Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

Edward Champion is the Managing Editor of Reluctant Habits.
by Edward Champion

Loud Men Talking at a Starbucks Boiler Room Table

This invaluable field report of loud men talking at a Starbucks boiler room table will help you determine whether the men talking loudly in your cafe are on the same page.

On the morning of February 3, 2015, ten aspiring entrepreneurs, all men, ranging in age from their mid-thirties to their mid-fifties (“I’ve been in this business for forty years. There is nothing you can say that will hurt me,” said the oldest man), gathered at a Brooklyn Starbucks to discuss their great plans. They took up the entirety of a long table constructed of affordable wood and talked extremely loud.

The men confused this common space for a boiler room. They seized one stool, a precious seat in a crowded place, because some arcane section in the business plan required that one of their sparsely packed backpacks could not rest on the floor. After all, these men were not riff raff. They were meant to be tycoons.

These men believed themselves to be paragons of originality, altogether different from other captains of industry. Yet not a single man at the table sported a suit, much less a tie or a shirt selected with an iota of care. Indeed, the men had not bothered to dress well at all. They regularly looked down at their laptops and often made references to “being on the same page.” They swapped such invaluable tips on how to send an Excel document to other colleagues by email and the best way to swallow a cough drop.

They were the team. They meant business, even though it often took ten minutes to set up a five minute meeting. They were going to kill.

What follows is an actual transcript of their conversation. It is presented here as a litmus test, a way to determine whether the men who are talking loudly in your Starbucks are, indeed, on the same page:

“Let me do my damn job!”

“I want you to do your damn job.”

“I have to do my damn job!”

“Relax. I want you to do your damn job. We’ll get you cold-calling tomorrow. Now about this guy…”

“Yeah.”

“He’s a good guy. But he’s very predictable.”

“Not like us.”

“No. But if he talks about salmon, you talk about salmon. If he talks about brisket, you talk about brisket.”

“Right.”

“And you’ll be able to do your damn job. Because you’re an original.”

“Alright, so let’s say Friday. We’re going to say 8:30. Now what time is the meeting?”

“Let’s be realistic. He’s on a train. You’re on a train. Let’s say it’s a 4:00 drop dead time on Friday.”

“Well, I should think we should have the meeting a little bit earlier.”

“We had a 4:30 cutoff on Friday. Realistically…”

“Listen. 2:00.”

“I don’t care. I’ll come home at 7.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“We’re getting snowed in.”

“Let’s say we do a 4:30. We can concentrate on the meeting.”

“Is that okay with everybody?”

“Okay. 8:30 we meet, 4:30 we eat.”

“Nice rhyme.”

“Thanks.”

“Alright. So the next thing that we got throw at us. The Brooklyn Initiative. The theme is pretty much handling the scheduling on that, which is fine by me. Now here’s the thing with that. What day is it? February 3rd? What day do we got?”

“Not March.”

“We sat down with them and put together a strategy.”

“The Brooklyn Initiative.”

“Yes. These guys are conversating. The way I see it, they get compensated.”

“They get compensated?”

“In forty or so accounts.”

“We have the list.”

“The problem is that the person in charge of this Initiative wants more, which is pretty much impossible from a logistics standpoint. It’s going to be intricate changes. Impossible. So I’m going to make the Wednesday meeting with one of you guys.”

“Here’s the deal, guys. These guys are seasonal businessmen. I mean, it’s criminal. With that said, there’s not a lot of business out there. But those guys have about a twenty to twenty-two week season. So here’s the deal. Their owners start coming back in March. Whatever it is. By April, they’re back. These guys want to start. These guys gotta start putting their deals together.”

“Swinging.”

“Right. Swinging. But the moral to the story is — well, this is…”

“That puts it through to the end of April.”

“Right.”

“They’re going to start fluffing their pillows at the end of March.”

“I think we have four to five weeks with them tops.”

“Here’s more on that note. Thank you for opening that door for me. Because I’m going to walk through it. I need to make out the items that we’re going to sell.”

