I pour beers and bar-back at a little place [in Carrol Gardens]. Great place. We get a good crowd on Sundays for NFL football... So anytime someone would squeeze up near the taps to order a drink, if they were of the female persuasion, he'd strike up a convo. "So... are you a Green Bay fan?" type stuff. Within a line or two, he'd mention that he wrote for Gawker, and the girl would get interested, ask a few questions about "that life" (I’m very serious, one girl asked, “What’s that life like?”), and then eventually they'd take their beer and walk away. Some of his answers were so funny and vague:

Girl #1: Cool, what kind of stuff do you write? Mugged Guy: You know, we do a little bit of everything over there. Girl #4: Wow, how did you get into that? Mugged Guy: Well... I was an English major in college. Girl #6: Gawker? Never heard of it. Mugged Guy: Oh, really. It's like, a very influential media blog. I mean, we touch on everything important in this city.

Haha "touch" is right. A description of the perp:

He was short and skinny, but had long arms that took up a bunch of space. He had short black hair, a stubbly little stubble thing going on all over his face, and some thick black glasses. He was also a Packer's fan and had enough green on to prove it. He also would work in, “little white guy” and then shrug a lot when talking about his mugging... "You know, I mean that's just the price you pay if you want to pursue this type of career. Um could I get a High Life for the lady?" was his response at one point.

I overheard this shtick (multiple times) while bartending this past Sunday. If he's not a Gawker employee, I just wanted to say, "Damn, congrats. You've become a pick-up line for hipsters working the pity angle."

Well, no one here is a Packers fan. So it's definitely not one of us. We'd like to set up a blind date with him and any interested commenter if he wants to make contact, though.

The latest (and well-researched) anti-snark missile comes from Geekcentric:

"Somewhere along the line we stopped using snark on the people who “deserved it” and started snarking at normal people. In fact, with the advent of email and open comment sections, many bloggers have discovered that the line between celebrities who are worthy of scorn and normal people who are just doing their jobs is a very thin line indeed.

I remember tearing into Ken Levine when he mocked my favorite television show on his blog. Ken is an Emmy-winning writer/producer/director — the creator of some of the most popular shows on television. Exactly the kind of elitist celebrity jerk that it’s safe to make fun of — until he shows up in your comment section and turns into a real human being.

Suddenly this Hollywood luminary, so famous I couldn’t really conceive him as a person, was addressing my comments and taking me seriously. He tried to be polite and respect my opinion, and it’s very hard to snark at somebody after that."

That's a good defensive strategy for the snarked-upon, actually!

NYU Local, on the other hand, is more of the opinion that some websites such as this one just aren't snarky enough anymore and have in fact "lost [their] edge":

"These days, it’s tough to imagine a world where Gawker, current media gossip mega-site and “flagship” of the Gawker Empire, had enough chutzpah to really piss people off."

You should see my inbox, sweetie!

"The internet was the happy place where smart people could finally scream “FUCK EVERY1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”—a sentiment I never thought I’d miss. But with Gawker now adding “Well, I guess some people are actually okay,” the sardonic are alone again in their silence."

The writer has an adorably overinflated idea of this and other snarky websites' importance. Let's take that down a notch: we'll begin by oversharing that some of us are working from home today and not wearing any pants. (It's hard to be sophisticated while not wearing pants—but it's so much easier to be snarky!)

If there was less snark, the world would maybe, possibly be a better place. But it would be way less fun. Snark is an essential social release mechanism, like blowing off steam at the bar and talking shit about everyone in your industry after work. Gossip is necessary as a way of exchanging vital social information.

Perhaps we'll begin by putting on some pants.

Update:

It's not the Feds. And the "job background check" line was a fraud. Furthermore, these PI's were hardly stealthy. They've been randomly knocking on the doors of people like my parents' neighbors, asking what they knew about me. In a small, tight-knit place like my hometown, this was guaranteed to immediately be passed on to my family and to me.

Which means that this investigation is either amateurish, or that whoever hired these PI's wanted me to know about it. I think a bit of both. I was back in my hometown last week, and got hold of the business card of the female PI. The next day, she appeared on my mom's street, knocking on the neighbor's doors, in search of...what? Info about my old Halloween costumes? It's hard to tell. I became convinced this wasn't a top-notch operation when this happened: she knocked on the door of my mom's house. My stepfather answered, and she asked if he knew me, and how. "Yes, I'm married to his mother," he replied.

