January | 2010 | Bryan Joiner

January 13, 2010

Time for something new?

This post is about my job, so anyone who doesn’t like hearing about the day-to-day of being a trade editor should probably just skip it. But I am wiped. out. today to the point that I’m finally realizing it’s time to get serious about moving on. It’s one thing to be the editor of a magazine, and it’s one thing to technically be responsible for every p and q therein, but being a small enough operation where it’s my responsibility to personally inspect every p and q 10 times has taken its toll on me. As I wrote yesterday in a fit of delirium, I’ve done this before, and what I didn’t write yesterday is that while last night’s staying-up-late-to-finish-the-magazine session was unique for some reasons (i.e., being in the office for 16 hours), it was typical in the sense that finishing these issues is a drain.

That’s not entirely an accident, because as much as I would like to convince myself otherwise, this is a straight-out-of-college job, a starter job that I backed into after my rough go in Queens. In fact, my career has gone roughly the exact opposite direction you’d expect given the two experiences; I’d be a much better reporter now, and I would have had more energy to be the big fish in the tiny jar six years ago. But what’s happened has happened. I just don’t know how much more I can take. I have another issue that I have to turn around in exactly two weeks and I can’t even think of going into the office tomorrow because I’m so worn out. The good part is that the other main editor and I have discussed and agreed to a division of duties (me, more writing; her, more layout and editing) that suits both of our strengths, but we’re not putting that into play until after this is done. Right now I am very much in the shit, and it sucks.

The question is, where to go from here? I don’t know, and the whole thing is exacerbated by the fact that I’ve got a headache and can’t stomach the fact of going back to the office in 8 or so hours. At least I’ll get birthday drinks on Friday. That’s a plus.

4 Comments

January 12, 2010

Been About 8 Years

Since I’ve had a proper publishing Production Night—up late, putting the finishing touches on an issue before daybreak. Not much need for it in the trade magazine biz, and the second newspaper I worked at in Queens (and the one I worked at for by far the longest), we handled all that stuff in the late afternoon and maybe early evening hours. Our new business plan involves putting out targeted mini-magazines tied to trade shows, and the Halloween Show is coming in a couple weeks. With the other editor on maternity leave, it was basically up to me to get the magazine done in about two weeks of actual work time. It was fun as sh*t. This is what I love to do. I don’t like sitting in the office for weeks on end, waiting to know if we’re going to publish anything again, and that’s what I’ve gotten used to.

The only difference between this production night and the others is that I was the only person there. The latest anyone usually works there is 8, and that’s exceedingly rare. Most people like the job because it’s a 9-to-5; that’s what I don’t like about it, though the benefits are good (we’re grading on a curve here; I am a writer. At least nominally). No one else would even think of staying that late, but that’s my instinct. It just seems like the most efficient way to get things done, and when they are done, there’s adrenaline to spare. Hence the blog post.

But I also know that there’s quickly diminishing returns, and that I’m happy I don’t do this for a living anymore (stay up late, that is). Once is exhilirating, twice is interesting, and anything on top of that is a drain and self-perpetuating. If I wanted that lifestyle I’d be a waiter and make a lot more money doing it.

2 Comments

January 11, 2010

The Decline

The Patriots are on the decline. There’s no question about that now. I pooh-poohed people Bill Simmons earlier this year for calling them DOA after the Indy loss, but I stand by that. Simmons and his ilk fed us the Patriots as “winners when it matters” for the last decade, but called the dynasty kaput over a matter of a couple inches in Indianapolis. To suggest that 4th-and-2 had anything to do with what happened today was ludicrous. Maybe the plays preceding 4th-and-2, but not the event itself.

Randy Moss probably has to go. I’m drawing some parallel with Gisele here. Tom Brady finds a tall, lanky, good-looking friend. Tom Brady is enamored to the point of supplicance. Moss certainly appears to dog it from time to time out there, and Brady doesn’t seem to raise word one with him. Every time they talk, it’s a pep talk or they’re trying to speak some superstar language. That ain’t going to win you ballgames when a team’s got as many holes as this one. Put another way: that, in itself, probably has no bearing on much. But take away the time from Brady trying to fix the little problems with the offense, and that’s time wasted. As is becoming clear, there’s not much time left.

It seems like Brady and Moss are on one island, and the rest of the offense is somewhere else, particularly the offensive line. The defense played like crap today, and that’ll happen. It just hasn’t happened to us in such a big game in awhile. The defense was pretty good in the Super Bowl two years ago, but not anymore.

