[This is fourth in "The Pride of Phoenix" Series.]
by Jerome du Bois
Amy Silverman, the associate editor of Phoenix New Times, and a city native, enjoys boasting about her shallowness, self-loathing, and stupidity in her latest cover story, "Phoenix Has An Inferiority Complex." She also tosses out unsubstantiated generalities about the city's character in between sharing snippets of her pathetic autobiography. I couldn't figure out why this woman was in any way significant --and I use the term as a synecdoche. I suppose the angle is that she is Phoenix writ small. She is indeed small, and a lousy writer, but she doesn't stand for my city.
She doesn't have a classic inferiority complex, anyway. She has what my wife has termed a classic imposter complex --that is, she knows she hasn't earned her present position, doesn't deserve it, but will fight like hell to conceal these truths, and will simultaneously project her unworthiness upon the world, so that all may wallow. I will do my best to justify these claims below.
If Phoenix --cultural Phoenix, I assume they mean-- had an inferiority complex, it would be because of Amy Silverman and Kimber Lanning and Beatrice Moore and Michael Lacey and Sloane McFarland and the other players who have retarded progress and innovation, and who want to keep the scene as mediocre, debased, and inbred as they are, so they won't be threatened by real talent from outside their various complacent crews and claques.
As Ms. Silverman wanders through over 5600 words, I kept saying to myself, "I thought this article was about Phoenix." About 3600 of those words are about her, and they don't describe a pretty picture. I'll show you what I mean right after the jump, but here I want to bring right up front a quote from the editor of this filthy and worthless rag, Rick Barrs, at the end of Ms. Silverman's dreadful piece. Keep in mind, Mr. Barrs has been here less than three years; he came from LA.
When I got back to Phoenix, I told my boss Rick about my funny epiphany about the New Times building [that it was a converted elementary school]. "You've got to use that as the ending to your story," he said. I agreed.
"Yeah," Rick said, glancing around his office, which overlooks a beautiful patio with a pond stocked with bright orange fish, "this building is really great. Too bad this part of town is such a complete shithole."
Yeah, reader, you read it right. He's talking about Jefferson Street between 7th Street and 16th Street. This twit makes me sick. He blithely disrespects an entire dynamic, multigenerational and multiethnic neighborhood, which has more character and pride in its very gutters than he will ever bear in his heart. I hope the neighbors --those in Mrs. White's Golden Rule Cafe, various churches and BBQ joints, and Mexican party supply stores and car repair places and bridal boutiques, and those who live in the modest, neat homes surrounding his charming enclosure, all predating Mr. Barrs by decades-- I hope they read what Mr. Barrs says here. What an arrogant, privileged jerk. Miami calls, Rick; move on, why don't you, like Tony Ortega, and tear down somebody else's city?
And Ms. Silverman thinks it's just fine to put this remark on the record for all the world to see their shared insensitive, racist obtuseness, their hermetically-sealed colonial-enclave arrogance. You see what I mean by stupidity? She cannot see the offense. Who is her audience here? You, reader? Some tight-assed coterie of martini-swilling intellectual midgets? Certainly not me.
She has no problem with what he said. She thinks it's cool. Hence the shallowness: she and hubby, who sells T & A and sex-hook-ups and other stinky advertising for NT, will hop in their Lexus and get the hell out of the neighborhood, cruising happycool up to their safely-gated mcmansion somewhere up north, where they can kuddle with their kid.
Phoenix deserves better than these people. I'll show you some reasons why.
[This will be a skip-fisk, by the way; no word-for-word, or para-by-para, nitpicking.]
Ms. Silverman begins her article with clichés about several cities --"Austin rocks. Dallas shops."-- and then:
And Phoenix? Phoenix is slumped on the Barcalounger--
and there follow more clichés about Phoenix as a couch potato (with helpful distasteful photographs, of course, on every page; typical lowest-rent NT). Then:
But Phoenix is depressed.
She knows this how? No evidence provided, and none forthcoming.
I think the city's having a quarter-life crisis-- you know, that new trend--
More cliché personification about this made-up problem. Who says Phoenix is 25 years old, anyway? Why not fifty? Why not twelve? No explanation for this demarcation. It just fits her mental age, perhaps.
This first occurred to me about a year and a half ago, when urban-studies rock star Richard Florida came to town to talk about the creative class. New Times did a big long project on downtown Phoenix --why we've never had one, why we need one, what it will take to get one. After Florida left, everyone admitted they hadn't been able to make it all the way through the book, and we all agreed the guy was a real boor, but that he was onto something when he said that cities need more bookstores, coffee shops and art galleries.
