Hermenaut staffers Ingrid Schorr, Scott Hamrah, Josh Glenn, Richard Grijalva, and Carrie Ingoglia were joined by loyal supporters Susan Roe, Sally De Angelis, and Elizabeth Glenn this past Sunday night as the insanely tedious work of "blowing" subscription envelopes into the new issue of the magazine, stuffing the magazine into a too-small manila envelope, sealing said envelope, then stacking all the sealed envelopes somewhere underfoot—for the day when Josh gets around to printing out address labels, applying them to the envelopes, organizing them into bundles by zip code according to bulk mail regulations, rubber-banding the bundles and putting them into sacks (also organized according to bulk mail regulations), and somehow hauling all the sacks over to the Allston P.O. for mailing—began.
We say "began," because we might have finished doing all that on Sunday were it not for the fact that Hamrah decided the subscription envelope's teaser copy was embarrassingly out of date. You see, when we had the envelopes printed this summer, Cameron Diaz's new brunette look was on the cover of every magazine on the newsstand—so, in the course of trumpeting Hermenaut's superiority to mainstream magazines, we'd made some passing remark about it. But now she's a blonde, again. It should give you some insight into the reason it takes us so long to get each new issue of the magazine out when we tell you that Scott forced us to insert an errata slip—they were actually Ingrid's idea—into each and every subscription envelope pointing out that "Cameron Diaz has blonde, not brown, hair."
PS: Don't forget, James Parker is reading from the new U.S. edition of Turned On, his critical biography of Henry Rollins, tomorrow night at the Harvard Coop, at 7 pm. See you Boston-area readers there.
01.17.01 This past Friday, Hermenaut's Josh Glenn and James Parker rented a 14-foot U-Haul and drove up to Cummings Printers in Hooksett, NH to pick up the 16th issue of Hermenaut: the "Stockholm Syndrome" number. James recalls that Josh's eyes bugged out of his head when he first caught sight of the towering ziggurat of cardboard boxes. To be precise: 197 boxes, each carrying 52 issues; that's 10,244 copies. Since each copy of issue #16 weighs 11 ounces, that adds up to about 7,043 lbs. of white-hot intellectual excitement. Our pals at Cummings used all kinds of heavy-duty equipment to cram those pallets-full of magazines into the truck, but it was up to Josh and other Hermenaut staffers—including Hermenaut.com contributing editor Matthew Battles, who came down to the office in the middle of the night when we called him in a panic—to unload the damn thing, 36 pounds a time. Next: Mailing #16 to subscribers and distributors. James, exhausted from watching Josh trudge up a hill with a can of gas after the truck pooped out on the highway, excused himself from the unloading part... But we're still going to urge all you Boston-area Hermenaut readers to show up at the Harvard Coop at 7 pm, on Thursday the 25th, to hear him read from the new U.S. edition of "Turned On," his critical biography of Henry Rollins7#8212;which has been described as "a compassionate, lyrical tribute to some of the
most savage music ever produced." See you there! 01.10.01 This week, Hermenaut mourns the passing of Nick, the beloved proprietor of Nick's Barber Shop on Harvard Ave., in Allston, Mass. Hermenaut editors Josh Glenn and Scott Hamrah used Nick's as a satellite office, talking shop while flipping through copies of Swing Magazine, watching "Bonanza"—which for some reason was always playing on Nick's battered TV—and waiting, along with all the other guys with nothing more pressing to do that day, for a turn in the chair. Willie, Benny, Sam, Joe... Hermenaut's editors have buried a lot of barbers in the past 15 years or so. We hate to see them go. Once all the old-timers have died, who will know what we mean when we ask for a "Men's Regular, High and Tight, Tapered, and Use the Straight Razor Around the Ears, Please"? And what barber starting out today understands the mysteries of the "Irish," the "Wiffle," or the "Ricky Ricardo"? There's more to a barber shop than a striped pole, friends. Please pause for a moment, then, before reading the rest of this week's newsletter, to think about our friend Nick—gentleman, raconteur, wristwatch repairman, baseball fan, and one of the last of a vanishing breed. 01.03.01 After the big party thrown by Michael Lewy and Tony Leone—Hermenaut's art department—this New Year's Eve, our staff was hurting. According to Josh Glenn's research, Clarke Cooper spent New Year's Day "flying home with a hangover, suppressing heaves from Logan to National." Ingrid Schorr, who wore brand new yellow underpants to the party—she claims it's a South American tradition, to ensure a lucky new year—says the only thing keeping her going this week is the memory of Josh "installing a 'narcoleptic' friend in a vacant bedroom." Chris Fujiwara doesn't remember anything much after "some drunk said I looked 'shifty.'" And Scott Hamrah—last seen dancing at 2:30 in the morning with Hermenaut editorial assistant Tara Koelbl—tells us that, "as the sun rose over Jamaica Plain, I took over the turntables and played a set consisting entirely of Frankie Laine, Notorious B.I.G., and The Cars." Yowch! 12.27.00
On December 22, 1999, Hermenaut's Carrie Ingoglia posted "Atlas Against the Czar," a meditation on the meaning of an obscure sword- and-sandal film by Chris Fujiwara, to our just-completed Web site and—despite the fact that we had no money, no staff, and no other articles lined up—declared Hermenaut.com open for business. The very next day, a total stranger dashed off a response to Chris's article in the Wicked Pavilion; by February, there were a dozen conferences running simultaneously. In the year since we launched, we've published 75 original and reprinted articles, and our readers —and writers—have engaged in a spirited back-and-forth to the tune of almost 2500 posts. And we've made a lot of new friends, too: including Matthew Battles, who showed up to kibbitz and stayed to become a contributing editor (and a friend). We've had a great year doing all this; and we think 2001 will be even better. There's more: Although we've barely advertised our existence, new people have shown up in the Wicked Pavilion every month, and most of them have stuck around. So we want to thank you all—Jessica Graves, Patrick Schabe, Washington Harline, Carl Schmitt, Edmond Keenan Wynn, Spencer, Mavis Dorleac, Eric Williams, Timmy Church, Luc Sante, Marilyn Snell, Cheops MacWhirter, Seth Sanders, Karen Carr, Pachinko, Jose Garriga, Ann from Dorchester, M. Wilson, Bill Krohn, F. Brunswik, Auslandisch Krankhaft, "David Denby," Jill Stauffer, Scott McLemee, Toby McLeverage, Carol M., KC, Yoni from Madison, Alice Dallmayr, Freddy Neptune, Jeff Decker, D.B. Weiss, Rachel Weathers, Erik Davis, "Jesse Garon Presley," Mary C. Taylor, Carly Sommerstein, George Rafael, Keith Gessen, Cookie Crumbles, Fluffy Love, Edna Mesmer, Chris Phillips, and every other pavilionista—for keeping the Wicked Pavilion wicked. 12.18.00 In the five weeks since we posted Josh Glenn's An Idler's Glossary," Wicked Pavilion regulars—including Scott McLemee, Patrick Schabe, Matthew Battles, D.B. Weiss, Timmy Church, M. Wilson, and Karen Carr; plus newcomers Jennifer Hart from Kentucky, Bill Fenton from Australia, Mary C. Taylor from Michigan, George Rafael from England, Carly Sommerstein from New Jersey, and Tom Hodgkinson from England—have offered a plethora of additional synonyms for idling and idlers. (These include: hacking, Schweikism, umbraticand, Murrumbidgee Whaler, señorito, lickdish, Superfluous Man, Extra Man at the Feast, and quatorzieme.) All was going swimmingly until Jake Lee, a self-described "boorish class warrior" from New York City, came along last week and challenged the very idea of idling. Now we're embroiled in the question of whether the quest for free time is a decadent one, or a revolutionary one. What do YOU think, readers? Please join in the discussion! PS: Hermenaut 16 (Stockholm Syndrome) is at the printers right now. Depending on how quickly they can run off 10,000 copies, it will either be the last periodical published in the 20th century, or the first one published in the 21st. If you're a subscriber and you've been wondering why #16 hadn't yet arrived in your mailbox, now you know. Thanks for your patience! Watch this space for news about release parties. We plan to have one in Boston, and one in NYC. 12.13.00 In a Slate "Breakfast Table" exchange last week, Baffler editor and Hermenaut contributor Tom Frank went head-to-head with conservative writer David Brooks, author of the much-discussed Bobos in Paradise. Remember what we said in this space a few weeks back about how, instead of actually debating the issues with him, Frank's opponents instead trot out one rhetorical strategy and amelioration technique after another? Don't take our word for it. In this exchange, you can find what Hermenaut's Critical Affairs Dept. has described as Charges of Elitism and Hypocrisy, Wackification, Unrealisticism, Action Pointillism, and Proactivism, among other offenses. (Here's an example of the first two, from something Brooks said to Frank last Tuesday: "Why are you hanging around the University of Chicago editing a highbrow magazine and writing books if all the insightful people are over at Shoney's? Could you please list your three closest friends who are Chi-Chi's servers so I can call and chat them up?") The URL of the Breakfast Table exchange is below; we encourage you to take a look. And then read Scott McLemee's harsh review of Brooks's Bobos in Paradise; we posted it to the site today. http://slate.msn.com/code/breakfast/breakfast.asp?Show=
