Radio (A Rant)

I've spent a lot of time driving lately.

My girlfriend, Lindsey, recently took a job in Round Rock and, rather than fight the traffic every morning, she's found herself an apartment near her work.

Seeing as I am the one with loads of free time on my hands and no real responsibilities, I've taken it upon myself to be the one to make the 17 mile trek to her apartment whenever I want to see her.

This means that I spend a good 30-40 minutes per day in the car. Seeing as it's April, I'm usually in a position to listen to the Astros valiantly flail about in the AL West while I'm driving. Unfortunately, today, the Astros had already lost by the time I was driving home and my iPhone was dead - rendering Spotify unavailable.

This meant that I was beholden to the caprices of terrestrial radio. I absentmindedly flipped through the stations until I found something acceptable - your standard top-40 stuff. After enjoying a little Adele, this song came on.

This is pure, unrepentant garbage.

In the first four seconds, the listener gains all she ever will from the song. There's a drumbeat, a few chords on the piano and the line:

I feel so close to you right now 

Being close to someone is a reasonable subject for a song, but it takes a turn toward turdliness immediately after that sentiment.

It's a forcefield

What is a force field? Closeness? Love?

Love is a great many things, and I suppose that it could be seen as a forcefield. Love often protects us from the worst parts of the world and the worst parts of ourselves, but here, divorced from any context, this line is meaningless.

Calvin Harris, the songwriter, continues.=:

I wear my heart upon my sleeve, like a big deal

Well we've solved the mystery of the forcefield. Apparently its chief utility is that it somewhat rhymes with the word "deal." Harris' heart is on his sleeve. He's not afraid to let the world know that he is surrounded by a forcefield of closeness. He will not hide his inanity from the hostile masses.

Your love pours down on me, surrounds me like a waterfall

This line isn't terrible, but it's not particularly meaningful either.

And there's no stopping us right now

Harris and his lover cannot be stopped.

I feel so close to you right now

The coda! Harris also gets to rhyme "now" with "now" thus making his job easier.

These same six lines are then repeated ad nauseum for the next four minutes, over the same simple hook.

Clearly, this song is devoid of any meaning or artistry. It's only value appears to be that it's simple and catchy.

There is no truth in this art.

It's just some simple rhymes that are tangentially related to some vague notion of love and commitment. No one learns anything from this song, no one can relate to this song - its meaninglessness makes it inherently unrelatable.

The question, then, is why is this song being played on the radio? No human being can actually enjoy it. It's not going to inspire anyone either personally or creatively. Two years from now, this song will be a relic remember by no one.

This isn't an indictment of pop music by any stretch. I enjoy a lot "disposable" art. I listen to Katy Perry's Peacock at least twice a month. But Katy Perry's music is fun. When you listen to Katy Perry, you're immediately excused from being a normal human being. Consuming her music is a conscious decision to give yourself over to a form of cartoonish hedonism for three minutes and fifteen seconds. You're granted a reprieve from being yourself and instead become the type of person who enjoys a song about passing out on a Friday night or being abducted by Kanye West.

By contrast, Harris' song does nothing. There is no catharsis in "I Feel so Close to You Right Now." It's music that is meant to be ignored.

This cannot stand. There is enough good pop music being produced right now, that there's no reason that Calvin Harris should ever destroy the integrity of the airwaves with his schlocky bullshit.

I implore all of you to write to Music and let them know that you're fed up. Only when we raise our voices as one will we be able to achieve justice.

Here's a palate cleanser to help choke down that spoonful of aural trash.

What I've Been Up To (An Update)

I've always had a complicated relationship with math. It started in the first grade.

I'd been aware of the joys of reading for several years (though most of the literature I consumed dealt with dinosaurs), but I had yet to be introduced to the world of arithmetic. I made it through kindergarten alright, when the only hurdle I had to overcome was being able to count from 1 to 100, but when they started throwing adding and subtracting into the mix I was overwhelmed.

I grasped addition fairly quickly (it is, after all, the cousin of counting), but subtraction alluded me. I remember very distinctly one of my first math assignments. It was a worksheet with a number of problems that I had to solve. (In my memory it was something like 25 questions, but my experience teaching second graders leads me to believe it was closer to 10).

It was a mix of addition and subtraction problems, which I understood. What I didn't understand, was how to subtract. So, in a moment of juvenile earnestness, I simply added every problem, confident that it was "close enough."

Shockingly, my first grade teacher, Ms. Dawn, didn't find my outside-the-box approach to mathematics as acceptable as I did, so she had a conversation with my mother about my struggles. In an attempt to aid my understanding, my parents sat down with me that night to work on math together.

My dad, an engineer and therefore a competent mathematician, explained to me that subtraction was just reverse addition, which turned out be exactly what I needed to make the concept click.

After that initial struggle, I traipsed ably through my elementary school curriculum. (It helped that most math at that level can be taught through the power of song.) I made straight-As and was in the gifted and talented program. I aced the TAAS in fourth grade (or I would have, had I not filled in the wrong bubble on one the scantron questions - I circled all the correct answers in my workbook).

My success continued in fifth grade, but fifth grade is also the time in one's life where you start to formulate a conception of yourself as an academic. I could certainly do math, I just didn't like math. I was a literary mind - a writer. So I naturally decided that math was not for me.

The sixth grade was where this newfound identity manifested itself into something with actual consequences. We started learning the most basic algebra - x + 4 = 5 and whatnot - and my struggles reemerged.

Come math time, my class was divided into groups. Those who understood the concepts got to stay in the classroom, while those who didn't had to retire to the desks in the hall and receive help from our student teacher.

Invariably, I would start in the classroom, become overwhelmed, and then request to go into the hall. After five or ten minutes, everything would click and I'd ask to be returned to the classroom.

I feel like I must have grasped the material, but I had decided that I was not good at math and therefore I became not good at math until I grew bored of being with the remedial students.

At my junior high, everyone was tracked. I was in the middle math track, and my teacher was an overweight woman who wore flowing purple pantsuits everyday - kind of like Stevie Nicks mixed with   Violet after she chewed Willy Wonka's three course gum. I remember that her name was Gigi, because she signed everything G^2 and was quite proud of that little pun.

Her room was always dark, illuminated only by the overhead projector. She kept a drawer of snacks in her room that she always fished in when we were working.

Looking back, I think she was probably depressed. She was always on the verge of crying, and did so every once in a while.

This, obviously, made her a target of 7th grade ridicule.

Anyway, she wasn't a terribly able math teacher. She'd been in the game for a long time and didn't seem to care whether her students learned or not.

I sloughed through her class alright, but there was no foundation for more advanced math really instilled in me - which didn't bother me in the slightest.

Eighth grade is where I had my first crisis of self. My teacher was a young guy just out of college. Our class didn't take him seriously and he returned the favor. I spent most of my math period vacillating between trying to distract the teacher and dicking around with my friends. This strategy didn't do much to facilitate any learning and, after one particularly inattentive six weeks, I took home my first and only C on my report card.

I don't know what my parents made of it. I think they were mostly flummoxed by their son. When I was 13 there were only two things I cared about - becoming a comedy writer and classic rock. I'm sure it was confusing to them when their son who, the year previous, had insisted on wearing Abercrombie and once loudly protested when his mother took him to Kohl's that he "didn't wear that kind of stuff anymore" had now switched to wearing exclusively black t-shirts from hot topic and Chuck Taylor's with ZOSO symbols drawn all over them.

