To: Amanda Marcotte From: Jonathan Ames Subject: Sad News, Showtime, Greenpeace, and My All-Around Nutty Friends

Dear Amanda,

In response to your first paragraph, I went to the Jewlicious story, and then I scrolled through The News Blog, and then went to Gothamist, and I feel sick. This is why I don’t read blogs. It’s like the treatment for the guy (Malcolm McDowell) in Clockwork Orange.

So I can’t make any intelligent commentary about children who have lost their mother and yet who are guided to think that she is in heaven for killing Jews. It’s tragic from every angle.

I skimmed/scanned The News Blog and read something about some conservative think tank/meeting, and there was part of a quote from Newt Gingrich somewhat blaming the residents of the 9^th ward in New Orleans for not being smart enough to flee, and the whole thing seemed like a real absurd and gross gathering (Ann Coulter was there, I take it). My general stance in life is: “I’m wrong and you’re wrong.” But conservatives do seem to be more wrong.

And about the triple-murder at Gothamist – last night I was walking through Manhattan after being in something called “The Rejection Show,” and there were all these ambulances and police cars and circling helicopters by St. Vincent’s Hospital (Seventh Avenue and Greenwich Street), this was around 9:50 p.m., and I asked someone what was going on and they said that some cops had been shot. And it was March 14^th and mild and balmy and everyone was happy with the weather, except we should have nights like this in May, not March. And there does seem to be more violence in NYC lately. Don’t know what to attribute it to. And the two cops who were killed were unarmed auxiliary policemen…

On a lighter note… about the Rejection Show: it’s put together by this guy Jon Friedman, who must be Jewish and so it’s good to mention him here on Jewcy, and he features acts who in some way address a rejection in their life, often a rejection in the entertainment field, though it can just be a general rejection. I showed a clip from my rejected TV pilot, “What’s Not to Love?”

In the clip, I box a naked guy in a hotel room (pre-Borat). I made this pilot in late 2004 for Showtime, but it wasn’t picked up for a series. But the people in the audience really enjoyed the clip, and I recently had a screening of the pilot at this nightclub in New York, Mo Pitkin’s, and that audience really liked it as well. Granted, it’s something of a hometown crowd playing it for these NY audiences, but it’s fun that it gets a good reaction.

Instead of my show becoming a series, Showtime went for a series based on the movie Barbershop, but I think it only lasted one season. If I knew how YouTube worked, I guess I could put my pilot up on YouTube, and then people could watch it. But what’s the point of that? Then again what’s the point of anything I do? Not much point. Oh, wait, my usual rationale – I’m a clown and the world has always needed clowns.

About the environment: you said that environmentalists are often stereotyped, most likely by conservatives, as ‘sanctimonious prigs’; well, if anyone could be/should be sanctimonious it’s an environmentalist – wanting to drink clean water and breathe clean air and not cause the extinction of millions of species is definitely something you can get on your high horse about. That said, it is just conservative propaganda to label environmentalists in a negative way, just as they falsely put forth that environmental actions are bad for economies, when usually it’s just the opposite – new environmental technologies will create more jobs, sustainable environmental practices (like green approaches to logging) will insure jobs down the road.

A few years ago, I spent two weeks on a Greenpeace boat in Alaska. They were up there because Bush was repealing the roadless rule and America’s beautiful rainforest, the Tsongas, was and is in danger, along with all the salmon, whales, eagles, bears, and everything else that is up there that needs the rainforest, including the human beings who survive off of fishing and hunting. It was the usual mess.

I was on the boat, covering this trip for Harper’s, and I loved being with the Greenpeacers. To me, they are true 21^st century bohemians – people living on the edge; people living out their ideals. I was very inspired. But then I couldn’t write the article. It was so meaningful to me that I had my first case of writer’s block. It really broke my heart that I failed. Anyway, check out www.greenpeace.org. I wish someone from Greenpeace would come clean up my apartment. I wish my mother would come clean up apartment. It’s really toxic in here, but I’m becoming a more and more insane bachelor as I get older.

About bohemians: in this modern world, modern economy, it’s hard for people to just live for art and survive, especially in New York. I would like to acknowledge three of my friends in New York, who despite the insane rents, still manage to live here and make wild and beautiful things: Dean Haspiel, Patrick Bucklew, and Reverend Jen.

