Thursday 11/25/21
A number of years ago, an editor at Vanity Fair who was really into the Beatles--he had a Beatles cover band named after the first club they played in Hamburg--told me about a conversation he had about me with David Remnick of The New Yorker. I am going to be thorough with David Remnick and The New Yorker in these pages, and I will not stop, as I've said, until I have justice. I've started, of course, as people who have been following this blog know. We are just beginning.
David Remnick is a small, petty, talentless, boring man, an empty suit who has fallen upwards into and because of his position as editor in chief of The New Yorker, and everything that has been handed to him in life on account of privilege and connection. He's verbally abusive, and he has employed some of the worst people, including a kiddie porn enthusiast, and a married man who wrecks lives, impregnated the daughter of a colleague, and follows women home whom he does not know, asking if they'd like to be fisted. I will post the emails on here is which he was verbally abusive to me, which led to me standing up to him, and him doing what cowards do, and retreating, running and hiding, slandering me to his employees, and helping extend a web of discrimination against someone he full knows could do in five minutes what he can't do in five million years.
One time, Remnick did one of his classic lickspittle interviews with Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which Remnick, excited about this opportunity to move his lips to the ass of someone who also has no talent, said, "You are a writer with a capital W!" which is hilarious.
But less so, perhaps, than this: You are a fraud with a capital F, sir.
He's a thief, too. I will show how he stole a jazz idea from me, for instance. He surrounds himself with lackeys, because that's the kind of pandering coward that David Remnick is. He's entitled, and he's that worst kind of entitled person--an insecure, arrogant individual, who knows what he is--which isn't much, as a writer, editor, or thinker--and who will seek to lock out those who threaten him the most because of what they are.
It's impossible for anyone to shake someone at their core, where their self-doubt lives and reigns, more so than it is for me to shake a David Remnick. In this conversation, Remnick told the Vanity Fair editor that he would do anything to know a fraction of what I know about the Beatles. He didn't even know where to start. He was at a loss. This guy, in his fifties at the time. And he had no clue.
This was ironic, because Remnick had already locked me out and instructed his staff to do the same. He had done the verbal abuse, he had done the stealing, and there he was, saying this about me.
Some time ago, despite everything, and despite what I know, I pitched him about a possible piece on the Get Back docu-series, and Let It Be, before anyone else was pitching those things. Clearly I am the most qualified to write on these subjects. And, too, clearly my ideas are different than anyone else's when it comes to the Beatles. Most people who take on that subject do the same exact thing: they rehash. They don't add anything new.
But I knew he wasn't going to reply, because of everything I just mentioned. Nor was I surprised when he assigned a piece about Paul McCartney to himself, given that he is an entitled, talentless person who knows nothing about the subject. David Remnick is a man who knows nothing about anything. That's not how he's gotten anywhere in life. He will resent someone who does know. He'll feel threatened by that person, and envious.
I had mentioned recently that it's very easy for me to write this kind of entry, because the work--the poor work--of these people does a lot of the work for me. Just as the contrast with my work does a lot of that work, too. It's like putting a side-by-side image up on the screen. On one side, you have a three-year-old trying to bounce a basketball that is too big for it. On the other side, you have 1991 Michael Jordan slashing through the defense and going effortlessly to the rim. Then you're asked, "Who is better at basketball between these two?"
I love it, personally, because there's no one, in this analogy, with any objectivity, who can say, "Um, yeah, it's definitely the toddler. He could beat 1991 Michael Jordan."
All I need to do is say what I've said--every word of which is true--and then show that person's work, and my work. So, here is that piece that David Remnick assigned to himself on Paul McCartney. Anyone could write this. And it's poorly edited, too. I could go through and circle all of the mistakes that an editor of any competence would have flagged. Basic writing stuff. It reads like it was written by someone who pulled up Wikipedia, did a quick skim, and knows nothing beyond that, but was most excited about getting to pretend they were themselves some kind of star because of their little visit with a Beatle. You can tell how clueless Remnick is when he's mentioning things that every last person who knows anything the Beatles has known forever, as if no one knows them. It's because they're new to him, and he's so arrogant that he figures if it's new for him, then that'll be true for all of the peons out there, because this is someone who needs to try to think he's better than people outside of his clique, where he insulates himself with people less likely to threaten his illusions. The writing is stiff, lifeless, and nowhere in this piece do you see any evidence of writerly ability, because David Remnick doesn't possess any. So go ahead: have a read.
Then, let's compare that piece to this piece that I recently wrote on Paul McCartney for The Daily Beast.
Kind of a different level, isn't it? That's where the hate comes in. And it comes in more because everything by me is this way, and it doesn't matter the subject. And I prove what I am again, and again, and again, and again. And everything that I am, is everything this person is not.
It is that which will make someone not just a bigot, but a publishing-sized bigot. There isn't a bigger one than David Remnick of The New Yorker.
Put it in capital letters, if you like. We could also say that B is for Beatles.
