Kevin Marshall's America
Literary dynamo Ben Wallace, whose aura of excitement and excessive charisma is too much for the quaint little hamlet of Albany, NY.
New York Magazine contributor Benjamin Wallace recently profiled Sandra Lee, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s live-in girlfriend.
The article is well-written but doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know: Sandra Lee had a hard life, she’s beautiful, foodies hate her, etcetera and so on. There are, however, a few surprises, the biggest coming early in the article:
The media in the state capital of Albany, a.k.a. the world capital of boring, bristled with excitement from the moment it became clear that Andrew Cuomo would run for governor.
OH NO YOU DI’INT, BEN WALLACE.
My first reaction was to dismiss the remark, since it’s really not worth reading into that much. I know many that would and did get upset when the article was circulated amongst the 518 twitterati yesterday morning. I’m not one of them. If I paid mind to every disparaging word written about the area, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning. Besides, the words Wallace wrote about Albany don’t have anything on the words written about it throughout the Times Union website on a daily basis.
As I continued reading, however, I did get annoyed. Not due to misguided civic pride , but rather on the false constructs in that same paragraph which he re-asserts and builds on in the article.
Let’s revisit that paragraph:
The media in the state capital of Albany, a.k.a. the world capital of boring, bristled with excitement from the moment it became clear that Andrew Cuomo would run for governor. Not because of Cuomo so much as for the woman whose home he shares in Westchester. Eleanor Roosevelt aside, the First Ladies of New York have heretofore not merited inclusion on TMZ’s stalk list. (Quick: State a single fact—anything at all—about Libby Pataki.) Sandra Lee was something entirely new: a bona fide famous person in her own right.
Given her Barbie-doll beauty and life story, writing an interesting profile piece on Sandra Lee should be a (Kwanzaa) cake walk: a girl with an impoverished and tumultuous upbringing in the Midwest grows up to become a frenzied entrepeneur and fiercely dedicated hunger advocate. The inclusion of an unfair and hostile ambivalence towards the area is a true mystery. Not only is it unnecessary, but it also shamefully plays into the stereotype so many throughout the country have of the snarky New York elitist.
But what really irritated me is that this entire paragraph, which frames everything else in the article regarding Lee’s role as Cuomo’s live-in girlfriend, is built on a (likely unintentional) lie. Little ink was given to Lee’s role and presence, which served only as a momentary distraction from the true circus of the race: first Governor David Paterson’s refusal to step aside and allow Cuomo to run unchallenged, then the baseball bat wielding racist opposition of Carl Paladino, then the SNL skit that wrote itself (the Gubernatorial debates). At no point was Lee a lead, nor was there much local media interest at all, let alone to the degree Wallace prescribes. In fact many in the area – perhaps lending some credence to Wallace’s assertion – had to be educated on who she was. Celebrity maybe, but superstar? Hardly. It was her association with Cuomo that raised her profile, not the other way around.
Despite a lack of support from reality, Wallace would not be deterred from his path:
“Would Lee redecorate the governor’s mansion? Enliven those fusty rubber-chicken dinners with festive tablescapes? There was a touching Waiting for Guffman quality to the way the glamour-starved local press corps dubbed the prospective gubernatorial couple Sandrew. Lee fed the anticipation, telling a television audience that she looked forward to bringing “great garnishes” to Albany.”
Oh, how those quaint, backwards local Albany media people embarrassed themselves with how they asked her questions pertaining to her role as First Lady.
Again, this local feeding frenzy only occurred in Wallace’s over-active imagination. I’m being kind in assuming that Wallace built this piece on flimsy assumptions rather than intentional fabrications. Some will insist he’s doing the latter, but I can see how someone with an insular downstate attitude could view anything outside of the five buroughs as being the setting of a Christopher Guest mockumentary. The United States is, after all, three regions: the South, the Midwest, and New York City.
There’s also one other embarrassing oversight Wallace makes: Lee isn’t actually First Lady. She has a presence at functions, but all are voluntary. Her and Cuomo aren’t married, and as such she doesn’t hold any official title, let alone the one Wallace repeatedly bestows upon her.
Even though I don’t find the subject inherently interesting, I did genuinely enjoy Wallace’s writing. I just wish he wasn’t so clumsy in certain areas. You can get away with it when you’re writing for a regional rag, but not in a publication with national distribution. Someone’s going to read it that has knowledge of the area and know you’re completely full of it. It’s not a big deal if it’s a minor detail, but not if you’re building an entire point on it.
