Dead mag helps VH1 talk about race, from Ice Cube to Elvis to Costello

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Deep in the Broadway offices of VH1, Gabriel Alvarez and Elliott Wilson, two-fifths of the Ego Trip brain trust, are debating an issue that could forever alter race relations in the Empire State—should Puerto Ricans be allowed to use the word nigga? "If these Spanish kids are on the train saying 'nigga this,' 'nigga that,' " says Wilson, "this old black man is looking at them like they're crazy because he's experienced some real-ass racism."
"I try to explain to him," says Alvarez, gesturing at Wilson, "that Puerto Ricans have African blood in their ancestry."

Oh yeah, that's real convenient coming from a goddamn Puerto Rican.

"That's the thing," notes Alvarez, laughing awkwardly. "I'm Mexican."

It is this type of inane yet complex racial debate that has helped Ego Trip go from defunct underground zine to arbiter of the color line. The Ego Trip crew has produced two books and, this year, a special for VH1's TV's Illest Minority Moments. Now they're slated to make three more specials for VH1 under the rubric of "Race-O-Rama." Proposed shows include Dude, Where's My Ghetto Pass? and Black-O-Phobia!

"Most of the time VH1 just looks back at the stuff we love, or makes us laugh or whatever," says Joey Anuff, supervising producer at VH1. "But when you take a look at Ego Trip's books, you see they're looking at the same stuff with a much more charged lens. In a way they're the perfect VH1 project."

Well, not on the face of things. While VH1 likes to focus on the intricacies of John Hughes flicks and the "Where's the Beef?" lady, the Ego Trip aesthetic wallows in such highlights of racial dialogue as Elvis Costello calling Ray Charles "a blind ignorant nigger," Ice Cube threatening to "go down to the corner store and beat the Jap up," or the black community's penchant for conspiracy theories.

Ego Trip came into being in 1994 as a magazine co-edited by Sacha Jenkins and Wilson, who at the time were both working as hip-hop journalists. The duo borrowed $8,000 and printed up a new issue whenever they had the funds. Ego Trip began strictly as a hip-hop zine, but later expanded to rock and finally to what Jenkins calls "the new pornography"—race. "A lot of people thought that a magazine that covers rock and hip-hop and has decent writing had to have some white boys behind it," says Jenkins. "So, we created a fake publisher, and he was a white, racist, and out of touch. He'd write these editorials he thought were progressive. That attitude that we created in the magazine trickled out into our other projects."

The magazine stopped publishing in 1998, which didn't bother Jenkins and Wilson much, because they'd always seen Ego Trip as a concept that could take a variety of forms. "We didn't look at ourselves as businesspeople," says Wilson, who now edits the hip-hop magazine XXL. "We were creative people, but we recognized that we were creating a brand. The Ego Trip brand became a magazine but it also became our own joint sensibility."

After shutting down the magazine, the Ego Trippers added three more members to their cabinet (Alvarez, Brent Rollins, and Chairman Jefferson Mao) and then published two books—Ego Trip's Big Book of Rap Lists and Ego Trip's Big Book of Racism. Both featured exhaustive research, but the second is both more arresting and more disturbing. What passes for race talk today usually amounts to painfully stilted arguments that seem not to have shifted since 1970. Ego Trip's Big Book of Racism replaced discussions of ethnic diversity and democracy with more pertinent questions like "Whatever happened to baseball players named 'Whitey?' " and "If I should associate with the knights of the Ku Klux Klan, what will be required of me?"

Flippant as it all may sound, Ego Trip's brain trust is convinced that the truth lies not in the polemic but in the mundane—and the insane. "We are always fascinated by ignorance," says Alvarez. "When you listen to people talk and say things that are ignorant, you have a better understanding of where they're coming from, and maybe they'll hear what they're saying."

The Big Book of Racism's penchant for abrasively noting the places where pop culture and race intersect eventually attracted the attention of VH1, and thus spawned "Race-O-Rama." And while the relationship has produced the occasional corporate headaches (like "Race-O-Rama" being slated to air during Black History Month), it's also afforded the crew an opportunity to launch a discussion that demonstrates exactly how much race matters—not that anyone will ever mistake them for Cornel West. "We're down with Cornel West," says Jenkins. "We think he looks like Gene Shalit. We're down with that."

Labels: Hip Hop, Racism, Stuff

In their latest book, the multiracial maniacally funny guys of the defunct hip-hop magazine ego trip turn their smart-ass, studiously well-informed attention to the subject of race.

With the disclaimer that "we just hate everybody," the book is a reference guide of sorts, crammed with lists, trivia, rants, and parodies. Together, they make a hilarious and occasionally insightful commentary on race and racism in culture, media, current events, and entertainment, with sometimes silly ("the hidden hate in Wite Out") and sometimes biting ("10 Popular Films in Which Middle Easterners Must Die in Order for the Good Guys to Win") results.

Have you ever been guilty of racial/ethnic stereotyping of certain groups-if so, which ones and why?

BRENT ROLLINS: This country was built on two things: competitiveness and racism--how can you not be prejudiced? Even blacks who talk a lot about white-man-this and white-man-that, go and turn around and treat some other struggling group like basura, sometimes. That's pretty hypocritical. People think that once they've established themselves, their little piece of the pie is sacred and no one can touch it, instead of realizing that we can always bake more pies.

JEFFERSON MAO Asians are constantly embarrassed or coming to grips with the stereotypes of our own behavior. When I watch the kids version of Jeopardy, I see the little Asian kid killing the math and science categories and then, when its time for "Final Jeopardy," he calculates and bets just enough to win the whole thing by a dollar. I'm both proud and horrifired.

What do you think of the contradictions of race in American culture today compared 'with those of previous decades?

GABE ALVAREZ People are so far removed from history it boggles the mind. How a white person can feel totally comfortable saying the n-word as a term of endearment is nuts! My feeling is that white people can't stand being told what they can and can't do.

The difference between those signs at restaurants that stated: "No Negroes, No Mexicans, No Dogs" as recently as the 1950s, and trying to figure out what happened with the last presidential election--where scores of black voters in Florida were kept from the polls through various devious means-comes down to what's worse: being obviously discriminated against? Or being opressed in manners that you have to dig beneath the surface to see?

BRENT ROLLINS: The '70s were great. GREAT. You had open dialogue and acknowledgement of other races and ethnicities--like the "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's bread" ad campaigns--showing black kids, Chinese, and Native Indian men eating Jewish rye bread. Who would have the balls to do advertising like that now? In our book we have a spread entitled "Whatever happened to?" which lists all these kind of "forgotten" racial pop-ephemera and terminology. It just sort of illustrates how American culture sort of neutralizes race.

What might the more recent immigrant groups do well to understand and be prepared to confront while in the U.S., in terms of race and how it's determined/experienced here?

SACHA JENKINS: They must understand that, at the airports, anyone who is a shade darker than J-Lo (hey, she's white now...ask her sexy hubby) will be detained and derailed and then told to have a nice day--and that that is their patriotic duty, this detention.

And they should ask: how come every time a boat load of Haitians arrives on American soil, looking for a better way...the Haitians are sent to detention camps while their Cuban hermanos often find warm soup and a nice firm bed waiting for them, just inches away from South Beach?

What aspects of race and racism do you take on in the book and how would you describe your approach?

GABE ALVAREZ: We tackle everything with humor, in a way that only non-white people could--and as the comedic greats like Richard Pryor proved, the best humor is based on truth. The book's info is presented in bite-sizes, and there's plenty of silly shit in it--but we were fully aware of all the jokes we were making, even the more offensive ones.

BRENT ROLLINS: Our approach is a blender. Throw it in there and watch it spin around. The entire concept of punk rock and hip-hop is central to our process.

While you have to be already a little predisposed to this topic to even think about picking up a book with the title Big Book of Racism, even those people are going to have preconceptions about how the topic of race should be presented. The intelligentsia and other people who write books spend too much time talking to themselves, but don't affect change. I respect anyone who devotes their lives to this race-shit, but really... who has more impact on shaping American culture--Cornel West or [pro wrestling star] The Rock?

Labels: Hip Hop, Stuff

by ANDREW DAVIDSON

Felix Dennis, former counter-culture icon and now full-time millionaire, is behaving badly.

"Bring me some fucking beer, Marie-France," he bellows from one end of the garden to the next, across the tennis court, over the ornamental pond, past the rolling lawns. Marie-France, a tall, angular woman who seems to be operating as chatelaine at his Warwickshire manor, pops her head out of the kitchen door and nods. Two other women lounge in the sun on the terrace, giggling as we go past.

Dennis, 48, short, bearded and bristling with aggressive energy, seems to have been on edge for hours. Perhaps it's the heat scorching the leaves of his beloved trees, or a hangover - Dennis is a man with a mountainous appetite and a large wine collection. Despite his Panama hat, top-to-toe linen and warp-around shades, he's sweating profusely, and spends the first five minutes of our meeting harrumphing around his sitting room saying he is going to hit someone because he cannot find the window lock keys.

Dennis is usually smooth and funny, say his friends, but on days like this you would think he has barely mellowed since his celebrated appearance as a defendant in the Oz magazine trial 24 years ago. He is talking fast and lewd, like a lubricious satyr, and guzzling tea, cigarettes, beer and sandwiches. "Try these, Andrew, try these," he exhorts. For all his occasional prickliness, Dennis is, by reputation, the sort of sentimental millionaire who waits for the "And finally" items on News at Ten and then sends off an anonymous cheque.

We start the afternoon in the pin-neat sitting-room of his thatched, picture-postcard manor near Stratford-on-Avon. Dennis, you would guess, has bought into the myth: topiaried yew and York stone, exposed beams, leaded windows and antiques. It's beautiful, but too neat, a house full of those fussy flower arrangements you only get in glossy magazines. You have to go upstairs to get a sense of his real playfulness. On the wall of his study there's a large Hockney, and a Warhol outside, and next door the Egyptian bathroom, which is decked out with pharaohs and hieroglyphics. But everywhere, everything is tidy. Tidiness is one of his obsessions.

All somewhat different, of course, from his mouldy hippie days, when even his friends complained about the state of his hygiene. At that stage, Dennis the menacing millionaire was but a glint in his own eye. Then came the moment when he, Richard Neville and Jim Anderson were charged with producing a magazine designed to "corrupt the morals of children". They spent only a few days in jail, but earned lifelong notoriety after the most famous obscenity trial of the Seventies.

Back then, Dennis told the High Court that, hey man, money corrupts, even though he was already frightening his hippie friends with his aggressive commercial instincts. He also, famously, got a shorter sentence than his co-defendants because the trial judge, Michael Argyle, who was later found to have misdirected the jury, thought he was "less intelligent". Ha! Now he is worth somewhere between pounds 110 million and pounds 200million, has residences in London, Warwickshire, New York, Connecticut and Mustique, and has reached that stage when multi-millionaires start to think of posterity and take to building gardens and setting things straight.

So, while Dennis is normally a man who keeps his head below the parapet - overseeing his stake in a large computer accessories business in America, running his British magazine empire, and generally enjoying his wealth, you might say, rather than building it - recently he has been popping up all over the place. Earlier this summer, he extracted a crawling apology and an out-of-court settlement from the Spectator after it rehashed the whole Oz affair on the back of Richard Neville's new memoir, Hippie Hippie Shake. The Spectator had printed a piece by Michael Argyle which intimated that the Oz team had peddled drugs to schoolchildren and fully deserved their jail sentence. The pounds 10,000 Dennis extracted went to charity. Easy money, and he could have asked for a lot more.