(My life has been a procession of ill advised fashion decisions made in an effort to fit in. In 5th grade, when I wanted to be an athlete, I wore my baseball pullover everywhere. I also had a Braves hat from my little league days that I had frayed (because my cousin wore a frayed baseball cap) to the point that the fabric was not attached in the front and the plastic of the bill lay proudly exposed. I also insisted on wearing the hat into any body of water (natural or artificial) that I entered - this, too, was a signifier of my coolness. Seventh grade saw the aforementioned flirtation with proto-Jersey Shore apparel. Then there were the band shirts, which I defiantly wore during high school retreat of my freshman year to make sure that everyone at Trinity knew that I was cool and not bound by the crushing authority of their dress code. When I discovered girls in ninth grade I switched to American Apparel, which was the worst choice for me because all of their clothes are cut for boxy future frat-bros. When I bought Hot Fuss, I was determined to become indie-cool like Brandon Flowers and, in the most regrettable fashion decision of my life, I once wore a black tie over an army green Fender t-shirt to youth group. My senior year, I was introduced to the v-neck and my wardrobe has remained pretty consistent since then. It should also be noted that throughout all of these transitions I lacked both the fashion sense and a profligate enough mother to buy more than one or two pieces - so I just wore the same ensemble repeatedly, or some horrible mishmash of conflicting styles.)

To return to the narrative, my insistence on spending more time on learning the various guitars that Jimmy Page played on each album rather than on how to calculate the volume of a cylinder had rendered me utterly inept at math. I don't quite recall how this resolved itself. I have a vague memory of my parents and math teach and I having a conversation during the mandatory parent-teacher meetings where I pledged to focus more in class, which led to an uptick in my GPA.

The last time I succeeded in math was my freshman year of high school with Mrs. Wolcott (Connie, as I came to call her once I graduated and played World of Warcraft with her and her family for untold hours during the summer).

I spent my next two years with Dr. Hickey bumbling through algebra and pre-cal. I spent most of my time in Dr. Hickey's class curating CDs for us to listen to during tests (they were heavy on Journey and Sufjan Stevens) or listening to one of my more unsavory female classmates discuss her sexual misadventures with a sympathetic male classmate, who I imagine listened more out of prurient interest than anything approaching concern.

I took physics as a junior and did quite well, but it's only because our teacher was excellent. Even then, I failed to retain anything and in the week between the end of the semester and the final I had forgotten enough physics to make a 70 on the final and bring my average from an A to a B.

I renounced math entirely as a senior and instead took statistics, which is math for the unmotivated. The early days of the semester were spent watching videos on the importance of stats. Unfortunately for Dr. Hickey, one video discussed manatees at length and my friend Jeth and I latched onto them as our spirit animal and proceeded to draw them on everything. My other friend Donnie openly slept through class and the remainder of the students (all female) diligently worked with Dr. Hickey. I took the AP test at the end of the year and earned a gentleman's 2.

I took one college math course. It was called "Contemporary Math." It was taught by a bored TA and the most challenging thing we tackled was adding and subtracting fractions.

All of that to say, I'm trying to learn math again.

While visiting Mrs. Wolcott this Christmas, I flipped through one of my old math books and was shamed by my lack of knowledge. I've always been a bit sensitive about this deficiency in my learning - my roommates are engineers and my ignorance is a source of occasional humor - but I'd never thought to do anything about. The afternoon after visiting Mrs. Wolcott, I resolved to become more well rounded and ordered two of my high school textbooks off of Abebooks.

When they arrived in Austin, I promptly abandoned my commitment and they lay buried under third class mail on our dining room table.

When I graduated, I was fairly certain that I'd find a job within weeks. I had a great GPA and tons of internship and freelance experience. I sent my resume to twenty newspapers that had posted openings for sportswriters. I received exactly one reply and it was simply a courtesy response.

My dreams of being the next Dave Halberstam temporarily shelved, I started applying for jobs in the corporate communications world. I got one interview and I was almost certain that I would be hired. It's been three months since that meeting, so I assume I probably didn't get it.

My dad told me about an opening at his company in Dallas. I had a meeting with the head of the department and she was incredibly nice and the job sounded interesting, but I feel bad taking a job because of my father's influence. I know that this is how these things work, but it would still bother me.

In order to escape this fate, I've established a backup plan.

I've applied to UT's Arabic Flagship Summer Program in hopes of a) learning Arabic and b) setting myself up for graduate school. I have my eye on UT's dual-degree Middle Eastern Studies and Global Policy Studies master's program.

In order to get into the program, it's recommended that one have 6 hours of economics, 3 hours of stats and 3 hours of calc. In order to obtain this modest amount of quantitative knowledge, I've enrolled at Austin Community College, which is shockingly lax about basically everything. They needed no confirmation of my place of residence, nor my up-to-date immunization. I'm taking an online economics course and dominating it. I'm also taking stats through EdX, which is the big free online class thing that schools like MIT, Berkley, UT and others are doing. It's surprisingly difficult. I feel like I'm really learning something.

If all goes according to plan, I'll apply for grad school in the fall and enroll next August.

All of this meditating on the future has led me to realize something. Chiefly, that I never made any real effort of pursuing what I really want to do, of attacking an actual dream.

The first thing that I ever remember wanting to be (other than a paleontologist, which is decidedly less cool than Jurassic Park makes it appear) was a writer for Saturday Night Live. I read Live From New York when I was in the 7th grade and in the 8th grade I took drama for the first time (out of two times). I loved playing improv games and making up skits and generally acting a fool. It's around this time that I realized that I was a funny human being.

Somehow, my sense of humor hasn't fallen prey to my usual flights of hubris. It's always taken the backseat to more lofty aspirations like blogging about my feelings.  I've always felt that I was funny, but I never defined myself as the funny guy. It's not a skill that I've honed, but I'd like to change that.

I still plan on applying to grad school, but I'm also going to take my first shot at being an actual writer. I've already written a pilot and I'm working on refining it. Oddly enough, the humor has been the easiest part for me. The dialogue is what's hard. It's basically impossible to make written characters sound like actual human beings, which is fine if you're going for a deliberate aesthetic, but is tough when the characters are all channeling a particularly low-energy voice (my voice).

I plan to submit the finished script to Austin Film Fest and to Slamdance. I'm sure I'm being just spectacularly naive in this endeavor, but what else am I going to do? I'm a man with a dream and an insane amount of free time.

Feed the Beat (The Ballad of Jo the Doorman)

It's South by Southwest time here in Austin, which is a conflicting time for me. I'm very keen on the idea of SXSW - lots of free music, food and drinks, but the execution always leaves me a little sour.

Like most Austinites, I'm both deeply proud and wildly protective of this city. I simultaneously want it to be known as the crown jewel of the American Southwest while also being an intimate place, a home.

This manifests itself in a weird sort of cognitive dissonance where I want people to recognize my taste and good fortune for living here, but not actually spend any time here themselves. This is the latent insecurity that dwells within all Austinites. Everyone rails against immigrants because, secretly, they fear being exposed for frauds themselves. There's something existentially troubling about looking down your nose at people who have the misfortune to be impressed by something as woefully mundane as Hey Cupcake when mere months, years, decades before, you were that person - caught up in the Austin image.

This sense of dissonance is felt most during SXSW.

South by is very much about status. You have the badgeholders, then the wristband folks, and then the plebeians. But beyond the attendees, there's a hidden layer of social machinations between the artists, promoters, crew, media, and socialites.

At South by, Austin values are flipped on their head. The most important people are the badgeholders. They have priority access to events, shows, and free food. The badgeholders, for the most part, are not from Austin. This means that all of the locals are forced to wait in line as they watch nitwits from New York, LA, Chicago, and the Bay Area get priority access to things that they want to do. 

To make it worse, these people kind of suck. They either talk about Austin like it's mecca (which comes across as patronizing) or they constantly remind you that they are from some major metro (which is even more patronizing). It feels like they are wearing Austin blackface (which, if we're being honest, would be the whitest possible face one could possibly find). 