Dean is an illustrator, cartoonist, and all-around nut, and we’re collaborating on a graphic novel for DC Comics, The Alcoholic, which will come out in 2008. I wrote the thing and Dean is doing the artwork and bringing my words to life. I finished writing it in January and Dean has started in on the artwork.

Patrick is a painter, sculptor, performance artist and all-around nut. We’ve collaborated on a lot of things together. If you go to his website, there might be some disturbing images, but also a lot of beautiful paintings.

Reverend Jen is a writer, performer, performance artist and all-around nut. She has a troll museum in her apartment.

Anyway. I’ve been reading this book, Perfume, the last few days and I’m loving it. I’m at this point in the novel where the protagonist is living in a cave in a mountain for seven years. I’d like to do that. Just hide and sleep forever and yet not die.

You mentioned Camille Paglia, because of a link to a satire on her, and no I haven’t read Camille Paglia, or Ann Coulter for that matter, but I have watched UFC fights and they’re quite brutal and thrilling and horrible. I probably shouldn’t enjoy them, and if I saw the exact nature of the brain-injuries that these guys suffer, I probably wouldn’t enjoy the fights, in the same way that it’s hard to enjoy meat once you’ve seen an animal slaughtered.

Well, this hasn’t been the cheeriest of entries. Oh, yesterday you described what RSS is and my head began to spin, like the girl The Exorcist. That’s sort of a religious note and for more religious notes one can go to The Revealer (I think we’re supposed to mention each blog.)

So do come to this Spaulding Gray play in Austin and we can meet in person, if you like.

All the best and none of the worst,

Jonathan Ames

To: Jonathan Ames From: Amanda Marcotte Subject: RSS Feeds, YouTube, Laura Bush v. Ann Coulter, and Bono

Dear Jonathan,

I’m in awe of your ability to type/write 2,000 words in an hour. And here I was thinking that I was prolific.

In answer to your various questions: No, I’m not Jewish. I hope and suspect that’s not a problem. My last name comes from the mysterious tribe of French-Canadians. I’m not really paranoid, but I have heard here and there that some people suspect that feminists are paranoid, and my need to please the crowds forced me to tip my hat to those folks. And yes, Bill Donohue and the Catholic League are one and the same thing. I suspect that Bill Donohue thinks that he is all Catholics, as well. If you want to read my entire tale of woe in tangling with this man, I wrote about it in Salon.

In answer to your other question, I fear explaining what an RSS reader is to you if your eyes are already taxed from internet backgammon. (I used to have an addiction to internet gin rummy, so my sympathies are with you.) It’s a very simple, but maddeningly addictive internet tool. All you do is create an account at someplace like Google and then you start adding feeds from various blogs and websites that update regularly, so you can read them all in one place and assure yourself that you’re not missing out on anything.

I have 167 blogs feeding into mine right now. I highly recommend not getting one, if you cherish your free time. For that reason, I also applaud your decision not to have a TV. Left to my own devices, I wouldn’t have a TV, either, but that’s because I’m strapped to my RSS reader.

I will say that I’m detecting a slight tendency towards being a Luddite from you. Am I guessing right? Being a Luddite has the pleasant side effect of saving money, if nothing else.

Looking over your contest to determine the most phallic building in the world, I have to admit that I prefer your initial pick of the Williamsburg Bank Building over the eventual winner. Sure, the Ypsilanti water tower looks more like a penis than the Williamsburg Bank, but that doesn’t make it more phallic. The water tower has some of the organic-looking humility of a human penis, whereas the Williamsburg Bank strives towards the unrealistic grandeur that makes something truly phallic.

Ann Coulter may not seem like she’s a conservative ideal of womanhood at first blush, but after giving it some thought (and writing a blog post about it), I’m inclined to think she is an ideal, just a different one from Laura Bush. Laura Bush is the fantasy wife in the conservative world, but Coulter is the fantasy mistress. Laura Bush will make you feel like a patriarch, but Coulter’s faux wit and faux sexiness is supposed to make you feel like a man.

Looks like the guest bloggers at The News Blog are intently covering the Justice Department scandals today. That said, the blog post that caught my eye was this one about Viacom suing Google over YouTube, and what Viacom calls copyright infringement issues there.