Vengeance at last? Dennis laughs: "And the Lord saith, vengeance is mine!" But it isn't quite. He has wisely backed off suing Argyle himself. "Oh, I don't want to make him a martyr of the Right: there's no glory to be had in suing an 80-year-old man and taking his house away from him. It was just a totally obvious libel." Argyle, however, had been repeating it for years, ever since he left the bench; and everyone who knows Dennis says the trial judgment ("less intelligent") has always nagged at him - so was he just biding his time? "I never wait," he says tartly. "I've got better things to do than wait." (Argyle declines to give his side. "I have absolutely nothing to say about that man," he told me.)

Now Dennis has other fish to fry. Last month, after buying David Bowie's Mustique estate for pounds 5 million, he emerged as one of the main backers of Spiked, a new fortnightly rival to Private Eye produced by the Scallywag team. Those with long memories will recall that the original Oz carried a Spike section and that, back in the late Sixties, the Aussie hippies that ran Oz and the British public school satirists on Private Eye loathed each other for most of the time.

So is Dennis - Surbiton-born but, he claims, "an honorary Australian" - just settling old scores? No, he laughs, pacing the room. "We used to say rude things about them and they used to say rude things about us but, when push came to shove, they waded in when we were in the shit and I've got to thank them for it."

It seems a funny form of gratitude. But Private Eye, he says, has gone soft, and he likes the mischief of the Scallywag team. Scallywag, of course, is best known for the furore it caused printing rumours of a relationship between John Major and his caterer, Clare Latimer. Dennis says he has put "a substantial sum" into the new title - less than pounds 100,000 - and doesn't care if he gets any return on it. But he hasn't become a director, and so cannot be sued for anything it prints.

The Scallywag team says his move encouraged four other investors to reach into their pockets, but it will be interesting to note if Dennis's involvement, even at arm's length, now makes him a target for Private Eye. If he is worried, he is not showing it. "With all due deference to Ian Hislop, he is a lot better on television than he is in the editor's chair at Private Eye. It's become part of the Establishment now."

Part of the Establishment? That seems a bit rich from a man setting himself up as landed gentry, but Dennis, if you hadn't realised it by now, is a master of contradictions. He built his fortune out of adroit investments, first in Bruce Lee kung fu books, then one-shot poster magazines, computer titles (Personal Computer World, MacUser, PCPro) and, most profitably, in an American software company called Micro Warehouse Inc. Yet he has never moved easily among the publishing plutocracy.

He describes himself as a "contrarian", but thought nothing of threatening to get the Spectator, that most contrarian of magazines, pulled from every newsagent, a move which many thought extraordinary behaviour from someone who used to complain about the "pigs" harassing Oz. He explains that he just had to put the record straight for his mum's sake. His mother brought Dennis and his brother up single-handed after his father walked out; she is installed in a farmhouse on his estate and, at 76, still exerts a strong influence.

Despite the trappings of the self-made man, there is still a restless iconoclasm about him, as if he despises the club he has worked so hard to join. Some believe he is constantly at war with himself: his old hedonistic, hippie side never coming to terms with his single-minded drive to prove himself. Prove himself as what? Intelligent? An achiever?

He obviously has a knack. His old friend and lawyer, Michael Nixon, says it is simply a remarkable eye for what will sell. "He's incredibly foresighted; he always knows what the public wants to buy." He cites Dennis's early move into computer magazines and now periodicals on CD-Rom. But others note that these days Dennis is ambivalent about business. He has dabbed his toe in the mainstream magazine market with the launch of Maxim, the young men's title, but it is a crowded sector and it is unclear how much he wants to build on its early success.

He does love his wealth, though. He drags me to the kitchen to look at his cheques to the Inland Revenue, copies of which are pinned behind the door: they are for pounds 2 million, pounds 1 million and pounds 900,000. Next to the cheques are an array of photos of Felix with female friends spilling out of swimsuits. His fondness for women is well- known. "But you know," says one friend, "they are all long-term relationships. If you go to his place, you see the same people there year after year."

Isn't he ever tempted to settle down and have children? "You realise how many hairless monkeys there are?" he retorts, looking horrified. The "hairless monkey" line is a favourite of Dennis's, which he uses to explain everything from motivation to morality. "I am gutless," he continues. "I haven't got the courage. How these people can just casually have children which, if they are any kind of responsible human being, will utterly transform their life forever, is totally beyond me. I know it would take over my life."

Some say that, because his Dad walked out when he was young, he married money-making instead; others, that it is a hangover from the innate misogyny which characterised the hippie scene of the late Sixties. Crap, responds the artist George Snow, an old friend: "Felix was the first guy on the block to be a 'new man'. His company had female publishers, editors, designers way before anyone else." He is also, by repute, extraordinary loyal to his friends, both male and female. When I ask Dennis, impertinently, if he has to sleep with all his female friends, he looks genuinely upset, as if I couldn't have got him more wrong. No, he replies - but there remains an edge to our conversation. When I ask if he is surprised at how wealthy he has become, he seizes on it. "And when did you stop beating your wife, eh? Eh? It's the John Lennon question, isn't it? How did a git like you get from there to here, right? Right?" Yeah, sure, right. At this stage, I am beginning to estimate the distance between my chair and the door.

But that's just Dennis: he gives as good as he gets. The next minute he is explaining to me why he was useless at school. He had never told anyone this before, he says, but the defining moment of his childhood was when, aged 13-and-a-half, a relative gave him a bunch of records from America. Till then young Felix had been doing fine at school. So one night, after his mother had gone to bed, he says he sneaked the records on to the radiogram. "And I can tell you what it was, and who it was, and for the next five years it was all I was."

Dennis then leaps up, pushing his face so close I can see the beads of perspiration, and screams, "If you hear me howlin', howlin' for my darlin', oooooohhhh, oooooohhh, oooooohhh, weee!" in a pretty passable imitation of the blues singer Howling Wolf. Dennis, by all accounts an ace singer and drummer, could have gone into the music business. The thing is, he says, he could always imitate other singers, but didn't have a voice of his own.

Richard Neville's Hippie Hippie Shake puts a different spin on his ambitions, with Dennis turning up on the Oz doorstep demanding royalties for a tape he'd sent in, apparently penniless after selling his drum kit to pay for a girlfriend's abortion. Dennis's huge libido is one of the book's running jokes. When I ask him, tongue-in-cheek, if he is even more attractive to women now that he is rich and famous, he answers, rather po-faced, "I think you will find, reading Richard's book, that I had no trouble in that department ever. I am a ladies' man." Then he lets out a barking laugh. "'Course I am attractive because I am rich! They want the money! That's not female psychology; that's hairless monkey psychology!"

Anyway, he lost his youth to the blues. His father, a jazz pianist and bomber navigator in the War, had left for Australia when he was three. The thought of another budding musician must have given his mother the shivers, he says. His father did try to contact him, much later, when he was older, but he rebuffed him. He also put his mum through quite a lot - expulsions, academic failure, dropping out - while his brother was the complete opposite, very quiet and straight; he became a master lens grinder, but currently works for his big brother.

Dennis ducks and dives when he's asked what now motivates him. He told a recent, fawning Central TV documentary that the secret of his success was easy to encapsulate: "Dear Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz! My friends all drive Porsches. . ." So what does he do all day? He spends a few days in the country, a few in town, a week in America, keeping an eye on his businesses. "My guiding principle is, 'I know a man who can', and I let them get on with it," he says cheerfully.

Right now he is occupied with Blender, Britain's first CD-Rom only magazine. "It's sensational," he says, leading me up to his study. Halfway there, he taps an oil painting of a bullock. "Vermeer," he says, waggling his eyebrows. Funny - surely Vermeer never painted cattle. "Wait till you see this," he continues, and switches on his AppleMac. "It will knock your socks off."

The disc has five hours of interactive TV, with pop features, movie reviews and star profiles. You flick from one to another, and it talks, it moves, it sings. Great, but where's the portability? You have to be plugged in to use it. That will all come, says Dennis, excited as a kid with a new trainset, and, when it does, his company will be at the forefront. The irony is, he doesn't much like computers, and has never been that computer- literate. But he knows a revolution when he sees one.

Beyond his study window, the Vale of Evesham rolls off towards the Cotswolds. There is a whisper among his friends that, as well as building a large estate - he buys anything that moves around Dorsington, then hands it over to the farming family running it all for him - he also wants to build his own mausoleum, a strangely morbid aim for someone not yet 50. Intimations of mortality? Perhaps. He has already had one dice with death. "You're looking", he explains, "at the only survivor of Legionnaires disease you will ever see." He caught it in America, in 1989. He remembers the doctor in Connecticut who saved his life continually shaking him and saying: "It's really simple. You're over 40 years old. You obviously smoke, you drink like a fish, and probably take illegal drugs. You have contracted legionella and, if you go to sleep, you are probably going to die." He stayed awake. Now he describes what's left of his life as "bonus time".

He says he has grown tired of the manor and all the houses in the village he has bought for guests, and moans that he never gets any peace. The new plan is to build another mansion from a barn half a mile up the road. He has already planted beside it a maze spelling the name "Oz", with the "O" as the centre. "This", he says, gesturing round the old manor, "is going to be my day-house." The two will be linked by the gardens and woods he is creating.

Is he happy? Today, at least, it seems that you could spend hours with him and never really get to grips with what he is about. "Oh, what a question," he explodes, slapping his thigh. "People always want me to say I am miserable. I am not miserable!" He is shouting. "You know, I have lived, and continue to live, the life of Reilly. I have, all my life. I have never clocked in, never said 'yes, sir'. I don't wake up feeling miserable. I do whatever I fucking well want every day of my life. I always have - and it isn't the money. I did the same without the money!"

Yet, I add piously, you need others to clock in to maintain your empire.

"And Amen to that!" he yells

Labels: Entrepreneur, Interesting Individuals, Strategy, Stuff

How do conmen convince you to part with your money? Who are they? And how do they choose their victims? Learn their secrets from someone who has studied their dark arts. Magician Nick Johnson has some interesting insights into psychology of scams...and some suggestions on how to stop your money from going up in smoke!

Damien Carrick: Now from secrets that get lifted from government, to how you and I sometimes inadvertently hand over information or money to con men. How do scammers manage to convince people to hand over their hard-earned cash?

To find the answer, perhaps we could talk to a police officer or a criminologist. But someone with a lateral take is magician Nicholas Johnson. He reckons that both magicians and scammers use the same box of tools: psychology and sleight of hand. In fact he's studied the dark arts of the scamster, and has some suggestions on how to stop your money from going up in smoke.

Nicholas Johnson: I think what I love most about con artists and the world of scammers is that they're criminals who manage to get their victims to hand over their possessions freely. Most thieves and robbers and the like, tend to use force, or deception, in order for them to take things, whereas a con artist manages to get their victim to freely give up their stuff. And I think that's what really fascinates me the most.

Damien Carrick: What makes people susceptible to con men?

Nicholas Johnson: The main thing that really makes people susceptible to con artists is the idea that we're going to get something for nothing. So it really buys into our greed; it buys into sometimes our lust, and at the same time, sometimes even our sense that we're going to do something good, so we're going to get a great feeling from helping someone out, we're going to make some money, we're going to meet a beautiful girl—it really ties into our basest desires, and that's what the con artist relies on.

There was a study done in the UK just in train stations. They would go up to people and ask them to do a survey, and said 'If you could just answer these ten questions, we will give you a free pen at the end.' And one of the questions was 'What is your security number?' So your PIN, or your email number and so on. And a whopping percentage of people were more than happy to hand over that information to a complete stranger in a train station, in exchange for a free pen, because the person looked like they were official.

Damien Carrick: Not much of a bargain.

Nicholas Johnson: Not much of a bargain, no, it was a pretty nice pen, though.