Again the blithe admissions of shallowness and stupidity. Consider the context here, reader. The NT management sponsored, and Michael Lacey, Rick Barrs, and Amy Silverman created and oversaw, a multi-article project, an author visit, a public Q&A, even some working papers that bore fruit; and now, according to her --how come she speaks for "everybody"?-- all anybody got out of it was advice available anywhere. Nobody could finish the book, supposedly. Why? Thousands of others have managed. Plus she insults Mr. Florida without a blink. Is this the new snarkiness? No, it's not even that good; it's second-grade talk. And they all signed off on it, without bothering to read the book of the author they invited out here.
Now, I don't think Richard Florida has all the answers, but he sure is smarter than all three of these so-called editors put together. The amenities, he emphasizes (in the articles I've read, anyway), come after the creative people --engineers, TV production people, scientists, very-high-technicians, graphic designers, advertisers, customizers and other niche marketers-- have set the synergy. Anyone who has run or worked in an art gallery, bookstore, or coffee shop --I've done all three-- knows they are not magic magnets. Just because you're there doesn't mean anybody's coming.
Ms. Silverman lays out some lame examples of Phoenix's inferiority:
In the early '90s, a local artist made tee shirts with booming yellow suns and the slogan "Phoenix Is Boring." Reubens Accomplice, a local band, named an album Blame It On The Scenery.
Later in the article she writes,
MTV hasn't even filmed a season of The Real World here.
(This is a bad thing?) Then there's this:
And for years, I had Hunter S. Thompson's opinion of Phoenix pasted to a wall in my office:
"If there is, in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viscously overcrowded version of Phoenix-- a clean, well-lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing."
I find this excerpt telling in several ways. First, that anyone, especially someone who is supposed to be an editor, would take Hunter Thompson seriously enough to put his writing on the wall. Second, Thompson's sentence contains one key word: "bromide," because that's all it is. It says nothing. Substitute Las Vegas in the sentence; Austin; San Antonio; they all fit.
And what's missing? As if that cruel and blinkered toad of a man would ever have known anyway. She doesn't care and she doesn't provide an answer in the article. She just thinks it's cool to still quote a man who not long ago blew his brains out in such a way as to cause the maximum cruelty to his immediate family, some of whom were in nearby rooms. And she proudly shares this apparently inspirational snippet right there where her eyes could see it every day for years.
And she's the second-most influential person at that rag, by title anyway.
Onward. She writes:
No one wants to live in Phoenix.
Of course, that's not true. People are streaming in here like crazy. They're also streaming out, not as quickly, but they are. And I've always noticed that smart people seem to leave the fastest.
Those first four sentences are just filler, unsupported and therefore stupid, irrelevant, meaningless, and unedited. Give us some figures or leave the statements out. The last sentence conjures up for me the fantastic image of Amy Silverman, like the troll goddess of exodus, multiplied like a squinting avatar at all exits, checking everyone who's leaving town for their, you know, smartness level, and conveniently calculating it all for us peons: yep, jest as I thunk, the smart ones leave the fastest.
No. Wrong. I'm still here. Catherine's still here. And there are others. And we're just getting started.
The other day, I stood in Stinkweeds, Kimber Lanning's record shop in central Phoenix, and she told me about Dominick, a kid she knows from Peoria. He comes into the store once in a while. Recently, he told her he was just back from New York City, had a great time, saw Tim Berne, a really great jazz musician.
Really? Lanning said. Tim Berne was just at Modified Arts, the performance space/art gallery she runs downtown. She didn't see Dominick at that show.
Oh no, the kid replied. Why drive all the way across town to see a band?
Well, it beats flying across the country.
It's not like the kid went to New York just to see Tim Berne, but you get the point.
No, no, no, thickhead, that's just the point: you're trying to smuggle in all kinds of manure disguised as cachet.
The point of the passage being: Lanning is claiming that Dominick could have had a comparable experience in both Phoenix and New York City. This is absurd on the face of it, and doesn't even need argument.
Next follows a couple of curiously lame paragraphs about the arts districts. Thank the geeks for cut-and-paste:
Go downtown. I remember driving down Roosevelt Street late one night a few years ago, on my way home from someplace, and noticing twinkly white lights on the windows of a building I'd never noticed. Hmmmph, I thought. Looks like someone's opened something. Good luck. Turns out, that was Modified, Lanning's place. This time, it was actually joined by other art and performance spaces, and something's happening in the Roosevelt neighborhood. It's like watching a Polaroid picture develop.