The interactive folks are probably the most egregious offenders. I hate interactive week. I hate walking around downtown being surrounded by people actually using QR codes and caring about their Klout score. People are exchanging business cards at every street corner. It feels (to borrow a term from grade school) phony baloney. 

These things are so annoying, of course, because they tap into that same cognitive dissonance that I mentioned earlier. Austin, however numerous its charms may be, is not a "world class city" and, for the most part, it's not a hub of industry or media or tech. 

It's a place where people compare the old money/new money status of Tarrytown and Westlake (s/o to Eric Webb for that anecdote). It's a place where a local weatherman gets cheered every weekend in the fall by 100,000 people simply for doing a bit on the jumbotron of the football stadium. Hell, it's a place that's still deeply invested in football at all. 

So, it is within this conflicted mindset that I worked my first event of this year's South by on Monday. 

I got a call over the weekend about working an event for 101X, one of the radio stations that I interned for last spring. I would be live tweeting/filming the Passion Pit show at Hype Machine's Hype Hotel. 

I didn't get a ton of details, but I was happy because a) I like working and b) I like Hype Machine and Passion Pit. 

At around 5:45 p.m. on Monday I parked on 2nd and Waller (I always park on the East Side during SXSW, which, unfortunately, isn't as successful a plan this year. Out of town hipsters don't irrationally fear minorities the way your run-of-the-mill Austin resident does) and started the long trek toward 3rd and San Jac. I was supposed to be there at 6:30, and my natural punctuality led me to be there at 6. So, I doubled back and prowled around the convention center for a while. I saw the Iron Throne and a bunch of movie posters and all of the people that were arriving for music week. 

I headed back toward the venue at 6:20 and got a text from the Taco Bell promoter, Jon, who had arranged for 101x to be a part of this. He told me to head to the lobby and avoid the line that had already formed for the 9 o'clock show. I'm glad he did, because I was dreading the inevitable 20 minute ordeal with the door people. 

I entered the lobby of the venue (which is normally a high-end set of condos that apparently nobody actually rents) and stood awkwardly waiting for someone to point me in the right direction. No one did (though one eager intern asked if I was there for some party that I wasn't there for). I eventually texted Jon and he turned out to be standing right beside me. 

He asked if I was excited about the event and I replied that I was. He then asked if I knew what I was doing and I replied that I did not. So, he filled me in.

I (as 101x proxy), along with a handful of other "Twitter influencers" were going to be assigned PAs with cameras who would document the show from our perspective. Along with our cameras, there would be a professional film crew doing an actual good job. The whole show was going to be broadcast live and directed by the guy that did the Wilco movie (nothing gets South by types more excited than Wilco). In addition to the film work, our tweets would be whitelisted, which means that they would be promoted over the tweets of regular folks. 

Jon introduced me to the people who helped run the show, Alex, a friendly guy who sort of looked like Dick from High Fidelity, and a woman whose name I can't recall. She claimed that I was her favorite for being the first to arrive, in a way that made me feel that I was decidedly not her favorite. I think being the first to arrive probably isn't cool in these circles.

Alex and the woman whose name I can't recall led me through a set of glass doors to a conference room with a table ringed with official looking folks. They introduced me to everyone and named all of the important people, whose names I never remembered. I was asked to select a PA, but, being me, I deferred to their preference.

They attached me to the person closest to me, Kristi, a Texas State grad who had been working as a PA for a filmmaker in Austin. Kristi was, possibly, the only person there less comfortable than me. She was nice and quiet and didn't give off the type-A vibe that literally every other person within 30 feet did. 

The other influencers started trickling in. There was a guy from Hype Machine and a guy from TechCrunch. There was some girl that did something that I don't remember. The only other blogger that I talked to was Tyler Oakley. He has a popular YouTube channel and 450,000 Twitter followers. 

As I watched him tweet, and then set up tweets for his account to send out in the future, I realized how far away I was from that world. I didn't understand how he could have the job that he has. It seemed so simple. I could put videos on YouTube - I just don't have the inclination. 

After most of the bloggers had arrived (there was one straggler), we went on a brief venue tour and then upstairs to eat. Little did these folks know, if I am presented with free food, I will not stop eating until my access is revoked. So, I sat down and plowed Whole Foods mushroom lasagna for the better part of 45 minutes - long after everyone else had finished eating. 

They sent us out to the show floor around 8. No one was there yet except the vendors and the camera crew and the band crew. Kristi and I wandered for a while. I tried to get a Miller Lite, but apparently I needed a drink ticket. So, I walked away thirsty.

When the doors finally opened, they turned our camera feeds on so that we could film the crowd coming in. I found a drink ticket on the ground. Everything was coming up Big Dawg. 

As requested, I tried to tweet every 15 minutes or so. I assumed that I was supposed to tweet in the voice of 101x. Unfortunately, I don't know what that voice is, since I spent most of my internship doing stuff for another station, KGSR. (The voice of KGSR? Mike Love). As the night wore on, the voice of 101x became the voice of me. 

I was requested to do an interstitial spot prior to the show, a task I avoided until being cornered by Alex. Reluctantly, I hit my mark and tried to think of some pleasant banalities to say about what was going on. Luckily, my experience as a high school sportswriter has made me an expert in pleasant banalities. 

"Hey guys! It's Kyle from 101X here at the Hype Hotel sponsored by Hype Machine and Taco Bell! There's people, food and music! It's going to be a great time. You know, this is what Austin is all about. At 101X, we already know why this city is so special, and nights like tonight show the rest of the world why it's special. You can watch the show live from our point of view, just follow the link from our Twitter - @101X!"

I'm sure I looked like a maniac throughout this speech. I was taught never to look directly into the camera during an interview, but there was no one to focus my eyes on so they just bounced wildly across the room. I also immediately fell into the stupid, syncopated radio guy voice. An inauspicious beginning. 

The opening band was Wildcat! Wildcat!, whom I'd never listened to. During their set, the crowd was mostly focused on getting drinks and eating free Doritos Locos tacos, so I was able to move about freely with the camera and try to get some cool shots. In the process of this, I moved in and out the VIP area beside the stage, which was guarded by Jo the doorman.

Jo the doorman looked like all doormen. He was stone-faced, a minority, and clearly did not give a shit about anything that was going on around him. I tried my best to befriend him.

As Wildcat! Wildcat! wrapped up their last song, I realized that the VIP area also housed a bar that did not require drink tickets. Feeling parched from my auteurish work with the Sony, I tried to mosey over that way.

Jo was not having it.

"No, you can't get in with those wristbands anymore." 

Kristi was in the VIP section 10 feet from Jo. 

"What do you mean? I was just in here. My camera girl is right over there."

Jo was resolute.

"You get your camera and you get out."

I got my camera and got out.

With nothing better to do between sets, I helped myself to some free tacos. I had yet to Live Mas since the Doritos Locos tacos had been introduced, so this was my first encounter with them. As far as I could tell, there was no discernible difference between the cool ranch version and the classic Doritos version. To me, they both just tasted like wildly salty versions of Taco Bell crunchy tacos.

(An aside: Taco Bell crunchy tacos are the first fast food that I remember really loving. When I was as young as 10, I could put down four in one sitting. Since then, the Bell has been supplanted by Popeye's and Wendy's in my fast food pantheon, but it still holds a special place in my heart).

Alex spotted me mowing down tacos and invited me back into the VIP area to do another talking head thing. I walked ahead of him and was once again rebuffed by Jo.

A word from Alex ensured my passage and I was certain that Jo now knew what the word was.

I did another manic interview and then Kristi and I tried to get in position for Passion Pit.

At this point, the room was packed and we had to post up in the back a bit and use the zoom on the camera to get any useable footage.