[On stage: I think it's important that if you are going to be a con artist that you learn how to lie to people. So what I thought we should do is actually bring up here on the stage some of the best liars in the room and see whether we can spot who's really good at it, and who's really bad at it. So I'm just going to have a look. Just by looking at people who here looks as if they may be a good liar. So we're looking for people with sort of cold, dead eyes, the kind of people who would just stab you for your Metlink card. Oh, right there, brilliant, fantastic. Come up, and give him a big round of applause. Fantastic ... ]

Most con artists rely on this idea that the victim is in control. The victim is the one who is controlling the situation. So a great example of that is the classic Nigerian email scam, the person who writes to you and says, 'I've got this money that I need to get out of the country, and I need your help.' So you're in control, you can help them, you can do a good deed, you can make some money, you've got this fantastic opportunity, and the con artist needs your help. It's not the con artist doing you a favour. So really, you feel like you're the one who's controlling the situation when really it's the con artist who knows the real deal.

On stage: That's a good guess, that is a very good guess. It's not a correct guess, you owe me $2. No, no, no, we'll settle up at the end of the night, that's fine. OK? What you really should have done is to actually bet on this one over here, but it's completely up to you whether you want to call me a liar and bet over here or whether you want to go with my choice which is right there. So what's it going to be? Are you going to bet there, or are you going to bet there? Am I telling the truth, or am I lying? OK, you do realise I'm a con man, that's $4 you owe me, OK, it's actually right there.]

Damien Carrick: Now you cut your teeth around carnival people and circus people, but have you also spoken to, or learned skills from the Real McCoy, the actual con men, the actual criminals?

Nicholas Johnson: Yes, I think the real con artists are the people who can really teach you the most. You can read books about it, you can talk to people who've had experience, the victims, but unless you can really get inside the mind of a con artist, you really won't ever understand exactly how it works. I've communicated a lot with some of the Nigerian scammers, the people who write those emails, because if they think maybe they're going to make a few dollars, they're always happy to spill the beans. And it's amazing that most of those people see it as a legitimate job. For them it's a bit like being a telemarketer, they're just working in an office, in a cubicle, sending out emails, trying to get leads just like a salesperson.

Damien Carrick: And they were happy to have an email dialogue with you?

Nicholas Johnson: They were, yes, but obviously they were fairly cagey about exact details of who they were and what they were doing, but I was surprised, many of them admitted that they were working for organised crime figures and organisations in their home country of Nigeria, and many of them were quite happy to say that they worked on commission and they made a bit of money based on how much money they brought in, and they were quite upfront about it. I think for a lot of con artists they're very proud of their work, and they like people to know exactly what they've gotten away with.

Damien Carrick: Tell me about some of the conversations you've had with people here in Australia.

Nicholas Johnson: I've met up with a few people who are pickpockets, and do small scale short cons, so they're the cons which are done on the street, door-to-door, some of them are people who've been caught and gone to jail and done their time, but some of them are still out there, and I was surprised how willing they were to sit down and have a beer and actually discuss what they do. The real thing I think about the Australian con artist, the ones we have here in Australia, particularly the short cons is that it's very much about personality, it's really—they love to buy into that whole idea of that sort of the larrikin Australian and the joker and the trickster that we love so much, and for many of them, they really feel like even if they get caught, or even if they don't get away with it, they feel like they're giving their victim a good story, you know, something to dine out over, something to discuss down at the pub. They think that's OK, you can scam somebody out of a couple of hundred bucks, because they're getting a good story in return.

Damien Carrick: That's one way of getting to sleep at night I guess.

Nicholas Johnson: Yes, it is interesting the justifications that con artists use. Some say it's a job, just like any other, 'I'm no different from a used car salesman, I'm selling a dream instead of selling a car.' So I like that one. The other explanation is, 'You can't con an honest man.' Now that's this idea that because you're buying into people's greed and their gluttony and their lust and so on, that those people are guilty. The victim is just as guilty as the con artist, and therefore they get what's coming to them.' Of course we know that's just not true and that it's really just an excuse that they're using.

Damien Carrick: Tell me about some of these short cons that the Australian people that you've spoken to engage in.

Nicholas Johnson: Sure. My all-time favourite one only makes the con artist a few dollars every time he does it, but I absolutely love it. These guys used to go door-to-door in the 1970s selling lightbulbs and they would offer to replace every single lightbulb in your house, so all your old lightbulbs would be replaced with a brand new lightbulb, and it would cost you, say $5, so a fraction of the cost of what new lightbulbs would cost. So the man comes in, he replaces each lightbulb, every single one in the house, and does it, you can check, and they all work, and then he takes all the lightbulbs that he's just taken from the person's house, goes next door and then sells them the same lightbulbs again. So it's really just moving lightbulbs from one house to another and charging people a fee to do it.

But there's all sorts of those homemaker scams, people offering to seal your roof so they say, 'We'll put a fresh coat of tar on your roof', or 'We'll re-seal your driveway'. In actual fact all they do is get old black sump oil and smooth it over the roof or smooth it over the driveway. You come home and it looks like wet tar, and so 'Don't step on it for 24 hours', and of course 24 hours later they're long gone with the money, and you're left with a sticky, smelly driveway.

Damien Carrick: You've spoken to some of the con artists. Have you ever spoken to any of the victims?

Nicholas Johnson: I have. I've spoken to a lot of victims. I get a lot of emails from victims and for me, I really love the world of the con artist and I have a real grudging respect for what they do, and I love hearing the stories. But hearing from the victims, you really realise that these scams have a real financial and emotional impact on the people involved. I spoke to a man just the other day who'd lost $5,000 investing in what he thought was an internet marketing company, and it was just a scam, it was basically an American-based pyramid scheme where the only way you make money is of course to try and convince other people to sign up to the scam. And he was absolutely heartbroken. He could afford to lose the money, for him it was only a few thousand dollars, but it wasn't that he lost the money that upset him so much, it was the fact that he really lost control, that he thought he was in control of what was going on, and that he really felt like that he couldn't trust the internet, couldn't trust other people making particular offers to him, that he couldn't really trust himself and his decision-making abilities. And that's really I think for a lot of people, where they feel the hardest hit.

[On stage: All right, so we're going to bet them. Here we go. You bet $1 and then I see your dollar and raise $10, then you bet $10 I bet $100, and then I bet $1,000, then it'll be your shoes, I bet my jacket, you bet your wife, I bet my first-born child. We put everything we own on the table, I reach into my pocket, put my last dollar down on the table and call, What do you have?' Two sixes. Yes, I think I've got you beat, because I have one, two, three, four, five, six of a kind. Six kings, ladies and gentlemen. Give him a big round of applause though anyway. Thank you very much for playing. Thank you.]

Damien Carrick: When I saw your show the other night, you hammered a nail up your nostril and it was horrible, it was funny, and it was compelling. And how common are scams involving that kind of physical illusion, and what kinds of motivations do they have?

Nicholas Johnson: Sure. What you're referring to there is what they call 'psychic surgery', so you'll see photographs of people and video of people reaching inside somebody's stomach, blood spurting everywhere, they'll pull out a tumour which they'll throw into a bowl, wave their hands over the person's stomach and they're instantly as good as new and restored with absolutely no cut whatsoever. Or in the case of the nail in the head, they'll get a nail and actually hammer it into somebody's face, just below the nostrils, that's sticking out horizontal. You maybe get a pair of forceps and sort of force them in there and pretend to pull something out, and these kind of gruesome, disgusting displays are so compelling to watch and so intense to experience that people feel that it must be doing you some good, it must be medical and it must be worth paying for. And sadly, lots of people hand over cash for these bogus operations.

Damien Carrick: And that happens here in Australia, or are we talking about vulnerable uneducated people in Third World countries?

Nicholas Johnson: No, it happens all over Australia. We had a guy in the Western Suburbs of Sydney trying to pull this a few years ago, and he was using a technique and a particular device which can be bought for $10 from any magic shop. So it's like a magic trick, and he was using it in order to pretend to be reaching into someone's stomach and pulling out guts and disgusting things. So it happens in Australia, it happens overseas more often, however because people in Western countries have perhaps more money and more resources, what happens is you'll get tour organisers will get together and they will get a group of people who are very sick and actually fly over to the countries, pay thousands of dollars, say in the Philippines, get themselves 'cured', and then come back to Australia. So you've actually got not only are the people performing the surgery making money, you have tour operators, hotel operators and various other people along the chain actually making money from the sick and the vulnerable, even though they're not performing the scam themselves.

Damien Carrick: Magician Nicholas Johnson, who likes to refer to himself as 'Australia's Honest Con Man'.

Damien Carrick: That's The Law Report for this week. A big Thank You to producer Erica Vowles and also to technical producer, Joel Church.


Guests

Nicholas Johnson
Magician

Presenter

Damien Carrick

Producer

Erica Vowles

Labels: Hustle, Stuff

By Shaila Dewan and Robbie Brown

ATLANTA: Democrats up and down the ballot have been trying to reverse the Republican rhetorical dominance that made "liberal" an unsavory label, and many have found help in a slender document percolating through their party's hierarchy.

It is called the "Message Handbook for Progressives From Left to Center," and, along with a companion piece on health care, it was created by Drew Westen, a psychology professor at Emory University here who was virtually unknown in political circles before this election cycle. Several Democratic consultants say it is the first systematic, data-driven effort to mold the language of the left to fit the sensibilities of the center.

Dr. Westen's advice can be heard when Alisha Thomas Morgan, running for re-election to the Georgia House in a conservative suburb of Atlanta, uses the word "leadership" in place of "government" and speaks about the middle class instead of the poor.

Or when Andrew Gillum, a city commissioner in Tallahassee, Florida, who is fighting a ballot initiative against same-sex marriage, tells members of his predominantly black church of the human desire for dignity and respect instead of lecturing them on the evils of discrimination.

Democrats of higher office who have heard Dr. Westen have also shifted their rhetoric, as when Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, fending off a Republican challenger, not only says that "health care is a right for every citizen" but pointedly adds, "Particularly citizens who are working hard every day."

Dr. Westen advises jettisoning wonkish 12-point plans in favor of direct emotional appeals that can compete with those evoked by Republicans using terms like "family values" and "the war on terror."

"We are a centrist nation," he said in an interview, "but people prefer center-left to center-right, even in conservative parts of the country, if they hear equally strong messages on both sides."

Liberal candidates, especially those running in not-so-liberal territory, have latched on to his approach.

"There's almost a rebirth, or a pride, that we can really talk about what we believe and not do so shamefully," Gillum said, adding that Dr. Westen's advice had given him the confidence to speak his mind even on conservative talk radio. "If we communicate it through our stories and our real-life examples, if they don't agree with you then they can at least understand where you come from."

Dr. Westen's ideas began to catch on when he was writing "The Political Brain," a scientific explanation of the central role of emotion in politics, published in 2007, that urged Democrats to stop cowering and fight back.

Among those with whom he has had audiences are Howard Dean, the Democratic national chairman, and Young Elected Officials, a national group of left-leaning city council members and state legislators. During the primaries, Senator Joseph Biden Jr., now Senator Barack Obama's running mate, recommended "The Political Brain" to his campaign staff. Bill Clinton is a fan.

Even Frank Luntz, the architect of many Republican rhetorical successes, says Dr. Westen is fostering a sea change.

"It's as though the Republicans have fallen back 15 years in their communication," Luntz said, "at the very moment when Democrats vaulted ahead 15 years."

Luntz said the Obama campaign often mirrored Dr. Westen's approach. Though Dr. Westen has not worked for the campaign in an official capacity, he has offered guidance, both directly and in his Huffington Post columns.