“We got beat up on Friday for saying that. I’ve seen the invoices.”

“So take ’em. This is all I suggest to you. Because the veterans of this table know about planning. No plan has failed.”

“An extra pair of eyes never hurts.”

by Edward Champion

Among the Distasteful: A Jeremiad Against Pizza

We were very honored when Leon Wieseltier contacted us to share his thoughts about an apparent pizza cultural crisis, but we’re not so sure he knows what he’s talking about.

Amid the bacchanal of culinary dilettantes, let us pause to honor and pontificate upon the Seamless junkies, the strapless smartphone whores of Babylon, and the editors who will never edit my prolix copy. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of pizzerias and Italian restaurants, which have been invaded by the greatest, biggest, plus-sized, vilest, ugliest, most malicious, thorniest, and savviest of hooligans in the history of the food industry. There are baleful brutes who stab at their slices with forks and knives, and these include a Gotham City Mayor elected by delusional liberals who now complain of turned backs from those stalwart officers in blue rightly wishing to uphold the old Paul Anka white bread standards in the name of American justice and the occasionally playful choke hold or wrestling move gone wrong. Eaters, when they are not hanging from a trapeze, hover between a decent share of a pie and an indecent bite cadged off some smelly bum; they are expected to open a plastic wrapper containing a mass-produced square of spiral noodles produced in some exotic export processing zone when they are not eating a gluten-free meal at gunpoint, and all the miracles of electronic pizza dissemination somehow do not suffice for the experience of a home-cooked meal cooked and curated by a bromidic homemaker who no longer exists in our world of career equilibrium and gender parity. There is not a stove in the New York City area that is turned on, unless it compensates for a tetchy radiator in the blistering cold. Everybody — and by “everybody” I mean the three magazine articles I read in a drunken, self-loathing haze over the holidays — talks frantically about pizza, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as if the prospect of tomato sauce vanishing into a bed of “cheese” is a cataclysmic event rivaling the First Battle of Ypres. “Cheese” must be contained in quotes, for it is very much a part of the crisis; its ineluctably paralytic hold was once embraced in rap by a hip young man named Marshall Mathers, from whom I quote: “Here I go again hammerin stammerin grammerin and eat it like cheese, pass me the crackers please / I’ve got a craving.” But what does this understanding of “cheese” contribute to to the understanding of life? Pizzerias and restaurants have slowly transformed themselves into hammerin stammerin grammerin venues in which customers willfully fill their stomachs with subpar Mozzarella and pepperoni from questionable meat vendors, without regard for last century’s pizza standards, the greatest pizza generation, or the way pizza used to be, and the gurgling of bellies bellows above all stabs at grace and thrusts at aesthetic consideration. As the frequency of hammerin stammerin grammerin expression grows, the force, nay the power, of proper pizza consumption diminishes: Pie expectations of plentiful toppings and extra crispness confer the highest prestige upon the masticating cacophony of stertorous belches and promotional coupons promising a two-for-one special during the next vulgar visit. It was always the case that all pizza eaters, especially those too indolent to saunter down to the local establishment and pick up the pies in person, must pass gas, but this is ridiculous.

Meanwhile the discussion of higher dinners is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of “bidness” – a shorthand slang term I first heard from this Mathers fellow and that a young African-American friend (I assure you that, as a cultural expert, some of my best friends are black, although only one returned my call for this essay) recently educated me on. Apparently, today’s youth is now pronouncing “business” this way. Are they ashamed of sibilant consonants? I haven’t a clue, but I’m not at The New Republic anymore and unpacking these seminal and intricate issues is a more complicated and arcane professional task in the pages of the New York Times Book Review. For example, it was my “bidness” to write this paragraph with my trousers tousled around my ankles, gaping at my study window to ensure that nobody was looking. Scummy little pizza! Kill the bastard! Am I straying from my point? Perhaps. But I was guaranteed a 3,000 word count. I am scared.

