(Warning: I would say this story signifies Nothing, but it probably signifies Nothing-1!)

Once upon the early aughts I lived in Philadelphia with two other soon to-to-be bloggers and a sad young literary journal editor.* When we lived in Philadelphia we were gainfully employed but also bored, so we — well, chiefly Pressler, who had a "gossip" column in the local alternative newsweekly, but also the other three of us, who committed various acts of "journalism" — unconsciously went to work constructing our own memory palace of microcelebrities, proving that a microcelebrity economy can exist even in a city with a crippling five percent wage tax and a severe (SEVEEERE) case of "brain drain"! The key was simply to 1. Zero in on someone trying to get attention and 2. Write about them in such a way that captures/wryly acknowledges/satirizes the absurdity of their endeavor to get your attention. Among them were:

1. A party promoter who was sort of like our Julia Allison named Rachel Furman. Pressler liked to call her "Hotel heiress Rachel Furman" but she eventually started a business not promoting parties but just showing up to them and the business, and eventually she, were called "Rachel Inc."
2. Restaurateur Stephen Starr, who owned all the restaurants in town and dated a much younger woman named January, and another restaurateur Neil Stein, who was a huge cokehead and pillhead and owned nothing but he used to write Pressler from prison, where he had to go on charges of tax evasion and being a big pillhead I think. I believe we pretended they had a "feud" although Neil Stein was too much of a drug addict to really feud with people and Stephen Starr's actual feud was with Jeffrey Chodorow, but Chodorow did not live in Philadelphia so we acted like he did not exist, even though he was actually important.
3. A crew of ambitious publicists who traveled in packs, stole one anothers' clients and marketed themselves by dressing like Julia Allison and sending out Christmas cards with pictures of themselves in Sex & The City poses. At the time we thought they were kind of pathetically trashy but at that time The Hills did not exist, much less The Real Housewives of New York. They all feuded all the time! Then we found out one of them was bisexual and had an "open relationship" with her husband and that was fun too.
4. And speaking of Christmas cards: a prodigiously obnoxious "blueberry heir" named Anthony DiMeo who became a sort of John Fitzgerald Page-cum-Tucker Max sort of character for us. Girls in his apartment building emailed us constantly to attest to his terrible woeful obnoxiousness. Pressler scanned his Christmas card for one of her columns, and DiMeo sued her. Fun times!
5. Gervase. Of Survivor I fame. (Obviously!)
6. A state senator named Vince Fumo who supposedly bought fake tits for his bartender girlfriend and had really amazing hair transplants.
7. An assortment of deejays, because hipsters were very important back then, the most — oh who am I kidding with the "most" -0 notable of whom was Diplo.*

See, it was not too unlike Gawker! Except we sort of hated Gawker in those days, because we read it and assumed the people it covered were somehow less pathetic and more special than the people we covered, which was actually not true. (Also this guy named A.J. who was from Philly but living the awesome New York used to try and get us to move because Philly was so pathetic.) But somehow Jessica convinced everyone that Philadelphia was the "Sixth Borough" and around that time Gawker even noticed us! Then somehow Doree and I ended up working here and Jessica meanwhile got a job working with former Gawker editor Jessica Coen at New York's Daily Intel. And A.J. — following a stint back in Philadelphia! — is also working for Gawker Media. And last I heard:

1. Rachel Furman had some sort of existential crisis wherein she went off the internet and drove cross country to get a nose job.
2. Stephen Starr owns a bunch of restaurants in New York now and he no longer returns our flirtatious text messages.
3. One of those publicist girls told everyone she was a millionaire.
4. Some guys made the TV show we always wished we had made about the whole scene but, who are we kidding, we don't know how to do that.
5. Diplo stopped dating M.I.A. and is still nowhere near as annoying as any of the Misshapes!
6. Vince Fumo was charged in a 139-count, 267-page corruption indictment. (I guess we could have paid attention to that!)
7. Anthony DiMeo sued Tucker Max.***

Anyway, today the same shit keeps happening with a whole new cast of new people! Every time we sit down to devote ourselves to trying to write something a little more pointful, it's…Mary Rambin! Raffaelo Follieri! Tao Lin! Jared Paul St…ill?! See, but it never lets up! Eventually "our Gessen" — he lives here now too! — wrote a highly thoughtful think piece on the subject for the Times Magazine. Perhaps we might direct you to the line:

This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well.