Instead of using euphemisms like "pro-choice" and "reproductive health," his handbook suggests, liberal candidates might insist that it is un-American for the government to tell men and women when to start a family or what religious beliefs to follow, arguments that test well in focus groups with conservatives and independents. On illegal immigration, he recommends, candidates who have said their plan would "allow" immigrants to become citizens should instead say they will "require" it.

"The idea," Dr. Westen said, "is to start to rebrand progressives using language that's as evocative as the language of the other side, and stop using phrases that just turn people off."

The handbook does not offer a script so much as a menu of options, each of which was poll-tested against conservative arguments. On economics, for example, one message begins with "I want to see the words 'Made in America' again." Another reads, "We need leaders who don't just talk about family values but actually value families."

Celinda Lake, a prominent Democratic strategist in Washington, said of the handbook: "I think people have been overjoyed to have it. I don't think we have rooted our message in the kind of systematic understanding of values and networks of values that Drew uses."

Dr. Westen is not the first to try to whip Democratic messaging into shape. But several political consultants said his scientific approach — based largely on recent advances in the study of how the brain reacts to political speech — and his advocacy of plain talk made him more effective.

Bill Jones, a moderate Democrat in a conservative, wealthy section of suburban Atlanta, said talking to Dr. Westen had helped him make the decision to run for Congress against the Republican incumbent, Representative Tom Price.

Among other recommendations, Dr. Westen encouraged Jones to make his background as an Air Force veteran a prominent part of his biography. "It wasn't a contrived approach like 'how can we create a persona?' " Jones recalled. "It's 'be the person you are.' "

In a candidates' forum at a church on a recent Saturday afternoon, Bobbie Smith, 77, listened while her husband, a veteran, exchanged war stories with Jones. Smith, who identified herself as a conservative-leaning independent, said she had seen Jones's television commercials, co-produced by Dr. Westen. "I liked the down-to-earth talk," she said. "Common words for common people."

Not everyone has jumped wholeheartedly onto the Westen bandwagon. Though praising Dr. Westen's work, Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the research wing of the Democratic Leadership Council, said he worried that it focused too much on the message rather than substance.

But Paul Begala, a commentator and Democratic strategist who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton, said that with candidates like Jones, Dr. Westen was helping to shape the future of the party.

"The fact that they're doing this in Georgia is really, really, really important," Begala said. "Great politicians often come out of enemy territory. Ronald Reagan came from Hollywood, and it made him tougher and smarter."

Labels: Strategy, Stuff

The Negro Donald Draper
27 Oct 2008 12:15 pm

So Mad Men is over, and short of the NFL, there really is no other reason for me to have a TV. I got rid of mine last spring, and I actually considered buying a new one just to see the new season. But then I discovered Mad Men was on Itunes. You should know that there are only two shows that have ever made me cry--Justice League and Mad Men. Sound insane? You obviously have never watched Justice League.

[MORE]
Here is the thing, in the superhero mythos, a character often gains his motivations, and his powers, because of some tragic event in the past--Spiderman loses Uncle Ben, Superman loses Krypton, a mad scientist runs devious experiments on Wolverine etc. The superhero is, at once tormented and empowered by his past. Often he tries to remake it, or he tries to abandon his power in hopes that his pain will come to an end. This invariably leads to more trouble, and the hero usually realizes that he can't actually escape his past. This is the essence of the whole "Great Power and Great Responsibility" theme that powers Spiderman That idea--the past as pain and power--has always been salient one for me.

I came of age in the midst of the Crack Era. I went to a besieged middle school in West Baltimore. My teachers were the sort of black women who were obsessed with getting the best out of you and also making sure you got the best out of the world. They did what they could--but this was 1987. I'm talking tons of guns, patent leather Jordans, Dopeman, and twelve year-olds dying for Georgetown Starter jackets. I spent as much time plotting a safe route home as I spent studying.

Once they caught me on Liberty Heights, right near the old CCB. Six kids beat the hell out of me and stomped on my face. A few years later I got into a fight in my high school cafeteria--some dude smacked me over the head with a trash-can. It was a bad time for the empire. And yet everything I learned about human nature, I learned in those years. Moreover, because I had to master a certain way of being, a certain style, in order to walk through my own neighborhood, I gained a sort of second sight that has never left me. When I write I am pulling from that past, I am seeing the world not just through refined adult eyes, but through the eyes of kid who's seen people at their lowest.

And then there is the collective experience of black folks. What does it mean to be the loser of history? To come out on the vanquished end of the great American narrative? Well, it kind of sucks. But too, it powers who we are--it gives us Zora Neal Hurston, Jimmy Baldwin, Marian Anderson, Nina Simone, Romare Bearden, Outkast and Nas. I think Jay summed up the entire deal:


Do not step to me, I'm awkward, I box lefty
An orphan, my Pops left me
And often, my Momma wasn't home.

That is who we are-- to be black, and successful in any way, is to box lefty. In many old societies, the left-hander is seen as cursed. But anyone from the street--or anyone who's watched tape of Ali-Norton--knows that the unorthodox fighter can be dangerous. To box lefty, It is to have a different way of grappling with the world, a different way of seeing. The trick is not letting it be your only way of seeing.

When I rewatched the first season of Mad Men, all of this came back to me. Don's past is unorthodox for his profession, and furthermore it is an object of great shame for him. And yet the past is the source of his power. In the last episode of season one, Don has to do a pitch for "The Wheel" a slide projector in need of rebranding. Don's marriage is crumbling and he's lost his brother--the last link to his murky, and poignant past. Don pulls all of that together and makes a beautiful pitch, rechristening "The Wheel" as "The Carousel" a device that's a time machine which takes us to a place where we ache to go again." The pitch blows everyone away, and Don is hailed as a genius. But what only we know, is that Don can write such pitches because he sees different, and he sees different because he's literally seen different things. His life has been much harder than his colleagues, and that gives him a power to see more than them.

But he's also haunted by the past. Don believes his progress is tied to no one ever knowing who he truly is, to no one discovering his true history--his secret identity, if you will. Don Draper is, in the parlance of old black folks, passing. His orgins are not proper and gentile--he is the child of a prostitute, who as reinvented himself for the Manhattan jet-set. He is Gatsby and Anatole Broyard, no? And yet the irony that animates Mad Men is the fact that, without that past, Draper would likely be the sort of pampered hack he despises. He'd be Pete Campbell. His double consciousness, makes him, indeed, doubly conscious, doubly aware. Don Draper sees more.

Only two groups of people truly can sense something amidest--the blacks, and the Jews. There is a lovely scene in Season Two where Peggy, Don and the black elevator man are riding up. They are talking about Marilyn Monroe's death and noting how shocked they are. The elevator man casually notes, "Some people just hide in plain sight." It is not so much that he directly knows Don's identity, but that he is playing the role that blacks play throughout the show--they are a kind of Greek chorus, unseen, but offering short poetic takes on the themes at work.

The major theme is set from the first episode, when Don, wooing Rachel, a Jewish proprietor of a department store, is enjoying the sound of his own voice. Rachel listens skeptically and then cuts right through the mask:


I don't know what it is you really believe in, but I do know what it feels like to be out of place, to be disconnected, to see the whole world laid out in front of you the way other people live it.There is something about you that tells me you it to.
To be out of place, To be disconnected. That is the essence of us, and I guess in one way or another, it's everyone else too.

Labels: Stuff

by Claire Hoffman

The government is after him because he crusades for illegal-immigrant workers. The lawyers are after him because of the three (so far) sexual-harassment lawsuits. This might be enough to bring down the C.E.O of most publicly traded companies but for American Apparel founder Dov Charney it's just another day at the office.

It’s close to midnight, and Dov Charney, the 39-year-old founder of American Apparel, lies in his bed staring at a massive flat-screen TV. A pair of boat shoes and a white electric muscle massager are on the floor nearby. Behind him, a huge window is lit up with a sweeping view of downtown Los Angeles. Inside his gated, marble, gold-encrusted mansion on a hill, Charney is insulated from the chaos below. His fleet of weathered Mercedeses and Cadillacs, parked bumper to bumper, fills the circular driveway.

Despite the safety of his lair, Charney is not at peace. On CNN, a powdered, sweaty Lou Dobbs is yelling about how “illegals” are destroying the U.S. economy, taking jobs away from real Americans, and taking our money out of the country. Dobbs declares that business owners who employ illegal immigrants deserve to be punished.

“This is a disgusting perennial problem, and we have the opportunity to fix it,” Dobbs sneers.

“He has an anti-immigrant piece every night,” Charney says. Then he shouts at the screen, “I’m an industrialist! I get to call myself an industrialist, you know! When you have a factory with more than a couple hundred people, you get to call yourself an industrialist!”

With a squeak of a vintage sneaker, Michael, a handsome 21-year-old, emerges from a creaky bronze elevator and asks Charney if he needs anything else for the night. Perhaps a stick of gum? Michael is both an assistant of sorts to Charney and one of his half-dozen roommates, mostly twenty-somethings who work at an American Apparel factory a few miles away and come home at night to their boss’s mansion (where Charlie Chaplin once lived), making it their own by hanging posters on the walls and piling clothing here and there. In return, they are on call to do Charney’s erratic bidding. As Michael leaves, Charney explains to me, “I used to have girls around, but it’s easier with boys.”

Charney is off the bed now, pacing, his lean frame hunched forward like a cartoon of someone walking fast. “Some people call me the masturbator,” Charney says. “Okay. But I’m the industrialist!” At his feet, Hedkayce, one of his mongrel Chihuahuas, starts yapping. “And he,” says Charney, gesturing toward the television, “doesn’t know what it is.”

Charney is an old-fashioned captain of industry, a manufacturing tycoon who came up with a concept (sexy T-shirt), made it, advertised it, sold it, and watched over it all like a madman. He is obsessive about the product, throwing tantrums about stock allocation and necklines with equal petulance. Along the way to taking his company public, Charney acquired an accounting history that at times seems more street corner than Wall Street. And he is widely characterized as a pervert, a libertine who has made his company’s image hypersexual and, some employees have alleged, his workplace too. (View an interactive map of the world showing where T-shirts are made.)

But lately, all that has faded into the background. In December 2007, just as his third sexual-harassment suit was headed to court, Charney took a wild and potentially hazardous stand by placing ads in such publications as the New York Times to state his progressive position on the subject of immigration. One ad, featuring a photograph of an earnest young Hispanic factory worker, read, “It’s time to give a voice to the voiceless. Businesses are afraid to speak to the media about immigration, frightened of reprisals by government agencies. But we cannot just sit in the shadows and watch the government and politicians exploit and misrepresent this matter to advance their own careers.”

Charney’s newspaper spots all but said that American Apparel, like many other U.S. employers, makes use of illegal-immigrant labor. The ads directly criticized the Bush administration and asked the public if maybe it was time to be open and honest about the subject.

Perhaps not.

Last December, Charney was served with a notice of inspection by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the largest investigative branch of the Department of Homeland Security, informing him that he needed to prepare documentation on all of his workers for review. Charney and his growing team of lawyers and consultants have taken this as a warning. The company has given the feds records for thousands of workers; Charney says he hasn’t heard a word in response. Since then, he’s spent his days bracing for a raid at any time on American Apparel’s factories.

American Apparel is the largest clothing manufacturer in the United States, and in downtown Los Angeles Charney employs about 4,000 sewers, cutters, dyers, and other workers, most of whom were not born in the U.S. Although they have all provided documentation, he is still concerned about the legality of the majority of them. Now he is desperately trying to bulk up his workforce in order to keep his operations running smoothly. This year, he has hired an additional 2,000 workers, many of whom found out about the jobs from fliers that Charney himself handed to them on downtown L.A. sidewalks.

