinton is doing a swell job for New Yorkers. Strike One.

He is a slave to the city’s unions, caving in to their demands while inflicting economic duress on the rest of the citizenry, regardless of income. Strike two.

He thinks that part of his job description includes imposing his morals upon those under his charge, so he bans smoking from all bars and restaurants and slaps an extraordinary tax on a pack of smokes, crippling not only the tobacco-addicted but every deli and bodega in the city that has lost customers who now cross state lines or use the internet to find cheaper prices. Oh, and he’s also damaged the nightclub business not only with the cigarette ban but by additionally imposing "noise pollution" fines. Strike three.

No fair-minded person would deny the entrepreneurial skills that earned Bloomberg untold billions—he worked like a dog and deserves every cent. That makes him an unlikely candidate to skim from the public till, but it also leaves him entirely isolated from 99 percent of his constituents. When the mayor declares that no one would ever leave New York because it’s the greatest city in the world, that’s coming from a man who can afford a hike in subway fares, sales, corporate and property taxes.

Bloomberg tried to pull a mini-Rudy during this summer’s blackout and performed admirably, traveling throughout the city and issuing bulletins on the status of the crisis—lucky he wasn’t in Bermuda at the time. Unlike ’77, there was virtually no crime, which may or not have had something to do with the fact that the electricity died in the afternoon rather than night. But he didn’t blow it, which is nothing short of amazing.

Best Daily News Photo Caption

Best Loyalty
To Print

Blog is a four-letter word. Time was—and what a glorious time it was—we could update our website with personal anecdotes, stories, bits of miscellaneous writing, and it hadn’t been given a name. Wired was still interesting, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was fighting the good fight and we early adapters were going to change the world. That’s right, change the world. We were laying the foundation for a lush creative paradise.

Sometime around 1999, our internetal offspring pulled up in their RVs and turned the web into a wasteland of irrelevance, indulgence and hackery. The weblog had been created, and the entire construct was ruined for everyone who’d inadvertently birthed and championed this "new form."

No, no, go ahead, bloggers and bloglovers, call it a publisher revolution. Just know that like Magic: The Gathering, fantasy football and rehab programs, blog culture is a circle jerk. Like missing a rerun of Friends, when you stop reading any given blog, life is no worse for it.

Blogging is not the new journalism. It’s the new zine. They will disappear when some of the more high-profile bloggers—those who came up from nothing with a will to write, not those high-vis journos who slummed in the freeform—find jobs in the mainstream press, where they clearly thirst to be. Their sites will atrophy, and the left-behinders will become bitter, scream "sellout" and lose interest.

The blog is a dead form within two years. On the outside.

Best Media Whore
Under the Age of 25
David Amsden

Some things matter. This slightly built, self-promoting 23-year-old resume-enhancing machine and celeb-sucker first came to our attention by way of his terrible little Holden Caulfield impersonation act, Important Things that Don’t Matter. We never would have noticed it, but Amsden’s friend qua informal agent J.T. Leroy tried to plant a buttery author Q&A in these pages, and we did some sniffing. A little birdie soon informed us of the true scale of Amsden’s biographical deceits, not the least of which is his bravado regarding non-existent working-class roots. In 2003, Amsden milked such lies—with some success—in a frenzied reach for the title of Next Hot Young Suburban Memoir Thing.

Not only is this kid without talent, he is without shame, and deserves whatever life awaits the kind of people that want desperately to be Bret Easton Ellis but never are, no matter how much they lie and try.

Over the Age of 25
Ian Spiegelman

Everyone’s churning. Gossip writer Ian Spiegelman introduced himself shortly after we took over the helm of this ship. He contacted us for two reasons. One, to plug his debut novel, Everyone’s Burning, a slim volume that’s been written about by other gossip scribes more than it’s been read. Two, he wanted us to whack a young writer with whom he’d had a failed sexual relationship. (The sex part’s not true, so far as we know, but it would make sense, he was so apoplectic with hate.) Not exactly fans of the little hack in Spiegelman’s sights, we gladly accepted several hundred words that lambasted—and possibly libeled—the author.

Since he has connections at Page Six and Details, b-list-fucker Spiegelman thought he was doing us a favor by skewering another b-list fucker—thus his insistence that his hands remain unsullied and face hidden. We must allow him use of a pseudonym (against our policy) and guarantee that nothing would be traceable to him.

"It can’t even sound like me," he whined, as if he bore a strong authorial voice in the first place.

This is why we keep a safe distance from the incestuous circle of dimbulbs who think they’re contributing with their gossip pages and idiotic blogs. They’re cowards and hypocrites, happy to mock and deride as long as they don’t have to take responsibility for their actions. Ian Spiegelman, nice as he may be in person, is as useless as a stopwatch at the Special Olympics.

Best New York Post Lede

Best Classroom Experience
Methods of Expository Writing and Styles of Cultural Criticism, Co-Taught by Christopher Hitchens

Can assholes get tenure? We could hack through a lecture course taught by Christopher Hitchens. We might even enjoy it. Yeah, that’s us, sitting in the back, taking copious notes, timing his whiskey shakes like birth contractions, documenting his hangovers. When things get slow, we shout "Kissinger" as a fake sneeze, and after class we bust out snide impersonations for our friends, saying "Islamo-fascism" every third word.

Years later, when his wheezy near-corpse is rolled out onto MSNBC for one last shouting match with Chris Matthews, we moan lazily: "That guy’s still alive? Yeah, took a class with him. Total cock-knocker. For a term paper once, I turned in one of his Atlantic Monthly pieces as my term paper. His T.A. gave me a B-minus."

But it’s not a lecture course. It’s a seminar, which amps it way beyond our threshold for pain. In seminars, students are expected to take an active part in class discussions. In this class, they’ll be expected to argue with a guy who prides himself on being the world’s most contrary contrarian, who thinks he has the world’s most caustic wit and deft language skills, who believes he has never lost an argument. Just look at the toxicity he directed at the jellyfish of the Nation.

Just consider this, please. Christopher Hitchens teaching an undergraduate Liberal Studies class. According to the New School catalog, in this class, "Mr. Hitchens will analyze several exemplary cultural critics, and discuss his own experience as a leading public intellectual." Imagine the poor little Sylvia Plath-quoting girl who signs up because it both fits a core requirement and looks like fun. She doesn’t know from Hitchens, she’s never heard of the Nation, neither knows nor cares about his political trajectory. One day, she lets slip that she thinks war is bad for children and other living things.

Seconds later, she’s rushing from the room in tears after Hitchens announces that her "semi-coherent ad hominem attack on my argument is an admission that you would rather not engage with my arguments and would rather suck off academia’s tit!" Et cetera, et cetera.

Too bad. If only she had the staying power—and the good judgment to keep her tofu-hole shut—she could’ve witnessed Hitchens dressed up in George Orwell’s skin, Silence of the Lambs style, muttering, "Would you revere me? I’d revere me." We expect this class to focus on two things: George Orwell’s writing (specifically his famous "Politics and the English Language" essay) and how Christopher Hitchens is George Orwell reborn, despite the fact that Hitchens’ Earl Grey skin and desk-jockey pudge grant him a passing resemblance more to the titular animal of "Shooting an Elephant" than its author.

Orwell strenuously advocated surgically precise language and argued that unclear writing muddles thought. Hitchens practically chortles with joy in his gushy prose. Of course, mention that during class and the hungover giant may wake, throwing down upon you all of his fury. And no, those Paglia quotes will not save you.

Best Email that led to Removal from the New York Press Masthead
Under the Age of 25
J.T. Leroy

Ciao ciao, darling. "Hiya, I can only do that for $1 a word. That is a lot more work. what I can do an intro in my own words and then a Q&A if y’all aint payin $1 a word. yers, Jt"

Over the Age of 25
Alexander Cockburn

Thanks for the new vocabulary word. Buh-bye. "You may be under pressure, but I’m not quite sure why you feel it necessary to adopt the tone of a Prussian gauleiter, and I very much resent the hectoring tone, as though I am some errant schoolboy, to be dosed with heavy breathing about squirrels. I don’t know about ‘inflexible,’ but you certainly come off as rude. With your phrase ‘I need to get things in line’ the intimation seems to be that things have been way out of line."

Best Historic Event on the Horizon
2004 Republican National Convention

Here we go. You know that grainy 1968 footage of Tom Hayden running through tear gas in Chicago’s Grant Park wearing a wig and an oversized football helmet? For better or worse, New York 2004 is going to put all that to shame. When the GOP gathers to re-nominate George Bush in August, it will be hard to remember that SDS and the Yippies ever cared about some guy named Hubert Humphrey. (But we’ll never forget that Norman Mailer holed up like a coward in his hotel suite when the shit hit the fan, while Genet and Burroughs were in the smoke.)