Then again, maybe he’s on to something. After all, clearly I’m bored here. Otherwise I wouldn’t have spent over nine hundred words dissecting a handful of sentences about our dull All-America city.
- SEE ALSO: the All Over Albany reaction
- UNRELATED EXCEPT IN NAME: local blog Keep Albany Boring, which really needs to jump on this.
- REMINDER: donate to help raise $1,000 by April 10th for childhood cancer research and I’ll shave my head
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51 Responses to New York Magazine: Albany is the most boring place IN THE WORLD
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STALK ME
That’s not Ben Wallace.
http://a.espncdn.com/photo/2007/1002/nba_a_wallace_195.jpg
THAT is Ben Wallace.
Anyway…’World Capital of Boring?’ Someone needs a trip to the Side Door Cafe on Saturday night… :)
He certainly looks bored…
Look at this New York Magazine guy Ben Wallace, he looks to be the epitome of excitement!
Clown…
It’s not just NY Mag. The Times is also famous for parachuting Someone Who Can Explain Everything To The Benighted Roobs into the wilderness above Westchester…and the number of errors and misquotings in these meisterstucks is really quite amazing. The Chairwoman of a planning board in Dutchess County back in the 80s said she had never been so misquoted in her life.
At some point, I got so disgusted with the phone-in-the-local-slur method that I sent Gerald Boyd a little sign to post in the NYT newsroom:
“Keep the f—— pontificating south of Spuyten Duyvil!”
I’ll send one to Wallace now.
Gman? More like THE man. As in you are THE MAN.
I’ll pay you $1,000* to never use the phrase “twitterati” again.
* in Monopoly money
You mean in Times Union Blogger Dollars? SOLD.
Anyone who think Albany is the world capital of boring has clearly not spent much time in Worcester.
The caption under the real Ben Wallace’s photo made my day. Oh, the simple pleasures in life!
He obviously hasn’t been to Ted’s Fish Fry
tom - or Bomber’s with the Planned Parenthood (that used to be) across the street!
@bdp – At one time Worcester, MA called itself “Paris of the Eighties.” Now if that doesn’t just scream excitement…
People from New York City also have an incredibly annoying habit of thinking “Only in New York!” A squirrel playing in a tree? Only in New York! People ditching work to enjoy a warm Spring day? Only in New York! A tourist getting beaten to death by a claw hammer for his watch and $7? Only in New York!
Albany, NY is almost as boring as Castle Rock, Maine!
I love NYC there really is nowhere else quite like it.
It still has it’s share of nerdy self important jerks like everywhere else.
Maybe someone was mean to him here or something?
What i see is a guy doing a biased piece on her, why biased? Because he has his head so far up her ass that he seems like a little kid that was allowed to sit in the dugout with the yankees in game 7 of the World series. Giddyness over your subject is very unprofessional, and he either should have known he wasnt the right person for the story or NY Magazine should have assigned someone that would have wrote something better. Unless this was a segment on “queer eye for the straight guy” he missed his mark completely.
I’m sure Albany isn’t literally the most boring capital in the world!
Although NYC may be the dirtiest, smelliest, non-capital large city with the snottiest people. ;)
Sandrew? Really? How long did that take him to come up with. More than 15 seconds would be too long.
NYC got a lot less interesting in the 1980s after the crackdown on illegal kangaroo boxing operations in various warehouses along the West Side Highway.
That guy couldn’t even get a lap dance up here…
Now, to be fair, the strip clubs up here ARE pretty boring.
He must be the only person who hasn’t watched the Kegs and Eggs riot on Youtube.
Albany is so boring it could drill a hole through dry wall.
Albany might not be Bangkok on an acid trip but should a guy who looks like he tries to cram the words “milieu” and “simulacrum” into his daily conversations be calling anything boring?
I was just as irked. You did a much better job at dissecting why exactly.
Sorry guys Albany is extremely boring! Stop getting so upset it’s not such a big deal. The magazine is right though Hartford may give it a run for it’s money. Both old depressed cities, if you could call them that. Get off the inferiority complex snd come to grips with the fact that Albany is about as boring, listless, and dull of a place as you could ever find.
Everyone – As a reminder, I’m not going to allow comments that are just slander and/or are mean towards and individual or individuals. Please see the comment above the box where you type your comments for guidelines regarding personal insults.