12/4/2000&idMessage=6614&idBio=219 12.06.00 As readers of this newsletter are well aware, Hermenautdeplores the trend at content-oriented websites toward replacing original content—which we define (call us crazy!) as works created by writers and edited by editors—with "user-created content," meaning conference postings and the like. We agree with the disintermediators that conference posts are often brilliant and well-written; that doesn't change the way we feel about disintermediation, however. So we were distressed to hear that Britannica.com, the online encyclopedia venture to which some of our writers have contributed, has announced the dismissal of nearly one-quarter of its U.S. workforce... including nearly every single editor. In an effort to reach profitability, in this time of dotcom wipeouts, Britannica.com's new content strategy is this, according to one source: "There will no longer by any original articles on the site, just a bunch of reference/search content. So what is it gonna mean to be an editor here anymore? Being a file monkey... shepherding aggregated loads of data around our publishing system, writing teaser text here and there, maybe making a decision now & then about where something belongs—that's about it." Now that we've invented writing without writers and editors (as Chris Fujiwara noted in a Hermenaut article which was reprinted by Britannica.com), we've disintermediated the reader—who now only searches texts, instead of reading them—as well. Goodbye, Britannica.com, we'll miss you! 11.29.00 We noticed, recently, that there's been over 2000 posts in the Wicked Pavilion since we launched the site last Christmas. Then we remembered that back in May we'd awarded Keith Gessen (we barely knew him at the time) a lifetime subscription for having been poster #1000. Combing through the records, we determined that one Christopher Schmitt, a student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, was poster #2000. We got in touch with him, and—as part of our lifetime subscriber screening process—asked him a number of penetrating questions: Q. How did you find out about Hermenaut, Christopher? A. My high school friend David had a copy of The Factsheet Five Zine Reader. One day, as he was spouting out some subversive rhetoric, I paged through the book and A.S. Hamrah's article on Jerry Lewis ["Thus Spake Cinderfella," from issue 7] caught my eye. A year later I was in college and bored of school—I'm double majoring in Zoology and either English or Sociology—so I found your site, and the rest is history. Q. What do you think of the Hermenaut site? A. I prefer reading print magazines, but the Wicked Pavilion gives me an opportunity to challenge and be challenged in an intellectual arena—which college is theoretically supposed to do. Q. What do you mean by that crack about the academy? A. By "the academy" do you mean the upper echelon of university ilk that spout the mainstream of "new ideas"? Q. Er, yes. A. The academy hasn't exactly been sharing with the masses in a readily accessible way for as long as I've been exposed to it. I would hope its role is to spread the wealth of thought it amasses to all who wish to attain it, but that doesn't seem to be happening. People who go and look for knowledge in academia rarely come back to redistribute the ideas; I have a friend at U. of Chicago whom I swear has been swallowed whole. This is why I'm glad Hermenaut is around: instead of retaining what it ingests, it digests society and philosophy just enough to gloriously vomit it back out to the general public. Q. We were with you until that last part, about us vomiting half-digested ideas onto people. Now we're depressed. Why should we go on publishing? A. Your articles confuse the hell out of me, and then I get to untie the mental knots. I think that should be the role of the intellectual in our society: to confuse the hell out of the masses. Unless the state of mental apathy, atrophy, and neglect is completely thrown on its ass, there will be no progress either philosophically or societally. Q. OK, OK, you've already won the lifetime subscription, so cut it out already. Do you want to make your acceptance speech now? A. I'd like to thank you for this great prize! As a dirt poor college student who has almost no prospects for the future, it's comforting to know that when I re-enter the minimum wage work force, I'll at least be able to get my twice-yearly fix of heady philosophy! Q: Oh yeah... did we mention we're only coming out once a year now? 11.15.00 Way back in March of 1998, Esquire contributing editor Mim Udovitch wrote a cover story for that magazine on Uma Thurman. Udovitch didn't want to do the usual celebrity puff piece, yet she had to, anyway—pbecause that's just what they do over there at Esquire. Or something. In the third paragraph of the profile Udovitch jokes that she could "write a whole big academic paper" about the "ontology of Uma Thurman"; she goes on from there to describe Uma as an intellectual, who probably "would have gone to the same parties as Lionel and Diana Trilling" if she'd lived several decades ago. And then she starts in with a whole thing about Foucault, teleology, heterotopia... you get the picture. This is where we first got the idea for "Philosophywatch." We are delighted to report, therefore, that Ms. Udovitch herself posted an apologia to the "Philosophywatch" conference in the Wicked Pavilion this past weekend. "I'm a writer of limited ability, working for magazines and newspapers, the quality of whose work varies according to circumstances, some of which I control, others of which I don't. It certainly hurts my feelings to see the word 'ugh' appended to my name," she tells us. "I'm not neo-Foucauldian. I don't know enough about Foucauld [sic] to be neo-him, though if I were writing about him or his work seriously, I would do what I could to make sure I knew what I was talking about before I wrote. I'm not trying to infiltrate anything through the application of trivia, I don't think—I don't actually understand the characterization. In a nutshell, I'm not that bright." We find Mim's disingenuous confession charming, so—although we would ask that she try to mend her ways in the future—we're letting her off the hook. If anyone else we've criticized would like to defend him- or herself in the Wicked Pavilion, do it now! We're feeling good. 11.08.00 As we go to press with this week's newsletter, we find ourselves very perplexed by what, exactly, is going on in the US of A these days. Our main question is this: Who is our president? If anyone out there knows the answer to this question, please don't keep it to yourself. This will be a brief gossip section today, by the way, because the editors of this newsletter both turned on their televisions last night at two in the morning and were horrified to see a blood-red map of America hovering before their eyes. They're freaked out, so they need to leave early today. Here in the commonwealth of Massachusetts, among the referendum questions we voted on were the following three stumpers: Should people arrested on drug charges have the opportunity to go through treatment instead of going to prison? Should prisoners have their right to vote taken away from them? and Should greyhound racing be made illegal?
