Tag: snark

Crooked Media’s ‘What A Weekday’ As A Prototype For A New Gawker-Like Podcast Covering NYC

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The more I think about it, the more it is clear that Crooked Media’s What A Weekday is not only great, but is very similar to the vibe of my dream podcast that would be devoted to NYC.

This hypothetical podcast would be topical, funny and peripatetic. It would have a thinking man’s Morning Zoo vibe to it. Most of all, there would be ENERGY. It would have a lot of young, smart, just-out-of-college people talking about the parties they’ve attended, the people they’ve fucked while sprinkling in a white-hot obsession with New York Media — specifically The Old Gray Lady.

I think if you treated the constant power struggles of The New York Times as if it was life-or-death type of situation, people would love it. That was part of what made Gawker so much fun — they “gawked” — if you will — at the colorful characters of media and entertainment in NYC.

I continue to think Ye’s former muse Julia Fox is so naturally intriguing that she would be the one person that the podcast obsessed over the most — maybe to the point of having her come on as a regular guest and just talk about her “dope” life and all the “dope shit” she does.

Also, I think covering fashion would be something the podcast should a lot of. You draw Alpha Males to the podcast by talking constantly about the Wall Street and the women in by taking the colorful figures of fashion seriously. New York Fashion Week would be like the Superbowl for this hypothetical podcast.

Or something like that. That’s the vision I have.

I continue to find it odd that New York City doesn’t have it’s own devoted podcast that is popular enough outside of NYC that rubes in the hinterlands like me know about it and can listen to it.

I want a podcast that is like Late Night With David Letterman and Spy Magazine in the 1980s and Gawker in the aughts. But, as I keep saying, the window of opportunity is closing — soon enough, AI agents will mediate everything for us and there won’t be ANY human generated media at all.

All while we’re living in a fucking MAGA fascist state.

UGH.

Undead Gawker & The Dog That Hasn’t Barked



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

What a curious state of affairs. Not only is rock dead, but it seems as though snark is, too. I occasionally look at Undead Gawker and am taken aback. That’s it? Undead Gawker is extremely boring. It doesn’t have any of the spunk (or punk) of the living Gawker.

Oh well.

It makes me wonder if This Is It. No matter how many vibe shifts we may have, because of modern sensibilities — and technology — we’re just never going to have what I thought we would always have — a snarky publication of some sort that comments on the day’s events.

It could be that if it happens, it will happen in the Metaverse. Now isn’t that going to be something. I have a feeling us Poors don’t appreciate how much Silicon Valley is sitting on its hands when it comes to investments as it waits for the kinks to get out of the Metaverse.

So, here we are.

No new Late Night With David Letterman. No new Spy magazine. And no new Gawker. We just have to wait until, maybe, until we’re all being snarking virtually with no legs.

It’s all very disheartening. Even more so when I know that I have the vision to pull off a new, real reboot of Gawker, but for, well, waves hand. Everything else in my life besides vision.

Anyway. I have five novels to develop and write.

A Hot Take For Undead Gawker: Is Canada A Real Country?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Editor’s Note: I can’t tell if Undead Gawker is boring or if the snarky milieu of the OG Gawker has so permeated our mainstream culture so much that…meh. But the following is all in good snarky fun and it’s the type of post that would get people talking if my dream of a Modern Political Gawker every magically came into being.

I sometimes find myself thinking — is Canada a real country? The reason why I ask this is Canada is so nationalistic compared to the United States that it’s almost like they know they’re not a real country. The “country” of Canada hides its insecurity about itself via being really nationalistic.

Let’s look at what Canada is more closely. It’s not really a nation-state. It’s more of two nations force-fused together with some leftover land above the United States tacked on. What race is to the United States, language is to Canada. There’s a reason why Canada defines itself as being NOT the Untied States. They don’t really have much of an identity otherwise because of the Anglophone – Francophone divide.

In a sense, North American geopolitical boundaries make no sense in the context of geography. What North America SHOULD look like is a huge French Canada that comes down through the center of the continent and reaches the Gulf of Mexico. The United States should be a small — but powerful — country that resides from Maine to about North Carolina.