It’s 11 months away, and already the buzz around the country is making this feel like the Convention of the Century. Optimistic activists are promising more Seattle than Chicago.

One of the reasons so few protestors showed up for the ’68 Days of Rage was geography. Chicago is in the middle of the country. Another reason was the deathwish lurking behind the radical calls to "kill the pigs." Everyone’s a lot smarter and more serious this time around (right?), and the Republicans are walking right into one of the larger bellies of the anti-Bush beast. Don’t expect a fizzle.

Best Waste of Public Funds
Those New Walk Signs

And talk this way. It seemed to start slowly. You’d see one here and there. But suddenly by the end of the summer—whoosh—they were everywhere. It was like a flash flood. Every last "Walk/Don’t Walk" sign in the city had been replaced with those Lite-Brite LED pictograms of a hand and a pedestrian. Why?

With New York in such a financial mess, with basic services being cut left and right, why is the DOT wasting millions on the equipment and manpower it must have taken to replace all those walk signs with the fancy new Lite-Brite jobs? Sure, the bulbs in the old ones tended to burn out regularly, but for godsakes, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with them. Replacing a few bulbs every day has got to be cheaper than throwing the whole damned thing away and hooking up a new one.

The NYCDOT isn’t saying, but our guess is that the reversion to pictograms instead of written English is just the city’s own, quiet first step toward admitting that the public schools just aren’t going to get any better over the next few generations.

Best Publicist
Tristin Laughter

"Fight the pow—oh, wait, that’s me!" So we’re looking into tales that a minor rock mag is trading positive reviews in exchange for advertising dollars. (We’ve already confirmed that reviewers routinely give good reviews to one another’s bands.) We start with the publicists, which may seem laughable to real journalists, but we’re not looking for a Pulitzer here. We want access to that supercool new wave of publicists who are really into the music and care about both their acts and the kids on the street.

Two publicists, though friendly and helpful, have no good dirt to dish. The third, however, is more than friendly. She ignores our inquiry, but quickly contacts the magazine in question—Magnet, if you care—to let them know that we’re asking about their editorial policies.

Our first thought is to wonder why proud punk publicist Tris Laughter is invested enough in Magnet to want to protect them. Then we remember that this is the same lady who, inspired by her strong feminist sensibilities, refused to alert the Donnas that Playboy was interested in talking to the band about a photo layout to promote The Donnas Turn 21.

You have to respect a gal like Laughter—that is, if you’re selling out your editorial to corporate interests. Or, if you’re a band who wants a prudish publicist to make moral decisions as to what you should and shouldn’t do with your own fucking career.

This whole punk thing is working out quite well, isn’t it?

Best Campaign of Terror
Close Indian Point
www.riverkeeper.org

No one here gets out alive. We first saw the Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition poster taped to the side of a pay phone on 1st Ave. It depicted a map of NYC in crosshairs, with the words: "EVACUATION: IMPOSSIBLE" (referring to some official statement on the odds against a timely evacuation of Manhattan, in the event of a larger disaster than the WTC attacks) emblazoned over it in a pseudo-military stencil font.

Since then, on NY1, we’ve seen commercials produced by Riverkeeper—the Coalition’s foremost member—as well as their fallout-orange ads on the sides of bus kiosks and their postcards ("What exactly do WEAPONS of MASS DESTRUCTION look like?") in the wall racks of restaurants and bars. The card—created by something calling itself Think Tank 3 and preprinted with the smarmiest of form letters—is addressed to the wife of the chairman of the "Nuclear Regulatory Commision" [sic]. It begins, "Dear Mrs. Diaz, My name is ______ but you can call me Joe Public." It goes on to implore Mrs. Diaz to explain to her husband the dangers of keeping Indian Point power plant open in a "post 9/11 environment" and closes with "I don’t mean to be pushy, but since this is urgent maybe you could talk to him at dinner tonight?"

They don’t mean to be pushy? The point of this obnoxious, scatterbrained campaign, we gather, is to get the power plant shut down. This is a reasonable cause with which we absolutely empathize; none of us wants a nuclear plant in our backyard. What we can’t get behind are the manipulative scare tactics Riverkeeper and its associated "think tank" are using to get their point across to the residents of New York City.

History has shown us that nuclear power plants are enough of a threat all on their own. Look at Three Mile Island. Look at the meltdown at Chernobyl, popularly accepted to be the greatest nuclear catastrophe in the history of mankind. But while you’re at it, look at what was behind them: Accidents. Human error. Clearly, we pose more of a threat to ourselves than any foreign agents could, but somehow, this doesn’t stop Riverkeeper from hopping on the terrorist bandwagon to achieve its ends.

We actually appreciate Riverkeeper’s vigilance in other areas, like educating us on GE’s dumping of PCBs in the Hudson, or pushing through 1997 legislation to protect the NYC Watershed. This is why it disappoints and sickens us to see them stoop in this new campaign. There are more responsible, more effective methods of educating and motivating New Yorkers in regard to Indian Point. Poking at open wounds that are only marginally related to the cause is little more than psychological terrorism.

Best Cameo by a New York Press Box
Daily News (Sept. 12, 2003)

Best Stealth Smut in a National Advertisement
Mature Invitation to Loin-based Fraternization

Mom, get off my friends! "The dating world has changed…" the little black booklet informs us. "Women, and lots of them, are throwing themselves at men."

So say the makers of Axe deodorant, whose advertising campaign suggests that wearers will become so irresistible that they’ll need the Axe Wearer’s Handbook for guidance.

Inside are tips for men unprepared to be so pussy-laden:

How to Turn a Fivesome into a Manageable Threesome

How to Slip out Without Waking Her Up

How to Remove a Hickey

How to Gain Access to a Janitor’s Closet Without a Key

All of which are middlebrow boy humor, on par with a good pull-my-finger moment. Worthy of note, however, is How to Escape a Friend’s Mom:

It is not uncommon for a young man wearing Axe to be approached by a friend’s mother who can’t control her arousal. This is known as a MILF (Mature Invitation to Loin-based Fraternization). When confronted with a MILF, take a minute to consider the implications of fulfilling a MILF request—e.g. violent husband or awkward social situation—then quickly execute your escape plan.

What MILF actually stands for, as Axe’s target audience knows, is Mother I’d Like to Fuck. Factcheckers may consult milf.com, milf.net, milf.org, even milf.de ("M.I.L.F. - Willst du die Mutter meiner Kinder sein?").

We don’t know if the ad agency responsible for the Axe Wearer’s Handbook told their client the true meaning of MILF, or if they snuck it past a boardroom of old men. Either way, we applaud the oblique use of offensive profanity in a national advertising campaign.

Best Flawed Metaphor in a Response to a New York Press Cover Story
Chuck Klosterman on MediaBistro

YOU ARE SUCH AN ASSHOLE. Two weeks after our Chuck Klosterman cover story ran, the hot critic took part in Q&A with Chris Gage for MediaBistro. The resulting article opened with this ungodly lede: "Chuck Klosterman is an incredibly talented yarn-spinner. He knows so well how to build a story and wring out its punchline and significance that you’d think he was raised by an ancient tribe of devoted oral historians."

As a MediaBistro production, the interview was intended as a lesson for aspiring pop-culture journalists. When the interviewer eventually tired of the "How can I, too, parlay my masturbatory obsessions into a book deal?" line of inquiry, he turned his attention to the house that Russ Smith built:

MB: Clearly other people seem to find you entertaining as well—though perhaps not the New York Press.

CK: That was really weird, a very weird thing. I got an email that day that said, "This guy you’ve never heard of has written a piece for a publication you’ve never read and is attacking what you look like and claiming you’re the anti-Christ." I still have a hard time understanding how I would warrant that. But, I don’t know. It wasn’t hurtful, it was just strange. I’ve been asked about this constantly, and I compare it to how if you’re walking down the street and some schizo guy comes up to you and vomits on you: You wouldn’t be hurt by that, you’d just think it’s weird. I keep saying the word "weird" over and over again, but it’s the only way I can describe it.

Actually, Chuck, that’s not quite right. If your "schizo guy" were vomiting at random, then the vomit could have landed anywhere, on anyone. But it didn’t. It landed on you. For a reason.

Here’s how that exchange should have read:

MB: Clearly other people seem to find you entertaining as well—though perhaps not the New York Press.

CK: I compare it to how if you’re walking down the street and some schizo guy comes up to you and says, "Hey, are you Chuck Klosterman?" And you say, yeah, and he says, "Your book sucks and you make me sick and I hate everything about you, your culture, your approach to writing, your smug face and the mediocrity you bring into this world that we’re forced to share with you." And then he sticks his fingers in his mouth and vomits on you. You wouldn’t be hurt by that, you’d just think it’s weird.