Hermenaut celebrity bio columnist Ingrid Schorr made what we think is an excellent suggestion: people arrested on drug charges should be offered the opportunity to run around a dog track while other people bet on them; the winners of each race will be allowed to vote. Huh? Huh? Hey, we're just trying to have a little fun, here. Lighten up! 11.01.00
Noble souls interested in conversation-for-the-sake-of-conversation pray that their own discussions will live up to the definition of a "salon" offered by a guest of the famous salon hostess Rahel Levin: "the boldest ideas, the deepest thoughts, the cleverest witticisms, the most capricious fancies, all strung together by careless chit-chat." But the Wicked Pavilion—whose denizens are as bold, deep, clever, capricious, and careless as any chit-chatters in history—is no salon: it's more like a grand hotel, full of exiles and malcontents, perched on the edge of an abyss. James Parker's polemic on his own debased style of film reviewing (Softcore: Yeah, You Know the Score), Josh Glenn's attack on the state of American magazines (Journal: August 1999), and Keith Gessen's mention of a Foucault-spouting apologist for genocide (Philosophywatch): critical perspectives like these, which refuse to accept the way things are right now, have caused one uproar after another. This week, Chris Fujiwara's essay I, Robot: The Shame of 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' has sparked the latest of many exegetical furors among the pavilionistas. Since this past Saturday, J. Christie, Edna Mesmer, Timmy Church, Patrick Schabe, Spencer, Clarke Cooper, Karen Carr, and others have been arguing over the following questions: Are the robots of "MST3K" who talk back to the screen during "bad" films engaged in what Timmy calls "a vital and organic form of folk resistance to corporate shenanigans?" Is it true that, as Patrick would have it, "all life on celluloid is inherently crap, so you might as well have fun with it?" Or do "bad" films offer what Fujiwara's article describes as "unique aesthetic experiences, strange personal films, and precious cultural documentation"? Does "knee-jerk irony interposed between us and those ['bad'] films make us not less, but rather more complacent," as Karen Carr suggests? And what makes a film "bad," anyway, huh? Are you one of those people who complains about the lameness of
public discourse on issues that truly matter? Join us in the Pavilion! 10.25.00
The Baffler's Tom Frank was in Boston these past three days to
promote his new book One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism,
Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. Last night,
at Wordsworth Books in Harvard Square, he read from the chapter
entitled "To the Dot-Com Station," which demonstrates how a
Stalinist insistence upon the historical inevitability of socialism was co-opted in the 1990s by free-market capitalism's boosters—think of the magazine Fast Company—who've vied to explain "how all of human history merely led up to the victory of the free-market 'New Economy' over the government-laden old." Anyone *insane* enough to criticize the way things are now, he explained, is dismissed as a griping naysayer, an elitist, an unrealistic boondoggler, or worse: Frank himself has been accused, by an editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, of being an "Enemy of the Future," even. The day before that, worried that the ubiquitous Art Cods might
confuse our friend from Chicago, the city which gave us Art Cows,
Hermenaut's Josh Glenn and A.S. Hamrah accompanied Frank to his
appearance on WBUR's "The Connection"—where host Christopher
Lydon, a liberal, kept referring to "our friends at Fast Company," and insinuated that his guest was—can you guess what's coming next? a griping naysayer, an elitist, and an unrealistic boondoggler. Everyone else at WBUR, however, Glenn and Hamrah report, seemed to disagree with Lydon. (Lydon seemed to disagree with himself, too.) RETRACTION: Speaking of Reason, in this space last week you may have read something about how Brian Doherty had described the Wicked Pavilion as a 'Rage Against the Machine message board' in a recent article for that magazine, a crime for which we accused him of a Stephen Glass-like lack of journalistic ethics. This was a rather ham-fisted joke, of course—as the anecdotes quoted from the Pavilion and from the Reason article clearly had nothing to do with one another—but Mr. Doherty has informed us that the editors of two of the publications for which he writes didn't get it. Sorry about that, Brian. 10.18.00
Earlier this year, Christopher Schmitt (of Madison, Wis.) posted the following pithy comment to the Wicked Pavilion conference for "Feel Like a Stranger," by Matt Goldberg: "Many people are constantly searching for themselves through the accepted un-accepted routes. Just ask a Rage fan with the life sized image of Che Guevara dominating his dorm what the man did to deserve his wall space and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about." Not long afterward, Gary Downie (of W. Lafayette, Ind.) responded, "I am a Rage Against the Machine fan, and I do know who Che Guevara is and what he stood for. I would agree that many Rage fans do not know what it means when they wear a T-shirt with a picture of Zapatistas on it, but there are also those of us who listen to Rage Against the Machine because we support their ideals, not in spite of them." We intervened, as soon as we could, to discourage this sort of dorm-room bull session jive, but it seems we were already too late: a certain Brian Doherty (of Suck.com) had already downloaded the malarkey. Just take a look at the following anecdote from an article he's written, entitled "Rage On: The Strange Politics of Millionaire Rock Stars," for the October 2000 issue of the libertarian magazine Reason: "On another popular Rage message board, a fan told of spotting a fellow high school student wearing a Rage T-shirt. The fan engaged the shirt wearer in a discussion of Rage's socialism. But the shirt wearer didn't believe it: How could his rockin' rebels be socialists, since 'socialists were fascists who stifle freedom'? The wounded reporter of this exchange noted, 'I hope people will actually find out what a shirt stands for before they wear it.'" Doherty, who goes on to make an extremely dubious point—"But the other kid knew what he knew. And in the market system that pays Rage so handsomely for its anti-capitalist songs, he's the one who imposes value on the objects that he uses to create his public personality. No matter what Rage's members might think, he knows they stand for freedom when he listens to them."—deserves kudos for his Stephen Glass-style creative journalism... but dammit, he's insulted the WP with that 'Rage message board' crap! Is it too late to point out that A.S. Hamrah has always felt that Rage Against the Machine should be called Rage Against the Equipment? 10.11.00
The current issue of Print ("America's Graphic Design Magazine") features a heavily illustrated overview—entitled "Lit. Class," by Tom Vanderbilt—of the country's most exciting and well-designed indie literary magazines. Among the half-dozen publications singled out for praise, including Open City, McSweeney's, and the Baffler, is—yes—Hermenaut. Print describes our latest design as being a happy collision between Jean-Paul Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes and the pulp sci-fi mag Amazing Stories. (Since we've always aimed not just to criticize pop culture but also to BE pop culture, we find this description very gratifying, indeed.) Please join us in congratulating Hermenaut's art director Anthony Leone, and our art editor and cover artist Michael Lewy, for receiving such insightful praise from their peers in the world of graphic design. And we thank them for putting up with us, too. Oh yeah, we also want to congratulate our friend, and loyal subscriber,
Laylah Ali—not the boxer—for having a number of her paintings featured in the most recent issue of Harper's magazine. Way to go! PS: If there was any gossipworthy news in the world of Hermenaut
this week, editor Josh Glenn hasn't reported it. That's because, early
Saturday morning, his wife Susan Roe gave birth to a baby boy: Max.
