RIP Josh Ozersky

I came to embrace a martial philosophy not through any insight of my own but by once getting so mad that I forgot to be a bad cook. I was fighting with my first wife one winter night and I stomped into the kitchen, recklessly jacked up the heat under my cast-iron pan, and slammed a steak onto its smoking surface. I was rewarded, almost instantaneously, with the violent secret of meat. My rage spent, I found a surface of burnished mahogany and an interior still red and raw. I took my time bringing the meat to medium-rare and ate it with a feeling of triumph. Meat, I now understood, called forth not measured skill but courage and animal aggression. Finally, I was in control.
 

From The Violent Secret of Meat by Josh Ozersky, published in Esquire in 2013. Ozersky died this past Monday in Chicago, just before the James Beard awards. I did not know him, though I knew of him through Grub Street, the food blog he founded and which I read when I lived in NYC. The man could spin a sentence about food, as the passage above shows, and I don't say that about too many people with the thankless job of having toput words together to describe food or music.

NY Mag friend and coworker Adam Platt remembers Ozersky.

But I also think that he was the closest thing to a real Liebling-esque figure in this increasingly gaseous world of food writing that we have. Like Liebling, he was an outsider and a glutton who loved sports. The only difference — well, of course, there were a lot of differences — was that Leibling wrote about that world, while Josh actually lived in it.
 
That’s part of why Josh hated Brooklyn the way he did. Professionally he lived there, but publicly he hated it. He thought it had become prissy and pompous, and like all old-fashioned New Yorkers, he viewed it as a place of exile. He hungered for recognition and life in the emerald city. I like to think he found peace in his marriage to Danit, and I like to think he found peace out in Portland, which, when you come to think of it, is an idealized, platonic version of Brooklyn without all the excess baggage. It was much more peaceful, he was under less pressure, he could come and go, and write his Esquire pieces and do his videos and his Meatopia without getting too close to the fire, without getting burnt to a crisp. Pete Wells wrote in the Times that Josh was last seen at a karaoke bar in Chicago singing his giant lungs out at 4 a.m. That’s Mr. Cutlets, more or less in a nutshell. That is how he would want to be remembered.

r/lonelyheartbeats

A subreddit for early Apple Watch owners to find others to share taps, drawings, and heartbeats with. I suspect it's only a matter of time before someone turns this into an app for people to find others to do this without having to share one's iMessage email publicly. The Apple Watch seems like the ideal device for this type of simple interaction to tackle one of the internet's two most popular use cases, that is: you are not alone.

BF calls BS

Websites including the Daily Mirror and Metro in the UK and the New York Daily News in the US duly published the story, alongside an image showing the teacher posing poolside in her bikini. “Teacher suspended after sex session with teen pupil ends up on hardcore porn website,” read the Mirror’s headline. The Daily Mail – the most successful English-language newspaper website in the world – even went so far as to claim that there would be a criminal investigation, and that this wasn’t the first time that the teacher in question had sexual relations with a student.
 
There was just one problem: It wasn’t true.
 
...
 
So how did this fake story make the leap from South America to the English-language press? The answer is tucked away in the bottom right-hand corner of the photo of the woman in her bikini: a credit labelled “CEN”.
 
Central European News (CEN) and its sister outfit EuroPics are small news agencies, largely unknown outside certain sections of the media, whose headquarters are in Canterbury in the UK (although they claim to have 35 staff based in offices across central and eastern Europe). In recent years, CEN has become one of the Western media’s primary sources of tantalising and attention-grabbing stories. They’re often bizarre, salacious, gruesome, or ideally all three: If you’ve read a story about someone in a strange country cutting off their own penis, the chances are it came from CEN.
 

The full crazy story here. The same conditions that reward viral news like much of what's on Buzzfeed also work on behalf of CEN. So it's some poetic justice that Buzzfeed did the legwork on debunking so many of CEN's stories. It reminds me of those movies like Blackhat in which the government has to release a hacker from prison to chase down other hackers, or a thief to catch a thief.

At the bottom of the piece, Buzzfeed publishes a list of stories they previously sourced from CEN. It's an amusing collection of headlines.

Are you Courtney or Kim?

No, not these two, I'm not just a bad speller.

Rather, Courtney Love or Kim Gordon. Agatz Pyzik reviews Gordon's memoir Girl in a Band and Anwen Crawford's Hole's Live Through This (33 1/3), about the making of Hole's Live Through This, and uses the two books as an opportunity to contrast two styles of feminism.

The differences of perception between Courtney Love and Kim Gordon were, and remain, profoundly a matter of taste, which is to say of class. Courtney Love never said that she came from a working class or poor background, and stressed a few times that she didn’t. (Love’s mother was a psychotherapist and her father was the first manager of the Grateful Dead.) But she was kitschy, exhibitionistic, shameless, and at the same time vulnerable and ready to show it. Love came from a “complicated” family background. She grew up without much attention, and was passed from relative to relative, and traveled as a teenager to the UK to follow around Liverpool bands Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes. In the ’80s she worked as a jobbing actress and a stripper. Side by side, Gordon and Love represent mirror images of the Nineties—of music, femininity, feminism, and politics. If Gordon was tastefully highbrow, Love was lowbrow, “distasteful”: the disgraced widow, widely regarded as someone who was, if not directly responsible for her husband’s death, then at least insufficiently “helpful,” who was too mad, too freakish, too much of a selfish junkie careerist to look after her suffering husband. But that’s not how her fans saw her.
 
In her book on Live Through This, Crawford gives Love’s fans room to say what she meant to them. (“A long-standing bugbear of mine is the way in which teenage girls are never taken seriously as an audience,” Anwen told an interviewer when describing her research and writing process for the book. “They are the easiest demographic to patronize. Hole were huge with girls and young women, so of course they and their audience can be dismissed as silly and trivial.”) While Love may not have been poor, many of the fans described in Crawford’s book on Hole were, and they found something inspiring in those features which others found most problematic about Love. These fans were mostly Australian and New Zealander women or gay men whose lives were changed by the music. Hole dragged them out of depression, out of being closeted or harassed, and helped them do something positive with their lives. They’re now music journalists, writers, or work in radio. They started groups, often riot grrrl/punk in style, though the relationship between Hole and the riot grrrl scene was far from simple. They courted different scenes, different behaviors.
 
The feeling that recurs among them is that Hole, and Love in particular, gave them “permission” in their lives. “Hole gave me this permission to feel like it’s OK to want to be heard,” says Dominican-American radio DJ Mariel Reyes. Another interviewee, Nicole Solomon, disputes the notion that Courtney was a terrible role model: “No, she’s not. She’s a great role model! She’s telling you not to be ashamed of yourself and to express yourself, including the parts of yourself that society may deem ugly and inappropriate. Especially in her lyrics, she was so visceral, the amount of times the vomit comes up, or bleeding, ripping your guts out. And to have that made cool?” Around the world, and especially in its less-privileged parts, Love’s version of “visceral,” vulgar feminism resonated because it was all about the lack of shame, about giving yourself permission to be the way you want, no matter what society tells you. Even Gordon admits that Hole’s music had something in it, that it was positively messy. Messy, visceral, distasteful but thrilling—things that were the opposite of Sonic Youth.
 

I grew up listening to Sonic Youth, and a friend at a label invited me backstage to meet the band in happier times for them years back at the Wiltern in Los Angeles. What this article gave me was a greater appreciation for Courtney Love.