“I’ve spent every moment of my existence from the minute I wake up—I have a stomachache, and I get up, and this is what I do,” says Charney. “I do this every day. I do it on Sunday. I don’t even remember when it’s Friday. One day it’s Saturday, and one day it’s Monday. I just keep going and going and going.”


Maybe someday Dov Charney will be known as a tireless crusader for immigrant workers’ rights, but until then his current wicked reputation will probably remain in place. Mention him and people make a sound of distaste and then ask if he is really an exhibitionist-pornographer-compulsive masturbator. This mantle is one that Charney both encourages and abhors but is hard-pressed to shrug off. The public has reacted strongly to the images of out-of-control carnality beamed down from American Apparel’s billboards and splayed across its ads, often photographed by Charney himself, that show young bodies in various states of undress, sporting his company’s clothing.

This sexual aura has cut both ways for American Apparel. Charney has made his name in part through controversy. He once famously masturbated in front of a female journalist. Charney says the reporter, for the now-defunct Jane, took the masturbation out of context. “I was a younger man,” he says, wearily. “The lines were blurred between paramour and reporter.” The reporter has said that her tape recorder or notebook was in full view at all times and that the relationship was professional.

Since the resulting 2004 article was published, four female employees of American Apparel have filed three lawsuits against Charney. One suit was settled; another was dropped; and the third, by former sales representative Mary Nelson, 36, alleges that Charney wore a skimpy thong that barely covered his genitals. During Nelson’s initial job interview, which was held at Charney’s home, she says he referred to female employees as “sluts.” Nelson’s attorney, Keith Fink, told the Los Angeles Times that she was wrongfully terminated after she consulted with a lawyer. The suit was sent into binding arbitration at the beginning of the year; a settlement has not yet been reached.

Charney insists that Nelson, who worked for American Apparel for a little more than a year, was a bad employee who swore compulsively and hustled him, often referring to him as “donkey cock.” In court papers, Charney’s lawyers portray Nelson as a sales rep who performed below expectations. Charney says she was the mastermind of the suits, and he even drew a diagram for me of how three of the four women went to the factory roof to conspire to file them. He can talk for hours about what he calls their scheme and their betrayal.

Still, Charney hasn’t denied the majority of the allegations. His own lawyers have stated in court documents that “American Apparel is a sexually charged workplace where employees of both genders deal with sexual conduct, speech, and images as part of their jobs.” Charney has said that his behavior is the norm in the fashion industry and shouldn’t be considered harassment. He has defended himself by saying he is in the business of making underwear. He points out that in addition to being the company’s creative director, he is also one of its fit models—a simple explanation for why he would stride around his offices half-dressed. He has said that the real reason he had the underwear on was to show his employees and ask them how it looked. He has also said he “test-drives” the underwear to see how it fits “in action.”

He concedes that there was one point when he ran through the factory wearing his underwear, but says it was to entertain staff and film a spoof video. In a deposition, he said he “frequently” had been in his “underpants” because he was “designing an underwear line” while Nelson was working at the company. He says, “I’m very proud of my underwear.”

The sexual harassment suits torment Charney, if for no other reason than because they divert attention away from what he sees as his utopian American factory.

At the end of the 19th century, the U.S. finally got around to establishing its first immigration laws. Since then, much of the debate about who should and shouldn’t be allowed in has centered on California, where the gold rush and the construction of railroads drew a large influx of laborers from China and Mexico. Though the U.S. has dabbled in deportation methods in order to control a growing population of illegal immigrants, federal authorities have mainly turned a blind eye. But in recent years, illegal immigrants have become a potent political symbol. The blind eye seemed to open abruptly last summer, when Michael Chertoff, secretary of homeland security, announced that federal authorities would crack down—not on workers but on employers.

Federal immigration raids on companies around the nation have increased, with 3,900 administrative arrests made since October 2007 and more than 1,000 criminal charges filed. States, too, have joined in the effort, with more than 175 bills introduced into legislatures throughout the country this year. In May, 389 employees were arrested in a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, and 230 sentenced to jail terms. (See “A Beef With the Rabbis”). In another instance, in late August, 350 workers were arrested at an electronics-manufacturing firm in Laurel, Mississippi.

Some estimates put the illegal-immigrant population of the U.S. at nearly 12 million. Most illegals perform at least a portion of their work either under the table or with the help of false documentation. If there’s a ground zero for this issue, it’s Los Angeles. By some economists’ estimates, 1 million of the city’s 10 million inhabitants are there illegally.

So in January, employers in Los Angeles gasped when federal authorities raided Micro Solutions Enterprises, a sleepy, long-established printer-­cartridge manufacturer based in East L.A. that employed 800 workers. Federal officials said that 138 employees were undocumented, but owner Avi Wazana told his customers that the company had been verifying the legal status of all new hires through federal programs for almost a year.

“It’s very nudge-nudge-wink,” says Jack Kyser, the chief economist of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. “What you have is a large immigrant workforce. And if you are an undocumented immigrant, all you need is to get the documents necessary to get a job. They go in, and the employers look at it, but employers have to be careful.” That’s because state laws prohibit companies from asking prospective workers for more than two forms of identification, and they risk civil suits if they do.

This situation spurred California businesses to begin quietly lobbying public officials to push for change. In March, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wrote a letter to Chertoff criticizing I.C.E. agents for raids on “established, responsible employers” in the city; he asked the secretary to focus on those with a record of labor violations. Meanwhile, in April, Gavin Newsom, San Francisco’s mayor, said he would not cooperate with the federal crackdown.

In a recent interview, Chertoff defended his hard-line approach, saying, “We are not going to be able to satisfy the American people on a legal temporary-worker program until they are convinced that we will have a stick as well as a carrot.”

For most of the apparel business, illegal immigration is no longer an issue, since 97 percent of the clothing purchased in the U.S. is manufactured in foreign countries. In the world of T-shirts, all Charney’s major competitors—Hanes, Gap, and Fruit of the Loom—make their goods abroad.

Charney is in his office at 8:30 at night, typing on his computer. On the seventh floor of the 800,000-square-foot factory that houses most of American Apparel’s design, manufacturing, shipping, retailing, and customer-service departments, Charney’s spacious corner office functions as the control tower from which he wields his power in his own peculiar, Willy Wonka-ish way. He constantly calls out to anyone who passes by in the hallway, regardless of whether they are on their way to the bathroom or, worse, on their way home. “Hey, hey! What’s going on?” he shouts, always with a question. “What are we running out of? What’s selling? Did you get me those mannequins I asked for? Where are we at with that neckline?”

Charney’s desk faces a line of cheap black-leather chairs that could have been lifted from a nail salon. Behind him is a honeycomb arrangement of shelves where he has tucked items of importance—from vintage advertisements showing bare-breasted Polynesian women to a letter he wrote at age 11 asking for a refund for his not-quite-right bag of potato chips. There is also a handwritten list of what he believes fashion is made of: fantasy, function, status, anxiety. The shelves are lined with books with such titles as A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Population Studies, and Understanding Judaism.

His assistant Marina, a stocky woman with the patience of a saint, comes in and places two Hungry Man frozen dinners in front of him. “Chicken or turkey?” she asks. He ignores her. She looks up at me and rolls her eyes, like a bemused babysitter. Eventually, Charney stops his intense, jab-jab touch-typing (he’s severely dyslexic); grunts; points to the turkey; and then raises his head and flashes Marina a beaming smile. She wanders off, and he turns his attention back to his keyboard.

Charney’s project today and for the past few weeks has been to bulk up the immigration section of the American Apparel website called Legalize L.A., which is an extensive collection of news clips, pro-immigrant fact sheets, videos, an excerpt from John F. Kennedy’s 1958 book, A Nation of Immigrants, and other material advocating the legalization of L.A.’s workforce.

Charney has long been obsessed with immigration. He still has a copy of a school paper he wrote entitled “The Immigrant.” When I ask why he seems fixated on the subject, he shouts, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall! It’s because I’m a Jew! Birds are free! We want to go somewhere, let’s go! I just don’t believe in borders, in the end. The Americans who do just don’t trust humanity.”

A young, loud, pear-shaped man named Johnny Makeup wanders in wearing a Mickey Mouse sweater, purple jeans, and shiny loafers. Johnny says Charney recruited him from an American Apparel store in New York after being charmed by his sense of style. Now he’s apprenticing in the P.R. department, where his tasks include putting together music mixes, updating his MySpace page, making Charney salads, and keeping him company. He lives in Charney’s mansion and calls him Daddy.

“Daddy,” he says, as he plops onto the leather couch next to the desk, “I saw a vagina for the third time today.” Charney ignores him and continues to stare at his computer screen, scrolling through immigration fact sheets that he can use to bolster his arguments.

“Daddy, I know you don’t like doing anything fun right now, but my friends are going to Coachella,” Johnny continues happily. Charney picks up the phone and punches in a number.

“Mom,” Charney barks. “I need that picture, that picture from the march. No, I want it for the site. I’m putting it up on the site.” He wants a picture his mother has of them at a pro-choice demonstration march together 30 years ago. Then he asks her if she’s seen the photos of Zaida (the Yiddish word for grandfather); Charney’s grandfather is memorialized in countless photographs pinned to the office walls and on the American Apparel website. Charney is worried that people have the wrong idea about the company, so he wants to humanize it. If people know he’s human, he thinks, maybe they won’t be so hard on him.

He hangs up and turns to me with a funny look in his eyes. “What size waist are you?” he asks, rummaging in the corner and pulling out a teensy pair of periwinkle jeans.

“No way,” I say.

“Come on,” he wheedles. “These aren’t even in stores. I’ll leave the room if you want.” When I say no, he huffs in frustration.

If the feds do raid American Apparel, they will walk into a factory of 4,000 or more employees who are living in a sort of phantasmagoric Charney dream of blue-collar America: largely immigrant, Hispanic, hardworking, and at an average of $12 an hour, probably better paid than any other workers on the planet sewing T-shirts. Most clothing manufacturers have decamped to foreign shores over the past two decades, but here in downtown L.A., American Apparel offers health insurance, an in-house health clinic, subsidized meals, English-language classes, and a host of other cushy incentives. It is, in some sense, a utopian enterprise.

But it is also one that, some complain, exists only at Charney’s command. In 2003, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees attempted to organize factory workers at American Apparel. Its efforts failed. Charney says that it was his employees who didn’t want the union. But union organizers said Charney directed his managers to intimidate and threaten the workers. Five years later, union leaders in L.A. have arrived at a kind of cease-fire with Charney, but they remain critical.

“We think all employers have that obligation to take care of their workers, so we can’t say it is an exemplary employer,” says Kimi Lee, director of the Garment Workers Center, a nonprofit organization that deals with labor issues. “It isn’t a shining star, but it’s not a sweatshop. It could be better. Even though Charney talks about workers’ rights and trumpets all the things he’s done, he’s not letting the workers speak for themselves. It’s significant that he doesn’t. It’s very paternalistic. He believes he’s treating them better than anyone else could.”

When Charney finishes work, at 11 p.m., he nods at Johnny, who scampers after him, lugging an old tote bag. Charney walks down the hall, charges through a set of industrial doors, and plows across the cafeteria. Johnny vamps behind him, gesturing at Charney’s ass, and the night-shift workers sitting at the tables on break let loose with catcalls and whistles. Charney gives them a distracted smile and keeps going.

As a child, Charney showed signs of possibly having a future as a tycoon. When he was 11, he started a newspaper in his Montreal neighborhood. He contracted with an area printer to produce his weekly journal, which had about 50 subscribers and sold for 25 cents a copy. His mother, recalling the night when she almost lost her mind with fear because her son was missing, remembers him returning home in a cab at 2 a.m. with the latest edition of his newspaper under his arm.