Why this didn’t happen is, well, the French weren’t all that interested in North America and so the English speakers were able to plow through the middle of the continent, leaving the rump remains of New France and the parts of America that remained loyal to the crown.

But is that a real country? Defining yourself by what you’re NOT is kind of a strange national identity. What’s worse, the United States is so big that should we have another civil war, it’s very possible that this particular issue will solve itself.

You’re the real MVP.

If the United States should, say, split into the rump Blue USA and Trumplandia, it’s easy to imagine Blue USA gobbling up Canada so Blue States remain contiguous. This would happen regardless of what Canadians felt about the matter.

Another issue that faces Canada is global climate change. It’s very easy to imagine 50 years from now the United States finally invading Canada for its “resources” which, in this case would be the resource of livable land.

So, is Canada a country? I guess so. But it’s more a construct of the modern world that started about 1865 when America figured out that whole slavery thing. Once the United States realized it had the Wild West to settle and the “Dominion of Canada” wasn’t all that interesting, it’s position as a “country” was finally established.

God save the Queen!

Did Trump Kill Snark?



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m reading the book “The Fourth Turning” for the novel I’m developing and I can see why people like Steve Bannon like it so much. But it has got me thinking just now about other cycles in culture, outside of the political.

We are definitely in something of a funk when it comes to edgy, provocative writing and art. It happened in the 2006-2008 era for some reason. We really haven’t had good snark (or pop rock) sense then. We don’t have any popular, yet edgy pop culture to consume these days. And the case could be made that the Trump administration’s lack of shame and self-awareness has killed irony and snark for all times.

I kept expecting some punk Millennial to pick up a guitar and start writing punk songs, but that has yet to happen. I now have to hope that “Zoomers” are going to do it — that they managed to punk Trump’s asshole campaign manager Brad Pascarle is a promising sign of a possible future.

And, yet, I almost think the very ideas of “irony” and “snark” no longer are applicable in this hyper connected world. Maybe there will be no Fourth Turning. Maybe it won’t come roaring back.

Maybe irony is dead. Maybe Trump killed it.

V-Log: Did Millennials Kill Snark? Or Did Twitter?

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Some thoughts on NYC media.

What Happened To Snark?

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I’m old enough to have some context on the notion of snark in the mainstream world. I’m old enough that I remember staying up way past my bedtime in the late 1970s to see the Not Ready For Primetime Players do their thing on SNL. A little bit later, it was David Letterman’s Late Night that was the center of the snarky world. About the same time, Spy Magazine was picking on Donald Trump and everyone cool seemed have an inside joke they could all chuckle about.

Then things changed.

The 1990s came and, well, things weren’t very snarky. There was the wildcat site Suck, but that was a flash in the pan as the Internet began to go mainstream. People were too fat and sassy and the only snark in mainstream was stuff like the comedy troupe The State. But for about a decade, there wasn’t much snark.

Then, about 2003-2004, Gawker popped up and snark came back in force. Unfortunately, Gawker started off snarky and ended up, well, just fucking mean. But it definitely served a snarky purpose and even went so far as to write really long pieces about snark / smarm that everyone talked about for a few days.

And….now…we got…nothing?

I would say the closest thing we have to mainstream snark is, well, Twitter. We have a kind of peer-to-peer snark now. What’s really ironic is Gawker died just about the time Trump rose to power. Gawker probably — if it had kept it scruples about it — could have been a major player in the Trump Era. New York Magazine and The Daily Beast occasionally attempt to claim the Gawker snark throne, to varying degrees of success. And a lot of the writers of Gawker have endup in plum write gigs across the media world, so its snarky legacy lives on in its own way.

And, honestly, I don’t see a Website devoted to snarky content ever popping up again. It just costs too much money to start a Website now. So unless something extremely unexpected happens…snark is dead. Long live snark.

V-Log: A Brief Chat About Julia Allison & Snark

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

This is an interesting chat.