Best Scary September News Story
Saudis Consider Going Nuclear

Gulp. The Saudis—you know, that shaky oil dynasty with al Qaeda connections—have been talking about joining the club for decades. Now, faced with the near-term prospect of a nuclear Iran, they’re said to be considering it seriously at the highest levels in Riyadh. So it’s worth taking a hard look at what would be required to stop Saudi Arabia and Iran from joining the club: A security architecture guaranteeing a nuclear-free Middle East. And that means you, too, Israel. Until the world reckons with Israel’s 200 atomic warheads, the logic of proliferation will unfold in the region no matter how much Washington huffs and puffs. Nor will Israel be able to freeze history with its warplanes forever.

Israel has been the nuclear power that dare not speak its name for 40 years, but faced with the prospect of a fully nuclearized Middle East, the world may finally be ready to confront the consequences of its ongoing double standard. It’s time.

Best Out-of-Touch Advertisement
Gillette Venus’ "Now in Pink"

Sink the pink. First, we assumed Gillette was indulging in campy nostalgia when we saw the Pink ad featuring four bathing-suit-clad models assuming silly action poses while driving down the street in a pink convertible.

But this was no clever throwback. It was a ham-fisted attempt to convince women to trade in their perfectly suitable blue Venus razor for the newest model. Does the pink upgrade possess the power of Gillette’s mighty Mach3? Does it, perhaps, sport a new pivoting head system that reduces nicks while shaving? How about a built-in shaving- cream dispenser?

Nope again. Gillette’s ad campaign is based around a question: "What is it about pink that makes you feel so good?"

We have yet to think of an answer, because every time we see the ladies of Pink partying away—be it on a building or in the pages of a glossy—we consider not shaving ever again.

Gillette may be the best a man can get, but when it comes to women, they have a long way to go, baby.

Best Term Coined by a Lad Magazine in the Dying Days of the Lad Magazine
"Post-Lad"

Same as it ever was. The first time a magazine approached us for coverage was when the horrid L Magazine hired a very sweet but clearly inexperienced woman to beg us for a story. We declined politely, noting that the L would probably be out of business before we went to press. Our turnaround is measured in hours.

Wendy Coleman, director of marketing and promotions for Razor Magazine (a publication of Razor Media LLC), became number two. In a letter from the company’s Scottsdale, AZ headquarters, we were told that Razor is the "logical choice on newsstands today for the twenty-something ‘post-lad’ reader." The Razor "formula" is one of "sophistication with sex appeal," a formula that Playboy and GQ are "striving to emulate." Unlike Maxim, FHM and Stuff, Razor wasn’t yanked from the Wal-Mart shelves—clear proof that it’s nothing like the "typical ‘laddie’ book."

How cute. We don’t dispute that GQ may not offer your average twentysomething what he’s looking for in a magazine. But the Razor "formula" of half-naked women, dating advice, video game reviews, gadget reviews, a light smattering of "serious" articles, Details dropout Anka Radakovich and a 34-year-old publisher posing with a cigar hardly warrants coining a new marketing term.

Nice try, Wendy, but "post-lad" is a very weak, very silly attempt to be "lad" without the cloying stink of the reprehensible Maxim and Stuff and the countless knockoffs that were pee in the pool of our corner newsstand. Try relaunching Razor as something original, and we’ll consider assigning that story.

Best "And What Was His Crime?"
West Side Spirit (May 15, 2003)

Best Press Release for a Christian Magazine
Relevant Magazine

Tell us, what is God doing? "Filling the need for media that effectively reaches God-hungry, mainstream savvy twentysomethings, RELEVANT magazine is gaining recognition not only in the Christian marketplace, but in the mainstream market as well…

"RELEVANT covers God, life and progressive culture with a fresh perspective not found in any other publication. Each issue offers in-depth features, columns and reviews on issues that affect this generation. It examines what God is doing and saying today and spotlights the people and events shaping culture. The magazine pushes boundaries, asks questions, spots trends and challenges worldviews—all while helping readers pursue God in everyday life."

Best Consistently Ugly Cover Illustrations
New York Observer

We thought you people had money? We at New York Press occasionally make a mistake with an illustrator, too. But the key is, guys, to learn from those mistakes.

Best New York Times Editorial
"NOW’s Woman Problem"
Sept. 14

Half a loaf’s better than none. Whenever the Times’ editorial page prints something sensible, we immediately suspect a hidden agenda. It’s no secret that the paper longs for Sen. John Kerry to challenge President Bush next year; absent, of course, an entry by Hillary Clinton or possibly Al Gore.

Still, for those who don’t read between the lines, the Times’ spot-on ridicule of both the National Organization of Women (NOW) and footnote presidential candidate Carol Moseley Braun, the ethically challenged former senator from Illinois, was a refreshing respite from the usual fare of "quagmires" and "tax cuts for the rich."

NOW is an institution in serious disrepair, challenging Jesse Jackson for another category we can think of, "Best Anachronism." Who, besides the Nation’s Katha Pollitt and perhaps a few herbal-tea drinkers in Greenwich Village, takes NOW seriously anymore? The group’s steadfast defense of the lecherous Bill Clinton—because he’s in favor of abortion, the only issue that matters—in the 90s was a disgrace, especially considering its hysterical attacks on Clarence Thomas. The Supreme Court Justice, you see, was accused of watching pornography and, of course, was a Republican. A far worse sin, in NOW’s warped thinking, than Clinton’s public humiliation of his wife and daughter.

NOW, a parody of itself, has endorsed Moseley Braun for president in 2004.

The Times had it right on Sept. 14: "[I]t is hard to see a principle that distinguishes Ms. Braun’s candidacy, other than perhaps the right of a tarnished former official to seek the nation’s highest office. By racing to assist Ms. Braun’s candidacy, the leaders of NOW showed loyalty to someone with a long relationship with the organization, going back to the unsuccessful struggle to enact the Equal Rights Amendment. But they also trivialized the important role women will play in the coming election, and made themselves look silly to boot."

One caveat: Do the Times editors believe that women haven’t played "important" roles in past elections? Tsk, tsk.

Best Newspaper Commemoration of 9/11
William Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News

Loose ends. If ever a day commanded a prolonged, nationwide head-hanging moment of silence, it’s Sept. 11. But two years later, we’re not yet at a point where we can be satisfied with a nod, a flag and a prayer. As William Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News reminded us, there are still a lot of unanswered questions hanging uneasily over the memories of the dead.

On Sept. 11, Bunch listed 20 of these questions, among them:

Who made a fortune on Sept. 10, 2001, when the trading ratio on United Airlines was 25 times greater than normal at the Pacific Exchange?

Why were Rumsfeld and others in the administration so quick to link the attacks to Saddam Hussein?

Why did the Bush administration lie about dangerously high levels of toxins and hazardous particles after the WTC collapse?

What’s in the 28 blacked-out pages of the congressional Sept. 11 report?

Bunch isn’t the only journalist asking these questions, but we thank him asking them so pointedly on a day when so many others were busy scoring points with easy, maudlin remembrances.

Best Sign that You’ve Arrived
You’re a Meta Tag for a Porn Site

It’s the company you keep. "chubby teens nude…lick creek…medical diagram male reproductive…trans mississippi…bodybuilders naked men…young boys in locker room…free online music for 6 hole flute…interracial dating survey…nudist girl…free hardcore kidsporn…boy sucking smooth cock…free preteen thumb galleries…child models gallery upskirt…liver damage soft drinks…jeff koyen…private sex party…xxx insertions…amsterdam women blowjobs…lesbian torture machines…sex stories and free and group…gay shirtless underage boys…pics young boys swimming…kiddy porn…lez vampires gallery…root canal crown dental…sick twisted fuckyou…sean michaels ass lickers…accounting recruitment…kinder love"

Best New Free New York Publication
New York Sports Express

Best Ignorant Banshee of a Pundit
Ann Coulter

Is this ding on? This walking self-parody should be the shame of the right, but somehow isn’t. In 2003, Coulter treated the reading public to Treason, the third of her semi-literate screeds, whose theme bears a startling resemblance to the previous two—namely, that everything wrong with America is the fault of liberals, while everything right about it is the work of conservatives.

One needn’t be a communist to admit that maybe those crazy labor radicals were on to something when they suggested having weekends, or that the silly black people might have had a point about riding in buses and sitting on benches. And never mind the feminists who spent the 1990s vainly calling attention to the depravities of the Taliban.