“Dov has been driven since he was born,” Sylvia Charney says. “I never pushed him. In fact, I tried to pull him back. He’s always had that energy. He pushed, pushed, pushed until he got what he wanted.”

Charney came of age in the 1980s, an era that, since it coincided with a major shift in U.S. apparel manufacturing, laid the groundwork for his company. The major T-shirt makers left for cheaper pastures in China, India, and Pakistan. In love as much with the old-school model of in-house manufacturing as with clothing design, Charney is fervent about everything from his desire to maintain control of the total operation to the cut and feel of a polo shirt.

There are three main strands in the story of American Apparel: Charney’s obsession with free trade, his love affair with American T-shirts, and his fixation on sex. His love of T-shirts began early, with visits to his grandparents in Palm Beach, Florida, where he bought Lacoste, Gant, and Hanes shirts and proudly returned to Canada sporting the preppy look. In 1988, while a high school senior, Charney started American Apparel. “I was this little Jewish rat,” he recalls happily. He got his logo by tracing the eagle on a dollar bill and came up with the slogan “Canada’s direct source for American-made T-shirts and fleecewear.”

“I got so obsessed with it,” he says. “If you want to take the long view, I’m the only fucker still making this stuff. I was a Canadian in love with this iconic idea. It was like M&M’s if you’re from Moscow.”

At 19, he moved to Columbia, South Carolina, and insinuated himself into a world of aging manufacturers, from whom he learned elaborate formulas for how to produce apparel and make pennies on the dollar. He imitated the soft, basic simplicity of the Hanes T-shirts he’d grown up with and, trying to compete with the giants, sold shirts in bulk to printers and stores.

But for all of Charney’s passion, he was disorganized, and by 1996 he was having trouble paying his bills. That year, he filed for Chapter 11 and fled to California. He says he’s been ashamed ever since and has avoided talking about it. “It’s a disgrace!” he screams, when I ask. He arrived in Los Angeles and went to work in a sewing room downtown. He then met an apparel manufacturer named Sang Ho Lim; after the two had dinner at a restaurant where the sushi is delivered to customers on a conveyor belt, the two became partners.

With Lim’s backing, Charney retooled American Apparel in 1998, merging his existing operation with Lim’s cutting and sewing business. As the brand gained currency with antilabel young consumers—the clothing is famous for having no visible logo—the business began to grow. In 2003, he had three stores; in 2005, he opened 65 more.

But that year, the company’s then-C.F.O. Mark Schlein died of heart failure. Rather than hire a replacement immediately, American Apparel relied on an outside accounting firm to help oversee its finances. Meanwhile, Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank, which had given the company an early loan, grew uneasy with the rapid pace at which it was opening new stores and asked Charney to secure additional financing. By the end of 2005 he still hadn’t found a new investor, so U.S. Bank declared American Apparel in default of its covenant agreement. Then, says Charney, an internal audit discovered that the company’s earnings had been “accidentally” inflated by 30 percent for the year; rather than $26 million, it had earned only about $18 million.

In 2006, Charney hired Adrian Ko­walewski, a newly minted University of Chicago business school graduate, to advise the firm on financing. The two met that spring when Kowalewski was writing a research paper on American Apparel. Shortly after, Charney was approached by Endeavor Acquisition, a recently formed special-purpose acquisition company. (Robert Kennedy’s daughter Kerry Kennedy is a board member.) Endeavor wanted to take a share of American Apparel; Charney would keep a 55 percent controlling stake, and American Apparel would receive more than $125 million. Endeavor would then take the company public, as long as Charney agreed to step down as C.E.O. and take the title of creative director.

Charney refused to step down but agreed to hire a real C.F.O. Kowalewski advised him not to take the deal, but Endeavor agreed to Charney’s terms, and it went forward anyway. On December 12, 2007, American Apparel began trading on the American Stock Exchange. Charney’s stock was worth more than $580 million. The deal also resulted in $67.9 million in cash for Lim, the company’s other principal shareholder. Hundreds of employees received cash bonuses totaling $2.5 million.

Still, Charney, ruminating on his negative image in the public eye, calls me late one night and spends an hour complaining about an article in the Wall Street Journal that details the company’s spotty financial history. “I just have to close my eyes and lie in bed with the windows open and let the wind blow over me and imagine I’m being covered in sand,” he says, sounding exhausted.

It’s four months after the notice from I.C.E., and the anticipated raid has yet to come. But Charney is convinced it will happen soon. On a blazing hot afternoon, he sets off on an employee-finding mission in his sparkling gray Land Rover. He pulls into a garbage-strewn parking lot in the old bank district in downtown Los Angeles. The ornate Beaux-Arts buildings in copper, stone, and wood that once housed the infrastructure of an early-19th-century city have been completely gutted and remade into sweatshops.

Charney hops out of the S.U.V. with a thick fistful of fliers advertising positions at American Apparel—sewing, dyeing, cutting, cleaning, security. He marches along the sidewalk, shoving papers at passersby with the zeal of a political propagandist. “Here you go,” he says, as he hands fliers to a homeless woman, a shop owner, a man eating a sandwich, and a woman walking down the street with a baby. We walk past two homeless men who reek of alcohol. “You don’t get a flier if you’re drunk,” he whispers to me.

“What about us?” one of the men yells. Charney stops and hands them a flier.

“You gave us this last week,” one of them grumbles.

Charney passes out the rest of his fliers and drives 10 blocks back to the American Apparel factory, where the unpaved and cratered parking lot is jammed with cars. Dozens of middle-aged women—Filipina, Chinese, South American, Mexican—are lined up at the gate waiting for the elevator. Job interviews are being conducted inside. A pair of twin blond surfer guys wander by in flip-flops. A tall redhead in purple jeans hurries past with a frantic look in his eyes and a measuring tape around his shoulders. One young woman is in hot-pink tiger-print pants; others wear miniskirts and tights and carry vintage Chanel purses. On a bench waiting with her mother is a little girl squeezed into a tennis skirt, eating a hot dog.

Inside the factory, on the high, white walls, hang large photographs of young women, their sweatshirts and T-shirts falling off. Employees—Charney’s soldiers—wear candy-colored T-shirts with the names of their departments (manufacturing, security, shipping) printed in both Spanish and English. Spend an hour in American Apparel’s factories, and you see two categories of employee: hipster and immigrant. There is some crossover, of course; Charney is quick to point out that he himself is an immigrant. But most of those who work on the factory floor are modestly dressed, tidily groomed, and Hispanic. The men wear loose jeans, T-shirts, or button-down shirts; the women wear embroidered tops and carry simple handbags.

On the second floor, a photo shoot is under way. A man in a turquoise nylon jacket and skintight jeans photographs a young woman in leggings. Standing nearby is Iris Alonzo, one of the company’s creative directors and a close Charney ally. “We’re living in a world of bullshit,” she complains. “They’re targeting us. Dov is a character, and it’s easy to make him a target. Older people, like government types, like to think of him as a pervert. But we put $100 million a year into the L.A. payroll. We’re a micro version of a macro problem,” she says.

In March and April, American Apparel interviewed between 3,000 and 4,000 people for factory jobs. They found fewer than 10 percent with impeccable documentation. “We’re not the bad guys. The I.C.E. guys are like rednecks,” says Alonzo. “Every time I drive in here I get teary. People are stoked to be here. It’s like a little team. It’s just really sad that—you know, we’re not evil. We had to let a small group of people go and give them severance.”

In the spring, Charney had to fire 30 employees—many of whom had worked at the company for a decade or more—when he discovered that they had improper paperwork. Each one had $30,000 worth of company stock to cash in, a kind of severance unheard of in the world of apparel-factory workers. When I ask Charney about it, his eyes seem to tear, and for once, he ignores me.

It’s noon on May Day, a pleasant 72 degrees, and in downtown Los Angeles the sun burns through the smog and onto cordoned-off streets. Long lines of police and firefighters coordinate crowd-control routines. In this city, May 1 has become the day to protest the treatment of immigrant workers. In 2007, during the annual march, police clubbed and teargassed protesters.

The American Apparel factory has closed early for the day so employees can take part. Charney pulls up to the factory in his Land Rover, parks, and stomps up the ramp with his mother trailing behind.

Today is supposed to be about the march, but the accounting staff is immediately in Charney’s face. It must file the company’s 10-K report by midnight. A series of whispered conversations takes place. He’s furious about something.
“You won’t understand what’s about to happen,” he tells me.

Nearly running, Charney barrels through the parking lot to the warehouse. The freight elevator is slow, so he runs up seven steep flights of stairs, his group of workers behind him, panting.

He silently plows through long rows of cardboard cartons, his chin thrust forward, moving spastically, jabbing at boxes. On this floor are products that have been identified defective. Charney says his company’s profits have been hurt by too much inventory designated “off quality.” He is convinced that lazy employees—those he’s summoned—are to blame.

“You’re robbing the company of profits!” he screams. “All these pink boxes need to be opened and accounted for.” The production manager sits on a box and starts to cry silently.

He seems angriest because he’s the one losing money. “You have to be a greedy monster in this world,” he says.

“Like a pig! Like a monster! That insatiable appetite is what drives business. I have the smell for it. I’m a pig! I’m an animal.”

Seven floors below,Bare in the parking lot, thousands of American Apparel workers holding protest signs are waiting for their leader. Charney and his aides have been gearing up for the march for weeks. Throughout the city, they’ve been giving away free legalize l.a. T-shirts in all their stores.

Charney joins his workers, but there’s still a delay: He’s waiting for a state senator who has promised to march with them. When the politician finally appears, Charney charges down the street, and within minutes his assistants are shouting that he has left the rest of the workers in the dust. He’s marching next to his mother, whom he ignores. But then she disappears, and he starts looking around, and then everyone is searching. In a soft voice, Charney says, “Where’s my mom?” and then his fabric guy, who is wearing an earpiece, announces that she’s been located.

Johnny Makeup shows up too, carrying a huge cutout of Paris Hilton, on which he has arranged a LEGALIZE L.A. dress.

“Immigrants are hot!” shouts Johnny. “Come party with the immigrants.” Johnny makes his way over to Sylvia, calling her Grandma. She doesn’t seem to like it.

Charney has said he wants American Apparel to be to L.A. what Levi Strauss was to San Francisco during the civil-rights era, when the jeansmaker desegregated its factories long before the federal government mandated it. But today, Charney seems conflicted about how much he will speak out. The march ends downtown, in front of the Los Angeles Times Building. A stage has been set up, where mariachi bands perform and local politicians take turns speaking out against I.C.E., Bush, and anti-immigrant sentiment. Charney has been looking forward to the march for weeks, but now, as politicians and activists are begging him to take the stage, he’s silently pacing. His mother urges him to go up there and speak.

But Charney says that politics doesn’t sell. Sex sells. And in the end, he wants to sell. I ask Charney about how all the pieces fit together—the sexual-harassment charges, the lewd advertising, and what he says matters most now, his political agenda of immigration reform.

“Fashion is about sexuality,” he’s shouting. “It’s hard to be fashionable and sanitize it and take the sexuality out of it. It’s tasteful. It’s utility—it’s not Frederick’s of Hollywood. It has to make you feel attractive. Sex makes you feel beautiful or handsome. And doesn’t it make you feel good that it’s made in conditions that are not deplorable? The whole sweatshop-free thing, it’s too complicated. It’s too sophisticated. So we were like, ‘Fuck it. Let’s not talk about it. People can’t get it.’ It’s a victory that we’re able to make clothing that people love in a place that isn’t embarrassing. Get over the ads. Get over the complaints. Get over the fact that I made a mistake making a comment to one or two girls. How selfish! Why couldn’t they just walk away? Think of the thousands of suppliers, the thousands of sewers, the workers!”