And trust us, "out there" does not only mean New York. It is like Staphylococcus Aureus…it's actually everywhere, but it's not going to emerge as the bombastic plague of pointlessness until you start cultivating it in the ego-advancing agar of your wholly unwarranted attention!! (It's the microbiology of microcelebrity, doncha know!) (I know! It doesn't ever stop though.) And to that end I will leave you with two quotes from a seventeenth century philosopher I learned about from this N+1 guy:

If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.

It's universal! But… this

To establish oneself in the world, one has to do all one can to appear established.

So what are you waiting for? Go forth and establish! Perhaps I can interest you in Tumbling your endeavors? We'll be most gracious followers.

*One was former Gawker editor Doree Shafrir, another was New York magazine Daily Intel blogger Jessica Pressler, and the literary journal editor — "our Gessen," as Doree calls him fondly — was a guy named Matt "Mattathias" Schwartz. (Everyone was intimidated/repelled by Schwartz's highminded seriousness at first! But I ended up dating him and he turned out to be high-mindedly serious in a good way.
**Philadelphia deejays have a long history of local prominence: we often found ourselves writing about the antics of this one, who is now 67 years old.
***Though alas, Tucker Max won the great douche-off.

Bonfire of Inanities [Eye Weekly]

Yes well that is how this "market" thing works, folks. Though the commenters don't have to think it's fair! It sounds like "Reaganomics," they say. ("Also known as neo-liberalism.") On the other hand, as Inquirer business reporter Joe DiStefano points out. all the money former Knight-Ridder CEO Tony Ridder made certainly makes him look a lot smarter than any of his journalists wanted to give him credit for back when they were complaining about his stupid business strategies!

Which brings up an important point: if anything good comes of the death of print journalism — no seriously, fuck trees — maybe it will be that more journalists finally grasp basic market principles.

The grad student writes:

The first problematic aspect of the public / chain ownership model? The relentless focus on the quarterly bottom-line to the exclusion of a long term plan. In October 2000 the New York Times wrote this:

“By almost any business measure, the Knight Ridder newspapers in Philadelphia would be deemed a success. Since 1995, profit margins at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News have more than doubled, reaching close to 19 percent after years of single-digit doldrums. Good? Absolutely. Good enough? Not for long. For 2001, the target margin is 21 percent. And now there is talk about 5 percent budget cuts at the papers, if not more. Anxiety is as plentiful as oxygen in The Inquirer’s newsroom.”

Because the relentless focus on quarterly results really is a bitch…for every company with a ticker symbol! Certainly, there are companies with controlling shareholders who take an interest in their long-term financial health. But they are the exceptions that prove the rule. You do not exactly get to be the controlling shareholder of a shitload of companies by being a big sap.

If you are a "sap," you tend toward silly pursuits like journalism, which invariably break your heart, at least until you learn to appreciate the absurd game of clinging to an industry that incorporates variables other than the three required to conclude a PEG ratio.

Philly Newspapers Under Knight Ridder By The Numbers via Romenesko

One of my old [Conde Nast publication redacted] interns had a nightmare herself - she moved up to Vogue and was passing Anna in the hall on her first day. Knew she wasn't supposed to look at her. As they passed, Anna tripped and fell, just bit it. Intern freaked out. she didn't know what to do. So she ran.

Oh, no! How like a poor young thing unschooled in social interactions not involving the "BRB" option! However.

Didn't help AW. got back to her desk, told her new boss what had happened, and the boss told her she did the right thing and that if she'd actually attempted to help AW, her first day would def have been her last.

Of course, there are two castes of interns at Vogue: worthless debutante billionairespawn, and meticulous and diligent pretty untouchables. Now let's contrast that with this dispatch from the Embassy of a major European country:

I've got a story of an intern here whose dad is some bigwig in the biggest [European country] union, and who has erased his title of "intern" from his sig., and instead calls himself the "acting social economic attache" or some bullshit like that just because he's commandeered in the office of the REAL social economic attache, who is on vacation. Because of this elevated, clearly non-intern status, he refuses to engage in the less-glamorous work all the other interns are required to do, namely act as hosts and hostesses at events and basically be bitches.