Somehow, Coulter gets a pass. Her more centrist apologists call her "provocative," as though that alone warrants her being taken seriously.

Pulling down your pants in Grand Central Station and screaming, "Hey ladies, come and get it!" is provocative. It is also boorish, juvenile and insipid, and, come to think of it, is an apt-enough metaphor for Coulter’s work: Her books are acts of indecent exposure. Reading them is like watching someone scream at a cash-register clerk for no good reason—you start to wonder if they were born without the mechanisms that give most of us restraint and dignity.

Reading Coulter also makes us suspect that her editors secretly hate her: Why else would they put such fatuous incompetence on display? A compassionate publishing professional would set aside her manuscript, gently suggest a switch to decaf and maybe enroll her in a few history classes at CUNY.

Best Reason to Not Send Your Kid to Columbia
Professor Nicholas DeGenova

Those who can, do. Those who can’t… Aside from the ridiculous tuition and Ivy League pretentiousness, there’s always the danger that your offspring could take a class with Nicholas DeGenova, the assistant professor of anthropology who, at a March 26 antiwar event, wished "a million Mogadishus" on U.S. troops in Iraq. He was referring, of course, to the military mission in Somalia that went horribly awry, leaving 18 American servicemen dead, to say nothing of hundreds of Somalis.

Needless to say, this seems an appropriate desire for a committed anti-war protestor. Taken literally, DeGenova was hoping for—what? Eighteen million dead Americans and hundreds of millions of dead Iraqis? DeGenova, of course, says he was not speaking literally, which is good in some ways but also raises the question of why not. Is it really too much to ask that a professor at a prestigious university speak with precision about matters of life and death, particularly at an event advertised as a "teach-in"?

During his speech—which could not have better discredited the antiwar movement if it had been penned by Paul Wolfowitz—DeGenova also added that any American who considers himself a patriot is really just a white supremacist. That makes sense, if you have long since abandoned any commitment to objectivity or nuance.

It’s nice to know Columbia still hires privileged people who romanticize the plight of the poor and who make reckless generalizations about things they know nothing about. Send your kids somewhere else, and let’s put DeGenova to good use by throwing him in a cage with Ann Coulter. We can bill it as the world’s first fact-free argument, and with any luck they’ll destroy each other under the weight of their own idiocies.

Best New York Times Charade
Appointment of "Standards Editor"

Whitewash 101. When new executive editor Bill Keller tapped Allan Siegal, a Times employee since 1960, as the paper’s first "standards editor"—perish the thought that the common position of an ombudsman, who writes a column, be considered—the move was more smelly than a raw chicken left in the heat for a week. Keller said that Siegal would function as "the main internal sounding board for staff members who have doubts or complaints about the paper’s content, whether already published or in the works."

Isn’t that dandy? Instead of hiring a respected journalist who hadn’t spent his entire professional life at the Times, acquiring prejudices for or against certain staff members, Keller booted one of his first major tests in restoring readers’ confidence in the paper. Keller, not prone to risk-taking by nature, was probably also hindered by lifestyle-over-news publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. in making an appointment. It’s not as if there aren’t a number of distinguished journalists from other respected newspapers—say the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal—who’d serve as a legitimate watchdog.

Theo Lippman Jr., an editorial writer for the Baltimore Sun from 1965-95, wrote an acidic column on Aug. 31 explaining that the yet-unnamed "standards editor" would be a eunuch from day one:

"Once the Times had a sort of de facto or ad hoc ombudsman. That was Sydney Schanberg, who won a Pulitzer Prize as a foreign correspondent, then wrote an op-ed column on metropolitan issues in the 1980s. Schanberg wrote that the Times was ‘venal’ in dealing with the city’s business establishment in connection with a disputed development proposal. The then-publisher, the senior Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, charged him with having ‘peed’ on the Times, fired him as a columnist, and he resigned.

"There’s an old Swedish saying: An ombudsman who can’t pee on his own paper from time to time is no ombudsman at all."

Guess Keller missed Lippman’s prescient column.

Best Job Interview
With Mike McPadden

Aka our old friend Selwyn Harris. Thanks to our adult-industry connections, we scored an interview at a celebrity-themed skin mag a week before the job was posted on MediaBistro.

(Hear that, Mom? Thanks adult-industry connections! Proud yet?)

The job, managing editor of one of those stroke mags that come three for 10 bucks in plastic, was far from the primest piece of real estate in the New York media landscape, but desperation’s desperation.

The office where we were interviewed resembled a Being John Malkovich-style isolation tank with no windows and few decorations on the wall. The interviewer looked overfed yet undernourished, alcohol-pickled and covered in a thin film of scum. Still, he was a pretty nice guy for most of the interview, even after being informed that his titles weren’t on our stroking A-list. Still, trying to keep things chummy, we namedropped an alleged mutual friend, New York Press editor-in-chief, Jeff Koyen. That’s when things went bad.

"Koyen??? I hate that guy!" he exclaimed, our dream of porn employment drifting into vapor. "And his writing? Pee-yoo!"

He pinched his nostrils and waved his hand in the air to visually demonstrate the stink of Koyen’s work.

Fumbling for a change of subject, we asked what we’d be doing as managing editor.

"You know," he answered, "the usual stuff you do at a skin mag."

(Hear that, Mom? The usual stuff you do at a skin mag!)

After another few awkward minutes of pointless back-and-forth, he said he’d let us know either way. We’re still waiting for that call.

Best Downslide

What would you do for a Klondike Bar? When a senior publicist at Warner Books is pushing your once-fantastic magazine as "The Onion meets The Anarchist Cookbook," something’s gone wrong.

The boys at VICE have a reputation for being control freaks—in a good way—so money is the only explanation for allowing the goochy-goochy-goo press release that announced the VICE book to editors in July 2003. We understand forfeiture of power of attorney is a fact of life, but there must be a line. Check this VICE promo copy:

"Replete with the best VICE Magazine has to offer, the book includes hilarious, edgy and informative guides to sex, music, and navigating the party scene that hipsters now enjoy… [This book] is a collection of irreverent, hilarious and downright scary gonzo journalism that has spawned the cultural arbiter of what’s cool in American today."

Couldn’t someone at the Williamsburg HQ have stepped away from the party, just for a minute, to eye the sell-sheet? "Downright scary gonzo journalism"? What the fuck is that?

We wish Vice continued success with the clothes, the tv shows, the Broadway musicals and the lunchboxes, but we’d also urge the guys to put away some of that cash. Last we heard, the Jerky Boys had dayjobs.

Best New York Press "Press Box" Ad

Best Village Voice Full Split
"The Foreign Invasion of the American Game" by Dan McGraw

Air ball. Over-the-top identity politics in the Village Voice are a tradition nearly as old as time itself. But jingoism tends not to go along with it—that is, until this May piece, which intimated that the recent influx of European players into the NBA is part of a nefarious conspiracy by the league and its corporate sponsors to drain pro basketball of black players.

The "American Game," which was invented by Canadian James Naismith, is really two games, according to McGraw: the finesse-oriented "white game" and the more power-based "black game." McGraw believes that as the sport globalized throughout the 1980s and 90s, foreign-born players such as Andrei Kirilenko wanted to play the game the "black" way, and thus steal yet another innovation from black America, like jazz and rock ’n’ roll before it.

In truth, the NBA has become more of a meritocracy, one that has greatly improved the quality of play in the league in the last decade. Not only has this supposedly revolutionary development brought the league’s percentage of black players from 82 percent all the way down to 78 percent, but several of the foreign players (including championship-winning San Antonio Spurs guard Tony Parker) are themselves black.

Even more ridiculously, Maxwell claims that the league’s mostly white owners would prefer to see white players, hence the Europeans. We’d make the opposite argument—white players not named Larry Bird have generally been mocked and derided by most fans, and isn’t it counterproductive for owners and sponsors to try to sell fans players that speak heavily accented English, if they speak English at all?

The NBA is now a multicultural, international league—combining the best players of every race and every basketball-playing culture on the planet—Maxwell may not like that, but I’d say most fans do. If a conspiracy existed, you’d think the owners would be trying to create a white, American-born NBA superstar. Now that John Stockton has retired, there is probably not a single such player among the NBA’s top 75 players.

Best Kiddie Porn Magazine
Male
Tiger Beat

Touch it, Corey. We’re betting that this venerable teen fan mag doesn’t keep track of the number of adult subscribers. But it would be interesting to do a merge-and-purge with NAMBLA’s membership or a directory of parish priests. From John, Paul, George and Ringo to David Cassidy to Leif Garrett to Boy George to every boy band made in Orlando, Tiger Beat has catered to the incipient lust of tween girls by putting their heartthrobs in states of undress. Any one-hit wonder or sitcom brat can become a first-name-only pin-up.