I looked around at what the other bloggers were doing. Most were in similar situations, marooned in a sea of people, poking out their cameras on monopods like periscopes. Tyler was in the front row simultaneously filming and also posting to Instagram, Tumblr and Vine. I again felt out of my element. I didn't even know Tumblr was still a thing!

One of the bloggers I hadn't seen since 8:30, when he used his camera to get a friend into the show and then promptly disappeared. I don't understand douchiness of that magnitude.

(An aside: I was just looking at Vine, and apparently I was standing right next to Rembert Browne, my favorite Grantland writer, but didn't realize it. Missed opportunity).

Kristi and I decided to move around a bit in an effort to get some #dynamiccamerawork. We prowled around the edge of the crowd as I worked up the courage to try to get past Jo and into the VIP area.

I fixed my gaze just beyond him and hoisted the camera with purpose. Jo didn't even speak, he just shook his head.

Demoralized, Kristi and I were stuck beside a large cement column that greatly hindered our view. We remained there for about 20 minutes until, out of nowhere, Jo motioned over to us.

"Come in."

So we did.

(Another aside: The crowd thinned out noticeably once "Take a Walk" had been played, which is the most South by thing ever. It's a shame too, because right after that they played Cry Like a Ghost, which is the best track on their new album).

Safely ensconced behind the three foot fence beside the stage, Kristi and I shot the entire encore from behind the musicians, facing out toward the crowd - I thought it looked pretty cool.

Once Passion Pit left the stage, I wandered back toward Jo and the bar. With the night over, I decided that I had earned a celebratory drink. Unfortunately, the only liquor was Tito's and the only mixers were soda. Who drinks vodka and soda other than 19 year olds? I tried to think of the most palatable one and came up with Sierra Mist. It was undrinkable.

In the midst of my drink order, I saw Tyler trying to break Jo's goat-like will. Tyler's bewildered gaze caught my eye and I wandered over to help. Unprompted, Jo turned to me and started explaining himself.

"Sorry man, the big boss man told me not to let in people with that wristband anymore. But, I know you have the camera and you're just trying to do your job."

I told Jo that I didn't mind and I understood that he was also doing his job.

During our conversation, Tyler darted through the entrance and slipped past Jo.

"I've always got people trying to do stuff like that," Jo said. "I don't care now, the show's over."

In that moment, I realized that I was more like Jo than I was my fellow influencers. When the show ended, so did show-biz Kyle. I didn't care about after-parties or talking to the artists. I wasn't interested in building my brand or my online presence. I just wanted to do the best job that I could while I was supposed to be doing it.

Later on, after I had turned in all of the camera equipment and was making my way out, I stopped by the stage again. There, guarding an even more VIP VIP area backstage, was Jo - impassively turning away gadflies. Standing as a silent guardian against the worst sort of South by people.

I Went to the Alabama Game (A Southern Gothic Tale)

My deep love of the brawny men is no secret. I would estimate that I spend at least three hours per day reading about college football in some form. This brings me great pleasure, but, for the most part, I am assaulted on all sides by my nearest companions about the foolishness of my passion. Regardless, I ignore them and soldier on. In the parlance of John L Smith, my piss is hot.

The big time game of opening weekend this year was the annual Cowboys' Classic, held at Jerry Jones' stadium in Arlington. It's meant to be a showcase game for high profile teams (occasionally, it's not) and this year happened to feature a top 10 matchup, #2 Alabama vs #8 Michigan.

My younger brother happens to be an Alabama student, and, through the back alleys of the natural gas world, my father managed to secure four suite tickets to the game - so it was decided that the three of us would attend. This meant missing a UT home game, but, much to my girlfriend's chagrin, I made up for this absence during the week by securing a ticket to our upcoming game against Ole Miss in Oxford.

It should be noted that I bear an intense dislike of the SEC as a whole and Alabama in particular. I find the conference's athletic achievements to be overstated and won through unscrupulous means. The fact that SEC has now become a thinly-veiled codeword for some of the worst parts of southern culture is also troubling. There may be a nobility in the idea of this ragtag group of largely poor and obese states coming together in unity to challenge the rest of the nation, but any grandness is rapidly nullified by the boorish crowing of these yokels.

Bama is the focusing lens for all of this SEC pride, and perhaps that is why they are the most deplorable. The school claims 14 titles (of which only a handful are legitimate), they backed into an undeserved championship last year, and they are coached by an unethical egomaniac who routinely bends rules meant to protect student-athletes in order to give himself an advantage on the playing field.

That said, I somehow found myself walking through the parking lot of Cowboy's Stadium in a red shirt, surrounded by similarly clad southerners with red faces and red solo cups.

Both fan bases had assembled an impressive contingent of tailgating rigs, so hats off to those intrepid travelers.

As my father and I approached the stadium, a young, friendly looking drunk pounced ahead of us and shouted, "Roll tide!" My conditioned response whenever yelled to in a parking lot on a fall Saturday is to cast up my pinky and forefinger and shout, "Hook 'Em." I was halfway through the ritual when I realized that this was an inappropriate setting. Luckily, the drunk wandered off during my confusion, so no harm was done.

We accidentally tried to enter the wrong gate, so we were forced to lurk further around the outside of the stadium. This provided time for more people watching. There wasn't much of note to see. There was an A&M tailgate set up, doubtless the work of some poor Aggies desperate to ingratiate themselves with their new SEC overlords. There was also a tailgate manned by a Bama fraternity which featured a tasteful cardboard sign that simply read, "Tits?" I didn't see any evidence that this act of romance was having its intended effect.

My brother and the proper gate located, we headed into the air-conditioned confines of what is informally known as the Death Star. The suite is a pretty nice place to watch a game, particularly if it's a game between two teams that you don't take any particular interest in. There are three televisions mounted on the walls. One was showing Mississippi State, the other Auburn, and the third the Rangers. If this game had taken place in 2008, there's no way in hell that a Ranger game would be on the television. Anyone who suggested such a stupid thing would be summarily tossed out.

There was a small table with hors-d'ouvres - shrimp, veggies and hummus, macaroni and cheese. I loaded up on shrimp and hand cut chips while my father paraded us about, introducing my brother and I to all of the folks from his company who had come out to the game. One man showed us a photo he had taken with Gene Stallings, who had apparently been wandering around our area. Stallings coached at Texas A&M from 1965-1971 where he amassed a 27-45-1 record, as well as two NCAA probations.  He also contributed to the maelstrom of idiocy that was the Texas A&M move to the SEC this past summer. He also won a national title at Alabama (where he earned another major NCAA infraction), which is why he was at the game. I'm glad I didn't have to see him and pretend to respect him.

Introductions and whatnot over, I settled in with a Shiner Bock to endure the war of attrition that is Nick Saban football.

The game quickly got out of hand, which was unsurprising. What was surprising was the behavior of the Alabama fans around me. As I stated previously, I really love college football. I am often chastised for how much I love it, and yet, I don't think that I can say I love college football in the way that these Bama fans did. I'm not sure I love anything the way the love Bama. It was a sort of primal passion that I don't think I could summon unless threaten by a bear or other woodland creature. Even the most insignificant play was greeted with uproarious cheers or vicious curses. Grown men were stomping about like angry schoolchildren after poor play - it was, quite frankly, unnerving.

I hate to perpetuate the idea that the SEC has the best fans in college football, as I think there is more to being a fan than pure unadulterated passion. I think that a sense of decorum and an understanding of the game is a necessary component to ideal fandom. Passion is important, yes, but if it's purely passion then all of the WGS wanks who love to prattle on about sports being a modern day form of barbarism have a point. It reduces fandom to an animalistic fervor that is decidedly unbecoming. There were also some sequined ladies in front of the band, whose only purpose appeared to be shaking their chests back and forth to the fight song, another thing that said WGS wanks would not care for.