But! What works in Old Europe won't fly in, say, Boston.

We had 2 interns last semester who showed up at an Ashlee Simpson appearance at saint, or some other club here, and tried to bully their way in by telling the GM they worked for Boston Magazine and if he didn't let them in they'd blog mean shit about him and his club. Then they gave him the names of various Boston Magazine editors. While they were arguing they spotted one of our art department assistants, who was on a freelance photo job, and tried to pretend they were with her.

Such an uncharacteristic show of resourcefulness, right?

So the art assistant almost lost that freelance account because the GM was so pissed, and an editor here had to make some big show of apology to the GM or else it would probably end up in the Track. And then the interns first denied the whole thing. Then each blamed it on the other one.

God, are they too preoccupied with aspirational reality TV to have absorbed the single most obvious lesson of all crime television?

Then we made them write notes of apology to the club and they were filled with misspellings.

Yes.

Anyway, our last story, from a publication in Philadelphia, is a long, cautionary tale about Why You Cannot Trust Ivy Leaguers Even If They Appear To Be Hardworking And Eager To Please (And Also Attend Lesser Ivies)

Once upon a time, [website] had an intern. Let's call her Jennifer Aniston. Jennifer Aniston came into our lives around three winters ago. Our website explicity states that we do NOT consider Penn students for internships, for reasons that would be obvious to anyone who's ever lived in any kind of proximity to Penn, and Philadelphia's radical allergy to the kind of senses of entitlement for which Penn students are widely known. But when we met Jennifer Aniston, she made a good point: She had graduated from Penn, and was thus, no longer a Penn student. And she seemed nice enough, and we really needed the help, so we let her by on the technicality.
And here it must be said that Jennifer Aniston was actually a really, really great intern. She loved the [publication], did tons of grunt work with gusto, and was really just super diligent about any task with which she was charged. She ruled. But the more time we spent with her, the more we realized that Jennifer Aniston basically had no sense of self. For example, she constantly talked using "we" when discussing anything about her personal life, referencing things not simply she, but she and her boyfriend of a few months, did or enjoyed.
Q: Hey, Jennifer, what are you listening to these days?
A: Gosh, well, we really love Peter Bjorn and John and Italo disco!
It also became apparent that JA was just a really, really sheltered young adult — that she was one of these people who moved to a big city to go to school, and then proceeded to basically never leave the campus, thereby terminating more than half the value of her education.
In addition, we soon learned that she was attending this strange emo born-again Christian church that seems to prey on hipster transplants here in Philly.
We felt bad for her. And we also felt like we wouldn't be doing our duty as intern masters/psuedo mentors if we didn't expose her to the world as we knew it. So we took her on a trip that we needed to make for work. A long, long road trip.
On the trip and long conversations that ensued as we drove halfway across the country, we learned a lot of wacky stuff: That Jennifer Aniston didn't seem to know a lot about sex for a young woman approaching her mid-20s. That her boyfriend seemed to hold an almost cult-leader-like control over her. That she would pout at the slightest inconvenience. She was utterly horrified when we started listening to Howard Stern to break up the car rides.
Well, the trip was what it was. But when we got back, through the strange social mesh of Philadelphia, we found out (inadvertently) that a friend of a friend of ours had met up with Jennifer Aniston's boyfriend roughly 30 minutes after we picked her up for the trip. This friend of a friend was then reported to have holed up and fucked Jennifer Aniston's boyfriend for a week solid.
We didn't know what to do with this information.
So we just held onto it for a while. But then, things got weirder
It turned out that we started working another young woman who turned out to be Jennifer Aniston's Boyfriend's last girlfriend. We'd known this woman for a while, respected her a lot, and eventually, one day while chatting we realized that she and Jennifer Aniston shared something in common ( Jennifer Aniston's Boyfriend), and unbeknownst to Jennifer Aniston, that at least in the beginning, they were sharing this young squire concurrently.
But Jennifer did know that our new co-worker did see her boyfriend in the past. When she found out that she was on the team, Jennifer quit her internship. Immediately. Despite the fact that she'd basically never have to see her.
Meanwhile, Jennifer had been posting on her blog and talking nearly constantly about when she and her BF were going to get married, and how much in love they were, etc.
We were worried. It made us sick to think that here she was, proclaiming eternal love, when in reality her BF was basically the town pump and here she was, unwittingly making a fool of herself.
This all came to head at another employee's birthday dinner, where, unlikely as it seemed, all concerned (except the chick that Jennifer's BF screwed for a week while we were away) were present.
When Jennifer's BF showed up, our new employee asked if they could talk outside for a moment.
While we were not there, we assume and were told later that Jennifer's BF was given the dressing-down of his life.
Meanwhile, Jennifer Aniston slowly sat at the table and slowly lost her mind. When everyone returned to the table, Aniston bragged to our new employee, as if she had been hypnotized, about how she and the BF were so in love and were going to get married and make many many Aniston babies.
Everyone at the table stared in disbelief. Silence.
When the dinner ended, we decided that this could not go on. While it was not really our place to tell Jennifer Aniston what we know, we could, we realized, pass it along to a mutual good friend and co-worker whom we did know, and at the time, was very close to her.
In short order, Jennifer Aniston reacted in the following ways:
- She pulled down her Myspace and her blog.
- Her Flickr stream as well.
- And never spoke to us again.
In the time since, it's become clear that she shot every messenger she could, and stayed with the BF. She still alludes to us on her blog from time to time as these evil, awful people from her past. It's made us sad, but it's also shown us one thing that we kind of knew already, but needed to be reminded about:
No Penn students, ever.