As a showcase for this week’s flavah—whether "bad boys" like Good Charlotte and Eminem, rappers like 50 Cent, cherubs like Stevie Brock or stalwarts like Justin Timberlake—it’s still the best kiddie porn you can buy at the corner newsstand. Even if the perv patrol confiscates our computer, we’ve still got our centerfolds of Ashton and Nelly above the bed.

Female
Teen People

Touch it, Avril. On the topic of Camille Hall, who’s just been given a whole new look: "With her sultry, smudgy eyes, dark lipstick and fanciful ’fro, Camille’s funky style practically screams diva. ‘It’s very rock and roll,’ says NYC-based makeup artist Scott McMahan… ‘She could be up onstage with Lenny Kravitz as his backup singer.’"

Staring longingly at Camille’s plum-red, fuck-me lips parted just-so to suggest fellatio, we’re thinking of several other stages that might be more appropriate for this fetching woman. And then we realize that Camille’s 16 years old, and this is Teen People.

Oops.

As a young teenager discovering the special gift our boy parts had to offer, we "borrowed" our older sister’s Cosmopolitan. We could always count on Helen Gurley Brown for a glimpse of a nearly naked woman, which was plenty for our young minds to, er, work with. Were we to return to that age again and the internet didn’t yet exist, we’d be sneaking our little sister’s copies of Teen People, the Time Inc. publication that features more exposed underage flesh per page than any glossy this side of Barely Legal.

In the May 2003 issue, for example, the photo spread for the 50 Best Swimsuits is touted as "model-free fashion," which sounds like pornography code for "amateur girls." In one layout, Lara, the eldest amateur at 19, bends forward on a Vespa; in another, Gabrielle, 17, nibbles on a lollipop. Two pages later, Cynthia, Brooke (13) and Gabrielle pose together inside a hula hoop, while across the spread, Jane (15) jumps for the cameraman. Her bikini bottom is pulled so far up her crack that an eagle-eyed OB-GYN could probably tell if she’s a virgin.

We’d never deny wanting to fuck Avril Lavigne—if only to shut her up for five minutes—so maybe her ubiquity is why we always flip through the latest issue of Teen People. (Just how we got on that comp list, we’ll never know.) Or maybe it’s the dependability of seeing underage girls dressed like whores.

Fortunately, we’ve reached an age where it’s more appalling than titillating. Or just about.

Best Sleepwalk by a "Most Loathsome"
Ted Rall

Get the message this time, Ted? On March 26, 2003, we named comic artist and political whip Ted Rall the runner-up in our "50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers" issue.

Six weeks later, Rall sent us a letter offering his 650-word political column with neither a hint of irony nor awareness.

Though tempted by the witty and insightful titles of the sample columns—"The Moron Majority" and "Bush Comes Clean: It Was About Oil"—we decided not to accept the left-wing firebrand as our latest columnist.

Is he too brave for us? Are his opinions too dangerous? Has not New York Press the guts to take on The Man?

As we wrote in March, Rall is a self-righteous prick who deserves derision from all political camps, and we’re finally glad he stopped badgering us with voicemails.

Private to Ted: The next time your intern sends out a mass solicitation, have her double-check the spelling of the editor’s name. It’s a small thing that says a lot, you dink.

Best Pissy Piece Written by a Bitter Musician Who Went Nowhere
GQ’s "I was dumped by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs story"

File Under: Nobody Cares. New GQ editor-in-chief Jim Nelson is clearly a guy in the midst of a midlife crisis. He’s a fortysomething Editing Stud with a dream job where he can cover anything he wants, so what does he focus on? The nonexistent New York rock scene. There was that Mooney Suzuki cover line. There was a gushing review of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs written by Nelson himself, in which he seemed to want the reader to infer that he was cool enough to have seen the Yeah Yeahs Yeahs at a small club or two.

The most offensive, pointless exercise in New York rock excess was hack writer Mike Guy’s bitchy "I was dumped by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs" story. Guy and Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist/mastermind Nick Zinner were once in a band together, it seems, and that band got left in the dust when the Yeah Yeah Yeahs took off, partially because that band sucked and partially because it was called Challenge of the Future.

Ridiculously, Nelson let Guy write a feature-length piece about how controlling and disloyal Zinner was. More ridiculously, Guy offered up teenage gossipy bullshit about how Zinner used to fuck Karen O., as if the idea of a hot guy and a hot girl in a band hooking up would be shocking to anybody but a person like Guy, who probably never gets laid.

No doubt, Nelson and Guy thought this piece would be fodder for Page Six, but not even the gossipy NY rock weblogs cared. Do a Google search for "Mike Guy and Yeah Yeahs Yeahs" or "GQ and Yeah Yeah Yeahs" and see if you find any proof that this article ever existed.

Maybe soon, Nelson will discover that the Strokes made out with one of the band members. He can write about bisexuality among the 40-year-old set. All we know now is that Diego from Elefant better expect GQ’s call soon; we can only imagine how he’s making Nelson cream his khakis.

Best International Editorial
Jerusalem Post, Sept. 11, 2003

Guts. If it’s not clear to those who follow the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinians that Yasser Arafat is the key impediment to any sort of "peace process" or "road map," they’re either in denial or just plain stupid (or a pacifist). Arafat has been handed opportunity after opportunity to reach a settlement, so to speak, with Israel, but has steadfastly refused. That’s because he’s a terrorist every bit as dangerous as the most nefarious member of Hamas.

The Jerusalem Post, on Sept. 11, ran an editorial that was both levelheaded and blunt. The paper said that no progress will be made until Arafat is gone, and therefore he must be killed. Shocking? Yes, only because no other newspaper or leader has the vision to state the obvious.

An excerpt: "The world will not help us; we must help ourselves. We must kill as many of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders as possible, as quickly possible, while minimizing collateral damage, but not letting that damage stop us. And we must kill Yasser Arafat, because the world leaves us no alternative… Arafat’s death at Israel’s hands would not radicalize Arab opposition to Israel; just the opposite. The current jihad against us is being fueled by the perception that Israel is blocked from taking decisive action to defend itself… Europe’s refusal to utterly reject [Arafat] condemns Palestinians, no less than Israelis, to endless war and dooms the possibility of the two-state solution the world claims to seek."

The Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer, writing in an op-ed the next day, gets it, even if he doesn’t explicitly call for Arafat’s assassination. Commenting on the resignation of Mahmoud Abbas, Krauthammer said: "What should the United States do now? The editorialists are issuing the usual knee-jerk call for the Bush administration to intensify its efforts in the peace process. What peace process? Intensify efforts with whom? With Arafat—who is behind the terror, who destroyed Abbas, who will never sign a peace treaty and whose commitment to war-until-victory is as enduring as was Ho Chi Minh’s and Mao Zedong’s?"

Leave it to the New York Times to issue yet another namby-pamby editorial criticizing Israel’s right to defend itself. The paper, also on Sept. 12, lashed out at Sen. Joseph Lieberman for his condemnation of Howard Dean’s call for Israel to dismantle most of its settlements. (Dean, forced to "clarify" his remarks then said that Clinton be sent to the region to negotiate everlasting peace.)

The edit concluded: "We strongly disagree. True support for Israel means helping it see through its pain and rage to its own best interest. You do not have to believe in Mr. Arafat’s sincerity or the Palestinians’ good will to grasp the need for a radical course shift. You need only understand the meaning of self-preservation."

Easy for Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and his minions, nestled in New York or country homes, to say, while people are being slaughtered.

Best Straight-Faced Cover Story Interview With Joan Rivers
New York Resident (July 21, 2003)

Best Reason Not to Support NPR
Musical Interludes

Ragtime, with a "look at the numbers." Forget Terry Gross and all the other fashionable reasons to hate NPR. We hate the musical segways. Nothing makes American public radio harder to swallow than those fatuous musical cues between hard news reports and cutesy commentaries. The BBC has the right idea here: Open with a staid French horn theme and then get down to it. We don’t need to hear the musical equivalent of Kenny G frowning after learning about a famine. If there is any hard proof of the soft-minded infantilism of the Boomer middle class in this country, the emotional pointers on NPR during rush hour are exhibits A, B and C.

Best Example of a Young New York Times Journalist Fucking it up for Everyone Else
Jodi Kantor

Young, dumb and lacking aplomb. Let’s say you’re 27, and you’ve stumbled into one of the world’s most coveted journalism jobs. You’re now "Arts & Leisure" editor for the New York Times. What do you do? If you’re even a little bright, you would immediately recognize that you’re now a power broker and ask every important writer and big-time entertainer you’ve ever admired to contribute. You’re now the Times arts czar, so most people will call you back. And since you were hired to help the old dog reach a younger audience, you would scour magazines for young talent.