Go over to Grand Avenue; you can actually park and spend a hunk of time, walking from gallery to gallery. There's even a place to get coffee. We all joke about how crappy most of the art for sale is, but that's changing, too. Artists from Phoenix are starting to get recognized in New York, but for the most part, they're still ignored here. Lanning swears she heard a statistic that on a given weekend, there are more shows here than in Seattle. I'm not sure I believe that, but there's a lot more going on than most people think.
For answer, I begin by referring the reader to our series on the sidebar for the true abysmal scene. Next, I note that this so-called reporter and editor makes no mention of either the new, huge, $200+ million ASU campus expansion in the Evans-Churchill area, which blankets and surrounds Roosevelt Row; or the just-approved distribution, on April 7th, of funds for the Phoenix Artist Storefront Pilot Program, $500,000+spread among galleries and "multi-use venues" all over downtown. Not worth mentioning from the only other newspaper of record in 200 miles. Not to mention the ongoing $1000 "mentor" grants. This is unprofessional.
Onward. Ms. Silverman writes:
When I decided to write this, I started--
Whoa. When I decided to write this. Amy Silverman could probably write a cover story any time she wanted, or perhaps it's in her contract, so many cover stories per year, but what she has written here is a new and curious social document, at least to me: a confession in which she reveals her self-humiliation and lack of standards, with no sense of shame, and no sense of irony. She hijacks the title subject and substitutes herself: "Amy Silverman Has An Impostor Complex."
--asking people, "Do you think Phoenix has an inferiority complex?" You can split the response down the middle. Half the people groaned. "Don't write a b***j** story," one colleague warned me. "Don't be a booster." the other half groaned, too. "Please don't write another negative story about this city," an academic type begged.
The truth is that this story is neither.
The truth is that this paragraph, and its kicker, is all made up, isn't it? Was it really half and half? If so, of how many people, from what cohorts, where? This is just fluffy set-up, a see-saw fabrication, not real writing or reporting. Plus she gets to put a nasty word in there. Waow.
Ms. Silverman is a nano-narcissist: the tiniest things are supposed to fascinate us as much as she.
You know, there's this house west of Seventh Street, just south of McDowell; I notice it from Seventh sometimes when I'm driving to lunch. Someone's put a ton of junk --lawn gnomes, statues, recently I noticed what looked like a wooden horse head-- in the front yard. I always think to myself, That looks like shit. But I have to stop and wonder, what would I think of that if I saw it in Chicago? I'd think, Cool! Why doesn't anyone do anything that original in Phoenix?
She offers no explanation why the tableau would be cooler in Chicago than Phoenix. And what's so fooking original about it, anyway? It's what Catherine calls "Hokey-Folky." Continuing:
Look, I won't pretend to be this city's biggest fan. Last month, I had a lunch appointment at the Arizona Center, and walking through that place was enough to make me want to slit my wrists --a mall that can't even sustain a Victoria's Secret.
I can hear her daughter crying, "Mommy, Mommy, don't slit your wrists over lingerie!" Sorry to be crude, but she was, wasn't she, and gratuitously? Just drawing a little attention to the rebarb here. And wasn't she just talking about the need for bookstores (one of which failed at Az Center), coffee shops, and art galleries? Continuing:
Driving to work the other day, I could not believe how gross the brown cloud was.
She writes this sentence without irony, as she cruises down from the tony burbs into the filth she helps create with her own driving.
Skip to:
The other day, I stopped for coffee at Lux, the über-cool coffee bar on Central Avenue, housed in a funky green slump-block building next to Passage, an artsy boutique, and Pane Bianco, pizza guy Chris Bianco's sandwich shop. The landlord, Sloane McFarland, another native, walked up with his kids. Like many of us, McFarland left Phoenix after school, ultimately landing right back here.
I asked him my question [does Phoenix have an inferiority complex].
He laughed. "No, but I think I used to have an inferiority complex," he said, as he disappeared into the coffee shop.
The baby-food green is at least two years out of date; it looks stale, and fungal. It does say volumes about Phoenix's promoters that these two places get mentioned over and over, once even in a food magazine --an astringent, twee coffee shop and a sandwich place! In a town full of fantastic restaurants, from Los Dos Molinos in the south to North in Kierland Commons up north, people keep dragging out these two limited venues. I drive by this Lux complex often, and I have a message for the husband of Amy Silverman's good friend Christa, by whom I mean Phil Gordon, mayor of Phoenix:
Phil, take your head out from between the stale cheeks of Lux and Pane Bianco and look northward to Central and Camelback, where Kimber Lanning is creating a kind of dead zone of anti-style (who calls anything Stinkweeds?) and cultivating an incipient population of sketchy folks. (I drive by there regularly as well.) The bus stop makes for much convenience. Go look, Phil. It's your neighborhood, man. Ours, too.