Josh has been careening around self-importantly ever since. 10.04.00
Hermenaut's assistant editor Tara Koelbl has been known to complain that, "For some reason, I get all bruised up whenever I go out drinking." What do you say when a co-worker makes a comment like that? Is it a cry for help? Or a Falstaffian boast? In Tara's case, we believe it's the latter. This Sunday, she tells us, she woke up with a swollen and throbbing left hand. (She's a southpaw.) With some effort, she recalled having been challenged—the night before, at the
Middle East nightclub in Cambridge—by a young man wearing a polo shirt to "Punch me as hard as you can in the stomach. C'mon, really let me have it!" His stomach, she recounts, was indeed quite firm; but, she continues with a blush, "the jerk had a glass jaw." Meanwhile, at the Revolving Museum's "Virtual Circus" in downtown Boston, Hermenaut's celebrity bio reviewer and copy editor Ingrid Schorr was wearing a wire mesh frame completely covered with pink cotton candy. She and gal-pal Sally DeAngelis, also wearing cotton candy, walked through the crowd, which collectively ate them. It was a completely successful performance, theater critic Scott Hamrah tells us, especially because when it was all over "they looked like Dalí with gingivitis." Hamrah's only complaint about the virtual circus? "Office lighting obliterates the carnivalesque." 9.27.00
Last week in the Wicked Pavilion's "Philosophywatch" conference, a forum dedicated to combatting what Hermenaut's editors call the "neo- Foucauldian" menace in mass culture, Feed book critic Keith Gessen reported that he'd discovered what appeared to be the real thing. The author of a recent New Yorker article on the Congo, Gessen reported, had inquired of Kabila's foreign minister Yerodia—a Lacanian psychoanalyst who'd left his Parisian practice and become one of the primary instigators of mob violence against the Tutsi minority—why such an educated man would become party to genocide. "I refer you to Foucault," Yerodia suavely replied. "You'll see that, before using a word, you must look at the thing the word describes." Keith and other Wicked Pavilion regulars, including Matthew Battles, Patrick Schabe, T.R. Johnson, Josh Glenn, Spencer, Karen Carr, Scott McLemee, KC, and M. Wilson—who've been joined by Jill Stauffer, editor of the philosophy-oriented zine h2so4; and Chris
Phillips, founder of the Society for Philosophical Inquiry—have
speculated as to what, exactly, Yerodia's appropriation of Foucault
("the raised fist of tenured radicals, the whipping boy of the neocons," as one pavilionista put it) is all about. Fundamental questions, such as "How alienated and negative ought an intellectual to be?"; and "What kind of responsibility do intellectuals have for whatever sympathetic vibrations their work sets off in the consciousnesses of other people?"; and "How is it that people can read thinkers in the tradition of negativity and then go on to write puff pieces about pop stars, or participate in ethnic cleansing?"; and even "Where does the stupefaction of disease and poverty meet the boredom-unto-death stupefaction of New Yorker readers?" have been asked. The names Adorno, Benjamin, Marx, Simone Weil, Al Gore, Scooby Doo, Norman Mailer, Elaine Scarry, Paolo Freire, Charles Manson, Mim Udovich, and Burt Lancaster have been bandied about. And Ms. Stauffer invited Jean-Paul Sartre to "bite me." This is what online conferencing is all about—join in! NOTE: Last week, it was announced that the Hermenaut release party
would be held at the fabulous Milky Way Lounge and Lanes in
Jamaica Plain, Mass. on THURSDAY, October 26th. That date, too,
has been changed, as we won't have the new issue in hand by then.
Please cross the party off your social calendar until further notice!! 9.20.00
Hermenaut's Josh Glenn, Scott Hamrah, and Chris Fujiwara were faced with a dilemma this past weekend: who was going to drive to New York City for Lingua Franca's 10th anniversary party ("Drinks! Discourse! Downtown!" promised the one-out-of-three-ain't-bad invite), and who was going to take public transportation to Harvard Square for The English Institute's 59th annual meeting, which promised a "roundtable discussion"—it was neither—on Adorno's infamous essay Resignation? As always, Glenn drew the short straw. Hamrah and Fujiwara, accompanied by publishing biz professionals
Carol Hayes and Vanessa Mobley, enjoyed the drinks—mixed by
not-for-profit caterers—which, they report, were four parts gin to one part tonic; Glenn, who was forced to rise very early to make the roundtable discussion, had to settle for a plastic bottle of off-brand orange juice. Hamrah and Fujiwara relished the booze-fueled discourse, mostly because they got to meet Lingua Franca associate editor James Ryerson, but they claim the highlight of the evening was spotting a dead ringer for Jim Backus in the crowd; Glenn struggled to keep his eyes open as well-known English professors from around the country droned on and on about how great they all were. (By an extraordinary coincidence, the Backus lookalike, on being approached, identified himself as Erik Lee Adorno, a CCNY philosophy professor and the illegitimate son of the co-author of The Dialectic of Enlightenment and ecdysiast Gypsy Rose Lee.) Hamrah and Fujiwara were duly impressed by the setting of the party, a shabby-chic former church on Norfolk Street; Glenn was rescued by Harvard University Press's ever-impressive Lindsay Waters, who took him out for Vietnamese. 9.13.00 According to the latest issue of Zine Guide, an underground press resource which recently conducted a comprehensive survey of the zine-reading public, despite all our best efforts to sell out—by running color covers, selling advertisements, and editing our writers —Hermenaut is still considered a zine. In fact, Hermenaut made the Zine Guide's short list of Favorite Zines Among [Its] Readers, Favorite Zines Among Record Labels, Favorite Zines Overall, and most exciting to us, Favorite Zines Among Females; this latter honor, despite the fact that we have never once run an interview with Cat Power, Janeane Garofalo, or Cristina Martinez from Boss Hog. This just goes to show... something. But what, exactly? Any ideas?
9.06.00 Last night, the editor of Hermenaut magazine attended a literary event at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, Massachusetts. He'd heard that the featured writer and his writer friends were going to put on quite a show, and in this he was not disappointed. Nor was the audience disappointed, for they had come ready to be entertained. They hooted and guffawed during the theater's previews for the films "Escape from New York" and "Robin Hood", and they just... kept... laughing. One guy—who was wearing a smoking jacket and holding a pipe—stood up on the stage in front of the screen and claimed he was a former literary agent; he poked fun at the New York publishing scene in a mock-serious fashion, and plugged the independent efforts of the featured author's publisher. He then invited the publisher—himself a literary celebrity—to read aloud questions from the audience about the book publishing racket, which he (the ex-agent) then answered in a mock-serious fashion. The publisher mock-seriously instructed one of the question-askers on the proper use of semi-colons; this was greeted with a great deal of laughter and applause. The ex-agent introduced a writer who played a guitar and then smashed it, and then smashed another one, while reading some story. Then the ex-agent introduced a writer who read a mock-serious speech about her love affair with the featured writer, about whom she made extravagant claims of various sorts. She then asked the audience to cheer for the featured writer, who ran around the theater in sunglasses and a silver jacket pumping his fist in the air; meanwhile, a band played a James Brown-type entrance number. The featured writer then sang "God Bless America" in a mockingly serious way, praised himself extravagantly with mocking seriousness, and read two mock-serious travel narratives in a mock-serious fashion. The New Yorker was mentioned a couple of times, and large international media corporations were denounced; also, many jokes were made about bodily odors. The ex-agent put a cape over the featured writer's shoulders and tried to lead him off the stage. Also, a member of the publisher's entourage asked everyone in the audience from Massachusetts to stand up and cheer; then he read the comic strip "Curtis" aloud while the featured writer laughed uproariously. Eventually everyone got back on stage and swayed back and forth while the featured writer sang "Tomorrow" in the voice of Dan Aykroyd. The whole thing was like an episode of "Mystery Science Theater 3000"—only it was LITERATURE that was being projected—as the comical robots prancing in front of the screen simultaneously flattered our intelligence and provided what Chris Fujiwara once described, in an essay on "MST3K", as a comforting distance between us and our anxieties. What a hoot! 8.30.00 Hermenaut's Ingrid Schorr and boyfriend Mike won tickets to a Tony Bennett—you know, that crooner Gen X'ers are supposed to love—concert this past weekend. So how was it? we wanted to know. "It was a hell of a metaperformance," reports Ingrid. "That is, his performance seemed to be all about the performance: give a thumbs up here, yell 'Yeah' to one of the band members, point to someone in the audience. Several songs had a stirring vocal coda, such as 'Ohhhhhh yeahhhhhhh!' (the 'yeah' in the deepest possible growl). Then he'd wait for the applause to die down and sing the coda again. The march-tempo version of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' inspired us to leave, and we repaired to a sushi restaurant in Chinatown, where the clientele were mostly coked-up couples in denim jumpsuits and one table of crazed Hong Kong sailors on leave. The man next to us said to his date, 'So where can we dump the stuff illegally?' They apparently came up with a solution, because soon afterward she said to him, 'Manhattan is an island.'" As Tony Bennett might put it, ohhhhh yeahhhhhhh!
