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

Dear Amanda,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All the best and none of the worst,

Jonathan Ames

To: Jonathan Ames
From: Amanda Marcotte
Subject: John Waters, Eco-Prigs, Pregger Fundamentalists, and Camille Paglia

Dear Jonathan,

I’ve been enjoying the more light-hearted tone of this exchange, so it saddened me to see that the first three of our assigned blogs had depressing content at the top of the page. Jewlicious’s top story was about two Palestinian kids who lost their mother when she killed herself and five others in a suicide bombing. The new content at The News Blog is all about Steve Gilliard’s continuing surgery issues. Gothamist has a terrible murder at the top. All of this is too fresh for a writer to really be irreverent about it.

Pro-Divorce: Trash auteur John WatersAnd I really cherish irreverence. Last night, one of my major heroes of irreverence, John Waters, was on “The Daily Show” promoting his new show on Court TV about spouses who murder each other. I rarely turn on the TV to do anything but play video games when left to my own devices, but I may have to watch this show. The favored description for Waters’ output is that it’s “life-affirming”, and I whole-heartedly agree. It’s hard to see initially why a show that revels in spousal murder could be considered life-affirming, but as Waters said on “The Daily Show” last night, he really considers the show to be “pro-divorce”, which demonstrates why having a healthy sense of irreverence is an important feature of a truly life-affirming worldview.

You mentioned in your last letter that your only real political issue is the environment. Environmentalists (like feminists) have this rather unfair reputation of being overly reverent, sanctimonious types, and in my experience that’s simply not true. One would almost suspect that some conservatives in a think tank somewhere created this stereotype of environmentalists in an effort to get people to dislike them and therefore dislike their cause. There’s some truth to the idea that there’s some environmentalists who are prigs, but that’s probably true of any political movement you join. Even the movement to legalize drugs has its share of prigs, which is hard to believe if you consider that they are organized around the idea that everyone should chill out and get stoned legally once in awhile.

Environmentalists often have an irreverent streak, once you get to know them. It’s hard to avoid irreverence when the theory underpinning your work is that humans are, as you put it, a uniquely destructive animal, especially since environmentalists are trying to save the planet in part to save the lives of this uniquely destructive species. You get a sense of humor about that contradiction or you lose your mind and start wearing hemp in a self-punishing way, as the modern equivalent of the hairshirt.

Permanently Pregnant: One happy Quiverfull familyThe Revealer has no new posts up at the time I’m filing this letter. It’s too bad, because the blog is all about religion, so that means that 95% of their stories are about people doing illogical, ridiculous things. The other day, Kathryn Joyce of The Revealer emailed me and reminded me about this piece she wrote for The Nation about religious people doing ridiculous things. In this case, it’s about a bunch of white Protestants who have got it in their heads that God gets off on watching white men keep their wives permanently pregnant. They call themselves the Quiverfull movement, and yes, they spell it that way and it’s grating.

Which isn’t to say that most religious people are especially ridiculous. In fact, the definition of “mainstream” religion in my book is that the people who follow it understand the importance of keeping the ridiculous nature of religion under control.

Maud Newton hasn’t updated either, but she’s on route to Austin, so her ability to rip herself from her blog for a day is understandable. In her sidebar, I did catch a link to this column, a satire by John Warner of Camille Paglia’s writing that’s almost too accurate to be funny. That’s almost—it’s actually pretty damn funny, especially since the premise is that Paglia is coming out of retirement for the 5,000^th time in order to comment on the cultural and political importance of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, after almost losing her will to live after Anna Nicole Smith died. If you’ve managed to avoid Paglia’s writing so far, this column won’t make a good deal of sense to you, but if you’ve ever suffered even a paragraph of it in the past, this column will offer a humorous solace.

Sincerely,

Amanda

P.S. I do hope you enjoy your stay in Austin. Bring bug spray and a bottle of allergy pills. We try to pretend that we aren’t living in an area that’s one step up from a bog, but with global warming making steady inroads, that lie is getting harder to tell ourselves.

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

Dear Jonathan,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,

Amanda

Dear Amanda,

At Jewlicious, there was a lot about a big party, something called the Jewlicious Festival, which happened recently in Long Beach, CA. From what I can gather it was hosted by a Rabbi Yonah Bookstein and his wife Rachel. I like the name Bookstein. Jews have the most absurd names. Bookstein has the word ‘book’ in it and I love books. Sometimes Jewish names seem unattractive to me, but that’s probably my Jewish self-loathing asserting itself. On some level part of me feels intrinsically unattractive because I’m Jewish.

Anyway, at this Jewlicious party, I think some people were playing backgammon; I deduced this from this photo.

Like a CIA expert, I tried to analyze the photo to see who was winning, but it was hard to tell.

Ames' Online Pastime: Backgammon (German opponent not featured)I play a lot of internet backgammon. Most of the people you play are from Turkey or other Middle-Eastern countries, though Turkey isn’t quite in the Middle East. There are also Germans, and when I play a German, I’m like, “Okay, you German, let’s see what you’ve got.” I feel friendlier when I play Canadians. Though just yesterday I was challenged to a boxing match by a Canadian writer named Craig Davidson. Well, actually his American publishing house challenged me. I guess he had a book come out in Canada called The Fighter and to promote it he had a fight against a poet and lost.