Paul Tillich, imminent 20th century scholar of religion, postulated that the essence of faith is Ultimate Concern. As defined in his work Dynamics of Faith here.

"Man, like every living being, is concerned about many things, above all about those which condition his very existence...If [a situation or concern] claims ultimacy it demands the total surrender of him who accepts this claim...it demands that all other concerns...be sacrificed."

(Thanks Wikipedia).

Now, I would never compare football driven ecstasy to religion, because that is reductionistic and unhelpful and, generally the work of first-year philosophy student wanks who don't know their ass from the exit to Plato's cave.

However, what I witnessed last Saturday came awfully close to Ultimate Concern. For those three and a half hours, nothing mattered more to the fans in red than Alabama football. I suddenly understood how these grown and semi-educated (no offense, Ryan) were capable of deluding themselves into believing that they had earned 14 championships, that Nick Saban was an honorable coach, that Alabama deserved to be the number one team every year. In the words of Tillich, their love of Alabama football had "transcended the drives of the nonrational unconsciousness and the structures of the rational consciousness." Football had rendered their thinking bodies inert, all that was left were rammers and jammers and yellow hammers spilling out of their hearts and mouths.

So, I watched a hapless Michigan team get beaten down. I watched Saban joylessly command his squadron of oversigned troops. I engaged in a ridiculous dance with the bartender upon the acquisition of each fresh Shiner Bock, due to his insistence that I utilize the utterly impractical koozie that he had foisted upon me. But most of all, and for the first time I ever, I watched myself become a little disgusted by the Brawny Men and the effect that they had on those around me.

Luckily, I got to go home and watch OU struggle against UTEP, and all was right with the universe.

I Don't Care About Your Opinion (An Exercise in Hypocrisy)

Preface: This is a slipshod piece of opinion. If you'd like to read something of actual value, I point you toward Walter Wink's Biblical Perspectives on Homosexuality.

I'm a bad journalism student.

I don't read the paper, I don't watch any news networks, and I don't read any online news. In my opinion, most events outside of my immediate sphere are so inconsequential that they may as well just not exist. (College football happenings excepted).

Sadly, through the wonders of social media, I'm sometimes overrun by a typhoon of winging and hand-wringing because of some insignificant cultural or political issue. This effect is exacerbated when the issue of the day involves the plight of the homosexual. 

I reside uncomfortably between two very verbose camps, journalists (or, even worse, amateur journalists) and evangelical Americans. This means that anytime the sodomists take command of the national zeitgeist I'm forced (by virtue of casual Facebook browsing) to read 200 word excoriations from both sides, often riddled with incomplete thoughts, rampant generalizations, and an appalling lack of perspective. 

I realize that this issue could be resolved quite easily by averting my eyes from the offending posts, but this has proven difficult. Facebook is little more than a 21st century bathroom window, and we're all pervs in the bushes, hoping for glimpses of exposed humanity.

And, like (I assume) real peeping toms, this exercise leaves us with nothing but a sort of perplexed shame, wondering how we got ourselves into such a mess. 

Humanity is often beautiful and transcendent and moving, but this is never the case on Facebook. 

Facebook is where the sublime goes to rot away - discarded amongst the farmville and vampiretown requests. Facebook is a limitless reservoir of ignorance.

Which brings me to today's issue. A popular chain of fast-food chicken restaurants rustled all sorts of jimmies when the company president stated that he was steadfastly opposed to marriage equality.

This was a dumb thing for the president of Chick Fil A to say. It does nothing but alienate people and the franchise is already outspokenly evangelical, so most could likely surmise the higher-ups' views on gay marriage. He certainly can't have helped his business.

Things escalated from there. The laity mobilized on social media while those with actual clout began taking sides. The mayor of Boston crafted a letter to discourage the franchise from expanding in the city. Politicians began eating at Chick Fil A to show their support. Thousands of blogs were written and the whole world got dumber. Eventually, Mike Huckabee got involved and we're now all sitting here, existing, on Chick Fil A Appreciation Day (which is exactly what it sounds like).

So now, this is officially a thing.

The udder (little Chick Fil A mascot pun there for you guys) ridiculousness of this is hopefully not lost on you, dear reader. 

We should all be ashamed of ourselves. (I'm not ashamed, because I'm sitting comfortably on my high horse).

I understand that everyone has an opinion and that everyone feels that their opinion is of value, but that's because we all exist in our little solipsistic universe where we believe that eating or not eating from a certain restaurant, or, worse, writing a holier-than-thou Facebook status is doing any good for anyone. 

If anything, you're just annoying people and contributing to the already noxious level of acrimony that permeates the American political and religious discourse.

Even if you're delivering an even-handed and thoughtful critique of the situation you're at fault. This situation does not dignify even-handed and thoughtful critique. This situation should not exist and anything that gives it legitimacy should be cast down.

If I had any integrity, I would delete this blog right now and never share it, but I'm on the Internet, so I can do whatever I want. 

This kerfuffle will do nothing to bring LGBT equality, it will just give bigots an excuse to go bigot it up. 

I Went to Los Angeles (Part One: The Thing I've Already Written)

I've recently returned to Lubbock after spending the majority of the summer in Los Angeles (California). I was there as part of a school program, taking a couple of classes and doing an internship. I applied for this program over a year ago, in the hopes that I might demonstrate my value to some television tycoon and thereby find employment and fame in the city that never sleeps.

This was a misguided notion.

In the months before I was to depart, I had been interning for a local radio conglomerate in Austin. I was writing blogs, shooting video, going to concerts and generally just having a gay old time. This company even helped me find an internship in LA. Los Angeles magazine was part of the corporate family, and they were willing to take me on as an intern, sight-unseen. 

I should have realized that Bob Evans was never going to discover me building websites in a cubicle, but so it goes.

What follows is a harrowing account of my internship experience that I was required to write in order to get credit for the program. It's written as a weekly journal, but in reality, I wrote it all the weekend before it was due (rebellious). 

Week one: June 4 - June 7

I honestly didn't know what to expect from my internship at LA mag. I had been interning for a radio company in Austin, and their parent company happens to own LA mag. Our HR lady in Austin referred me, and I got the internship without even having to do an interview. The first day was a little intimidating. There was an editorial meeting first thing in the morning. The topic of the meeting was the website, and since I am a web intern, I was invited to tag along. I got the sense that most of the magazine people have a somewhat tenuous grasp of the web, but they all seemed to like the site.

           
 My bosses are Shayna and Israel. Shayna handles more of the content side of things, while Israel does backend work to make sure the site looks nice and runs properly. I assume we have an actual webmaster somewhere, but it's possible we farm that out to the corporate office.

           
 My first day wasn't super exciting. I have a cubicle near Shayna and Israel, but I can't see them unless I lean around. It's a minor annoyance, but I suppose it's an efficient way to minimize small talk. At our office in Austin, we all just worked in a single room (basement, technically) and traded jokes via instant messenger. The magazine environment is a bit more professional.

            
My first day was also somewhat awkward in that, one of the big features in the magazine this month was about a local shop that manufactures sex toys. As a web extra, I was charged with watching youtube videos of homely women reviewing their favorite adult products and picking out the funniest ones to post on the site. The women were so clinical that humor was harder to come by than one might think. Shayna and I narrowed down my choices and I wrote a little blurb about each one.

           
On Wednesday, I worked on our restaurant finder page. It's basically just a database of all of the food reviews the magazine has ever done, with contact information and a map. We're working on making an app for the magazine, and the restaurant finder is going to be an important part.

            
Thursday, I got to do a little more writing. I did a blog post and also wrote some entries for our calendar page. Because it's a large magazine with a professional staff, I'll probably never be able to write anything remarkably long, but the calendar page is a fun place to just sneak in jokes.