"Chelsea Clinton stopped traffic Friday night as she wandered the streets of Philadelphia on a gay bar crawl, winning rave reviews for both her politics and her appearance.

"Led around the neighborhood by Gov. Ed Rendell, Chelsea was mobbed by local gays and lesbians, as she walked from one club to the next. They ran up to hug her, posed for pictures and certainly invaded her personal space.

“'I grabbed her ass,' one young woman exclaimed to her friends after snapping a picture with her arm around the former first daughter.

“'Chelsea, the gays love you!' one fan exclaimed, as she took the microphone at Bump, a restaurant and bar that was her first stop. 'Oh, gosh, I don’t know if everybody loves me,' she responded.

"Most of those at the bar seemed to, squeezing past one another in the cramped space to get a photo. Even some patrons, donning Obama stickers—a rally for the Illinois senator had taken place a few blocks away earlier in the evening—tried to get a snapshot as well.

"In all, she visited four bars in Center City, concluding her tour at Woody’s, the city’s most famous gay bar. Getting from one event to another proved difficult at times, as she was constantly stopped by admirers while walking down the sidewalk. She reached into car windows to shake hands and was followed by several young women who tried to pose for photos on their camera phone, but seemed incapable of properly saving the pictures." [MSNBC via Drudge]

This comes as no surprise, since we already know how much Chelsea enjoys her gay partying.

Rendell's defense was kind of half-hearted. He noted that there were six other witnesses to the incident whose stories haven't been heard yet. Perhaps one of them will finally settle the "fucking dyke" versus "dyke bitch" debate!

"Does trouble seem to find her?" he asked. "Yeah, from what little I know about her entire life, she's had some difficult times, and I can guess you can say some of them were of her own making.

"But I think she is a very decent person," he said, giving her community service and police fundraisers a plug.

CBS3 hasn't fired her yet, but their people don't sound too confident that she'll be back.

Official Will Not Confirm Lane's Return To Newscast [The Bulletin]
Rendell calls radio show about Lane [Philly.com]
Photos: Philadelphia Will Do

Of course, at the heart of every coping-mechanism fantasy is the impossible escape. For tens of months, now, the nobly savage Neverland Shangri-la for depressed New Yorkers has been Philadelphia—a town, we hear, that's only a magic-carpet Acela ride away and basically has no cost of living.

