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I played and sang those songs that evening with two or three kinds of embarrassment. First of all, it seemed merely socially a silly thing to be doing. Then there was the fact that we had been moved, we had not rolled the union on or stuck to it, we had not kept our hand upon the dollar and our eye upon the scale, none of us would, that night, dream of Joe Hill, standing there as big as life and smiling with his eyes. I was embarrassed about the ineffectuality and yes, ordinariness of the Guild people we’d come in contact with. I was embarrassed for Shawn and the rest of the magazine’s management, because they appeared to have not the faintest inkling that much of what they’d said and done to fight off the union was typical of any management fighting off any union — unremarkable, unmiraculous. Again, ordinary. The union would destroy what we had all worked so hard to achieve. The New Yorker is different. We are above the crudity and coerciveness of bargaining and strikes. We are so very generous. There are no “sides” to be on. You will really suffer if you get the union. And so on. And, finally, I was embarrassed that I had looked so condescendingly on the political and economic values and ideas of many members of my own family, however romantic and oversimplified those ideas and values might have been. For here were liberals like Shawn and Jonathan Schell turning to the right when the capitalist chips were down — just as I had been told, from my childhood on, liberals usually do, often with no embarrassment at all. Just as I was doing myself, at least passively, by backing down, by not keeping the courage of what I thought were my convictions.
[...] The institution itself mirrored the famous paradox of the contents of the magazine it put out: preponderantly liberal — or antimaterialistic, or spiritual, or muckraking, or even vaporously socialistic — writing physically sandwiched and financially supported by fancy advertising for extravagant goods like Tiffany diamond necklaces, Mercedes-Benz automobiles, entire islands up for sale. Shawn either did not want to admit or could not see that it is the obligation of capitalistic enterprises to maximize profits and that part of doing so is, with varying degrees of ruthlessness, holding down costs, and that he was, willy-nilly, wittingly or unwittingly, sitting on the salary lid. The situation tied him into knots of anger and illogic and mired him in a swamp of self-contradictions. In my opinion, he bought the magazine’s much-vaunted editorial independence partly by running an aesthetically respected and commercially successful magazine whose stock value rose and rose and partly by acceding to Milton Greenstein’s advice to pinch salary pennies.
oof
Mitchell Cohen frequently lamented that we were a magazine without a movement. The mission remains. The movement? We hope to be there for it when it arrives.
WHY WERE PEOPLE HELPING US? It couldn’t only have been because we were lying to them. In truth, they must have been doing it for the same reason we were doing it — because they wanted to. They were lonely people who wanted to get out of their apartments; they were skilled people whose skills were being channeled into corporate or otherwise uninteresting work. We were all in our mid- to late twenties — we had seen a bit of the world and knew we didn’t like it. We had seen others make things and knew we could make them just as well if not better. We had seen some of the people we most admired come out in favor of the invasion of Iraq, or get hoodwinked by various transparently phony cultural projects, or start writing down to some imagined audience, rather than up to the audience that actually existed (or so we believed). We did not have a clear political project (we were “leftists,” but there were many things we didn’t agree on), but we did have a clear cultural project, to try to connect our politics with our literary tastes. It’s not clear, though, that the specifics of this project were what interested other people, or us. Often it felt like simply the idea of a project — any project — was enough. It was fun and interesting and sometimes incredibly frustrating to work with these particular people. And it was interesting to try to build an independent cultural institution where one had not been before.
What began as a relatively modest 800,000-square-foot expansion of Carousel Center quickly mutated into a 100-million-square-foot Frankenmall that would cost $20 billion to build, making it one of the largest building projects in US history, according to Architectural Record. And it wasn’t going to save just Syracuse, but the entire world. In the pages of the New York Times Magazine, Congel crowed that DestiNY USA would “produce more benefit for humanity than any one thing that private enterprise has ever done.”
Below is a partial list of DestiNY USA’s humanitarian benefits:
- 5-star restaurants, including Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville
- 25,000-square-foot off-Broadway theater designed to host premier acts such as David Blaine Magic and Blue Man Group
- Onondaga Dunes, an 18-hole golf course to be built over the Solvay wastebeds
- Swim-with-the-Fish Experience, with dolphins, tropical fish, and stingrays
- Torch-lined historical re-creation of the Erie Canal
- 4 miles of jogging and biking trails
- Butterfly sanctuary
- Rainforest habitat, with real tropical plants and animatronics
- 5-acre extreme sports complex
amazing
“My daughter lives in Wisconsin and that place is just — everybody raves about that place,” the woman said. Other members of the tour started whispering to each other and shrugging. Melting Pot? What’s a Melting Pot?