Anyway, “bidness.” There are no known “metrics” between the relationship between “cheese” and “bidness.” Numerical values are assigned to orders that ping from the deepest recesses of the electronic vortex, as a voracious digital consumer logs onto Seamless and contributes to the “cheese” industrial complex. Economic concepts grow into great kaiju destroying our proudest metropolises: There is, in fact, an economist standing next to me right now! He does not answer to the name of Krugman but he is growing big bigger BIGGER! Oh shit! There goes my 19th century bronze chandelier! To paraphrase Yoda (and I’m not sure this benign, large-eared, fictitious creature actually said this; I have not actually seen these movies), where ceiling once was, bitter tears will now be. Ergo, pizza is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. This draconian hold is enabled by the video game characters Mario and Luigi, two Italian stereotypes from Nintendo who should rightfully be employed as co-owners of a pizzeria (this was, after all, Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto’s source of inspiration), but who were ignobly cast as jocular plumbers, thus subverting the consumer’s expectations and therefore the pizza scholar’s. Yet in a Pavlovian salivation tactic worthy of America’s most craven marketers, one looks at Mario’s red and Luigi’s green and sees tomato sauce and bell peppers. Beyond their predatory and symbiotic relationship with pizza, all distastefully clandestine, Mario and Luigi penetrate even deeper levels of identity and experience, to cognition and consciousness. Such transformations embolden certain high culinary priests in the church of nostalgia to espouse the doctrine of “transmarioism” and to suggest, without any recollection of the bankruptcy of Atari or the guy who created the Pong game, that our pizza-eating acumen will carry us magnificently beyond our affinity for Mario and “allow us to, like, chill out with an old GameCube if you can bring the weed, bro…Smoke a few bowls and there will be no distinction, post-Luigi’s Mansion, between human and Mario.” (The author of that frivolous nonsense, a random email that someone forwarded to me to help me pad out this piece, is a twenty-five-year-old pizza delivery man known among his peers as something of a beer pong champion. One sees how transmarioism and the great pizza lie feeds on itself.)

And even as pizzaism, which is not the same as pizza and not the same as “cheese” and not the same as any other sinister neologism I may coin, asserts itself over more and more police precincts that subjugate human life the thrill of a warm fascist bath, so too does hamburgerism, which is not the same as hamburgers and not the same as hot dogs and not the same as pizza and not the same as pizzaism and if you send $9.99 to my home address I will provide you with a flowchart on all the terms I am establishing in this highly intellectual essay (not even my editor could figure it out!). I am Leon Wiesltier, which is not the same as Leon Wieseltierism and not the same as Wiener Schnitzel and not the same as the emotionally cleansing experience I have when spilling my guts out to my therapist, which may very well be better for me than accepting these assignments. The notion that the nonmaterial dimensions of pizza must be explained in terms of the material dimensions…OH WHO THE FUCK AM I KIDDING? I AM A 62 YEAR OLD MAN AND I HAVE NEVER EATEN A SLICE OF PIZZA! THERE! I SAID IT, GODDAMMIT! PIZZA, I JUST DON’T GET YOU AND NEVER WILL! DAMN YOU KIDS AND YOUR FUN AND YOUR SUPER MARIO AND YOUR CHEESE AND YOUR HAMMMERIN STAMMERIN GRAMMERIN!

Okay…calm down, Leon. Let’s get it together. We can get to the end.

A complacent eater is an eater who has not picked at his pizza closely. But never mind the pizza. Our solemn responsibility is to stop writing dull and incoherent essays that fail to inspire anyone and that say absolutely nothing at all.

by Edward Champion

The Cop Shootings Were Awful, But This Doesn’t Let the NYPD Off the Hook

The murders of two cops in Bed-Stuy shouldn’t let the NYPD off the hook for Eric Garner, but this must also reaffirm more peaceful commitments.