8.23.00 This Saturday afternoon, Pedro Martinez struck out ten of the Texas Rangers en route to a 9-0 win for the Red Sox. Why, then, wondered Hermenaut's Carrie Ingoglia, who happened to be walking past Fenway Park as the game let out, was everyone wearing YANKEES SUCK shirts? Carrie—who's only lived in the Hub for a year now; and who would have been too young to have participated in this city's violent hatred for Bucky Dent, anyway—was on her way to visit a production coordinator friend on the set of a Chuck D video at Axis, a fratboy rock club around the corner from the ballpark. As no-one had responded to the call for extras, she'd agreed to stand in the crowd feigning excitement while Chuck D yelled "Break the law! Break the law!" (she thought he was saying, "Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!") for four hours; as if that weren't bad enough, about a hundred drunken Sox fans were roped in, too. The low point of the whole experience, however, Carrie recounts with a shudder, was when "this one band member who looked like the Edge from U2 but with a painted-on goatee jumped off the stage and started crowd-surfing. He'd been standing under hot lights wearing a 'pleather' jumpsuit, and as he passed over my head about a pint of sweat suddenly poured out of his pantleg onto my head." Look for Carrie when this video airs: she's the one in the pigtails and the Mickey Mouse T-shirt who's vomiting uncontrollably. 8.16.00
A couple of weeks ago, in a Wicked Pavilion conference on ex-Harper's editor Willie Morris, the editor of Hermenaut invited all the magazine-bashers present to design the perfect periodical. M. Snell, Luc Sante, Matthew Battles, Spencer, Margaret Blonder, and Dave Pierce did just that. So, if anyone reading this newsletter is an eccentric multimillionaire who'd like to publish a magazine whose dis-departmentalized and deadline-free writers would pay attention—by remaining vulnerable and un-self-centered—to the world; an unfinished and open magazine whose misfit readers would write letters to the editor like they were writing some indolent cousin who can't get his act together; a furiously inclusive, irresponsible, deflationary, tabloid-looking magazine with no identifiable demographic; a generalist scientific magazine—with a very small "s"—which would promiscuously merge specialized disciplines and remain respectful of the intelligence of the senses; and a dialectical magazine, one resistant to mission statements of any kind, in which discussions between writers would realign premises and vanquish assumptions, please drop us a line. Have we got a business plan for you!
8.9.00
As we may have mentioned once or twice before, Hermenaut's ultra-modern offices are located at the pinnacle of a threatening smokestack (upon which is painted the cryptic message "...FENREFFER"—huh?) high atop the fortress-like Samuel Adams brewery complex, which broods over what were once the banks of the Stony Brook River. On most days, our dialogues about truth, ethics, and the girl who plays Topanga on Boy Meets World are underscored by the steady industrious hum of brewcraft from far below, and the odor of roasting hops ascends to our nostrils like the aroma of burning sacrifices once did to the nostrils of the gods.
Two weeks ago, however, our reveries were shattered by the Samuel Adams Beer Festival, a Thursday-Friday celebration that drew Sam Adams employees, radio stations, standup comedians, and indie rock bands from all over the country to our rainy parking lot. Let's not comment on the jokes and the bands (including Veruca Salt) we were forced to endure. The free beer, free food, and free pick-and-play CDs courtesy of VH1 (given six choices from a list of sixty, we chose Duran Duran's "Rio" six times) more than made up for the Guitar Solo Contest the brewery sponsored. Two weeks later, however, one thing besides the CD remains: we can't get any work done without free beer. Finally, we feel like we work for an Internet start-up—where, we hear, it's impossible to get anything done without massage tables, vintage pinball machines, and nap rooms. Unless we get more free beer soon, we may have to start a paintball team.
8.2.00
A.S. Hamrah, Hermenaut's Critical Affairs Dept., was trying to drive through the permanent gray drizzle of his neighborhood (Brighton) on his way to the Hermenaut office here in Jamaica Plain today when it hit him: Brighton, Mass., is actually a town in Poland, circa 1974. By the time he'd skirted the gaping craters in the middle of the road only to be turned back at the border by policemen, he'd formulated a plan. After waiting in line to use the one working pay phone in the area—it's at a woefully understocked Christy's convenience store—he called us with the following idea: have Susan Sontag put on "Waiting for Godot" in the shell of the building that used to be Friendly's. He suggested casting his suspended-from-the-force cop neighbors as Didi and Gogo ("I'm tiyed of waitin' Guh-doh—get OVAH heyah!"). As his thirty-five cents ran out, Hamrah yelled something about asking Philip Roth to smuggle him some Underwood products (Deviled Ham and a typewriter ribbon), and then it was nothing but static. We're putting a call into PEN.
7.26.00
Hermenaut celebrity-bio columnist Ingrid Schorr takes a powder every year around this time, just when we need her to copy-edit the lay-outs of our summer issue. We managed to get a message to her, however, asking if she had any gossip to report this week. "You've got to be kidding," she replied frantically. "I'm living at an elite boarding school, teaching New Hampshire's best and brightest public school students. I eat lunch and dinner with 350 people. I sing Episcopal hymns. A student, asked to write about his coursework from his parents' point of view, speculated on whether I was anorexic and why I'm always so 'artificially happy.' He also referred to homework as being 'ass raped.' Occasionally there's a bout of bickering amongst the faculty over 'jouissance.' But not too often. Gossip? No. Derangement? Nearly." Considering the fact that, here at Hermenaut HQ, we've been known to debate the proper usage of "jouissance," and to speculate about Ingrid's physique and state of mind, not to mention the fact that Hatebath often describes being required to get his twice-yearly column in on time as being "ass-raped," one wonders what Ingrid's trying to tell us.
7.19.00
The confusing expression "Life does not live," which Adorno used as an
epigraph for Minima Moralia, can be easily understood by anyone who reads the "Living" section of the Boston Globe regularly. Week after week, the citizens of the Hub of the Universe are assaulted with banalities about who's in the latest issue of Talk magazine (in the "Literary Life" column, no less); what really goes on behind the scenes of Friends; where you can buy pre-weathered, faux-wicker patio furniture; when Juliana Hatfield—the daughter, we are never allowed to forget, of a Globe fashion writer—is playing in the lobby of Tower Records again; and why, according to Ann Landers, the mother of a one-legged teenaged girl should be particularly worried about her daughter's dating habits. OK, this last one was pretty interesting, but you get the idea.