           
Overall, I enjoyed my first week. I'm kind of intimidated by the structure of the organization, but I think I'm just intimidated by LA overall, so that's nothing new.

Week two: June 11 - 14

            
I've opted to abandon the daily rundown in this week's journal and will instead just speak broadly about the events of the week, unless a certain day was particularly noteworthy. This week, I worked mostly for Israel, building pages for the website, particularly slideshows. I think I'm given these tasks because I'm the only intern with a working knowledge of web programming, so I'm able to do them much more quickly, even though it's fairly easy, as there's already a template built for you.

            
There are two other interns in the web department, Marielle and Sean. Marielle is older than me, she has a master's from Columbia College in Chicago - I don't know what her degree is in. Sean is younger than me; he's studying English at USC. Sean and I do most of the tedious work; I think Shayna trusts Marielle with writing more than either of us because of her age and advanced degree.

            
The most interesting thing that I did this week was edit together a video for the site. We did a feature on the Hollywood Sign this month, and the Hollywood Sign Trust sent over an educational video for us to put up on the site. The video was a bit long, and kept cutting to an awkward talking head, who explained the history of the sign. Since I am the only one who knows FCP, I was charged with making this video more web friendly. I chopped out the awkward talking head, left all of the cool historical footage, and ran a VO over the interesting bits. I chopped out all of the boring bits. I then had to find free music to use, which is harder than it sounds, as we don't have any kind of audio bank. I just had to scour the Creative Commons for applicable stuff.

            
Shayna was impressed, and now she wants me to shoot a talk that the magazine is hosting next week, so that's pretty cool.

            
I'll be shooting a conversation about religion in the media with Mike White and two professors from Pepperdine and USC. I'm also a religious studies major, so I think it will be pretty fun. My only concern is that the camera we have is an older gen Sony Handycam. It shoots in HD, but sound is going to be a real issue. Israel doesn't keep a tripod at the office, but he said he'd bring one from home before the event next week.

Week three: June 19 - 21

            
What a frustrating week. I showed up early to the event on Tuesday. It was at some fairly nice, but not too nice, restaurant in West Hollywood. I had the Handy Cam, and Shayna was supposed to meet me there with the tripod. As I said last week, I was concerned about having only the Sony, so I asked Ty if I could borrow his camera. He wants to be a DP, so I assumed he'd have something a little more high-end. He ended up having a Canon 7D, which is a wonderful camera, but he only had a 35 mm lens and I figured it would have the same sound concerns as the Sony. I took it anyway.

           
Things start off pretty well. I'm there before Shayna, and I'm getting some beautiful b-roll with Ty's camera. I'm feeling good. I figure that I'll set up the Sony on the tripod right in front of the speakers and I can get close ups with the 7D. It wouldn't be great, but it'll look nice and fairly professional.

            
Then Shayna arrives, tripodless. I'm concerned, but not overly so. The room is fairly small, and I can sit on a stool near the back and film by hand. I won't get all those pretty close ups, but it'll look the same as most of the videos they have on the site.

            
I get caught off guard by the start of the talk, getting on my stool and flipping on the camera right as the introductions begin. I then realize that I've made a terrible mistake. The stool is not bolted to the floor, as I originally assumed. Rather, it was a swivel chair, which meant that I had to maintain my equilibrium, while simultaneously filming three different people. Needless to say, there was some camera shake, but I honestly felt that I did a pretty good job.

            
The sound, on the other hand, had me very concerned. I could barely hear it from where I was sitting, and I was directly across from the speakers. I knew that it would be hell trying to get useable audio from this, but one soldiers on.

           
I spent the afternoon Tuesday and all of Wednesday working on the video. The audio was terrible, which I had anticipated, but I thought the camera work was pretty good for a tripodless non-cameraman sitting on a swiveling stool.

            
I wasn't given explicit instructions about how to cut the video, but my first draft was around 20 minutes long and a pretty accurate facsimile of the event. I feel like I captured the overall tone of the talk and provided a sense of what each panelist was like. Then Shayna emailed me and told me to make it around 8 minutes, so I cut out most of the stuff, but allowed the speakers to linger on certain questions and flesh out at least one solid idea. I showed Shayna and Israel, and let me tell you, things did not look good.

            
I started the video with 45 seconds of gorgeous b-roll, with a clever VO from the magazine's editor, who moderated the panel. My Malickian camera work was not appreciated by Israel, who suggested that I cut out some of the intro. Then, we got to the talk itself, and I & S were apparently revolted by the camera work. It was a little shaky, but I had cut around the most egregious bits, and it honestly looked like your run of the mill one-camera video.

            
I took my supervisors notes and went to work. Honestly, I was pretty annoyed with Israel. He was being overly critical, despite the fact that it was his negligence that forced me to rely on the uncertain power of my forearm, as opposed to a steady tripod. He compromised my entire vision for the project.

            
I kept my cool though, and cut the video down to the suggest three minutes, allowing only the most pristine shots to be used. At this point, the video had basically devolved into a series of one response - but so it goes. I did my best to salvage the audio, but it was clippy and horrible. I still stayed an hour and a half late to try to make it better, but eventually I had to just let it be. Our editor deemed it acceptable, and it went online. I think Israel saw how disappointed I was by the video, and he was very kind to me before I left.

            
The worst part of the entire ordeal was as I was driving home, stuck on Highland staring at a billboard with a rainbow condom, I realized that all I had to do was go see Neil at the UTLA center and I could have checked out a tripod, an HMC150, and probably an audio recorder with an XLR port.

            
It was my lowest moment in Hollywood.

Week four: June 26 - 28

                        
Despite my seeming incompetence, it appears that my dedication to the botched video project did not go unnoticed by Israel and Shayna. They both treated me as more of a peer this week than as an intern. I've also started talking more to Sean. He's a friendly guy, but we don't have a ton in common. He's into classical music and art, and it doesn't come across as an affectation, which is uncommon in someone so young. He and I are still plugging away at the site, specifically the restaurant finder. I have been placed in charge of the project (a dubious mantle), and I'm doing my best to make it fun. We need to find and crop over 500 photos of restaurants. This is complicated by the fact that these photos cannot be copyrighted, and many of the restaurants are tiny ethnic joints without websites. Still, we soldier on. I'm doing my best to endear myself to Shayna through witticisms in my emails to her. She seems to be warming up to me.

            
The president of Emmis visited one afternoon. He was very personable and answered any questions that were thrown his way. He's on the BoT at USC and used to own an MLB team, so he talked about sports, which was gratifying for me, as most magazine people are magazine people precisely because they've run from sports their entire lives.

            
He also said that Emmis is looking good financially, which was also gratifying for me, as I'm trying to get a job at our Austin offices this spring.

            
All of the interns have also been invited to go to a meeting next Tuesday to discuss ways that we can get more involved on the content side. It seems a bit late in the semester for this, but it could be profitable.

Week five: July 3 - 5

            
I had another wretched Tuesday. My front bumper has been secured to my car through high-strength epoxy since the beginning of the summer. It finally gave way as I was leaving for work Tuesday morning. With the bumper half severed, and with no sensible way to reattach it, my only recourse was to tear it all the way off and go bumperless. This necessitated a 4-mile round-trip walk to the dollar store for some basic tools. I managed to get there and back and remove the bumper by noon. I had to boogie to work in my newly modified car in order to make it to the 1 p.m. internship meeting.

            
I arrived just in time to find Shayna, a friendly looking woman (Elina), and a severe looking woman (Nancy) all sitting across from the troupe of interns. There were pastries and pie. I had a slice of icebox pie, and it rivaled the much-heralded Czechspertise of Grandma Sheblak, my roommate's industrious grandmother/baker.