“It’s a fondue restaurant,” said a man in a suit who’d been sitting quietly in the corner. Strang introduced him as the mall’s manager. “See, it’s set up with these individual kind of cubbies, and they do seatings of seven and nine,” the manager said, then realized that this level of detail probably wasn’t necessary. He crossed his arms, raised his eyebrows, and said, “It’s an experience.”
“We have them in a number of our properties,” Strang said. “If anybody’s driven by Buffalo in the last few years, we just did a renovation there. And they have a Melting Pot, a P. F. Chang’s, a Cheesecake Factory — ” The woman in pink clapped her hands. “Oh see, that too, a Cheesecake Factory!”
I stared at the notebook on the table in front of me. In it I’d written a list of Destiny USA amenities that had gone by the wayside over the years. My plan was to ask questions as if I’d just stepped out of a time machine from 2002. How much did it cost to play the back nine on Onondaga Dunes? Stuff like that. But I didn’t have the courage to do it. For some reason, I figured that a mall tour scheduled for the middle of a weekday would coax other unemployed cranks like me from their caves for the rare opportunity to harangue Destiny USA executives in person. But my compatriots were nice people, the kind who came to the mall on a summer afternoon to buy presents for their grandchildren. My bitterness dissolved inside a steaming pot of gooey cheese.
amazing
Destiny USA, and Carousel Center before it, could not have “happened” anywhere else but here. And not just here, in Syracuse, but on the frothy, stinking shores of Onondaga Lake. If it wasn’t the most polluted lake in the country, if it didn’t sit smack in the middle of a Rust Belt city verging on bankruptcy, Congel would have neither abandoned land to grab nor the political leverage to exploit it. Had he hawked his megamall to any community located on any of the other Finger Lakes — the affluent resort town of Skaneateles, say, where the Congel clan owns multimillion-dollar mansions — they would’ve told him to take a hike.
For days now I’ve been talking to everybody I can find, asking them how long they’ve been raw, how they found the diet, how they make it work financially, what they eat, why they eat it, and what they think about the rift that has opened up between Durianrider and Freelee and the remaining WFF pioneers. Mostly what I’ve learned is that nobody wants to discuss the controversy. Instead, we talk endlessly about food: what kinds of fruit we could buy where we lived, what kinds we wanted to try, our dietary goals and aspirations. Many were working to become fully raw, and those who were already strove for intense cleansing or fasting. Many said they were “always hungry” or “always thinking about food.” It’s generally believed that the development of agriculture made civilization possible, freeing early humans from lives in which nearly all of their time had to be spent planning and pursuing food. But you could also say that agriculture, and the divisions of labor it propagated, created the ancestors of our present-day lifestyle options — specializations in class, consumption, and daily routine that have grown more numerous and finely demarcated over time. Lifestyle differentiation made possible lifestyle choice, including the choice to adopt a lifestyle in which you would once again spend nearly all of your time thinking about eating.
The room is dark and smells like a sleeping person; there are records and DVDs everywhere, and a suitcase flung open on the floor that’s piled high with clothes. I ask Juice whether it’s all he brought to New York and he says yes. He is wearing a hoodie and a jacket with the NBC logo on the back, and something about seeing him in this context, living with other people in a Williamsburg apartment, makes me imagine walking past him in the street not knowing who he is; I realize that I’d probably dismiss him as a typical hipster dressed in corny thrift-store scraps. When Juice asks whether I want to hear some of his new songs, I wonder how many of the people I write off in this way go home to a room where they make things they’ve devoted their lives to.
“Look,” he says later, when I admit that the Extreme Animals stuff hadn’t really done it for me, and that noise music in general has always utterly mystified me. “You have to understand . . . I feel embarrassed that this is what I’ve spent my life doing. In a way, it’s really bleak. Like when you’re so deep in the vortex of a certain kind of niche culture, it’s easy to take it as your reality. But when you step outside of it, it can just look so dumb, you know?”