As for Sloane McFarland and inferiority . . . I think his latest project is a diner on Roosevelt so small that all seven patrons have to raise their forks in unison to eat. But then, a man is no bigger than his dreams.
What follows in the article is a lot of autobiography, to no apparent purpose except to expose the reader to Amy Silverman's completely unremarkable passage through life, with an emphasis on her own embarrassments. She tries to style it like That Girl, one of her favorite TV shows, but she can't pull it off:
I went to high school in the '80s [in Phoenix], the last time preppy was big. The Preppy Handbook was published, and I got my hands on a copy and memorized it. I was no dummy, I was president of the Speech and Debate club at school (quit laughing), but I had no idea this book was supposed to be a joke. This was my bible, all about people I knew nothing about, but wanted to be, people who vacationed at a place called Martha's Vineyard, drank cocktails and did not shop at Yellow Front. I poured Lauren cologne on everything I owned and came to school layered in my favorite outfit: a hot pink polo shirt, with a bright green polo over that, with a pale pink button-down Oxford shirt over that, khakis, pink espadrilles, a pale pink/hot pink/green striped grosgrain ribbon headband, a pink belt with green ladybugs embroidered on it and a purse with a button-on madras cover in matching hues.
My mom and her best friend started calling me Muffy Buffy, and not in a nice way.
Why share this? Why admit you were duped, if you really were, by a parodic book? And what does it have to do with Phoenix, anyway? There's more:
New York was onto me. I'll never forget my most cinematic moment, waiting to cross the street at Columbus Circle, so sick with a cold that I'd actually made a doctor' s appointment. It was cold and rainy, and I stood right at the edge of the street, eagerly waiting to cross, not noticing that for once, I wasn't crushed with other people. They were keeping a safe distance, which I realized only when a bus drove past, drenching me with dirty New York City gutter water. I stood there, blinking through the black gunk, and thought, "Maybe it's time to go home."
Anyhow, I'd failed the bartending class. So I finished school, packed up all my stuff and shipped it to Phoenix, vowing I'd stay a week or two, a month tops, before moving on to some place cool like Philadelphia, since I really liked the show thirtysomething, or maybe even back to D.C. (St. Elmo's Fire was an all-time favorite).
This woman makes moves in her life based on movies and TV shows. Earlier, she wrote:
From there [Claremont College, CA] I went to Washington, DC, even lived in London for a semester, but no place was quite right. I had seen When Harry Met Sally . . ., and I absolutely had to live in New York City.
And so I did. I applied to grad school not because I sought academic enlightenment but because it seemed like the easiest way to get to New York.
Two things struck me here: the easy travel, which indicates Mommy & Daddy's dime subsidized this American Princess; and the denigration of her own education. She tells us she failed the bartending class, and finished school, but we don't even know what her Master's Degree was about. And she just brushes it off. Well, she's honest about why she went to grad school, if you believe this tale. Maybe she minimizes her education because she completely bypassed academic enlightenment, which indeed shows.
So she comes back to Phoenix where she begins to create memories, sweet and charming local memories:
I moved to another apartment, and eventually to another job, at New Times, and I made some friends. One of them, Christa, was just the sort of girl you'd stumble on in D.C. or New York. She'd gone to my college, although we hadn't known each other there, and had come to Phoenix to work for Bruce Babbitt when he ran for president in the late '80s, and she just sort of stuck around after that, working political jobs. Christa loved to hate Phoenix as much as I did. But then she met a guy who really liked Phoenix. [Later she'll spring this on us: it's Phil Gordon himself!] They got engaged, and she refused a bridal shower (as well as a diamond -- and she got married in the rain on the carousel at Kiddie Land, with sneakers under her wedding dress), so a few of us took her out instead. We ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant called Such Is Life, where the waiter found out Christa was engaged and gave her a rose, telling her, "Laaaaahhv him to death," which made us laugh. (So did the margaritas.) And somewhere along the way, we all decided that we were going to love Phoenix, too. Christa and I wrote "I [heart] Phoenix" on little slips of paper and shoved them in our wallets, like fortunes.
What a marvelous story. And that explains why Phoenix has an inferiority complex?
Then comes a passage, after she gets married, that stunned me:
. . . I had decided that being happy isn't about where you are, it's about who you are. Early one Tuesday morning in late summer, I was watching an ER rerun, feeding our three-month-old daughter Annabelle, when without explanation the show broke to an image of the second tower collapsing.
I was meant to come home, I thought. When my husband suggested--
Whoa whoa whoa! She goes on about some damn thing, but I'm still back at that line:
I was meant to come home.