He continues, “Of course our clothing is intimate.” Then he switches briefly to his Québécois French. “Les intimes. It’s leisure. It’s intimacy. It’s a cold night, and you cuddle up with a blanket in your panties. You ever put on a pair of pants that made you look good, Claire?” he asks.

“Yes,” I tell him. “The pair I’m wearing right now.”

“See!” he shouts victoriously. “That’s what a beautiful, intelligent woman wants, to go to dinner in a pair of pants that makes her look good. She’s on top of the fucking world. That’s what it’s all about. The pants! The pants! That’s all a beautiful woman wants! A pair of pants that takes her into a restaurant. She looks beautiful. She looks intelligent! She’s got a pair of pants! She’s on top of the world—and it’s the pants, the pants!”

Labels: Art, Stuff

By Josh Dean
It's not hard to find someone who delights in attacking the show Family Guy. Which isn't a criticism, per se. Much of the animated sitcom's purpose seems to be to stoke the opposition, to offend the easily offended. But that's not the only reason it annoys people. There is a school of thought that says the show is hackish -- crudely drawn and derivative of its cartoon forebears. Members of this school would include, most prominently, Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the fathers of South Park, which is probably the only show on television that rivals Family Guy for objectionable content per half hour. South Park has devoted entire episodes to attacking Family Guy, portraying the show's writers as manatees who push "idea balls" with random jokes down tubes to generate plotlines. Kricfalusi has said, "You can draw Family Guy when you're 10 years old."

What does Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane -- who earlier this year inked a $100 million -- plus contract with Fox, followed by a breakthrough deal involving Google -- have to say about that?

"I would say, 'How many violas do you have?' "

MacFarlane is hovering over the soundboard in the control room of the Newman Soundstage on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles. Various engineers twiddle knobs and adjust levels as he looks out on a gymnasium-size room full of classically trained musicians tuning their instruments. Every piece of music on every episode of Family Guy is recorded live by an orchestra that on this day numbers 56. The only music that ever repeats, even once, are the opening and closing themes, and those too are frequently updated, just because. Now, it is not unprecedented to use a live orchestra in today's TV world. But it is highly unusual. "All the shows used to do it," laments Walter Murphy, one of Family Guy's two composers. "It's mostly electronic now -- to save money." The Simpsons, he says, still uses an orchestra, as does Lost. King of the Hill has a small band. And, of course, there's an orchestra on American Dad, the other show created by MacFarlane, who is now the highest-paid writer-producer in the history of TV.

MacFarlane, despite being 35 and looking like an average dude, possesses the musical inclinations of a septuagenarian drag queen. A significant percentage of Family Guy episodes feature extravagant Broadway-inspired song-and-dance numbers (because, really, why have the cartoon doctor tell his patient he has end-stage AIDS when a barbershop quintet can break the news via song?), and only some of them are sacrilegious or scatological. Among the features of his new contract with Fox is a Family Guy movie he imagines as "an old-style musical with dialogue" in the vein of The Sound of Music, a poster of which hangs above his desk. "We'd really be trying to capture, musically, that feel," says MacFarlane, whose father moonlighted as a folk singer. "Nothing today feels like it'll play 50 years from now, like Cole Porter or Rodgers and Hart."

If you're waiting for the punch line here, there isn't one. Critics may dismiss MacFarlane's show for being vulgar, but when he writes a song, it's going to be lush and jazzy and, at least musically, exactly as you might hear in something by Irving Berlin. It's all part of a manic attention to detail that not only gives the show its layered humor but also has made MacFarlane a massive multiplatform success.

MacFarlane is more than just an eclectic entertainer. Stripped of its crude facade, Family Guy -- indeed, all of MacFarlane Inc. -- exposes itself as a quintessentially modern business with lessons that extend far beyond TV land. MacFarlane has divined how to connect with next-generation consumers, not simply through the subject of his jokes but by embracing a flexibility in both format and distribution. He has also stepped outside the siloed definitions of a single industry (Hollywood) and exploited opportunity wherever he could find it (Silicon Valley). And perhaps most instructive, his success is not predicated on his product being all things to all people. He has bred allegiance from his core customers precisely because he's been willing to turn his back on (and even offend) others -- a model of sorts for how to create a mass-market-size niche business in our increasingly atomized culture.

MacFarlane is a fairly unassuming young man. He is partial to long-sleeve T-shirts, fraying jeans, and laceless black Chuck Taylors. Various stories have described him as prematurely graying, but today his hair is convincingly black and lightly gelled, and he's wearing wire-rimmed glasses. Beard stubble is a staple. The net effect is the look of a full-grown, thinking man's frat boy, which also pretty well sums up the target of his comedy (minus, perhaps, the full-grown part).

His show concerns the Griffins of Quahog, Rhode Island, whose patriarch is Peter, voiced by MacFarlane. Like Homer Simpson, he is lovable but bumbling, overweight, and a little slow-witted (a recent plot development is that he's mentally retarded, but just barely). His wife is Lois, cartoon sexy and much sharper; she adores him despite his flaws. They have three children: Chris, overweight and dim, in so many ways his father's son; Meg, smart but underappreciated and ever the butt of jokes about her homeliness; and Stewie, the infant pedant with the football-shape head who secretly wishes to murder his mother. Rounding out the clan is Brian the talking dog. He lusts after Lois, drinks martinis, and has been known to snort the occasional line of blow. (MacFarlane also voices both Brian and Stewie.)

Back in the soundstage control room, with the orchestra on the other side of the glass, a bank of flat screens are frozen on an image of Stewie staring out a window, forlorn. MacFarlane tells me that in this future episode, Stewie has been left home alone while the family goes on vacation.

"Let's try it once with the dialogue," Murphy says to his musicians. Stewie's quasi-British voice -- inspired by Rex Harrison, MacFarlane says -- booms through the control room. "Oh, Mommy! Thank God you're home! I promise with all my heart that I'll never say or do anything bad to you for the rest of the evening." Comedic pause. "By the way, I disabled the V-chip and watched so much porn."

Out in the orchestra room, trombonists erupt in laughter.

It is a violent collision of high and low -- classical musicians accustomed to the Hollywood Bowl recording music for a show heavy on poop jokes -- and a perfect lens for examining why this man sipping coffee from a paper cup emblazoned with the Fox logo has such an enormous and perpetual grin.

*****

It would be fair, at this point, to call Family Guy a juggernaut. If you're looking to get acquainted, it airs Sunday evenings at 9, just after The Simpsons, which it has surpassed as the most-popular animated show on TV. Among males 18 to 34, often cited as the most desirable demographic in advertising, Family Guy is the highest-rated scripted program in all of television (American Dad ranks sixth). It is the second-highest-rated show among males 18 to 49. It is among the most-downloaded shows on iTunes and the most-watched programs on Hulu, and it was the eighth most-pirated show of 2007 on BitTorrent sites.

Next spring, MacFarlane will introduce The Cleveland Show, a spin-off starring the Griffins' African-American neighbor. The show will be MacFarlane's third in prime time and the first new product of his megadeal with Fox. (He is also prepping a live-action movie, but no title or dates have been announced.)

A common complaint about MacFarlane's shows is that they are random and disjointed, with episodes that veer wildly off course for no apparent purpose. A human-size chicken, for example, has been known to show up and battle Peter, apropos of nothing, in elaborate fight scenes that mimic movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and stretch for more than a minute.

The show's tangents are intentional, but in no way intended to advance plot. MacFarlane admits that sometimes vignettes are inserted into an episode just to fill time, or just because they're good for a laugh, regardless of plot relevance. As a result, Family Guy is easily digested in bite-size portions -- the breakout gags, like the musical numbers, can be watched in isolation, at any time, and still work. This makes MacFarlane's show especially well suited to the Internet and mobile devices -- perfect for viewing during a boring history lecture or on the dreary commute home on the 5:07 to Ronkonkoma.

Easily masticated comedy -- plus a fervent audience of college kids in baggy cargo shorts bursting with disposable income and electronics -- also made MacFarlane a natural fit for Google. In September, the first of 50 bizarro animated shorts by MacFarlane appeared online. Seth MacFarlane's "Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy," distributed by Google via its AdSense network, is a series of Webisodes that MacFarlane describes as edgier versions of New Yorker cartoons come to life. Running from 30 seconds to just over two minutes, the shorts are sponsored by advertisers and noteworthy for a host of reasons. For fans, they are MacFarlane's first non-TV venture and so exist outside the reach of censors and network suits and introduce a universe of entirely new characters. For the entertainment industry, they mark the first experiments with a bold new method of content distribution (and the entry of the beast Google into its world). This purportedly unsophisticated hack comic now finds himself, in some ways by accident, at the intersection of advertising, television, and the Web -- all of which are blurring together.

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that while a MacFarlane product like Family Guy may seem slapdash when you're watching it, the creative process behind it is decidedly sophisticated. "He's kind of a modern-day cross between George Lucas and Norman Lear," says his manager, John Jacobs. "He thinks on a big canvas."

Says Norman Lear himself, a man who was once also the highest-paid creator on TV: "I'm crazy about him and his work. I can't think of anybody doing a better job right now of mining the foolishness of the human condition."

*****

A Family Guy episode is more or less a nine-month undertaking, from first script to finished animation. All episodes take shape in the writers room on the third floor of an unremarkable office building on Wilshire Boulevard, home to MacFarlane's Fuzzy Door Productions. It's pretty much as you'd imagine: a conference table surrounded by rolling chairs and covered in computer monitors, action figures, and the assorted detritus of the comedy writer's diet: soft-drink cans, candy wrappers, half-finished bags of beef jerky. MacFarlane takes a chair in front of a dry-erase board as his 16 writers stagger in drinking coffee and stabbing at cups of fruit. One of them asks the boss how a concert he'd seen the night before had gone, and when MacFarlane complains about the bathroom lines, the guy suggests he stick to "lesbian shows, like the Indigo Girls."

The typical episode begins with a single writer producing a script, but then the whole team gets involved, dissecting each scene and line to decide if a) it's actually funny and b) it can be made funnier. In a loose but laborious process, each gag gets chewed over ad infinitum in this peanut-gallery forum. The goal is to produce an episode overstuffed with jokes -- something that gives fans plenty to discuss late at night on bulletin boards. "I think we're the most joke-per-minute show on television," asserts executive producer David Goodman.

This late-summer afternoon, the challenge is to fill out a scene in which Stewie and some friends are at nursery school. Ideas are tossed out in various impressions of Stewie's voice: There's a molestation joke, some poop jokes, a joke about a rogue chicken because, according to the writer who pitches it, "chickens just wander around the yard at some schools."

"Is that safe?" MacFarlane asks. "Aren't chickens aggressive and, like, poke your eyes out?"

Anyone can speak, and jokes are called out with no introduction. MacFarlane sits up front, along with Goodman, reclining in his seat and appearing in no way dictatorial. He'll chime in, but his input seems no more or less important than anyone else's. "If the writers in that room don't laugh -- it's not going on," says Goodman. "That's a tough room. If we laugh, it's probably funny."

The prevailing meta-joke about Stewie is that, despite being an infant, he is the most intellectual character on the show, even if the only family member who can hear him speak is Brian the dog.

"Stewie could wear a cop hat and go up to a white girl standing with a black kid and say, 'Are you okay, miss?' " one writer suggests.

Awkward, almost embarrassed laughs break out around the table. It's a joke that could be viewed as offensive, or as fairly pointed social criticism. A digression on race follows, before everyone moves on to another idea, about toddlers as obnoxious art critics picking apart one another's finger paintings.