Two cops were gunned down near Myrtle and Tompkins Avenue on Saturday afternoon. It happened near my old neighborhood. There was a palpable panic that hit the latte drinkers like an epidemic, as if one shooting had the power to halt the eastward wave of gentrification. The more troubling question, of course, beyond the immediate concern for the victims’s families, was whether this incident would serve as a smoking gun for an altogether different war against peaceful activists, Mayor Bill de Blasio, and any person standing in the NYPD’s way.

Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the gunman who killed Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, was neither a protester nor a political agitator, unless one counts Instagram photos as a manifesto. He was a mentally disturbed man, admitting to an unspecified illness in court, and he shot his ex-girlfriend on Saturday, only to continue his spree at Bed-Stuy. Thus, Brinsley’s “motive,” which has been widely associated with Eric Garner, could just as easily have been hearing one too many treacly Christmas carols at the supermarket.

In all the finger wagging and op-ed quarterbacking, there has been little ink devoted to how a man like Brinsley obtained his silver pistol. Much like Elliot Rodger back in May, Brinsley was eager to communicate his plan (“I’m Putting Wings On Pigs Today”), motivated by hate, and carried out his violent rampage on people who were doing nothing: in this case, two cops who were merely eating their lunch. Whether Brinsley felt oppressed in an altogether different way, and didn’t feel he could express himself through peaceful means, is a matter that will likely have to be settled when further evidence pours in. But in light of 2014’s repugnant buffet of brutal violence, sexual assault allegations, #gamergate and other misogynist outings, and relentless racism, one must legitimately ask why it all seems to be spilling out now.

The loss of two cops deserves our sorrow and our respect. This was a violent and ineffable act, and the NYPD certainly deserves to mourn these losses.

Yet this incident must not be used by the NYPD to elude culpability for the murders of Eric Garner and Akai Gurley, who were both killed while unarmed and who both did not need to die. The NYPD must not stifle the necessary protests that will help bring about reform, much less any investigation into deeply inhumane and flagrantly over-the-top practices. The NYPD can complain about “NYPD KKK” epithets in chalk until it is as blue in the face as it is in uniform, but is not the written word better than the loaded gun? Surely, the NYPD must understand that there is a lot of rage over Garner, Gurley, and Michael Brown. The protests have attracted tens of thousands of people and, despite one questionable incident involving a bag of hammers, these efforts have been relatively peaceful.

Moreover, the NYPD is contributing to divisiveness. There were the I CAN BREATHE shirts brought by a Colorado man on Friday night, actively mocking Eric Garner’s dying words and heating up tensions with protesters on the other side. Then there was the NYPD’s astonishing disrespect for Mayor de Blasio on Saturday night, in which cops turned their backs when the Mayor entered a presser with Police Commissioner Bill Bratton at Woodhull Hospital.

The NYPD has been accustomed to getting what it wants and, as 1,000 more cops will be hired next year, there is little doubt that its militarized presence will escalate. And maybe that’s the problem with America right now. If everyone insists on being greedy and eating what little they have left of the pie, how will we learn to get through hard times?

by Edward Champion

Saying Goodbye to the Knight

A short essay on giving thanks to a lost neighborhood and the importance of reminding people of their positive contributions.

We underestimate our connections to neighborhoods: the friendly faces that we flutter our hands to, the casual conversations that shake our souls with an unanticipated import, the nodes and locational lodestones we come to know as intimately as our friends and lovers. But when we are plucked from these felicitous and regular rhythms because of an eviction or a job loss (or in my case, a colossal act of errant idiocy), it can be as unsettling as a divorce or as earth-shattering as an air strike. But one is forced to accept the hard reality: Your neighborhood is no longer yours.