The Patriots now remind me of those late nineties 49ers teams that raged against the dying of the light with increasingly futile playoff campaigns. The magic could show up for any single game, but never stuck around to get them what they really wanted, which was another title. There were too many teams that were just younger and hungrier, despite their best efforts.

I got a Facebook message after the game consoling me. I don’t know what I have to be sad about. If this is the end, I can’t say I didn’t get everything I ever wanted, and more.

5 Comments

January 8, 2010

Boxing Promoters

My friend Chris taught me a valuable lesson after the Pacquiao/Cotto fight. When I told him the $54.99 PPV was great for the first six rounds and blah for the last six, he laughed and spewed, “That’s why they’re called boxing promoters.”

That’s all I can think about during all the back-and-forth between Floyd Mayweather and Pacquiao for their supposedly canceled March 13th fight. As I said in an email with some friends, I’ll believe they’re not fighting when it’s March 13th and they’re not fighting. Even if they do scrap it, it’ll only end up to boost the profile of whenever they eventually do go at it (and they most definitely will) — which would, at least to me, cast doubt on whether there was ever really a March 13th agreement in the first place.

2 Comments

January 7, 2010

Today’s NYT Crossword

Is a work of genius. If you’re at all interested in that type of thing and are willing to spend the time to figure out the hook, it will be more than worth your while. The constructor’s name is Xan Vongsathorn, and he/she has created something wonderful.

January 7, 2010

A Day Late and a Framed Original Short

The other day some college heads and I were thinking on this cartoon for the New Yorker Caption Contest. Rather than actually thinking up entries, we were debating what sort of entries win, and the consensus seemed to be captions that could only be applied within the contest rather than trying to guess what the missing caption is, so to speak. That is, if the comic had a certain slug in mind, it probably wouldn’t win. That’s just sort of how it goes, and I won’t get any more esoteric than that.

But today I had a flash of inspiration that pretty much would have nailed the whole thing shut. Alas, I’m too late to win with:

“You always say you’d rather read, but I think you’re just a legs man.”

2 Comments

January 6, 2010

Power Drill

I’m going to buy a power drill. Any recommendations? I’ll spend a little bit more to get a better piece of equipment. (TWSS)

2 Comments

January 5, 2010

Borders (not the bookstore kind)

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a running dialogue today about a NYT trend story that basically says non-blacks are taking over Harlem. He disagrees, but more to the point is indifferent about what—even if true—it even means when there are like, real problems for black people. Something like: Gentrification isn’t new, and the root problem is bigger than any one instance of it happening.

But the better question is whether it’s happening or not. He asks in this post:

Still, thinking more on the geography the Times calls “Harlem” raises some questions for me:

“But the neighborhood is in the midst of a profound and accelerating shift. In greater Harlem, which runs river to river, and from East 96th Street and West 106th Street to West 155th Street, blacks are no longer a majority of the population — a shift that actually occurred a decade ago, but was largely overlooked.”

By my estimate this basically places Morningside Heights (amongst other things) inside of Harlem. I imagine that might have been true at some point. But those borders sound really permissive to me. Am I off?

What I thought (and wrote a comment to this effect that is basically reproduced here) is that it’s no different than a phenomenon I was writing about earlier in Queens, where most black neighborhoods are referred to as “Jamaica” on the nightly news, et al., because it’s expedient. If the Times is including Morningside Heights in its map of “Harlem,” maybe they’re going by an old map that places it “inside” a greater Harlem, but I agree with (Run) T-NC that that seems a little off. Which gets us to the idea of how a place is defined. If Harlem did once swallow Morningside Heights whole, why doesn’t it now? And to where does it extend? Most importantly, why do we consider it to extend to wherever it extends?

A friend told me a long time ago that I was into the idea of “place,” and I’m really starting to feel that. I’m about 200 pages into William Vollman’s Imperial, which is already the most exhaustive account of the idea of “place” I’ve ever read—and I have 800 pages to go. It’s all about Imperial County, California and its sister region on the Mexican side and treats the area (wisely, I believe) as a single entity, with this crushing vivisection that makes it almost impossible to view as a unit. But for most of history it was a unit, and at some point it very well may be again. On top of all this, I was in Imperial County last week, spending 48 hours of Christmas break in Palm Springs with pops and bro. I wanted to see the Salton Sea—a reeking, festering, dead body of water around which a good portion of Vollman’s Ouija-like narrative revolves—but was talked out of it, or rather basically forbidden (as family time was short) by my stepmom, who said she had investigated it for kayaking purposes and found it “disgusting.” I didn’t have the heart to say well yeah…

But it all gets to the idea of defining a place. I’ve tried to do this before with MV and think I did a bad job [note: I just re-read it and it wasn’t as bad as I thought, but I feel like I was grasping for something I didn’t quite reach] but I’m trying with Queens now and I think I’m getting some good stuff down. Definitely helps to not be from there and not be there; while there’s something to be said for writing things down as they happen*, there’s also a value in using what you remember—it’s our memories that make places what they are, to us, and it’s important to be true to that.