            
Even deeply satisfying pie couldn't rid me of the sense of intimidation that I've felt my entire time here. I had no way of knowing for sure, but looking across the table, I had the immediate sense that neither of these two new women would appreciate my literary sensibilities. To make matters worse, the Hollywood Sign was visible directly behind them, silently giving the finger to a small-town kid yearning for the comforting confines of Austin.

            
The meeting was brief and awkward. The two editors told us to pitch stories to them and they'd see if they sounded publishable. Sean asked if there were any specific gaps in coverage that they wanted filled; this was met with one of the least-committal responses I've ever seen.

            
We all filed out, confused and wanting more pie.

We were closed on the fourth, and on the fifth I attacked my restaurant finder duties with gusto.

           

Week six: July 10 - 12

            
Elina has taken to sending out the occasional email asking us to blog about something. I'm trying to get over my fear of Hollywood, so I've been submitting responses. I'm not used to being heavily edited, so it's a new experience for me. I think it's profitable though, I can't imagine that I'll work in an office as laissez-faire as Emmis Austin my entire life.

            
I'm at my most comfortable point so far. Maybe it was the confusing pie meeting, or maybe it's the realization that I only have a few weeks left, but I feel like the master of my domain. I've started wearing jeans to work. I bought all manner of adult clothing before coming out here, because I assumed that professional journalists all dressed like Aaron Sorkin characters. I was disabused of this almost immediately, but for some reason stubbornly continued to do my best fat Ryan Gosling impression. I fear it made me look overly earnest and therefore unapproachable. 

            
Whatever the reason, I'm starting to warm up to the office and the people around me. Although, this came too late for Shayna.

            
As I was leaving on Wednesday, Shayna came up to me and told me that it was great working with me over the summer and she was thankful for all my help. I was perplexed, as it was far from my last day. She then told me that she wouldn't be back from her trip before I returned to Austin. I then realized that this trip was her honeymoon. I knew she was getting married; she always had little pre-wedding tchotchkes around her desk. I just didn't realize that it coincided with the tail end of my internship.

            
I was sad to see her go. I felt like we had started to develop a rapport. It had been somewhat awkward around Shayna and I, although I don't know why. If I had to single out a specific moment, I think it was on my first day. I wrote some blog about horse racing and used the phrase "day at the races." Shayna thought the expression was "day at the track." I deadpanned, "I don't know, I'm not a degenerate. I'm not DeNiro." This was an attempt to reference the television series Luck, and I meant to say Dustin Hoffman, not DeNiro, but I was on the spot and flubbed it. So rather than a hilarious topical reference to a David Milch television program (that had been cancelled six months earlier), it appeared as if I was just some douche who hated gambling and mistakenly believed that Robert DeNiro was one of its emissaries. Or it could have been that she made me watch 30 videos of middle-aged women reviewing buttplugs on my first day at the office. Who can say?

            
The first post-Shayna day was pretty good. I reported to Israel, who has always been very kind and encouraging since the video incident. He gives me a task, I complete it, he says, "Woooooow, that was fast," (he has a very distinctive "wow"), and then he gives me another task. I feel productive and validated.

Week seven: July 17 - 19

            
It's just Israel and I against the world these days, and, so far, it's worked out well. Shayne left us a list of tasks for each day, and we're usually finishing them with an hour or two to spare in the day. I've started factoring this in, and it's making me more productive. I don't stress over every task. I do it at a leisurely pace, and I do it right the first time. It's a much more relaxed environment.

            
We hired a new intern, Matt, solely to take over the restaurant finder project, so I've sadly been relieved of duty as captain. I hope they offer that poor kid a job, because that is some thankless work.

            
On Wednesday, I conquered one of my fears. Nancy - the severe woman from the meeting. Israel tasked me with writing up some tweets for the weekend related to one of our August features. I took great pains to write the most concise, elegant, and informative tweets that left no extraneous characters. I even felt that I had captured the magazine's voice, which has, honestly, kind of alluded me. Israel told me to show them to Nancy, so, trembling, I did so.

"How long are these?"

"Oh, they're all around 140 characters or less. I plugged them in, and stuff."

"Can you make them shorter? I want people to be able to retweet them."

"Oh, uh. Yeah. Ok."

        

Internally, I thought of about six reasons why my tweets were flawless and of how Nancy clearly misunderstood Twitter, but I returned to my desk. I painstakingly edited my tweets until they were able to communicate all the necessary information in as little space as possible. It was a good editing exercise and it only took about five minutes. I then spent the next 10 minutes debating whether or not I had the courage to print and deliver these new tweets to Nancy and face a second rejection. Then I thought about how she would react to some sweaty intern cowardly emailing her over something as insignificant as some tweets.

            
I summoned my courage, booted Matt off the computer with a connection to the printer, and printed my tweets in order to hand-deliver them to Nancy.

"Yes?"

"I have the new tweets."

"Oh? Let me take a look."

She read them and flashed me a smile.

"Good work. I just wanted them to be a little shorter. You know how (I think she may have inserted a curse word here as a display of camaraderie, but I was flying so high on approval that It's possible that I just inserted it into my memory) lazy people are."

"Uh, yeah. They can be. Thanks," I stammered.

I returned to my desk a new man. I had accomplished an incredibly minor task, and in the process potentially endeared myself to someone that I found intimidating. Triumphantly, I handed Israel the tweets.

"Here are the tweets. Nancy approved them."

"Oh, ok cool! See you tomorrow!" Israel said.

           

I could tell he was proud of me.

Defending Adam Carolla (A Losing Proposition)

I know that too much time has passed to reasonably comment on the "Adam Carolla is sexist allegations." But, I feel compelled to anyway.

Full disclosure, I would consider myself a fan of Carolla. His podcast is in regular rotation on my long walks to class or commutes to work and I find him to be occasionally hilarious, often thought-provoking, and sometimes any number of "ists."

Carolla exists in an interesting comedic space. He's a lifelong Angeleno from a blue-collar background who decided to take some classes with the Groundlings and eventually found himself hosting several different television and radio programs, often with Jimmy Kimmel. His podcast is the most downloaded on iTunes and he has guests from every spectrum on, and -- for the most part -- treats them with respect.

His working-class roots show through in his show. He often pontificates on things like race, gender, and class with a level of temerity and certainty that you'd be unlikely to find from anyone who has spent substantial time in liberal arts courses. Any subject where my first statement would be, "Well, it's a nuanced situation..." is expounded on with unassailable confidence by Carolla. He shines a light on unpleasant truths, like the breakdown of the Black family structure, the notion that AIDS is an "equal-opportunity killer," and the contemporary American tendency to obsess over non-issues like peanut allergies, second-hand smoke, and the barbarism of sports.

All of this seems out of place in the relatively learned echelons of popular comedy which is, for the most part, occupied by neurotic, left-leaning folks who take pride in being somewhat enlightened.

Which would make one think that these sorts of people would be turned off by Carolla, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Almost every comic that I like (and some that I don't) have stopped by his show and interacted well with him. From Aisha Tyler to Patton Oswalt to comedy pariahs like Carlos Mencia -- Carolla hosts everyone and they all get along.

I can only think of three instances where a guest appeared uncomfortable on the show.

On a recent live episode with Wyatt Cenac in New York, Carolla aimed a few racially tinged jokes his Cenac's way, and Cenac seemed to stiffen.

Ira Glass once got a little standoffish about the fact that Carolla had been awarded the Guinness record for most downloaded podcast, but even he seemed to enjoy the change of pace from This American Life.

Lastly, Ben Schwartz lampshaded Carolla's tendency to refer to Adam Carolla Show newsgirl Alison Rosen as "babydoll," (which makes me cringe as well) but Rosen doesn't appear to mind and Schwartz played along after he pointed it out, referring to Rosen as "babydoll" himself.

What I'm trying to say is, I find it odd that there exists this perception of Carolla as some sort of neanderthal on the fringes of comedy, when he seems to get along swimmingly with most other comics.