Looks like former Slate nobody Jodi Kantor, who was hired by Howell Raines to edit Arts & Leisure this year, has successfully done just one of these three things. For those who weren’t paying attention, read this recent excerpt from Page Six:

"[Kantor]’s in over her head—and she’s very aloof," sniffed one ticked Timesie. Her critics charge that Kantor is larding her section with contributions from inexperienced, ‘old Slate cronies and web bloggers’—like online journalist Sarah Hepola, who wrote a front-page Arts and Leisure story about Sex and the City last month.

One webzine hack responded to the Page Six item with a piece proclaiming that web journalism was the "future of journalism…
where the next generation of writers is coming from." The piece weakly defended Kantor and Hepola by pointing out that the latter had also written for the Austin Chronicle.

This dumb-ass argument, of course, underscores the entire problem. There are in fact many—well, okay, a couple—talented scribes toiling online and at alt-weeklies, and they’d accomplish much if given a shot to work for the Times. As always, though, it takes just a couple idiots getting just a little bit of attention to fuck it up for everybody else.

Best Bitchslap Backfire
New York Post (Jan. 3, 2003)

Whoops. When the New York Times goofed and ran a picture of Clash guitarist/singer Mick Jones next to their obituary of Joe Strummer, the New York Post thought they’d have a little fun at their expense. But in calling attention to the gaffe, they themselves mistakenly ran a picture of Mick Jones—of Foreigner fame. Way to stick it them, guys.

Best Internal Memo
The Missing Mayo

And CCTV is born. "I bought a new jar of mayo a couple of weeks ago. I used it only a couple of times, when I went back to the fridge to use it today the ENTIRE jar was empty. Please understand that the mayo in the fridge is not community mayo, it is mine (or someone else’s who, I’m sure, wouldn’t want to share with you either). If you need some go buy your own. Thank You, Laura"

Best Rigged Talk Show
Hannity & Colmes

Dressing right. With all the hubbub about Fox News Channel’s lawsuit against Al Franken for appropriating their slogan "Fair and Balanced" in the title of his recent book, the reaction of most liberals was to laugh—not only at the suit, but at Fox’s audacity in actually giving that label to their news coverage.

Even by Fox standards, the show trial of a talk show hosted by Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes goes well beyond the pale. It doesn’t take a raging lefty political ideologue to see that not only is Hannity & Colmes not "fair and balanced," but it’s the biggest farce in the already farcical world of cable news.

Hannity & Colmes represents a microcosm of Fox News’ overriding ethos: a supposedly balanced debate that’s rigged from the start and has more in common with a kangaroo court than any type of serious political discussion. The dynamic and charismatic ultra-conservative Hannity squares off nightly against the weak, conciliatory and center-left Colmes, who is just about the least effective spokesman for the liberal cause imaginable. If that weren’t enough, rightie-tightass fuckhead Dennis Miller was recently added to the show as a weekly commentator.

Colmes spends all of each episode on the defensive, alternately stammering, apologizing for his liberal views, getting interrupted by Hannity, and just plain keeping his mouth shut for minutes at a time—even as such topics as "Is Hillary Clinton a fascist?" are discussed. Colmes never interrupts opposing guests (as Hannity does), nor are lunatic assertions such as Bush "got us out of the ‘Clinton/Gore Recession’" challenged. It’s no wonder TomPaine.com likened Hannity & Colmes to a Harlem Globetrotters game.

Colmes got a new contract last year to continue being Hannity’s prison bitch for several more years. Small consolation. Last year, within days of a report of Hannity’s $10 million radio syndication deal, Colmes’ radio show was yanked off the air when WEVD changed formats. When sucking that right-drooping dick gets to be too much, it’ll be a matter of short time before Colmes quits in a huff and writes an anti-Fox tell-all. Either that, or goes Columbine. On-air if we’re lucky.

Best Eastern European Newspaper to Fold this Year
The Prague Pill

Always zdarma. If you hopped through Prague anytime in the last year and a half, you probably saw it. It might have been scattered around the waiting rooms beyond the entry gate at Ruzyne International, or maybe it lay splayed and beer-stained on the floor of the hostel bar. Wherever it was, you picked it up and read it, surprised and happy to have an honest guide to the city. From January, 2001, until July, 2003, the more-news-than-you-can-possibly-use tabloid called the Prague Pill was the best English-language publication east of the U.K. and west of Moscow. Before New York Sports Express came along, it was also the closest thing New York Press had to a sister publication. Rest in peace, Prague Pill. You live on more than you know.

Best Vanessa Grigoriadis Retread
Tie: "Girls Gone Wild" and "Hey, There’s a Yoga Craze!"

This just in! Sex parties all the rage. It’s easy to have a crush on Vanessa Grigoriadis. We certainly did for a while. She’s mysterious and sexy, and she writes breathlessly about sexy subjects. In 1998, when she was just 25, her first major New York magazine piece was a flashy cover story about New York publicists. It read like a movie, so it was no surprise that the film rights Sony quickly bought for a reported $400,000. Wow, we thought, here was a young writer with verve to spare who cashed in right away.

Then we started to hate Grigoriadis because all of her magazine features sounded like movie scripts. Whether she was reporting on nightlife or Silicon Alley creative types, every story was a chance to update St. Elmo’s Fire or Less Than Zero. We couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to buy a story about New York bouncers or the founders of stupid shit like Feed, so we didn’t imagine she’d ever sell anything else to Hollywood. Maybe, we thought, she’d become just another one-trick magazine writer.

We worry that she’s tired of even being that. In 1999, Grigoriadis wrote about the growing popularity of yoga for New York, and followed it with a post-Sept. 11 story about yoga’s new importance. Then, when she essentially replaced Alex Kuczynski at the Times’ Sunday Styles section this year, she quickly settled in and wrote a piece about…yoga.

Despite spending so much time doing yoga and writing about yoga, Grigoriadis also turned out saucier pieces, like the features about Girls Gone Wild founder Joseph Francis that ran in both Rolling Stone and Radar.

The not-so-young-anymore Grigoriadis may simply be an opportunistic writer with a rare talent for reselling her work, but what if she’s just plain run out of ideas? Or what if she doesn’t want to write anymore? The New York Post reported in January that she was attending Harvard Divinity School. What if she takes her skills and becomes, oh please help us, a religious leader? Who’s going to be there when we want to read about feuds in the Hamptons or about club promoters doing cocaine or about a bunch of models who live in the same house and compete for the same jobs and men?

We don’t know, but we’re not worried. If she ever leaves, um, journalism, for something else, she’ll always know how to find a good publicist.

Best Prude
Bruce Weber

"Wait a minute—I’m offended!" What would the New York Times call a theater critic who walked out of a play because he was offended by the subject matter? In the case of Bruce Weber, they call him a Times’ theater critic.

Weber managed some classic mewling in his review of Discordant Duets, a play that showed the amazing range of the New York City Fringe Festival by actually being pro-Christian. Very distraught to actually consider a culture outside of the Times, Weber wrote that he didn’t like the play for "a very simple reason: it presumes that life’s problems have one unambiguous solution."

Weber’s problem is more with the "one unambiguous solution" discussed in Discordant Duets. He’s certainly quick to dismiss the play as something meant for a "simple-minded" and "born-again crowd." He also left during the second act because he was so offended by many ideas expressed in the play.

Of course, theater critics like Weber usually consider that response to be a significant measure of success. Maybe the play just struck too close to home for the sensitive Weber.

Best Dodge by a Weatherman
Al Roker’s Q&A with Jennifer Barrett in Newsweek

More hot air. We think his morning tv show on NBC is idiotic, but anytime someone manages to pull back from the brink of morbid obesity, we’re happy for them. We’re less happy about Al Roker’s performance in the role of America’s Weatherman.

In a synergized June 20, 2003, interview with GE’s/NBC’s/Newsweek’s Jennifer Barrett (also appearing on msnbc.com), Roker smilingly managed to make total nonsense out of a straightforward question about this summer’s bizarre weather and its connection to global climate change. After recounting the "wacky" weather experienced all over the planet, including record-breaking droughts, floods, tornadoes and heat waves, Barrett asked Roker to put it all in some context.

"You’re going to have anomalies all the time," replied the jolly, see-no-evil Roker, employing a new definition of "anomaly" as "something that happens all the time."

"You can point to it and say it is because of global warming or La Niña or El Niño. But sometimes stuff just happens. Because patterns have shifted, nature looks for balance. If it’s bad in one place, then it’s probably better than normal someplace else. The atmosphere and environment are always trying to balance out."