There are only two "Living" columnists whom we've ever found the slightest bit enjoyable: the Ambrose Bierce manqué Alex Beam, and Go! writer Hayley Kaufman, an Alexandra (New York Observer) Jacobs manquée whose louche descriptions of forthcoming events are somewhat enjoyable. In today's Globe, however, Beam defends the fake authentic Applebee's family restaurant chain by sneering that Applebee's critic Sallie Tisdale "is an Intellectual, so naturally she disdains Applebee's"; and Kaufman suggests that you'll want to read Amy Sohn's salubrious novel "Run Catch Kiss"... "unless you're one of those snooty intellectuals who eschews such voyeuristic pap." Now, when Bierce or Jacobs puts down intellectuals, it doesn't bother us one bit; but this gratuitous anti-intellectualism is ridiculous! Who do Beam and Kaufman think they are?
We hereby declare war on the Globe's "Living" section. (More later.)
PLUG: Daniel Brantley, who co-wrote the restaurant review "Our Night
on Mars" with Pauline Wolstencroft, in Hermenaut issue 15, is a member of the difficult-to-describe, but indescribably great musical act Double Dong. Anyone who will be in the Boston area this Friday (the 21st) is strongly encouraged to attend their 10:30 show at the Milky Way, in Jamaica Plain. They will be joined by the band Betwixt. (See? It's not so hard! Who needs the Boston Globe for this stuff?)
07.12.00
Because Hermenaut was on vacation last week, and came straight from
the beach to the office late on Wednesday, last week's newsletter was
riddled with errors and omissions. Sorry! We're still struggling
against lassitude, actually, so we interrupt our regular gossip
section for... BREAKING NEWS: As some of you may already know,
Suck.com and FEED magazine have banded together under the aegis of a
new company, called Automatic Media, Inc. It goes without saying that
we admire Suck and FEED—to which various Hermenaut writers
regularly contribute—very much. So we applaud the so-called
"economies of scale benefits" of this merger; the use of Slashdot.org
technology to create a "participative, self-organizing directory of
Automatic content and community"; and of course the influx of venture
capital (some of which we hope will go toward increasing our per-word
rates). However, those of us at Hermenaut who've worked at or for
Lycos, Inc., a major investor in Automatic Media whose
mantra—bleated every morning at their Waltham, Mass.,
HQ—is "Original Content BAD, User-Created 'Content' GOOD!", find
"automatic media" to be a potentially sinister phrase. It's one that
might suggest, you see, that Web content doesn't have to be written by
a writer, or edited by an editor. And the fact that Automatic Media
apparently plans to avoid hiring more writers or editors, while
focusing on increasing user participation in discussions, does not
make us feel more optimistic. Again, though, we have great faith in
the staffs of both sites; so we just wanted to get this off our
chests. We'll close, then, by asking you to join us in wishing Suck
and FEED luck! 07.05.00Hermenaut staffers drew straws last Wednesday and Carrie
Ingoglia lost—so she was forced to attend the premiere of "The
Perfect Storm," in Gloucester, Mass. Called "The Perfect Celebration,"
the party, she reports, convened "at some kind of yacht club-type
place in Cape Ann" after a simultaneous showing on 13 screens at the
Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers. While strolling amidst the
theme-appropriate, and very tasteful, underwater-effect mylar fish
balloons that decorated the party, she DID glimpse Marky Mark, sans
Funky Bunch. "Short, cute, bad haircut," she relates. "At least I
think it was Marky. It could've been his brother. Not Donnie. The
other one. Bobbo or whatever." What about the film, you ask? "It is
not a very good movie."
06.28.00A
felicitous combination of beautiful summer weather, an attractively
overloaded bar, and the finest electronica on the stereo system made
James and Kristin Parker's well-appointed Brookline apartment the
place to be this Friday night. As midnight gave way to four in the
morning, one Hermenaut staffer—deeply moved by the sight of
yeast-dusted chefs from the Clear Flour Bakery mingling freely with
Harvard grad students in tight black dresses, various members of
Boston's literary élite (including agent-to-the-stars Sabine
Hrechdakian, novelist Danzy Senna, and librarian-philosopher Matthew
Battles), and a two-year-old in his nightshirt—was heard to ask,
"Hey, who slipped me the Ecstasy?" (Turns out it was our new intern,
Tara, who'd done it.) In little league baseball news, Hermenaut's
team closed out the regular season with a game against Triple D's,
Jamaica Plain's old-school sports bar, which ended in a 4-4 tie.
(Hermenaut finished up half a game out of first place, behind Triple
D's.) We then went on to win the first two rounds of the championship
play-offs, against Rep. Fitzgerald (6-3) and Classic Cleaners (4-3),
which put us into a best-2-out-of-3 Championship Series against Triple
D's. Last Monday, we beat them 8-0; then on Wednesday they beat us
4-1. The deciding game of the championship series was played on
Friday, and we lost 9-4. What an incredible season! We're grateful to
our players and to the coaches—and to Coach Pat Glenn for
writing the baseball updates each week.
06.21.00A
writer's life is never easy. On Thursday night Ingrid Schorr read some
erotic fiction, and her Hermenaut review of the "Pam and Tommy
Lee:Hardcore and Uncensored" video, to a visibly shaken gathering of
the Boston Writers Union at a Barnes & Noble in Kenmore Square.
Attendees A.S. Hamrah, Josh Glenn, and Sally DeAngelis were almost
trampled by an older woman who'd just read aloud from her memoir of
growing up in Florida, as she exited in a panic. Meanwhile, the
dashing idler James Parker has been forced to take a job as a baker;
he had to fight back tears of humiliation for the first three days. He
didn't start to feel better, he reports, until he lost a bloody
Band-Aid somewhere in a tray of almond croissants.
06.14.00
Hermenaut started hiring (yes, HIRING) interns in 1998. This spring we
received dozens of impressive resumes—and increasingly sullen
phone calls—from prospective interns, but it wasn't until one
Tara Koelbl, a college drop-out working as a salesperson at the now
closed Videosmith in Fresh Pond, Cambridge, sent us a handwritten fax
from a drugstore that we knew we'd hit pay dirt. Tara, a former
production assistant for Blue Man Group, is perfect for the job: she's
used to a work environment where wearing a rain poncho indoors every
day is obligatory. Welcome to Hermenaut, Tara—we're the
Mumenschanz of American culture journals.