Three thousand dead, horror everywhere, the world changing before her eyes --and this is the totality of her comments on 9/11/01. She's nearing forty, and she still thinks the sun shines out of her butt.
After a couple of paragraphs about her "polite" boss, Rick Barrs:
But back to me. [Did we ever leave? Do you ever take the camera off yourself?] How weird was it that here I thought I was over the whole hating-Phoenix thing, but really, I was no better than ever? I started to think about all the things I like about Phoenix. I like my house, which I always tell people reminds me of someplace else --like someplace in the Midwest, or back East-- with its screened porches and hardwood floors. I like the fact that we finally got an Anthropologie, and a Sephora. I like it when it gets all cloudy in the winter, just like San Diego in the summer. I like my drive-through Starbucks. I like the fact that the airport's really close, and that the cost of living's so low in Phoenix that I can visit my friends in other cities.
Uh-oh.
I'm exactly what Kimber Lanning hates. The other day, she went on and on about those flags someone's hung on light poles on Seventh Avenue that say "Melrose on 7th."
"It's inexcusable, because Melrose stopped being cool 10 years ago," she says, adding, "It's not the cool factor that I'm worried about. It's the whole idea that we're pretending to be something we're not."
Lanning ought to know. She's been pretending to be a real entrepreneur, art dealer, city booster, and drummer, for years now. She also ought to keep her mouth shut about signage and public presentation as well, given the grim facades of her two Phoenix venues. Yech.
So this is what the important people talk about.
Then the important editor got down to some real research to make "a concerted effort to [heart] Phoenix." She looks at a website about an architect named Ralph Haver. Goes on about him. Then the sunsets. Aren't they great, until hubby makes a joke about nuclear explosions. More about hubby, a one-man Phoenix fan club. Blah. Then:
It was time, I decided, to do some serious reporting. Turns out, Rick and I weren't the only ones putting the city on the couch. Everywhere I go, it seems, people are talking about how Phoenix feels about being Phoenix, particularly around the New Times water cooler.
And that's who she talks to, a couple of staff members. This is getting deep. But she reaches out to none other than Phil Gordon, the mayor, and this is their exchange:
So although I make it a rule never to write about Phil, I called Mayor Gordon to ask him what he thinks about our inferiority complex. He's lived here forever, he should totally get it. I still think he does, although my head was spinning by the time I hung up the phone.
So, I begin, does Phoenix have an inferiority complex?
"No!" is the immediate reply. "This is a great city, and the proof is in the numbers. People continue to come to Phoenix for a reason."
And then I have to admit that I zoned out for a few minutes. I came back around the time the mayor was talking about how this is one of the only cities in America where you can have your own backyard. He wound down with, "We're a western city that was a small town that now has become a major city and needs to take its place in line and be proud of its place and start to influence policy in this country."
She unashamedly admits zoning out. Isn't anything important to her except her little quirks, and telling us about them? And isn't it rude to ignore the mayor when he's answering your question?
She then calls three urban experts to get their opinions. Most of this is boilerplate, but Wellington "Duke" Reiter, the dean of the College of Architecture at ASU, said something particularly dumb:
"I've never lived in another place where there's doubt."
Right. All the other cities are full of shiny happy people. And then there's Joel Garreau, still flogging edge cities after all these years:
Edge cities like Phoenix, he says, are great at making money, but they're not so good at what he calls the "squishy" things --civilization, soul, identity, community.
Garreau is full of manure. How dare he call the bases of society "squishy"? Every one of those things, especially the first, are very hard won, and, once won, hard-edged. They are all here in Phoenix. They are the conditions for us making money. Ms. Silverman just wanted another byte bite to fill her inane article.
Of which we're done --I covered the end at the beginning-- so I myself will end by answering the question: No. No such complex.
But Phoenix has inferior cultural leaders. Besides those we've mentioned in our series, the management at the Phoenix New Times are prime culprits and have been for years. Fourteen years ago, when I covered art for them, I told them they needed to create a staff position for a professionally-trained arts writer, so that the professional art world would take both Phoenix and New Times more seriously. Someone who could dig, travel, schmooze. But they never have taken the plastic arts seriously. After all, look who they trot out to cover them: Amy Silverman, Benjamin Leatherman, some new clowns. If the reader can stand it, go check out the first couple of sentences of Douglas Towne's squib on the "Wet" Show at SMoCA. And then go read the first couple of sentences in Niki D'Andrea's tiny review of the the Rezurrection Gun Show. Filthy talk, eh? You're reading the future of art writing in Phoenix. Read it, as we say around here, and weep.
Posted by Jerome at May 13, 2005 10:50 AM | TrackBack