* Of course, I did write everything down already, but that’s not the point.

7 Comments

January 5, 2010

The Inverted Pyramid

One thing I forget about my job from time to time is that it’s really a teaching job. I would like to think that, as editor in chief of a magazine, I shouldn’t have to teach people—but that was the approach that bothered me when I was on the other side of it. Case in point, in Queens the publishers of the paper didn’t like a lot of the editorials I wrote in my early years, telling me to do it “better” without giving me specific instructions. Their view was: We’re hiring professional journalists, so be “more professional” and do it better. Now that I’m on the other side of it, and I’m the one supervising people in their first journalism jobs, I realize that taking the easy way out and being vague about what you want is a great strategy if you really have no investment in the final product… or something less than full investment. I want my magazine to be good, but I’m not a maniac about it simply because the topics don’t really lend themselves to mania (It’s rather ho-hum business stuff that blooms with pretty pictures, which are the important things to get.) Still, I need to try harder to tell my assistant exactly what I need when her stories aren’t to their potential, and why, and right now she has a quirk that I used to have: Building to the lede instead of building from it. The thing is, it’s not really her fault. It’s hard to know what’s really important in the weird business I cover, and she’s learning about as fast as I did, if not faster. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t have learned faster here with some detailed instruction… and, in fact, I find myself lapsing into the exact same pattern that my boss imposed on me of passive-aggressiveness. My new goal is instead of building up to telling her that her article is wrong, just tell her it’s wrong and go from there. It’s the only way to work.

January 4, 2010

Holiday in Bizarro World

I am friends with a disproportionate number of creative professionals who have been affected by the economy: Writers, editors and graphic designers, mostly, but also architects, artists and others sprinkled in. The point was really hammered home with The Gawker Guide to Journalism, 2010 edition, which basically chronicles the ever-accelerating death spiral of paying media jobs. I’ve written elsewhere that I expect paid content to be a reliable part of the future of the Internet, but in a completely different form than how I grew up expecting to spend my life (and the events of the last couple weeks have spurred me to finally start putting my experiences as the Last Old Skool Journalist of a particular sort—one who grew up with newspapers, and was drawn to them—down on paper). I used to joke back in Queens that trade magazines were the places to get the money, and the newspapers like the ones I worked at were the place to get Real Experience, but translating that Real Experience into the job of one’s dreams seems to now be one of only 10 possible ways to get there, and certainly one of the hardest. The fact that I feel like I’m profoundly lucky to have the job I have now—the job I used to think was the “cushy” “journalism”—speaks to this fracture. In the Last Exit piece I cited above, I ask how much paid (as in, I get paid) journalism’s crash is actually related to the economy and/or the rise of the Internet and how much of it is cyclical, but there’s no doubt the economy has wreaked havoc on the best laid plans of many, many smart people I know who are working to a fraction of their considerable potential.

Contrast that with the lives of my dad and brother, who live out in the desert, and it’s like going to bizarro world. My dad works in academia, which for the gruff it gets during the fat years sure looks like a nice, warm incubator in times like these. Sez dad: “I will never curse tenure again.” My brother works at an investment company with the initials C.S. that basically doesn’t invest itself enough in risky things like the housing market to have suffered major consequences, as far as I understand it, as they work mostly in client services. Thus they haven’t been hit too hard, and anyway, bro is an up-and-coming manager there. Stepping into their world, it’s like the economic collapse was something that was happening simply to other people, one that made you appreciate what you’ve got, like seeing an accident on the highway. In fairness to them, I think they’ve looked at my career choice as foolish from the get-go, but the degree to which this has “confirmed” anything like that seems disproportionate with what I and hundreds of thousands of people are going through. I didn’t go to graduate school, but my four years in Queens were—and I don’t think anyone would doubt this—much harder than any J-school would have been; by extension, what’s happened to me is like if they went to medical school or law school and graduated only to learn that no one wanted to pay doctors or financial advisors anymore. I realize that people choose these schools mostly because they offer security against this inevitability, but growing up, who thought we wouldn’t have newspapers?

The point is, I spend last week in a bubble where the recession was happening to other people, and it really threw me for a loop. It doesn’t seem like the real world to me, and at least for the moment I still value the potential highs in my field over the security they have. God bless the trade magazine.

5 Comments

Month: January, 2010