06.07.00
"What the hell is going on in the Wicked Pavilion?" That's a question
we've been asked a dozen times this past week, thanks to the
subversive efforts of an enraged ex-contributor, a David Denby
impersonator, and a David Denby impersonator impersonator. The fracas
in the conference for James Parker's "Softcore" article prompted us to
dig up the quote from Dawn Powell's 1954 novel Wicked Pavilion
which gave Ingrid Schorr the idea for our conferencing system's name
in the first place. This is it: "Here was haven for those who craved
privacy in the midst of sociability ... here, in this cafe, were
blessed doors strategically placed so that flight was always possible
at first glimpse of an undesired friend or foe's approach. Here was
procrastinator's paradise, the spot for homehaters to hang their
hats... Here in the [cafe] it was possible to maintain heavenly
anonymity if one chose, here was the spot where nothing beyond good
behavior was expected from one, here was safety from the final
decision." Get it now? There've been exciting developments on the
little league baseball front since our last newsletter. On Wednesday,
Hermenaut shut out La Casa de Los Regalos, 6-0; on Saturday, we
defeated B&C Remodeling, 6-0. And on Monday, in its second matchup
against 2-time defending champs Morrison's Auto-Rite, Team Hermenaut
beat the Auto-Riters 13-3. As of Monday night, we're in first place,
half a game ahead of Triple D's. Our last game of the season will be
against the 3D's; it will determine the division winner! (All
reporting by Pat Glenn, team coach.) 5.31.00
This Saturday some of us attended a matinee performance of "Meat Cake:
The Play," which was based on (Hermenaut cartoonist) Dame Darcy's
comic "Meat Cake." The play, which was directed and produced by Dylan
Metrano in spooky-kooky black and white, featured Dame Darcy as
Richard Dirt; Zachary Katz as that loveable cad Wax Wolf; Leslie Goren
and (The Milky Way's) Darcey Leonard as the Siamese twins Hindrance
and Perfidia; Kate Queenie as Effluvia the mermaid; and Dave Geissler
as the Devil. Laurel Kirtz, who opened with an emo-baton-twirling act,
did the period costumes; and Jason Sanford painted the Edward
Gorey-esque sets. There was also a short morality play, made notable
by Darcey Leonard's performance as an angel of mercy. All in all, it
was a tremendously satisfying experience. Bravo to Dame Darcy and the
rest of the cast, and bravo to Jamaica Plain's ever-beleagured Bad
Grrls Studios, where the performance took place. On
Thursday, Team Hermenaut took on Rep. Kevin Fitzgerald's team.
Philosophy triumphed over politics, 12-6. 1st baseman Rogers "Boomer"
Diaz led the attack—going 3 for 3 on the day. Luis "LT" Torres
came up with the bases loaded three times in the game—he
delivered a 3-bagger and a round tripper for a total of 7 RBIs! Four
Hermenaut pitchers, Frank "Nomar" Romero, Luis "Cool Breeze" Soto,
Jonathan "Submarine" Guir, and Antonio "Cast" Comancho, combined for a
well-pitched game. (All little league reporting by Pat Glenn, coach.)
5.24.00
Extremely rainy and cold here in Boston. Hamrah is in San Francisco
for Scot ("Wittgenstein and the Cub Scouts," Hermenaut #4) Hacker's
wedding to photographer Amy Kubes; Ingrid is heading out there on
Thursday. Those of us who've stayed behind to soldier on with the
business of getting the "Stockholm Syndrome" issue finished are limp
and bedraggled. It's appropriate, then, that Team Hermenaut's
much-touted game against Morrison's Auto-Rite this Monday—coach
Pat Glenn used to be the coach of Morrison's—ended not in a
joyous victory or a tragic loss, but in an 8-8 tie. It was pretty
exciting, though. Morrison's jumped out to a 7-0 lead; thankfully,
defensive wizard "Magic" Wandy Peguero kept Hermenaut in the
game—making four put-outs on the day, including an outfield
catch which he turned into an inning-ending double play. In the fourth
inning, the vaunted Hermenaut bats came alive. Antonio "Cast" Comancho
and Frank "Nomar" Romero both had two RBI doubles in the rally. Manny
"shakes-off-the" Saenz had a solid pitching debut and helped himself
with an RBI single. Hermenaut is currently in 4th place.
5.17.00 Tonight
we bid a bittersweet farewell to Beverly Hills 90210. Sweet,
because Hermenaut and 90210 were practically twin-born:
the show in October of 1990, the magazine the following winter.
Designing the first (photocopied, saddle-stitched) issue of the zine
to look like SASSY, we put a big, kissable photo of Luke Perry
on the cover with no explanation. None was needed! In those days,
there was no World Wide Web, the economy sucked, and Linklater's film
Slacker hadn't appeared yet to show us how cliched our lives
already were. Overeducated and underemployed, recent college grads
across America drowned their sorrows in the exegetical wonderland that
was 90210. *Sigh.* Bitter, because the show really ended when
Shannen Doherty left in 1994. Or maybe when Jason Priestley left.
After that, why go on? Little league baseball-wise, on Friday night Hermenaut
trounced an undefeated Triple D's ball club, 14-5, thanks to Hermenaut
bats Christian "Ramon" Baez, Harold Mejia, Luis Soto (also the
pitcher), and Luis Torres; and on Monday Hermenaut exacted its revenge
on Classic Cleaners in a 13-1 victory, thanks to pitcher Baez and its
"Louie-Louie" offense: Soto started things off with a 2-run homer in
the 1st inning, and Torres added some insurance with a grand slam late
in the game. Hermenaut is now 3 -1 in the season 5.10.00 It was a great
weekend for tube sock vendors, moon walk proprietors, and anarchists
looking for love here in Boston, what with the May Fair in Harvard
Square and Wake up the Earth in Jamaica Plain—just outside
Hermenaut HQ, as it turns out. As if worrying about who's going
to buy Tori Spelling's 90210 shrug from the Amazon.com auction
weren't enough, Hermenaut's Ingrid Schorr—one of the
organizers of the Arts First festival at Harvard—found herself
forced to ask, um, working class heroes Ben Affleck and Matt Damon to
stick a (tube) sock in it. Speaking of heroes and tube socks,
Hermenaut's eponymous little league team lost its first game,
to Classic Cleaners, in a pitchers' duel. Looking on the bright side,
it was another error-free game for Team Hermenaut, thanks to fine
defensive plays from Jonathan Guir, Manny Saenz, and Luis Soto. Now if
we could just publish an error-free magazine... 5.3.00 Last week we
mentioned Hermenaut's little league team's upcoming first game
and Kristin Parker's upcoming stint as hostess of Lee Mingwei's Living
Room project at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum; here's what
happened. Mrs. Parker's disco tea party was a great success—it
was attended at various times by actress Elizabeth Shue;
Hermenaut staffers A.S. Hamrah, Josh Glenn, James Parker, and
Ingrid Schorr; and the disgraced former president of South Korea. And
Team Hermenaut, coached by Pat Glenn, won its first game 11-2.
Starting pitcher Christian Baez struck out six batters in three
innings, and the Hermenaut bats scored nine runs in the first two
innings (Wandy Peguero, the 1st Hermenaut batter of the season, led
off with a round-tripper; Baez hit a triple and a four-bagger in two
plate appearances). We play Classic Cleaners at 9 am this Saturday.
4.26.00
Jamaica Plain's little league baseball season has begun, and TONIGHT
(5:30, Daisy Field, off the Jamaicaway, for you Bostonians) is Team
Hermenaut's first game... unless it gets rained out. Team Hermenaut is
coached by Patrick Glenn, Hermenaut's legal counsel—and
Josh Glenn's brother. Also, remember Kristin Parker? This Thursday and
Friday from 11 to 4:30 she'll be hosting a disco tea party at the
Gardner, as part of The Living Room project by Lee Mingwei—as
seen in this Sunday's NY Times Arts section—in which
hosts enliven the permanent collection with the spirit of
entertainment begun by ISG herself. As far as gossip is concerned, we
were scheduled to report on A.S. Hamrah's doings this week, but his
girlfriend was in town and he's been incommunicado. All we know for
sure is that last night John Travolta signed Hamrah's copy of the
sci-fi doorstop Battlefield Earth... which is actually by L.