Any questions? Oops. Too late. America’s Weatherman is tired of explaining the fucked up weather, so the interview shifts to safer ground:

Barrett: "How long do you think you’ll keep covering weather for Today?"

Roker: "My mentor, Willard Scott, said ‘Never give up your day job.’ And this is my day job. I’m just fortunate NBC lets me do these outside projects."

Barrett: "Like your new barbeque book?"

Roker: "Yes, exactly. And with the weather improving, people will want to barbeque more, and they will probably want to go out and buy my book. Really, if you want to guarantee yourselves a sunny barbeque, you need to get Al Roker’s Big Bad Barbeque Book."

We feel better already.

Best Parenthetical by a New York Press Columnist
Michelangelo Signorile
"The Gist" (July 30, 2003)

Take that, George Will. "Full disclosure: I once spit on Mrs. Sheldon Lafferty while sitting on the Ricki Lake Show, after which she screamed, ‘You spit on me!’ It was, honestly, a complete accident—though I must say, honestly, that I don’t feel sorry about it."

Best Queer-Feminist Zine
LTTR—Lesbians to the Rescue
www.lttr.org

Grey matters. The latest, greatest example of queer girls’ DIY endeavors, LTTR (the "Listen Translate Translate Record" issue) is the offspring of K8 Hardy, Emily Roysdon and Ginger Brooks Takahashi. The second installment comprises essay, photography, oil paintings, collage, music and small sculptures and, even more so than the debut issue, it’s a dynamic and thought-provoking documentation of a corner of queer culture.

This new issue is a package just intricate enough to evoke Christmas morning. You may not be able to put it back together exactly as it came, but that’s not the point. (The fine print actually suggests that readers hang it on the wall or donate it to a library.) Through some dogged fundraising, these folks manage to put out something that’s at once attractive and high-quality, both in appearance and content. Even if you’re not part of this thriving, swelling subculture, LTTR is a compelling and important magazine.

Best Use of Hendiadys to Sell a War Plan
"Shock and Awe"

One by means of two. Originally used in a 1996 National Defense University paper entitled "Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance" this particular coupling of nouns generated reams of commentary at the start of the Iraq war. None mentioned the ancient and deceptively potent rhetorical turn that may or may not have been its genesis.

A hendiadys, as we all know, expresses a single idea with two nouns instead of a noun and its qualifier. It may seem ludicrous to suppose the war’s most famous tagline evolved from so redundant a phrase as shocking awe, but then this is precisely what a hendiadys is good for; it parses out redundancy, thereby amplifying and adding force to the original idea. Now perhaps the most apt phrase to describe the current condition in Iraq comes not by a hendiadys, but by an oxymoron: bloody peace.

Best Hope for American Media Landscape
The Guardian, U.S. edition

Jeeves, I say! Where’s that morning paper? At the age of 19, we discovered the Guardian during our first European excursion. We were a little hyper in those days, truth be told. We wore a backwards Stussy baseball hat, and we annoyed the shit out of our sophisticated Edinburgh hosts by blasting Gang Starr in their little European clown car.

We also learned a lot about the U.S. media through the method of compare and contrast. It was during this trip that we watched a four-hour Noam Chomsky documentary on BBC, during prime time no less. "No way!" we exclaimed, and then went on breathlessly about how the American BBC, the CPB, should stand for the Corporation for Petroleum Broadcasting, not Public, because it’s supported by corporations and Chomsky would never ever appear on—"Yes, yes, we know," our hosts interrupted us, returning to their tea and spliff.

We’ve been reading the liberal-left London broadsheet off and on ever since, and were cheered mightily by reports that during the Iraq war, millions of our compatriots were turning to the Guardian website to supplement their U.S. news intake. It is a further sign of hope that the Yankee traffic was and remains heavy enough to lead to serious rumors about an American edition of the paper. The writing in the Guardian is outstanding, its reporting fresh, the range of voices in its pages a damn sight wider than any daily currently on the American racks. We say, bring it on.

Best Law Passed by the City of New York
Cellphone Ban at all Public Performances

Best Unused Bridge
Honeywell Bridge over the Sunnyside Railyards in Long Island City

Where’s that confounded bridge? With the city so deep in economic-crisis mode, it’s nice to know that big bucks are still being spent on things we don’t have much use for.

After being closed for almost 25 years, the Honeywell Street Bridge, which runs over the Sunnyside railyards in Queens, was finally reopened for traffic on January 17 after an expensive renovation. The bridge was closed in 1979 when the Department of Transportation found severe deterioration in the bridge’s steel structure, and it was at one point slated to be torn down. After legislators put up a fight, the bridge was eventually saved, and construction on it began at the end of 2001 in conjunction with the Queens Boulevard Bridge rehabilitation project. The cost of the combined project: $72 million.

The result, almost a quarter of a century after its predecessor was condemned, is a top-of-the-line bridge with new steel and concrete, connecting Northern Boulevard to Skillman Avenue and Sunnyside to Long Island City.

Unfortunately, traffic on the bridge is way lower than the DOT had expected. Wonks at the DOT wax poetic about the bridge nonetheless, but there are plenty of people in the city who just went through severe budget cuts who could probably think of better ways to have spent the money it took to save a bridge that nobody uses.

Best Conflict of Interest at the Daily News
Richard Schwartz

Haven’t we met before? If you, like us, make the daily mistake of reading the Daily News, you may have seen umpteen editorials praising Giuliani and his legacy. To this day, the op-ed page pushes for Bloomberg to imitate Giuliani and curses him out when he doesn’t. Just one thing: The editorial-page editor, Richard Schwartz, is a former senior advisor to Giuliani and a personal friend of our former mayor. We find it curious and worthy of note that Schwartz praises welfare reforms from the safety of the anonymous editorial board when he personally devised many of Giuliani’s welfare reforms.

Best New Free New York Publication
New York Sports Express

We got your synergy right here, baby. We’re proud of our new little brother. We think he’s very cool, and we don’t take kindly to dissenters or bullies. He wears glasses, but he also has the most obscenely comprehensive sports tv listings on the archipelago. But the real reason you probably grab it every Thursday out of an orange box or mannish bar near you is because it’s the funniest, best-written sports rag in the country. You hear that, SI eggheads? You listening, ESPN.com buffoons? Do you need sign language accompaniment, you drowning children at the Post?

This is weekly Yankees and Mets analysis so sharp it cuts through old leather like fresh cantaloupe, so bright you can’t stare at it for long. Where else can you get 600 words of Sid "ALL CAPS" Rosenberg without commercial interruption? Bet-the-loft betting tips, ringside boxing news, off-season hockey—shit, they’ve even got two guys writing on soccer. And American football by Matt "Danny Aingel Dust" Taibbi.

Did we mention the sports crime blotter so powerful senators get debriefed on it over morning bacon? What about the grittiest round-up of local city sports since never? The only thing you won’t find in NYSX, folks, is NASCAR. And even that’s not true.

NYSX rocks you like a hurricane, just like the stadium anthem says.

Best Whipping Boys
Tie: Mayor Bloomberg, the MTA

Fit to be tied. When someone goes on vacation to Israel to get away from it all, you know that guy’s got problems back home. We were once tempted to cut Hizzoner some slack. After all, he did inherit an economy that was plunging into a recession and a federal disaster area for a downtown, not to mention his predecessor’s fuzzy accounting and the overinflated shoes he left behind to fill. But… No. Fuck Mayor Bloomberg.

Here are a few tips for our billionaire bureaucrat: Don’t close down six engine companies (most of them in poorer communities). Don’t allow the biggest fare increase in MTA history to stand. Don’t increase fines for minor infractions to astronomical proportions and then send the cops on a ticket-writing frenzy to make up for lost revenue. Don’t get all San Francisco on us and ban smoking in restaurants and bars.

Crap. Too late.

And speaking of hate, we have plenty to spare for you too, MTA. Last we checked, you were running at record ridership and revenue under Giuliani. Yet somehow, the minute Bloomberg set foot in office, you cried poverty. After increasing fares 33 percent, all commuters have to show for it are even more ridiculous service changes (with frequently inaccurate signage accompanying same) and the closure of dozens of part-time booths and turnstiles. To top it off, you’re holding on to your books tighter than a social club accountant.

Fuck you too, MTA.

Best Overstatement by a Salon Writer
Dave Talbot, editor, Salon

Look at me! Hey, look at me! I’m important! We realized a long time ago that Salon is just another free alt-weekly without the wasted paper. Seems nobody told editor David Talbot, who doesn’t know that his site’s contributions to political discourse and free speech are about as valuable as, say, those of the Village Voice. Need evidence? Choke on this:

"The enemies of a free and critical press—like the ministers of information at the Wall Street Journal—want to write off Salon as dead. With our voice silent, there will be one less bullhorn to question the wisdom of our country’s current direction."