@23:
Where did you bump into the word “simulacrum”? I’ve never heard it before you used it just now.
“Simulacrum” is not a bad word, if you actually know what it means and know your Baudrillard well enough to back up your assertions. Just sayin’.
In a way… at least he’s recognizing the fact that there’s a part of NY north of the Bronx or Westchester….
@ 28:
Well, of course I looked up what it meant. But I seriously doubt that Baudrillard is just about anyone’s first encounter with the word – he just wrote a tretise with “simulacrum” in the title.
It seems a word most commonly encountered when reading either science fiction or philosophy – good overlap there. First encountered the word “koan” in a Dan Simmons novel called Endymion. First heard of John Keats there as well, as a matter of fact.
Eh, I’m always suspicious of people who speak in absolutes. Because really, if as a writer, you can’t come up with anything better (as in more well-written) to say than to call Albany the most boring city in the world…I seriously question your credentials.
Wallace is clearly someone who would be shocked to discover there are people who actually avoid New York City by choice.
“31. Eh, I’m always suspicious of people who speak in absolutes.”
Oh, dude… ;-)
In the immortal words of Blazing Saddles: “I HAVE to!!!…”
Ahem…
Does that include yourself? :-)
jack
Heh. Sort of (but not quite) as conflicting as that (one of many) infamous line in the third installment of those wretched “Star Wars” prequels – “Only Sith speak in absolutes.”
Nuh-uh.
It’s “Only Sith deal in absolutes,” not “speak” in absolutes!
I am the Nerd King!!! :-)
Nerd King – I bow before your superior Nerdness!
Lauren – …how dare you. ;)
You’re right…(hangs head in shame)
From now on I will change it to “i’m often suspicious”. I’m guilty of it myself. I was driven to comment after Kevin’s fine writing.
But I would never say this blog is ALWAYS fine writing ;-)
Kevin, I’ll offer a different take. For me, he seems to be referring to the insular group of reporters that cover state politics. To be fair to Ben, aside from the protests, budget battles, and debates over big-time legislation like same-sex marriage, the business of the day at the state capitol is sometimes pretty boring.
#30/Muse: FYI — Kevin hadn’t approved your comment before I posted mine, which was actually in response to #23/Thor.
Arise, fair subjects!!! All are equal in the kingdom of Nerddom!!!
:-)
Let us celebrate our new understanding of the wise words of George Lucus with the traditional Singing of the Weird Al!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw
(BTW, any of you ever seen that Futurama episode where Star Trek becomes an actual religion? Hilarious.)
Nerd King – Yes! Love that episode. That whole series really grew its beard (bonus reference!) after the first season.
@ 40:
Hm, two possible responses to that:
(1) I guess that makes me Yoda…
OR (if I didn’t get the right ref, trying an alternate):
(2) I’ll have to “reflect” on the naughtiness of Futerama now!
The caption of Ben Wallace is top-notch.
@ 38:
Yeah, but that doesn’t change that:
(1) A person’s first encounter with the word “simulacrum” is unlikely to be Baudrillard (unless they’re in a college philosophy course).
(2) It’s a sci-fi word, definately, even if I’ve never seen it used there yet. It’s a pretty sci-fi concept, and one that’s easily adapted to science fiction.
Where’d you hear the word, Eric? Have you read Baudrillard?
This is cracking me up, especially #’s 8, 12, and 18-20.
Ok so we aren’t the capital of excitement…sure, but we are far from boring. Though if you want a REALLY good time, travel on over to Fargo North Dakota. I hear it’s as much a cultural destination as that home of all the best European cluture. I’m of course speaking about Yabol Bulgaria…dohn’t ya knowh. While we’re talking irresitable nightlife we can’t forget about Rutland Vermont. What happens in Rutland stays in Rutland.
…I first heard the word in a college philosophy classroom while discussing Baudrillard, of course: he coined the word. To put the term squarely in the realm of science fiction is to miss the point a little. The state of simulacrum means that our current world has been supplanted with the fiction so that we don’t recognize reality anymore.
The simplest example I can think of off the top of my head is that in the local garage where my car currently lays dying, there’s a space heater shaped like a small fireplace with an LCD fire. We’ve lost the real meaning and connection to the fires of our ancestors by replacing them with flickering lightbulbs and pretending it’s fire. By doing so, we construct a new image of fire that replaces the old: how often do you see people represent a picture of a fire with the colors white or blue?