Ron Hubbard. 4.19.00 This Sunday, after copy-editing half-a-dozen
articles for the new issue of Hermenaut, managing editor Carrie
Ingoglia acted in an independent movie under the non-direction of
aspiring filmmaker Dan Akiba; she thinks she was playing a prostitute,
but says her character might actually have been a "sex worker." Then
she went back to her apartment and made gnocchi from scratch. These
are the activities of a woman who missed out on all the post-Patriot's
Day Massachusetts-only extra-Tax Day fun by paying her taxes early,
according to A. S. Hamrah. He got to enjoy the cornucopia of
foodstuffs offered for some reason by Starbucks, McDonalds, and
Dunkin' Donuts at the US Post Office's 24-hour General Mail Facility,
where the Feds threw a party far more exciting than First Night:
harried jobholders exchanging business cards and getting late
deductions from their dependents over cell phones as they scarfed
donut holes and quaffed Orange Drink out of paper cups with Grimace on
them. "It was heartening to find out," he says, "that when the
government wants its money it can hold a soiree as exciting as an
adult-ed pub crawl or an evening in Jonestown." 4.12.00 Anthony Leone, our
Art Director, has redesigned our T-shirt again. Farewell
orange-and-blue rocket trajectory diagram and man-with-basketball-
in-head on white; hello blue-and-white retrofuturist rocketship on
orange. There's just one problem: our usual T-shirt printers have
taken a powder. So, if anyone out there uses or knows about a cheap,
high quality T-shirt printer—on the East Coast if
possible—please send us their contact info, OK? If we use the
outfit you suggest, we'll send you your pick of the litter. Thanks!
4.5.00
On Friday night, Hermenaut contributing editor Chris Fujiwara
mixed up a bathtubful of Robbe-Grillets, a vile Martini-and-Pernod
concoction which conclusively revealed —to staffers and
contributors of this magazine and Web site, including Richard
Grijalva, Ingrid Schorr, Carol Hayes, Michelle Chihara, Michael Lewy,
Susan Roe, Josh Glenn, Tony Leone, Keith Gessen, Carrie Ingoglia, A.S.
Hamrah, and James Parker; and also to assembled Boston art and media
types, including Lindsay Waters, Kate Guiney, Glenn Jones, Jefferson
Decker, Laylah Ali, Kanishka Raja, Steven Senne, Kristine Cortese, and
Kristin Parker—the irresolvable gap between external reality and
what the mind projects on it. The delightful Mrs. Parker, who fell
over a coffeetable while listening to a George Sanders record, seemed
*particularly* convinced of that notion. 3.29.00 Earlier this week,
Hermenaut's Ingrid Schorr attended an Oscars party with Andrew
Boyd, author of Life's Little Deconstruction Book: Self-Help for
the Post-Hip. Schorr reports that just before activist/NBC
announcer Peter Coyote began the Oscars countdown, Boyd—who was
in town for the Bio2000 protests—changed into a lavender wig, a
red- and-white polka-dotted strapless "poufy" gown (c. Cyndi Lauper),
white hose, and white pumps. Was he aiming for a genetically-modified
radicchio/street theater look? Ingrid wouldn't, or couldn't, say.
3.22.00
When we flew Hermenaut's music columnist James Parker and his
museologist wife Kristin to Chile to cover the inauguration of El
Presidente Eduardo Lagos a couple of weeks ago, you can imagine all
the Hunter S. Thompson-related remarks that were made. We were
kidding, of course. But did we know that Kristin's ex-spy father was
planning to tag along? We did not. Could we have foreseen that he
would urge fists-full of Ativan on his daughter and son-in-law? No, we
could not have. Had we known and foreseen these things, would it have
been possible for us to have predicted that James and Kristin would
vomit fluorescent orange fluids 14,000 feet up a mountain they call El
Plomo, and be carried back down draped over mules? Yes, it would've
been; but we still wouldn't have said, "We told you so."
3.15.00 We have no
idea what the St. Patrick's Day celebrations are like where you live,
but Boston is St. Patrick's Day Ground Zero. By tomorrow,
Hermenaut HQ will be in a state of lockdown. Considering that
our office is located in a brewery, the lockdown process is an
extensive operation and an all-around serious business. So serious, in
fact, that we're not going to tell you any more about it. If you were
expecting a punchline to this story, you can forget about it. (By the
way, does anyone out there know where we can get some green heroin?)
3.8.00
This week, Hermenaut mourns the passing of Baron Enrico di
Portanova, Flamboyant Member of the Jet Set. We'll miss the caviar
tossed with tagliolini, those madcap visits to his spectacular
Acapulco villa Arabesque, and most of all the endless anecdotes
about Roy Cohn. Thanks, Ricky, for everything you did for
Hermenaut. (Especially the fleet of gold-sparkle mopeds
emblazoned with our logo.) In other news, Hermenaut celebrity
bio reviewer Ingrid Schorr recently painted the bedroom of
CosmoGIRL! prize winners Ashley and Ariana Sciaparella, of
Somerville, Mass. The Sciaparella teens won, apparently, because they
used the words "self-esteem" and "self-confidence" in their contest
entry. The room's theme: fun shui! 3.1.00 Hermenaut's editors flipped
a coin and took separate trips to New York and Chicago this weekend.
Glenn toured Chicago's south side with a Baffler editor; Hamrah
toured University Place with one from InStyle. Glenn got
frisked by a bouncer with an editor at Britannica.com; Hamrah ate bad
turkey with an editor on the Discovery Channel's "Outward Bound."
Hamrah couldn't work up the nerve to talk to Steve Buscemi at a
closing night theatrical party; Glenn was snubbed by a writer of
staggering genius at an Ethopian restaurant. Hamrah visited the bars
of Brooklyn with a lovely graphic designer; Glenn watched
Heartbreak Ridge alone at a motel in Skokie. 2.23.00 The editor of this
newsletter woke up shouting, "EGGERS! EGGERS! EGGERS!" last night, and
feels very drained today, so he doesn't have much to report by way of
office gossip. Hermenaut #16 ("Stockholm Syndrome") has been
assigned and is underway now; it will hit the street in June. We were
thinking of publishing it as 16 separate issues inside an Audubon
Society-type corrugated cardboard box, but we've changed our minds. It
will look pretty much the same as it did last time. OK, gotta go look
for spare change under the couch cushions now... 2.16.00 Clarke Cooper,
Margaret Blonder, Ingrid Schorr, Dame Darcy, Chris Fujiwara, Michael
Lewy, James Parker, Michelle Chihara, Anthony Leone, and other
Hermenaut types staggered out of the Palace of Paneling—A.S.
Hamrah's chic Brighton, Mass., pied-a-terre—Friday night, after
another in the dizzying round of Hermenaut cocktail parties.
We're pretty sure it was the only party that night attended by both a
Boston Globe editor and a photographer from Leg Show.
Fortunately, no one (i.e., the host) punched anyone this time. On the
minus side, there was Carrie's "Long Island Lolita" impression and
Josh's Nutty Cheese Balls. 2.9.00 Globe-trotting Hermenaut writer
Margaret Blonder is visiting us here in the office today. She's quit
her job at the Economist and is homeless at the moment. (Sorry,
"entre maison": a subtle state of existence only the French really
understand, she claims.) Anyone know of a 19th century farmhouse where
she can live for free? She's convinced, based on her experiences in
Manhattan, that the entire world has become a luxury goods shopping
mall. Can you provide her with an escape route?
news item: http://www.msnbc.com/news/430894.asp
press release and FAQ: http://www.automatic-media.com/
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