But step aside, failed t-shirt-designers, the traders are coming through! On P6 (that's page 6 of Pursuits for the uninitiated), the "Power Table: Where the Business Elite are Dining" column-infographic profiles Le Bec-Fin, a French place at "1523 Walnut Street." Disbelief is suspended; logical inconsistencies elided. That is to say, Philadelphia has a business elite? Ditto, power?

We can only assume that conscientious Journal writers are trying to telegraph warning of the impending crash to the 401(K) hoi polloi: to wit, this "Le Bec-Fin" apparently features a "mussels la Spain," named after alleged Philly business elite-ist Bernie Spain, who made his fortune, such as it is, by selling his Dollar Express chain to rival Dollar Tree. (One suspects that dollar stores are ideal investments in times of catastrophic deflation.)

Meanwhile, over on P9, Eric Felton's "How's Your Drink?" column conducts a New Historicist reading of the Bloody Mary. Fascinating stuff—despite a rather unsavory predilection for abreving the drink as "Bloodies," Felton's archeology nicely uncovers the alcoholic's gazpacho in its intended form: no ice, no horseradish, no celery. But one can't help but notice that the tone's a bit off, what with the NEAR-CONSTANT INVOCATION OF MASSIVE HUMAN SUFFERING. Taking it from the top:

"The Tehran meeting of F.D.R., Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin in 1943 was at times a bloody-minded affair—in the strategy discussed and the cocktails consumed. Stalin suggested executing 50,000 to 100,000 German officers once the war was won.... Churchill argued that war criminals should be tried and get their due, but political mass executions were right out. The rest of the conference, Stalin needled Churchill repeatedly, insinuating that he harbored a secret love of Germans.... I like to think that Churchill—who oversaw every last detail for this birthday party that night—chose the drink with a purpose. Could it be that Churchill was getting in a sly dig at the man he toasted that night as "Stalin the Great" by serving the dictator a drink sanguineous in name and appearance, with a Russian spirit at its core?"

It's a similar story elsewhere in the paper: beer that's always already flat (P1), the technology-driven "de-skilling" of professional golf (P7), the ongoing miscegenation of couture and pr t- -porter (P3).

In good times, the wacky doings in the weekend WSJ just read like run-of-the-mill conspicuous consumption. But as the indicators turn gloomy, Pursuits seems to be morphing into something altogether more interesting; nowhere else is nihilism this brutal.

• Here come the layoffs at the Philadelphia Inquirer. [NYT]
  
• The Times might feel confident enough that everyone's forgotten the whole Jayson Blair thing to ditch the Public Editor position altogether. [NYO]
  
• Gerry Levin's "inner poet" turned out to be some dude who runs a spa. [NYP]
  
• That Allbritton online politics thing scores another defection; this time it's Ben Smith of the Daily News, who snared yesterday's scoop on the stolen Giuliani documents. [NYDN]
  
• Radar's John Cook, Jeff Bercovici get all Woodward and Bernstein on some dude who wrote a mean thing in Brit Hume's Wikipedia entry. [Radar]
  

• Diane Sawyer's not going anywhere. At least until June. [NYT]
  
• Liberty Media's John Malone looking to pick up some Cablevision assets. [NYP]
  
• Union representing WSJ reporters and editors takes out ad in NYT lambasting its own paper. [WWD]
  
• Did the Times use a source who had an interest in the direction of the story he commented on? We're shocked. [Brooklyn Vegan, first comment]
  
• We hope Jon Friedman isn't as quick to pull the plug on his loved ones as he is on Katie Couric. [MarketWatch]
  
• WaPo's Richard Cohen makes HuffPo's Rachel Sklar fear for her decayingg ovaries. [ETP]

• Ad Age's Media Mavens: A remarkably diverse group. [copyranter]
  
• Who's getting canned at Time Inc.? It's a holiday mystery! [WWD]
  
• Fox News: Here's the name of that broad what got raped. [Radar]
  
• Philadelphia papers rank-and-file not exactly thrilled with labor deal. [Philadelphia Inquirer]
  
• Gossip under threat in Great Britian. [Guardian]
  
• Pretty much everyone's gonna go with a "gets off" joke about Girls Gone Wild auteur Joe Francis' lenient sentence for using underage girls in his videos; we're still trying to work something out concerning anal violation. [AP]
  
• Rolling Stone reality show contestant disabused of romantic notions about the magazine: ""I guess I had this romantic idea in my head of people under their desks shooting heroin in their eyeballs." Sorry, kid, that's just the readers. [WWD]

Valania and Sweeney, both former staff writers at Philadelphia Weekly, parted ways over the summer due to differing creative visions. "Yeah, mine was to not suck," Sweeney says.