This caused the PI to thank him and rapidly shut her notebook and start hustling off. My mom ran out and confronted her, as she was moving away at top speed. The PI allowed that she had a "client in New York" who was interested in me, but said little else. I unfortunately missed this episode, because a video clip would have been priceless.

Now: my own personal redemption story is sadly unoriginal. It's a little like David Carr's, but shorter, with fewer drugs, and not nearly as entertaining. It's also not a secret to anyone who knows me, making it pretty poor blackmail material. The practice of turning up at the houses of random tangential acquaintances could really not accomplish anything in an "investigative" sense. So let's call the whole endeavor what it really is: an attempt at intimidation.

So who hired these people? I can't say for sure, although the lies they used as their opening lines, along with their weird tactics, have given me some very strong suspicions. The only logical candidate, as far as I can tell, would be someone pissed off at something I wrote for Gawker, and looking to strike back in the sleaziest way possible. (Or maybe I'm wrong and I'm soon to get an awesome job offer!)

I'm just a blogger. I don't cover national security or break news of secret business mergers. But the idea that it's okay to hire private eyes as retaliation for people covering you didn't work out too well for HP, for (a much more consequential) example, where it turned into a huge scandal. It's fine to ask questions. But it's a dirty move to go around telling lies in order to ask questions, and hiring a PI is a pretty standard attempt to impose a chilling effect on reporting.

Late last week I got the PI, Steven Brown, on the phone. He didn't seem particularly happy to hear from me, despite his innate curiosity in me. When I first asked him why he was using a lie to ask around about me, he said "I don't really know." That made me laugh. Then he said, "Well, it's not something malicious." That made me laugh too. Then he hemmed and hawed and politely declined to tell me who his client is, and eventually got off the phone.

But hey, maybe there really is a fantastic job offer out there that I know nothing about? They wouldn't tell me, but maybe they'll tell you. If you'd like to ask the PI's about their work, you surely can:

Names: Steven Brown (THE BOSSMAN) and Rachael Singleton (THE RANDOM DOOR-KNOCKER)
Website: StevenKBrown.com
Email them!: Steve@stevenkbrown.com
Rachael@stevenkbrown.com
You can call their office!: 904-819-9700
Or call toll free!: 888-299-7574
Or fax them!: 904-826-1071
You can even call Rachael Singleton's cell phone (From her business card): 904-814-4074

If you're in the area, stop by their office (or write them a letter!) at 10604 Quail Ridge Dr., Ponte Vedra, FL, 32081. Here's a map.

Rachael Singleton stopped by my town's Historical Society a few weeks ago to look me up, for the "job," of course. She listed her home address on the sign-in sheet as 1069 Ardmore St., St. Augustine, FL 32084. That matches up with this listing for Mary R(achael) Singleton, at the phone number 904-940-1492. She was last seen rapidly fleeing my mom.

Steven Brown's claim to fame? He's the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Private Investigating. I suppose I should be proud to have such a worthy follower. Here are some photos of him:

Hey, mystery PI-hiring sleazo: why not save yourself some money and some embarrassing slinking around and just email me directly? I'm a pretty friendly guy.

I am the least literary of all Gawker writers, and therefore the least qualified to comment on the contents of Gessen's book (which I haven't read). So I just complained that he talks about Harvard way too much (which he does). But Gessen responded!

Hamilton: I do say Harvard a lot, don't I? It's impolite, right? You know who doesn't ever mention where they went to school? People whose parents went there before them, or paid for a lot of tutoring. In my book I was writing about a certain subset of guys and I didn't think it served any purpose to be coy about where they went to school. But how's this—if you send me your copy I'll cross out all the references to Harvard and replace them with the college of your choice.

So I did. Sheila donated her copy of his book, and I took it and gave it to him at his party. I considered having him replace all Harvard references with Oral Roberts University, but eventually settled on Florida State University, on the theory that middlebrow is even funnier than lowbrow.

Do you agree? Disagree? Either way, you fall on one side or the other in the culture war!

Gessen lost Sheila's book, but, to his credit, replaced it with a brand new copy, and kept his word by replacing every reference to Harvard, by hand. And there are a lot. In the front of the book, he wrote (as best as I can make out):

At the request of Hamilton Nolan, all references to Harvard in this copy of All the Sad Young Literary Men have been replaced with "Florida State" or "FSU." I've also replaced dorm names and bar names, where necessary.