Jonathan, I’m not sure if you’ve ever succumbed to the urge to watch videos on YouTube, but if you haven’t yet, I also recommend avoiding it. You can’t download entire movies to watch there, but for folks who go for the emotional highs and lows, you can watch just the clips of the most moving scenes and get your crying fix without spending more than the length of the scene to do so. It probably does violate all sorts of copyright laws, but it would be a shame to have this resource snatched away.

I’m adding The Revealer to my RSS reader right now. This item about how Bono’s new slogan “Africa is sexy” sealed the deal for me. The more I see of Bono, the less I like of him, and now that I’ve seen a lot of him, I probably have an unfairly low opinion of him. Surely there are many worse people out there who I should hold in lower esteem than I hold him, but I can’t because I don’t see enough of them to dislike them with the same intensity I reserve for Bono. My apologies if you are at all a fan of U2.

Looks like Maud is coming back to Texas for SXSW, and is happy that I’ve granted her official home girl status so she doesn’t have to feel like one of the Brooklyn hipsters that leave us local types both with a feeling of awe and disdain. The latter especially reserved for those who expect their food orders to show up in the same hour they’re ordered in restaurants downtown. Drink your beer and pipe down; you sound like the tourist you are. Locals know to get there and order your food before you’re really hungry, especially since no one here takes reservations, either. Hope you’re taking note for your upcoming visits here, Jonathan.

And with this letter coming in under 900 words, I must hang my head in shame compared to my correspondent.

Sincerely,

Amanda

To: Amanda Marcotte From: Jonathan Ames Subject: My Left Pinky and Bill Donohue's One-Man League

Dear Amanda,

I’m going to try address each of your major paragraph blocks in order. You began with talking about the The News Blog, but mostly you wrote about blogging and nothing specific about the site. I don’t say this as a criticism but just some kind of need to restate things so that it explains to the reader and to you my comments. Does that make sense?

About blogging: I’m way behind the times. I don’t read blogs and when I’ve gone to them I find them hard to navigate, and so I just don’t do it. (Except for one blog – see below when I talk about Maud Newton.)

Also, my vision is going and reading on the computer kills me or something. It’s the glare, I think. I’m a very slothful person. For two years I’ve had the name and phone number of an opthamolagist and yet I don’t call. I desperately need glasses. But I never take action in life until it’s practically too late.

I write on the computer and I play internet backgammon on the computer and this is killing my eyes. My eyes are blurry all the time and they hurt. I can’t make out people’s faces the way I used to. Maybe today, I’ll call the opthamolagist. I also have some weird condition in my hand – dupuytren’s contracture – and I need to call the hand doctor since my left pinky is starting to look like a fish-hook.

Even my 95 year-old great-aunt, whose vision may be worse than my own, said: “What’s wrong with your finger?” This was in the nursing home two weeks ago. This past week, I took her out, it was a bit warmer, and we went to a restaurant called ‘the Kosher Nosh’, located in Glen Rock, NJ. I ordered a smoked-fish plate and fed her little bits of lox, sable, and smoked whitefish, kind of the way you would feed a child, since she has, unlike a child, lost her appetite.

Then I bought her cigarettes and she smoked a Virginia Slims, which I had to get going for her by taking a hit off the thing and I nearly choked, and then I think the cigarette made her a bit sick and so she had to lie down when we got back to the nursing home. Anyway, I’m digressing . . . She wanted me to lie on the bed with her, because I was also exhausted, but I was afraid one of the nurses would come in and I’d get in trouble, though I often take a nap on her nursing-home bed and she sits in her chair and looks at me. But this is different from the two of us being in the bed together.

Well, this digression is sort of all right because I mentioned smoked-fish and I think the website we’re writing for is somehow connected to things Jewish, though I’m not entirely sure because when I went to the site I couldn’t really decipher what it was all about; this is not a fault of the site but my own blog problem.

One further thought on blogging: I used to write for the New York Press in the late 90’s and people used to really look forward to getting the Press when it came out once a week. It’s where people went for unusual, idiosyncratic writing, but now readers don’t have to wait once-a-week, they can, as you wrote, go to blogs and refresh constantly over the course of one day. So I feel the kind of writing I once did for the NY Press (I had a bi-weekly column) has been replaced by what happens in blogs. This is neither good or bad, just a change I’ve noticed.