I once had a boxing match against a performance artist named the “Impact Addict” and lost. The “Impact Addict” jumped off of buildings as his performance art and once shot himself out of a rocket. I fought as “The Herring Wonder,” a reincarnated, Lower East Side, Jazz-era, immigrant Jewish boxer, who trained by eating Herring. My fight was in 1999. I’m not sure I want to come out of retirement to fight this Canadian. He’s twelve years younger than me and outweighs me by 12 pounds as well. A pound for every year of youth. Here’s a picture of me from my boxing days. And here’s another one.

The problem is that my nose breaks very easily. I broke it training for my fight and then re-broke it during the fight. I’m not sure I want to go through that again, but it’s awfully tempting. I still have my “Herring Wonder” robe and silk shorts.

Anyway, there are also a lot of Israelis on my backgammon site, which is called Gammon Empire and I’m not even sure how it got onto my computer. I wonder if the Turks play the Israelis. I also wonder, since you can send messages to each other, if the CIA is monitoring Gammon Empire, since maybe people could secretly send messages about plots to one another. I don’t want to say what kind of plots, but you know plots, the kind of plots that make you plotz. That was bad humor.

Amanda – are you Jewish? Do you have to be Jewish to write for this site? Marcotte doesn’t sound like a Jewish name.

How many words have I written? 527. That’s all I have to write, according to the Jewcy editor, 500 to 600 words, and I’ve only gotten through one blog. I’m going to try to speed things up.

Jonathan originally spelled her name "Anna Coulter": So he's not lying about not following the newsOn The News Blog, someone named Queequeg wrote about Ann Coulter. Now I don’t have a television and I’m not a blog person, but I’ve picked up from the zeitgeist that this Ann Coulter is a conservative person. Also, I did see her once on TV when I was in a hotel and it was quick thing about some rude speech she gave somewhere.

So this Queequeg was in a green room with her at some Fox news outlet in Miami and held his tongue and didn’t say anything rude to her, which he sort of regrets, but not entirely since he seems like a gentleman. He was also a bit intimidated by this Coulter.

I take it she has called John Edwards a fag, which is her latest offense.

I imagine she says things like this to make money. I wonder if she really believes anything she says. From my glimpse of her on TV, she doesn’t dress like a religious-right kind of woman. She dresses sort of sexy, which implies a different kind of mindset than a Laura Bush sort of Republican woman. So she’s kind of like the female equivalent of Gay Black Republicans – a seeming paradox. I imagine that she had a very stern father and that she’s exotically submissive in bed. Who knows? We’re all so flawed and confused. Nobody knows what the hell is going on. The Buddhists come close, I think.

Would I be wrong in making the statement that Arianna Huffington is the liberal parallel universe equivalent of Ann Coulter? I feel like a blindfolded kid playing pin the tail on the donkey as I try to keep pace with the culture. I’ve heard of Arianna Huffington and Ann Coulter mostly from my perusal of the NY Post, which is the newspaper I read since it only costs a quarter here in NYC.

I’m not very political, I’m afraid. I’m broken-hearted and passive. I feel bad for the state of the world and do nothing about it. I did go to Ohio in 2004 to try to get college kids to vote. I did this because this writer, who’s wonderfully politically active, Stephen Elliott, invited me. He organizes readings to raise money for progressive candidates. I’m sort of a one-issue human being – the environment.

We're all doomed: Earth is fucked, anyway you slice itWhen I was in rehab in 1987, my mother gave me a Sports Illustrated to read and on the cover was a picture of the planet Earth and a detailed article about the destruction of everything, and leading up to my hospitalization I had been going crazy, thinking of every car as a small fire destroying the world and I was a vegan because we were plowing the Amazon to make McDonald’s burgers and I was losing my mind . . . and then I had to be hospitalized because I had polluted myself and been abused by substances (I was a small planet wrecking itself) and then my mother gives me that Sports Illustrated, she was trying to be nice, and it was an issue about the environment and I went even more nuts.

Anyway . . . I eventually became less hysterical and just more passive and brokenhearted, while holding out some small hope for humanity, because when I was a kid I was reading some Encyclopedia and Richard Leakey had some quote about how man is the only self-destructive creature on Earth and that he was wrecking the planet, but that also man was the only creature who might figure out a way to change . . . so I hold on to that.

On Gothamist, there was mostly postings about what’s going on in New York. Nothing really caught my eye. Murders, Alex Rodriguez, new restaurants.

There was something about Bernie Kerik and I thought of him sleeping with Judith Regan, and I imagine that Ann Coulter would like somebody like Bernie Kerik, too.

Not much in The Revealer caught my eye. I did glance at this because it mentioned Bridge to Terabitha which I saw the other night. A friend of mine told me they wept during Terabitha and so I went to it by myself. I love going to movies by myself and I love to cry during movies. So I may have been set up to cry by my friend and started crying before things got sad, and then when they got sad, I really did weep like crazy. I wish I could cry right now in fact.

I’m having euphoric recall about crying the other night. I just felt inside myself to see if I could conjure up some tears but none came. My stomach is full of coffee so that I could write this letter to you and I think the coffee is cutting me off from my soul or wherever it is that crying comes from.

Don't Tell Ann Coulter: A Spartan and the effete Persian king from "300"After Terabitha