My, how sharp your claws are! So what's Valania to do now? Why, start a rival blog called Phawker.com. Which is a really catchy title, we admit, but perhaps a bit too high concept. Might we suggest something slightly more original and appropriate, like Phuckwit?

Battling Bloggers [PDN]

Philadelphia Will Do directs us to this video of crusading journalist Geraldo Rivera visiting the City of Brotherly Love to investigate a plot to whack him. It's pretty much what you'd expect (i.e., a lot of Italian guys with whiny voices yelling, "Hey, get outta my face") but what struck us when watching was this: Why do we need the Philly mob to put a hit on Geraldo? We're New York Fuckin' City, our mob can kick your mob's ass. This sixth borough shit is getting out of control.

Geraldo Discusses Plan to Whack Him, Asks If He's Allowed To Be Angry [PWD]

Move to Philly [Philly.com]
Earlier: Jessica Pressler Continues Wreaking Her Philadelphian Havoc

Kain was inspired by a New York Times article last August that referred to Philadelphia as "the sixth borough."

Apparently this Mr. Kain missed the subsequent orgy of mockery.

Ads Tell Artists Life Is Better Down in Philly [MetroNY]
Earlier: Philly Loses Imaginary Sixth-Borough Status

For Philadelphians, however, this is bad news, as McClatchy has said it's immediately offering for sale a dozen of the KR papers, including both The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News. And suddenly we understand why Philly was so eager to get that sixth-borough status: Even if though there may not be a future for their local papers, they'll still have the Times, Post, and Daily News.

McClatchy Buys Knight Ridder, Will Sell 12 KR Newspapers [Romenesko]

Crash Burns Brokeback [Philly Daily News]

Man suspected in theft: A man brought from a street corner in Brooklyn, N.Y., to help a man move from Brooklyn to the 2500 block of Dorothy Drive on Jan. 30 is suspected of taking a leather portfolio containing two passports, a check for $12 and a bank passbook, police said.

The lesson: Don't hire a guy from some random streetcorner in Brooklyn to help you with your 100-mile move. Oh, and always keep a close, close eye on your $12 checks.

Crooklyn [Philadelphia Weekly]

Someplace across the East River, we're sure, Marty Markowitz is cursing himself for not using that gambit first.

And someplace along the Schuylkill, Jessica Pressler would surely be doing the same. If she hadn't moved to Brooklyn.

Philly Named 'Next Great City' [CNN.com]

Mediabistro founder Laurel Touby swanned into Philadelphia two weeks ago for one of her exclusive!!! media non-networking parties, City Paper reports. She mingled, she listened to a book reading organized by her local Philly hostess, and then, in thanking the hostess, Bobbi Booker, who's been hosting Mediabistro parties there for two years, Touby misidentified her. Which prompted Booker to quit on the spot.

For the good of all involved, ourselves included, we'll refrain from further comment on this. Except to note our favorite detail from the City Paper story:

"I was crying after what she said to me," Touby told the paper, apparently forgetting it's actually the insulted volunteer who gets first dibs on tears. But we also understand where Laurel was coming from: It was her party, so she could cry if she wanted to.

After all, you would cry, too, if it happened to you.

Full Nelson [Philadelphia City Paper, second item]

The sixth borough concept was a good way to introduce New Yorkers to what's been happening in Philly. It's kind of like when you give a dog a pill you wrap it in something you know they like, such as cheese.

Is one of us supposed to be a dog in this scenario? We are? We're the dog?

Well, if so: Grrrr.

That Was the Week That Was: Jessica Pressler [Philebrity]
Earlier: The Word According to Styles