When you mentioned The Revealer you referred to your RSS. I have no idea what that is, but I know that it must have something to do with the internet. You also mention that this site goes into issues about Catholicism, and the editor of Jewcy who asked me to do this, wrote to me something about you getting in trouble with the Catholic League, and I was wondering if the person you got in trouble with in the Catholic League is William Donohue?

If so, that fellow once wrote a letter into NY Press complaining about a column of mine. In that column, I recounted my visit to a Mexican strip club/brothel where some of the strippers were wearing Catholic schoolgirl outfits. I didn’t write that I thought this was a good thing but I did mention that the girls were awfully cute. Anyway, I think I was told by my editor at the NY Press, though my memory could be faulty, that William Donohue is the Catholic League, or at least he was back in 1999 when he wrote to the Press about me. I could be wrong about this, though. But my impression was that the guy was the self-appointed leader of a group that had only one member – himself. Nevertheless, he puts a lot of people on notice – if you make yourself President of something it helps to get your letters-to-the-editor published. Then again I could be completely wrong and there might be many members of the Catholic League. Is there a Protestant League? A Jewish League? There used to be a Negro League.

One blog I have glanced at on occasion – about once every two months – to find out what’s happening in the lit world is Maud Newton’s blog. She’s very bright and writes beautifully about books and her various passions. For example, she’s a big Graham Greene fan. I went through a Greene phase about ten years ago and read about fifteen of his novels. His use of the colon is quite remarkable.

I thought I should check out Gothamist and so I typed in Gothamist and got something completely wrong. So then I typed in www.gothamist.com and it worked, but see this is why I can’t take the internet.

There was a piece on there about how there have been no female bridge-painters, or, rather, no female bridge-painters hired. I have no strong feelings about this one way or the other. It seems like an injustice that will now be rectified. I don’t know if you need extra strong arms to hold onto cables and paint them but I’m sure women are strong enough to do this sort of job and this leads into the next subject:

I like your mention of the posting on Maud Newton of “this story about an errant penis snuck into an illustration in the first printing of Huck Finn.” And then your further mention of the “little Mermaid scandal,” which I had never heard about, and when I expertly followed your link I was shocked to see that horrific pink penis on the Little Mermaid video-box cover.

But you write that you’re a proper paranoid feminist. What do you mean by this exactly? What should a feminist be paranoid about in relation to these two things? I don’t ask in a confrontational away, but in an honest and curious way as a myopic fool/male, and I’m not talking about my organic eye problems above but a sort of intellectual blindness.

Pursuant to this, I should mention that I once had a contest called ‘The Most Phallic Building in the World Contest’ because I made a remark in an article for Slate in 2003 that living in Brooklyn with the Williamsburg Bank building was like being in a locker-room with Shaquille O’Neal, that you just had to look at the thing, and I also stated that the Williamsburg was the most phallic building in the world and then lots of people wrote to me saying that it wasn’t the most phallic building in the world. So I held a contest to determine which building is, in fact, the world’s most phallic.

Four years later, people still send me pictures of phallic buildings. Here’s a link to the contest, which was hosted by my friends at Cabinet Magazine, though I just tried the link and it didn’t work (I don’t know why): but maybe it will work later.

Your last mention had to do with Jewlicious and more Catholic issues. I more or less covered this above, though I am a bit worried that William Donohue will somehow get wind of our dialogue and give us a hard time, but I guess it won’t be too painful. But maybe he’s not even the person who gave you a hard time. Who knows? I imagine I could search the internet and find out what happened to you, but my eyes are already killing me.

I do want to say, not to appease William Donohue, though I am a people-pleaser at heart, that I like the Catholic churches. They are often so beautiful. A couple of times a year, I find myself staggering into some Catholic church and breathing in the dusty air and feeling sort of peaceful, and I meditate and pray in my own confused, agnostic, lost, disheveled, and despairing way.

And I like the fact that the Catholicism inspired Graham Greene to write so many novels of torment (see my mention of Maud Newton above.)

Well, I guess that’s it.

All the best,

Jonathan Ames

P.S. You mentioned enjoying living in Austin, TX. I am going to be there twice in the coming months. March 29^th at 8pm, I will be at the Paramount Theater in the cast of the Spalding Gray play – Stories Left to Tell, and on May 3^rd at 8pm, I will be telling a story as part of the Moth, and this will be at Alamo Draft House.