I posit instead, that Carolla is subject to so much backlash because critics and comedy fans have deemed his humor "the wrong kind of comedy."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let's examine this most recent kerfuffle.

On June 16, Carolla did an interview with the New York Post where he made the following statements.

The lesson you learned from a sexual harassment seminar was “Don’t hire chicks.” Do you hate working with women?

No. But they make you hire a certain number of chicks, and they’re always the least funny on the writing staff. The reason why you know more funny dudes than funny chicks is that dudes are funnier than chicks. If my daughter has a mediocre sense of humor, I’m just gonna tell her, “Be a staff writer for a sitcom. Because they’ll have to hire you, they can’t really fire you, and you don’t have to produce that much. It’ll be awesome.”

The interviewer followed up.

The “are women funny” debate has grown very contentious. You’re not worried about reactions to this?

I don’t care. When you’re picking a basketball team, you’ll take the brother over the guy with the yarmulke. Why? Because you’re playing the odds. When it comes to comedy, of course there’s Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Kathy Griffin — super-funny chicks. But if you’re playing the odds? No. If Joy Behar or Sherri Shepherd was a dude, they’d be off TV. They’re not funny enough for dudes. What if Roseanne Barr was a dude? Think we’d know who she was? Honestly.

Obviously, Carolla is painting with a very very broad brush, but it helps to illustrate my point. His thesis should have been, "You know more funny dudes than chicks." Now, this is empirically unprovable, but I'm comfortable saying that I am familiar with more men who make me laugh than women. Instead of jumping to the conclusion that men are therefore inherently funnier than women, it behooves us to examine why Carolla and I find that there are more funny men than women.

The easiest answer is that comedy is subjective, and Carolla's tastes tend toward male comics. Another, less comfortable (but I think possibly more true) answer is that men feel a societal pressure to be funny that is not as strongly impressed on women. Lastly, of course, we can't forget that existing societal structures may make it more difficult for women to find an outlet for their comedic voices. (Although, in the age of the internet, this is less of a concern).

The interviewer's assertion that there is an "are women funny debate" is ridiculous, of course funny women exist. Carolla himself lists three. I may be shooting myself in the leg here, but Tucker Max of all people had a reasoned take on this at HuffPo.

So this interview, which certainly doesn't reflect highly on Carolla, has comedy nerds and the media up in arms. A Google News search for "Adam Carolla Sexist" turns in 86 results. The majority of which have some play on him being either unfunny or the chauvinistic clown from The Man Show, or it just provides a list of successful, funny women.

The first two characterizations are baseless, sheer numbers attest to the fact that someone finds Carolla funny, and the second accusation has no legs since The Man Show was largely a tongue-in-cheek send up of masculine stereotypes.

The third response is valid, if patronizing. If anything, it just makes the concept of a funny woman seem more remarkable. Let's also not forget that successful, "funny" women have subjected us to three different Chelsea Handler vehicles and two Whitney Cummings atrocities, which do a pretty decent job of setting female comics back all on their lonesome.

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To get back to my larger point, these critics appear to be attacking Carolla because he traffics in the "wrong kind of comedy."

The modern comedy fan is cultured. He or she listens to Marc Maron's podcast and supports Louis C.K and Aziz Ansari's independent comedy releases. They watched Arrested Development before it was cancelled. If he or she is as cool as me, they may have this spectacular Bill Murray print.

Comedy is for people with degrees that love Dr. Who and their iPhones, not former carpenters from the Valley. I bet Carolla hasn't even read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius!

It's the same level of entitlement one finds in the AV Club comments section whenever the site deigns to review an episode of Workaholics. (Which honestly perplexes me. The Mail Order Comedy guys are clearly comedy nerds like everyone in that comment section aspires to be, and yet they are lampooned for being "bros").

Carolla might be a dick, and he might be backward, but that doesn't mean you need to go around white knighting for females everywhere. If they're funny enough they'll prove it without your help.

I'm tired of it, you guys. People can be funny without being your cup of tea. Stop using someone else's words to prove how enlightened and comedy-forward you are. You're ruining it for everyone else.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go talk about what an asshole Dane Cook is.

BONUS

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Hold on, I just found this EW story that demands an FJM-ing. (Fire Joe Morganing, for those of you not in the online sports-comedy know).

Adam Carolla just turned the tables on himself. The funnyman became the laughingstock today after word got out that he told The New York Post that female comedy writers were usually the least funny people in the room. "The reason why you know more funny dudes than funny chicks is that dudes are funnier than chicks," Carolla cracked while promoting his new book, Not Taco Bell Material. Given a chance to, er, explain, he continued: "When you're picking a basketball team, you'll take the brother over the guy with the yarmulke. Why? Because you're playing the odds. When it comes to comedy, of course there's Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Kathy Griffin—super-funny chicks. But if you're playing the odds? No."

Leaving the other problems with that statement by the wayside for now, let us introduce Carolla to a whole bunch of funny people, dudes and chicks alike... 

"Wait, Adam Carolla, is he the one who did the voice of the parrot in Aladdin??? He makes me giggle," tweeted Girls creator and star Lena Dunham.

This is not funny, and Girls is a terrible, self-indulgent show.

"Currently collating today's 50,000 Twitter jokes about Adam Carolla by gender. Should be able to settle this shortly," noted record-setting Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings.

Not a dig at Carolla, but a decent joke. Ken Jennings is pretty clever and worth a Twitter follow.

"The biggest impact this whole Adam Carolla scandal has had is discovering 95% of people have no idea how to spell 'Carolla,'" tweeted writer and comedienne Jenny Johnson.

Jenny Johnson is pretty funny as well, once again, this isn't a dig at Carolla.

"Thank you, Adam Corolla. Your terribleness gives all of us the opportunity to scream how NOT TERRIBLE we are!! YAY!" added Chappelle's Show cocreator Neal Brennan, who perhaps unintentionally proved Johnson's point as well.

Brennan appears to be taking Carolla's side right here by trying to do what I'm doing with this blog in >140 characters.

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These are other stories that I accidentally copy and pasted into here. I'm glad EW is here to protect us from sexism.

 And the tweets from assorted actors, comedians and writers went on:

John Ross Bowie: "Adam Carolla saying women aren't funny is like cancer saying women aren't funny."

Danielle Corsetto: "In an ironic twist, 'women aren't funny' ranked number one funniest thing Adam Carolla has ever said."

Dave Holmes: "Why are we ruining our perfect not caring what Adam Carolla thinks streak?"

I don't know who these people are.

Kelly Oxford: "You know what Adam Carolla said about women not being funny is bull, at a party last week I made him laugh three goddamn times."

Molly McAleer: "I don't take Adam Carolla saying women aren't funny seriously. He once told a caller on Loveline to eat a used tampon, y'know?"

Morgan Murphy: "lets all stop being sexist and just admit that PEOPLE aren't funny." 

Lauren Ashley Bishop: "adam who?"

I don't know who these people are.

Carolla had a fleeting chance to not be the object of quite as much scorn, but he only dug the hole deeper on The Talk this morning. Asked by Sara Gilbert how he feels about gay people, he said, "That's dangerous—not being gay! Listen, I wish more people were gay. If you've driven over to the gay section of Los Angeles, it's like a golf course...Real estate values go boom!" But then the former Man Show host acknowledged making cracks about gay people in his comedy routines, saying, "Nice doesn't get laughs, especially on stage, that's what I'm saying...When did we start holding comedians up to the level of politicians and school teachers? We're comedians. We're supposed to say these things."

Perez Hilton, who was also a guest on The Talk today, tweeted: "Ugh. Adam Carolla is attempting to explain his homophobic jokes and failing miserably."

Perez Hilton draws penises on people for a living.