Yeah, right, Dave. Do you really think the folks at Mother Jones, the Atlantic, Harper’s, the Progressive or even the Nation will notice a slight upsurge in power once your servers are turned off? Salon is as important to a free and critical press as Joey Bishop was to the Rat Pack.

Joey who?

Best Rambling, Pointless, Local TV News Commentary
Channel 5’s Christopher Jones

Alzheimer’s is a terrible thing to waste. Time was, our goal in life was to be Bill Beutel. Clearly too old and out of it to do any real reporting, Channel 7 would roll him out at the end of the news once or twice a week and let him say whatever the hell he wanted—usually some comparison between historical events and this crazy modern world we live in. Clearly, he didn’t worry about fact checkers or any nonsense like that (there was always one historical reference that was just wrong), and he always had a lot on his mind about very little.

Not too long ago, Bill was retired from that position (or maybe he was fired after dropping his pants on the air, or maybe he died, we’re not sure). In a rush to fill the local Andy Rooney vacuum, Channel 5 gave us Christopher Jones and his "Bottom Line."

In the years just prior to this new gig, Jones, who was no longer the glamorpuss news shows are looking for, had been reduced to covering human interest stories. He made no bones about how bitter he was about this, openly complaining about stories on-air as he reported them (oh, how he loathed covering the Nathan’s hot-dog-eating contest!). Apparently realizing he’d be bitchy whatever he did, the bosses backed off, invited him back the studio and gave him the cushy "bitchy commentator" position.

Since then, Jones has complained about youth trends, about packaging and about news of the day. Mostly he’s pointed out the obvious. Crime is a bad thing, according to Jones, and people who use golf umbrellas in Manhattan are obnoxious. We get the impression that he’s trying to be funny sometimes, but he’s simply not.

Still, we watch him obsessively, our mouths hanging open in a mixture of horror and awe, wondering how in the hell Fox News is justifying this to themselves. Our favorite part comes at the very end, when Jones finishes up and the camera cuts back to the often-befuddled newsreaders, who are clearly asking themselves the very same question.

Best Pandering by a Movie Critic
Stephen Whitty

The quiver across the river. When it comes to desperate pandering by a movie critic, it’s hard to improve on the New York Post’s Lou Lumenick. Just admire the classic progression: Dorky-looking guy gets NYC daily gig, goes to the gym, gets a new haircut, begins carefully tailoring his reviews to meet what Hollywood expects to hear and eagerly starts manufacturing news items in a bid to buddy up to major players—not caring, of course, if what he’s reporting is vaguely true.

(Thanks to Kevin Smith, incidentally, for pointing out that last bit on IFC’s Dinner for Five chat show.)

Yes, Lou Lumenick is a fine example of transparent groveling in the name of criticism. And yet, in a stunning upset, Lumenick’s beat out this year by a stellar showing from the Newark Star-Ledger’s Stephen Whitty. Check out this line from Whitty’s review of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where the critic really goes the extra mile in laboring his insight:

"After decades of Anglo-American actors, it’s a relief to see Captain Nemo—aka Prince Dakkar of India—with his original ethnicity restored."

You hear that, people? Whitty’s relieved—and it’s surely not just because he’s a tired hack desperately seeking to seem enlightened. On the other hand, let’s note that Whitty’s under a lot of pressure. After all, he’s ignored in media circles, while Star-Ledger colleague Matt Zoller Seitz is regularly applauded for his insightful film criticism at New York Press.

It must get awfully uncomfortable around that water cooler.

Best Reson to Move to Canada

Best Arts Quarterly
Cabinet Magazine

Curios and curiouser. The finest thing to come out of Brooklyn since our grandmother, every issue of Cabinet is a deft collection of ephemera and anecdote, a Mütter Museum of themes. Every time, we’re left in the dust, wondering where they find their peculiar contributors.

Especially when it’s sitting amongst the competition. Artforum reads like industry stock listings; those Wallpaper* clones have just done Vanity Fair one better. They consist entirely of ads, or articles that mimick ads—women’s magazines for design fags. Some, like Metropolis, are all but bereft of copy.

Cabinet functions as any good quarterly. It presents you with a sizeable wealth of information and lets you take a couple months to absorb it. Their spring issue addressed the historical and societal significance of beheading, provided a history of amputee cricket games and a history of the pigment ultramarine. The writing is densely informative (footnoted, even) while still cheerfully meandering; creative writing without the sophomoric, self-centered writing-workshop sloppiness.

Like the best of artists, it’s not wrapped up in gallery gossip nor weighed down by Fluxus antics. Rather than making a big deal of how creative it is, Cabinet functions creatively, leaving the bullshit back at art school. Would that more people did.

Best Radio Station
Channel 632, Soundscapes
Time Warner Digital TV, Music Choice

Pump up the volume. We only got digital cable a few months ago, so we’re still getting to know the new features and channels. Our couch-commando instincts are propelling us forward though, and every night we branch out into the triple digits. One night while trying to hit BBC America on 106, we accidentally entered 601 and were treated to a Snoop and Dre duet from The Chronic. We pushed the Info button, but all it said was, "Beat-boxing, break-dancing, graffiti tags, DJ scratching, fat laces."

Channels 601 (old-school rap) to 645 (Mexican) are 24-hour, commercial-free music stations. There are no videos, and each song’s vitals are displayed—name, year, album, artist—often with a picture of the album cover, sometimes with artist facts and trivia. The sound quality isn’t great and the rotation is spotty, but we’ve yet to be disappointed by the spread of genres—from showtunes to new wave to contemporary Christian, many with multiple subcategories.

Our newest favorite is 632 (Soundscapes), featuring music by international DJs and new releases from smallish bands like the Act. Channel 631 (reggae) comes in a close second with obscure dub and ska recordings and surprises like tracks from Maya Angelou’s album. We’re told that in some areas we could actually purchase CDs through our cable box, but that’s just a little too Bill Gates for us right now. We’ve only just accepted that our trusty transistor radio is only good for the weather and headlines.

Best Horse’s Ass
Madeleine Albright

At least Bill Cohen’s zipped his trap. Madeleine Albright, a Secretary of State in the Clinton administration, is currently promoting a book, Madame Secretary, that almost no one will read. Not even Al Franken. No crime there: When you’ve got a stinker that’s destined for "80 percent off!" sales at Barnes & Noble about two weeks after release, every bit of publicity helps.

But J.F.O. McAllister’s brief interview with Albright in Time’s Sept. 22 issue illustrates, in just 10 questions, what an embarrassment this woman was as a representative of the United States to the rest of the world.

McAllister asks: "Do you ever succumb to schadenfreude?"—a reference to Bush’s change of stance in foreign policy from the 2000 election until after 9/11—to which Albright replies, "No, I’m much too kind and generous a person."

We suppose that was supposed to be a joke.

Take her position on Yasser Arafat. When asked if Bush is correct in ignoring the terrorist, Albright says: "I think that’s been a mistake. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s much fun to talk to him. I don’t think he’s a force for good, but he’s part of the story."

Brilliant, Madame Secretary: You’ve realized, unlike your former boss who gave the killer bear hugs at the White House, that Arafat, "isn’t a force for good."

Then there’s this beaut. McAllister: "Should the U.S. have invaded Iraq?"

Albright: "I always believed Saddam has the kind of record that justifies taking action. I didn’t see Saddam as an imminent threat, which is where I parted company with [the Bush administration]… I think the whole thing has been mishandled."

We won’t waste much more ink on this, but if Albright "always believed" that Saddam’s reign of brutality in Iraq justified taking action, why was she against the 2003 invasion?

Best Proof of our Readership’s Short Attention Span
"Maakies" who?

Burning more bridges per annum than any other editors! J.T. LeWho? Alexander Cockshisname? Neal Pollhack? Actually, we didn’t fire everyone who disappeared from the masthead. Christopher Caldwell, for one, is a gem. A real professional, a man we’ve long admired and still respect. We simply parted ways—under good terms. The same goes for William Bryk and his "Old Smoke" column, a writer and his work so perfectly integrated that it’s raised the bar higher for all other would-be columnists.

We’d like to take this chance to thank the writers and artists who stayed with us as well as those who returned from the hinterlands for another run with New York Press.

As for the rest of you—ye, who bitched and moaned about the old lapdogs put out to pasture? Who logged voicemail protests when we condemned your favorite rock revival band? Who blogged your hearts out when we dared to change the fonts?

Eat us.