This process might eventually yield what we think of as a sci-fi world (Dick’s electric sheep), but Baudrillard says that level of simulation is all around us even now.
@ Eric, #45:
But the layers of simulacrum become much deeper than that – and cause fear and anxiety in people who attempt to distinguish reality and fiction.
For example, do I know you know these things? Or are you a Wiki-mimic?
The Dick’s electric sheep thing is referenced in the Wikipedia article on the concept of simulacrum. That means someone who wants to mimic knowledge – a simulacrum scholar – can do so by simply reading the Wikipedia article on the subject and throwing such analogies out in debate or discussion.
Really absorbing a book or a concept or a philosophy is different. People should have slightly different opinions or analogies derived from the literature and non-fiction that they read.
But distinguishing between the two becomes impossible. Due to factors such as nomothetic personality traits (the fact that most people have over-lapping personality traits), and the commonality of human culture and communication, especially post-globalization, people might just be coming up with the same or parallel ideas on their own.
So for someone who loaths mimicry – simulacrum – thought, it becomes a constant struggle to distinguish between simulacrum behaviors and nomothetic personality behaviors.
What did you think of Baudrillard? Would you recommend him as an author or philosopher? Did you just cover him in a “general” way, such as a larger book that reviews general philosophies?
That’s okay if true; one of my favorite books is “Parallel Myths,” by Bierlein. It’s a very general review, it’s short, and it could be read by just about anyone. But that doesn’t make it excellent; CS Lewis is a genius because he could take incredibly complex concepts and explain them in a language that all people could understand.
– Muse
But mimicry isn’t really simulacrum. Through mimicry, we’re aware of an original. The original still exists. In Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum, we exist in a state of hyperreality, wherein the original has been supplanted by the copy so that the original no longer exists and we believe the copy to be the original.
It’s hard to pare down Baudrillard in a blog comment, and I don’t really know how heavily you want to get into this. He’s more of a social/media critic than a philosopher as we generally think of them. I’d suggest starting with “Simulacra and Simulation,” which is his most famous and readily available work. Here’s the start of the section of S&S (on Disneyland) that is generally excerpted to identify the cultural transformations he’s talking about: http://goo.gl/ewQWd
He’s a bit obtuse, and writes circularly around the topics instead of pointedly identifying what he means. But he’s a French critic associated with (but, if I recall correctly, resistant to the idea of being considered part of) post-structuralism, so that’s par for the course. If you’re used to that sort of thing, he’s an essential theorist to read. I also like Douglas Kellner’s book on Baudrillard, which hits the high points of some other Baudrillard essays I haven’t read, and positions them within (or alongside, or against, as the case may be) Marxist and post-modern criticism. Also, some background in semiotics (de Saussure, Barthes, Eco), and a reading of Daniel Boorstin’s lighter “The Image: A guide to Pseudo-events in America” would inform a reading of Baudrillard.
The only other issue to mention is that, if you delve too much into Baudrillard, as I find with Foucault as well, it’s easy to feel as though you’ve fallen down a rabbit hole and start to disassociate from the world. After all, S&S is sort of saying that we no longer live in a world that we can consider “reality,” and Baudrillard doesn’t really offer a way to cope with that except to notice that it’s going on.
So yeah…is Albany boring or what?
SHUT UP NERDS
(I kid, of course, and always welcome intelligent discourse. Now give me your lunch money right now.)
@ 47:
The Google book only gives up to page 27; I don’t really know what I think of it, honestly.
His writing style seems fixated more on the number of “big” words he can cram in any section of text than actually educating the reader on the dominate themes he wishes to present (although some excellent Scrabble words I now have include “phantasmagoria,” “praxis,” and “panopticon.” On panopticon: you have to wonder about an author who knows that many different synonymns for and adjectives to describe a “prison.”)
Also, I don’t think that his idea of “simulacrum” is well-defined. He seems to mix what are simply lies and misrepresentations with images built for comfort and consumerism, as if these are the same thing. While the whole basic idea behind “Disneyland” and “Watergate” is “untruth,” it still seems, in some sense, a type of equivocation – I’m not sure though, I’m going to have to think on it futher.