I came to know the knight when I first moved to Brooklyn eight years ago. I was living alone in a railroad apartment in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, barely slapping enough freelance checks together to make rent. A group of friends and I initiated a weekly writing club at a now somewhat notable cafe on Fulton Avenue. I would take the subway shuttle up from the Prospect Park station and, on the walk to the cafe, I would witness the shining knight standing proudly on the concrete, standing watch over the thumping Motown music drifting upward from a somewhat concealed basement. There was something homespun and authentic about this tidy arrangement, which was more ample once you stepped through the sanctum. It was a spirit not unlike Brazenhead Books, the great secret bookstore on the Upper East Side now threatened with extinction. It would take me a few years to actually walk down the steep steps and talk to the friendly dreadlocked man spinning vinyl and always having a hell of a mellow good time. He was a man doing his best to keep some part of Biggie’s old stomping grounds alive, even though the neighborhood was changing. I had no idea that I’d be living only a few blocks from the knight years later.

Now an affinity for a lost neighborhood should never be confused with nostalgia, and one should take great care to uproot any instinct to cling to the past. I suppose this is why I have been making a farewell tour of where I once lived. I’ve made most of my rounds, but there was one place missing. And it sneaked up on me on Thanksgiving, as I was walking to the subway from a not very notable place. The knight was outside, standing guard for the important values and defying the ineluctable tide of gentrification that was coming. The tunes were grooving. And even though it was very cold, the old school feel warmed me to the core.

I walked down the steps. Nobody was there except the practically ageless proprietor. His hands were gently pulling the next record from its sleeve. I had something to say.

“Hello! I’m not living in this neighborhood anymore, but I just wanted to thank you for being here. I’ve always said that, as long as you’re around, this neighborhood will be okay, that the shit coming at us from the west will be held off a bit. Please hold out here as long as you can. Please keep the knight on the sidewalk.”

There was a pause. The proprietor was surprised by all this.

“And thank you for being open on Thanksgiving!”

“Thank you. That’s…that’s the best thing you could have said to me. Peace.”

I said my goodbye. And he warned me about the sharp steps.

We underestimate our connections to neighborhoods. And that’s why it’s important to tell the people gluing a hood together that what they’re doing is essential. If you see something, say something.

by Edward Champion

An Apology

An apology for the inexcusable and unforgivable.

“The modern loss of respect, or rather the conviction that respect is due only where we admire or esteem, constitutes a clear symptom of the increasing depersonalization of public and social life.” – Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

First off, I’m sorry that this extremely necessary post was a long time in coming.

On the evening of September 25, 2014, I tweeted a number of inappropriate and over-the-line tweets to the novelist Porochista Khakpour, who I had been sparring with all day. I had been heavily drinking, but this does not excuse my behavior. In reviewing what I tweeted after the fact, I don’t even recognize the man who was tweeting that night. I am utterly appalled by my actions.

Thus, I offer my most heartfelt and earnest apologies to Porochista Khakpour. I am legitimately contrite, very aware of my wrongdoing, and have spent many hours rethinking what respect really means and what my relationship with words is.

I am not yet prepared to write about the more severe events that occurred the next morning (and after), but I was forced to remove myself from the Internet for a very long time. When I returned, I had no idea that so much ink and vitriol had been spread about me on social media. I have not read all the articles, but I have been apprised of their defamatory and outright inaccurate contents by other parties. Nevertheless, I earned the backlash. The punishment wasn’t just confined to the responses. There was the brutal and heartbreaking end of an eight and a half year relationship, excommunication from a sizable part of the literary community, and a sudden derelict status that I am now trying to claw my way out of. Despite all this, I have remained positive and have learned much that I hope to impart at length someday. And I will still be writing.

I would also like to thank one person.

One of the few people to rise above the toxic sludge of conjecture and innuendo was New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul. I’ve criticized Paul a number of times, but I respect the fact that Paul, who worked under the Sam Tanenhaus era and was undoubtedly familiar with the office shorthand, took the time out to debunk one of the promulgated stories. She didn’t have to do this. I doubt the Review‘s credibility would have been especially damaged by the rumor. But in an age where collecting unconfirmed gossip now constitutes “journalism,” I appreciate Paul’s commitment to professionalism over pitchforks. It’s an invaluable reminder for a writer with a loud voice that there’s another way to do things.