The "Sam" character still moves to Boston after college—I don't see why he wouldn't be able to do that just as well from FSU. Of course he would find the weather more depressing. Otherwise the tone of the force(sp?) of the book and its complaint(sp?) remain intact.

Keith Gessen
New York
6/30/08

Please: take a moment to reflect on all of the various threads of the literary, social, cultural, urban, educational, academic, media, and Gawkerist zeitgeist that are summed up in this single item. It is truly staggering. Do you want to keep it under glass? Burn it? Either way, it has a power over you that you cannot deny.

We are auctioning off this totemic volume for charity. All proceeds will be donated to the New York Coalition For the Homeless—the organization that will be responsible for sheltering all of us once this writing hustle plays itself out.

The link to the eBay auction is here. We listed the book last night at $10; bidding currently stands at $105. But it should rightly go much higher. It's for a good cause.

What price is too great to pay in order to own this, the new version of the "Morris" character's speech on p. 72?:

"There's this thing about guys from FSU. They think everything's fine, just because they went to FSU. And for them, you know, it is. Even the most mediocre mediocrity can make a nice life for himself in New York if only he went to Florida State fucking University."

[Bid for it here.]

From Emily Magazine, excerpted here and there for length:

"Before I get into this, I’ll save you the trouble of pointing out that I used to work at Gawker. I quit that job, and one of the reasons I quit was that I wasn’t comfortable with being shady, insulting, and two-faced. It’s not that I’m saying I’m some kind of moral beacon, I just am terrible at dissembling, acting one way to someone’s face and another way behind their back. And I’m not a hardnosed investigative journalist who will do anything for the story, no matter who gets hurts. I don’t like the idea of hurting people. It took me quite a while to realize this, and if you want to criticize me for having taken quite a while to realize this, go ahead. That’s valid. But just because I used to hurt people doesn’t mean I now have to approve of it when other people do.

"A woman named Susannah Breslin called me around the time that my Times magazine story came out, saying that she wanted to interview me for a piece she was writing about the Sex and the City movie... None of my quotes ended up in her article, which I was grateful for. However, I wasn’t particularly grateful when she wrote a post on her personal blog about how snotty I’d seemed on the phone. More recently, about the paragraph-long excerpt from an essay included in my book proposal that was posted on New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer blog, Breslin wrote a post on her blog entitled “Vomit,” which reads in part:

“This writing is so god awful I thought it was worth pointing out. I love the blogosphere, and the blogs, and the blogginess of the world, but one thing blogs have done is given people who write the perception they are writers.”

We'll break in here to judge—not professional, Suze. But, Em! We wouldn't have even known about this had you not called it to our attention. Anyway:

Yesterday afternoon I was waiting around for various deliveries and installations of things and I wasn’t screening my calls. So I picked up the phone. It was Jessica Coen, who used to work at Gawker and who now works at New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer blog, I guess overseeing it somehow, though during our conversation she was quick to point out that it’s not like at Gawker — “I’m not in in there in Moveable Type or anything” — so I guess this means she doesn’t have direct control over anything anyone writes there.

Daily Intelligencer posts don’t have bylines, but because one of their editors has always been friendly to me in person and wrote me a supportive, fuck-the-haters type email when that Times piece came out, I’ve been assuming that the really ad hominem posts about me on there — which are the fourth and fifth Google results for my name, respectively — have been written by the other editor, Chris Rovzar, who I don’t remember ever having met. Rovzar is one of the best Gossip Girl recappers of our time, and that’s saying something. But his posts about me are not only gross, they’re full of basic factual errors. He accuses me of documenting my “burps and blow jobs” and says, innacurately, that I “while at Gawker [I] made the site all self-referential, to the detriment of pageviews.” Well, okay, except that my Gawker posts still get more pageviews than the posts of some writers who actually currently work there. He has also taken me to task for misrepresenting bloggers to America, and for using the personal pronoun too many times in a personal essay.

Anyway, back to my conversation with Jessica Coen. “We have a very good source who says that you got a million dollars from Regan Arthur at Little, Brown,” she told me. I told her that rumor was wrong in all its particulars. I didn’t know then that Publisher’s Weekly and Publisher’s Marketplace had already run items about the book’s sale, which were correct in all their particulars (except that PW daily called it a “memoir,” a word that makes my skin crawl and which apparently makes everyone else’s skin crawl, too. What is a 26 year old who hasn’t overcome an addiction or been a child soldier doing writing a MEMOIR? But it’s hard to figure out what else to call a book of autobiographical stories, I guess. That is a few too many words to fit onto a computer screen, apparently.)