On Disneyland being a microcosm simulacrum of the layers of simulacrum in American culture:
First, the dominant theme of this thesis has some fundemental truth to it. Actually, when he went into discussing LA and California in general as a type of super-simulacrum dominated society, I kept thinking of the Steve Martin movie “LA Story” (yay! Kevin’s back in the conversation if he wants to be!!!) Steve Martin is an incredibly smart man, and I think that “LA Story” describes better the themes that Baudrillard is trying to express here. This might predominately be because Martin does it through analogy and story, while Baudrillard attempts to describe directly what we may not have words or ideas yet in our culture to describe in literal, direct format. Martin in LA story describes the malaise of living in a simulacrum society in a very noir-funny way. Also has excellent music.
Second, the obsession of authors, scientists, literary critics, philophers, psychologists and everyone else with “America IS Disneyland” is sometimes astounding. I hit it in “Escape from Freedom.” I hit it in SJ Gould’s books. It’s vaugely referenced in “LA Story,” and even in “Idiocracy.”
Baudrillard seems to careen off into the vaugely paranoid at times, like when he’s describing the political nature of presidental assasinations. Although… in a certain sense, things like Watergate do lead to simulacrum paranoia.
But my problem is that isn’t how I think of “simulacrum” – a symbol means the thing, so to speak, so that the meaning of the thing goes away, or an imitation that’s accepted as reality. In fact, things like Watergate are actually called “gaslighting,” and Disneyland and gaslighting are (maybe?) not the same thing. Maybe it’s an arbitrary value judgement, I don’t know, but I’ll have to think about it more.
Funny thing: he was unknowingly contributing to the associated gaslighting of Watergate by framing his presentation of the story in the way he did – brave, independant reporters, all that. Now that we know who Deep Throat was, that takes on a completely different tone, at least for me. Same with his off-hand comment “as in the army one prefers to take the simulator for a real madman” – well, read Kissinger’s “Necessity for Choice.” Sometimes the army itself would like to be percieved as a madman for tactical advantage! (Although I have a whole secondary analysis of that, and why that looks like a reasonable solution on the surface, it’s actually a long-term failing strategy because of a process I think of as “emotional investment.”)
Anyways, if you’d like to talk about it, I’m sure the university where I work can get a copy on loan from somewhere even though we don’t have any copies at our library, just might take some days or weeks.
In other news, you’re the second to mention Foucault, do you recommend him? Foucault we have tons of here.
Muse
Also, just throwing it out there:
I completely recognize that Mark Felt may, in fact, not be Deep Throat as reported. But this gets into the somewhat paranoid expression Baudrillard has in association with the murder of Kennedy:
“All previous presidents pay and continue to pay for Kennedy’s murder as if they were the ones who suppressed it – which is true phantasmatically, if not in fact. They must efface this defect and complicity with their simulated murder. Because, now it can only be simulated. Presidents Johnson and Ford were both the object of failed assassination attempts which, if they were not staged, were at least perpetrated by simulation…”
Now, obviously not literally stating that the Kennedy assassination was suppressed by the government – in fact, literally points out that this is a phantasmatic truth, rather than an actual truth.
But this goes into “Was Mark Felt Deep Throat?”
The news reported that he was, because he confessed. But although we can construct elaborate conspiracies to model the hypothesis “Mark Felt was not Deep Throat,” a simple possible “Mark Felt was not Deep Throat” was that he had enough info to know who Deep Throat really was, and wanted attention, so he claimed it for himself. Now, rather than being forgotten, he’ll be remembered as Deep Throat.
Does that mean he wasn’t Deep Throat? No, of course not. But drawing all these weird lines from one fact to another in an obscure way only contributes to the paranoia of the simulacrum, which, although not directly stated in the exerpt I read, seems a likely unstated grounding thesis of S&S.
Muse
Um…
I had many, many further thoughts on the simulacra phenomenon. About how, ultimately, there really is a parallel between Watergate and Disneyland (long explaination here); about how it’s actually not a phenomenon unique to the “modern” world, but that all empires are built around simulacra; about how “phantasmagoria” is an excellent term for the phenomenon, and that Baudrillard’s failure to cite the ancients – such as Plato’s analogy of the cave in chapter 8 of The Republic – demonstrates a lack of understanding for how human cultures and societies are built, as well as a failure to recognize the non-uniqueness of his situation.
That’s still out of the bit you recommended. I’d still be interested in discussing the idea further.
– Muse