Anyway, I told Jessica, off the record, to look for a press release, and then — stupidly! — I took the opportunity of having her on the phone to ask her why her site’s coverage of me was so personal and so negative. I don’t know what I wanted her to say, really. “I don’t like you and I never did”? That would have been kind of gratifying, I guess. Instead, though, she talked about how she was sure, having been there, I understood what it was like. And she “apologized.” She said,

“I’m sorry you’ve found it hurtful.”

Look, it’s not like Jessica Coen and I were ever friends, but there was a time — I guess when I worked at Gawker — that we were friendly.

Oh, and then there’s Rachel Sklar, who was so nice to me when I worked at Gawker, always sending me such long, chatty emails, especially when she wanted something she’d written to be linked to. Sometimes I’d write something about Julia Allison that would make her angry and she’d send me long, crackpotty, strange emails. She’s also a friend of a friend. She has never been anything but incredibly nice to me in person. And lately she has been one of my harshest critics, writing cattily and condescendingly about me on the Huffington Post’s Eat the Press blog.

“For anyone who has followed the saga of Emily Gould, this week’s New York Times magazine cover story comes as a shock only to the extent that they would publish it,” one of her posts began. Of course Rachel Sklar thinks my “saga” is old news. She used to live in Josh Stein’s apartment building. This is a person who has been inside this machine so long she no longer realizes that a world exists outside of it.

Yesterday, her post about my book deal included four references to my appearance and the speculation that I might be tempted to pose for Playboy...

It’s true, the kind of coverage my book deal has gotten has been a far cry from the kind of support that Sklar’s friend Skurnick got when her deal for a collection of nostalgic pieces about classic young adult novels was announced. I guess there probably aren’t a lot of bloggers, blog-editors and freelance writers sitting around thinking “I am the perfect person to write a collection of nostalgic pieces about classic young adult novels, but she gets to do it and I don’t! Bitch!”

Nothing personal, just business as usual! Um, enjoy the Fourth of July weekend, eating non-gossip sausages, everyone!

From How your Emily Gould gossip sausage gets made [Emily Magazine]

But it has nothing to do with the internet. It has nothing to do with “everybody.” Remember the old slogan, Choire—my sister had it on the back of her leather jacket when we drove cross-country in 1991—“Queers take back the night”? Well, we’re taking the internet back from you people. You’ve mucked it up something good.

TAKE BACK THE INTERNET!! From "you people," which means, specifically, Choire and Nick Denton. (Or maybe it is not "specific" at all!) Keith Gessen is going to reclaim the internet FROM THE GAYS.

QUEERS GIVE BACK THE INTERNET.

Choire and Emily [Keith Gessen Blog via YM]

[Key: Keith Gessen is the editor of n+1, an important literary journal, and the author of some novel about dudes trying to get laid. He used to date Emily Gould, a former Gawker editor. Former Gawker editor Choire Sicha wrote a story about how men are terrible novelists these days. Nick Denton is the publisher and acting managing editor of Gawker, a media gossip site that has devoted a bit of ink to the relationship of Gessen and Gould, which has upset both of them. Your day editor sincerely likes everyone involved, except Gessen, who seems like a tool.]

Nick Douglas
Jason Calacanis
Jackson West
Anil Dash
Allison Mooney
Lockhart Steele
Scott Kidder
Caroline McCarthy
Kelly Reeves
Jason Kottke
Peter Rojas
Lindsay Robertson
Julia Allison
Anthony Volodkin
Choire Sicha
Nicholas Carlson
Alisa Leonard
Jaclyn Johnson
Ana Marie Cox
Heather Snodgrass
Jessica Coen
Alex Blagg
Rex Sorgatz

Don't Shoot the Canary [YM]

[Photos: from Ext212's Flickr]

Like the rest of America, we missed the mention. But a loyal viewer said it went something like this:

"So far I've seen it on MediaBistro, Romenes... it got over 6,000 hits on Gawker."
[Screengrabs of Romenesko and Gawker on screen]

Over 6,000 hits! There is not a single item in history that was picked up from Romenesko and then went on to get 6,000+ views.

Screengrab? Or clip? Anyone?

Update: We have the Cashmere Mafia clip! It's amazing how "with it" this show is! Also it's totally up-to-date because Choire would never have let us use "Bitch" in a headline.