There isn't a comedy writers room in America where the banter doesn't often veer toward extreme subjects. The difference with this crew is that the extremes are the goal. Watch enough Family Guy and you'll almost certainly see something that makes you cringe; it might not offend you personally, but you can imagine how someone won't find it funny. Family Guy savages politicians and celebrities, and is more than willing to tackle all manner of touchy subjects in the name of comedy -- race, Islam, Christianity (Jesus is a recurring character, because FCC rules stipulate you cannot use "Jesus Christ" as an exclamation unless the deity himself is present), homosexuality, bestiality, pedophilia, the physically impaired. A favorite example tossed out by opponents is a sight gag that involved a JFK Pez dispenser in which the candy emerged from a hole in the president's head. (MacFarlane later admitted that maybe, just maybe, that one crossed the line.)

MacFarlane doesn't argue with the notion that many of his jokes border on offensive, but the notion that the content is actually offensive irks him. Each episode is vetted by a team of Fox censors editing with the FCC in mind. But beyond that, he contends, "There's an enormous amount of self-policing that goes on and a lot of intelligent conversations about whether a show is worth doing. I would stack the ethics of one of my writers up against the average Washington bureaucrat on censorship any day." MacFarlane is mystified in particular by the two things that most upset the FCC -- two basic elements of human life that, in his view, are far less sensitive than, say, religion. "For the FCC, it's sexual references," he says. "But even more than that, shit jokes. Any time we even show somebody on a toilet, we get in trouble."

MacFarlane doesn’t argue with the notion that his jokes border on offensive. But the notion that they are actually offensive irks him.
Which brings us back to the writers room. A source of ongoing consternation is Stewie's inability to master the commode. MacFarlane assumes the child's erudite voice and says, speaking in character to his fellow children, "I'd like to make an announcement: It's the elephant in the room. I made a stool. Now let's just all go about our business as if nothing happened, and it'll take care of itself in due time."

Most everyone in the room laughs. The joke is in.

*****

Seth MacFarlane was basically fated to this life. His middle name, Woodbury, was chosen by his mother as an homage to the town drunk back in Kent, Connecticut. "Some of the foulest jokes I've ever heard," he has said, "came from my mother." MacFarlane started drawing at 2 and published his first cartoon, "Walter Crouton," in a local paper at the age of 8. At 18, he left for the Rhode Island School of Design and, after his adviser sent his thesis film, "Life of Larry" (starring a lovable schlub with a tolerant wife and a talking dog), off to Hanna-Barbera, he was hired to work as an animator and writer on shows like Dexter's Laboratory and Johnny Bravo. In 1996, he created a sequel to "Life of Larry" that aired in prime time on the Cartoon Network. Fox development executives took notice and hired him away to work on interstitials to run between sketches on Mad TV.

A few years later, Fox asked MacFarlane, then 25, to develop an animated pilot, giving him a scant $50,000 to do it. MacFarlane emerged three months later with a nearly completed pilot, for which he had drawn every frame and voiced every character.

Fox bought the show, gave MacFarlane a reported $2-million-per-season contract, and premiered Family Guy in the highest-profile slot possible, following the 1999 Super Bowl. He was the youngest person ever to be given his own primetime network show.

It drew 22 million viewers but then became a sort of network foster child. For the next two years, Fox execs moved the show all over the schedule, trying it in 11 time slots, including in the death zone opposite Friends. Despite the fact that Family Guy tracked well with young men, the show's ratings were low. Fox canceled it in 2000, revived it briefly the next year, then canceled it again.

But a funny thing happened. The show lived on over at the Cartoon Network, with even edgier versions specially edited by MacFarlane. Regard for the show was so low that Fox essentially gave the Cartoon Network the first 50 episodes for free; Fox simply asked for promotion of the show's DVD in exchange. (They were having trouble persuading retailers to stock it -- another in a list of miscalculations that seems inconceivable in retrospect.) Family Guy's audience, ignored at every turn, followed the show to the Cartoon Network, dug in, and swelled, regularly beating both Letterman and Leno in the desirable young-male demographic. When Fox released the first 28 episodes on a series of DVDs in 2003, it sold more than 2.5 million copies. (In 2005, a straight-to-DVD movie called Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story sold about 3.5 million copies, bringing in almost $80 million.)

Twentieth Century Fox TV president Gary Newman (now chairman) summoned MacFarlane to his office in 2004 and did the unthinkable: He asked him to restart production. "I had gone into the meeting not knowing why I was going in there," MacFarlane recalls. "He said, 'We'd like to put this back into production,' and I almost fell out of my chair."

David Goodman says that when Family Guy was initially canceled, MacFarlane told him Goodman's job would be safe if it ever returned. "I'd been on 14 canceled TV shows," Goodman recalls. "They never come back. It's never happened before -- ever."

Fox brought the show back in a big way, ordering 35 episodes (22 is typical) and handing over the Sunday-at-9 slot, where it boomed. The 100th episode aired in November of 2007, pushing the show into syndication. Though schedules vary, Family Guy airs up to 27 times a week in a single market, with reruns on Fox, TBS, the Cartoon Network, and in 20 major markets on channels owned by Tribune Broadcasting.

"Animation is something that, if it works, it's more profitable for a studio than any other show," MacFarlane says. People don't buy Everybody Loves Raymond T-shirts, but they do buy shirts bearing the devious visage of Stewie, as well as action figures, stickers, posters, and video games. Increasingly, they also buy song clips and ring tones. And Fox, which owns the show, also owns the intellectual property (but kicks a percentage of sales back to MacFarlane). Reports have valued the Family Guy franchise at as much as $1 billion. Though neither Fox nor MacFarlane's team would confirm that number, a little back-of-the-envelope math indicates that it is overly conservative. At a reported $2 million per episode, Family Guy has garnered at least $400 million up front from syndication. DVD sales have totaled almost another $400 million, while 80 licensees have contributed at least $200 million from sales of various clothing and baubles, actual and digital. Fox's ad revenue off Family Guy can be estimated at at least $500 million over the years. "Suffice it to say, with it being a studio-owned show, and being on the Fox network, it's of substantial value," Newman told me. And none of this figures in revenue from MacFarlane's other hit product, American Dad.

Team MacFarlane, of course, also recognized the value of what MacFarlane has brought to the network. By the time negotiations on a new contract began more than two years ago, the challenge for both sides was how to put a number on MacFarlane's worth, considering that he isn't just a writer-producer but also an animator and actor. MacFarlane's team felt the need to let his contract expire, "to have him on the open market," explains one of his representatives. For more than two years, MacFarlane worked on Family Guy in good faith, without a contract. "There were a couple days when I was 'sick,' " MacFarlane says. "At times, that helps bring the negotiations back when they're stalled."

When the writers strike broke out last year, he sided with the guild and walked off the set. Fox decided to go forward and edit episodes without MacFarlane's participation -- they did own them, after all. MacFarlane called it a "colossal dick move." When asked about it now, he says it's a sore that's been salved ($100 million has a way of doing that). "They gave us money to go back and edit the shows the way we wanted, and we made nice."

One Fox-inflicted bruise that has yet to fade involves shots taken at Family Guy by The Simpsons, a show that MacFarlane says he admires greatly. Most famously, in an episode called "Treehouse of Horror," Homer creates a sea of clones even dumber and more dim-witted than himself. One of these is Family Guy's Peter Griffin. MacFarlane decided to return fire. He wrote a joke in which Peter's perverted friend Quagmire attacks and molests Marge Simpson. Fox, he says, nixed the idea. "They said, 'We want the feuds to end.' I thought it was very conspicuous that this came about only when we decided to hit them back."

What did he do? He left it in anyway, and delivered the edit to Fox, which then edited it out. "It's still a sore point," MacFarlane says. "It's still this wound that has never quite healed that says, 'We don't value you quite as much,' which I can't imagine is true, but ..." The thought trails off and, perhaps realizing that it's best not to follow this logic, he turns a corner. "To be fair to Fox -- for the most part, creatively they have been a very easy company to work with. This was kind of a rare lapse in judgment."

*****

MacFarlane's contract hiatus didn't just buy him leverage with Fox; it was an expansion opportunity. While the studio was noodling on the deal, MacFarlane's management team went out and signed him up with Google. The resulting "Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy" is outside the bounds of the Fox relationship. "In a completely perfect world," Dana Walden, chairman of 20th Century Fox Television, has said, "he wouldn't be able to do that."

He did. The idea stemmed from conversations between MacFarlane's lawyer and agent and representatives of Media Rights Capital, an L.A.-based multimedia financier. Loosely tied to the talent agency Endeavor (which reps MacFarlane, naturally), MRC partners with content creators -- whether that's director Alejandro González Iñárritu on Babel; or Sacha Baron Cohen on his next film, Bruno; or MacFarlane -- giving them funding and a share in ownership, plus creative control.

MacFarlane produced the Cavalcade shorts with a team of six writers. The animation is instantly recognizable as his, as is the humor. The shorts lean heavily on pop culture (say, "Fred and Barney Try to Get Into a Club," which is fairly self-explanatory); they're rude (in one, Tara Reid's grotesque belly flab talks); and of course, they're crude (a boy is told he is adopted by two parents with nipples that stick out of their chests like javelins; his name, they tell him, is not Michael Sticknipples but rather Albert Horsefeet Turdsneeze -- whereupon the boy sneezes a turd that sprouts horse feet and gallops off).

The Cavalcade shorts are also distributed in an innovative way: targeting young males where they lurk by popping up in ad windows on sites such as Maxim.com and Fandango.com (while simultaneously appearing on YouTube). "The idea is not to drive someone to a Web site but to make content available wherever the audience will be," explains Dan Goodman, president of digital at MRC.

Also unprecedented is the way MacFarlane is being paid. MRC is not Fox; it can't just write him a nine-figure check. Instead, MacFarlane's status as an equity partner in the deal entitles him to split the ad revenue with Google and MRC. Because the whole idea is new, it's hard to draw parallels to current entertainment and marketing models but, essentially, MRC provides the funding and sells the ad partnerships, MacFarlane provides the content, and Google serves as distribution outlet, providing the "broadcast" via its AdSense network. Then all three split the proceeds. It can, and will, be replicated with other content providers. Already, MRC is working with the Disney Channel's Raven-Symoné on kids-targeted programming. You could easily imagine it with, say, Rachael Ray.

Each Cavalcade short carries a single advertiser. The first 10 were bought by Burger King, and -- in yet another unprecedented move -- MacFarlane animated the company's ads for them. It's an option available to any of the sponsors if they choose to pay extra for it.

For Burger King, the appeal was obvious. "Seth's fan base intersects squarely with our audience of young men and women," says Brian Gies, vice president of marketing impact for Burger King. In other words, MacFarlane's comedy provides a very powerful and friendly connection to a very targeted audience, one that tends to get the munchies. Says Google's Levy: "We know where to find them, and we're putting the advertising in an environment they're comfortable in."

"The idea is to take the TV experience and provide it on the Web," says Alex Levy, Google's director of branded entertainment. "But brought to the people you want to reach, when, where, and how you want to reach them." For a company that likes to say it's not in the content business, that's a remarkable statement. Google, in essence, is trying to use its ad-distribution network to turn content distribution upside down. (Google calls it the Content Network.)

There's no guarantee the new model is going to stick, of course -- advertisers could decide they get as much value by just buying regular Web ads and avoid paying extra. But early returns showed viewers were responding well to the shorts. In its first days, Cavalcade was the most-watched channel on YouTube, and the videos racked up 5.5 million views across the various sites running them. And MacFarlane wins no matter what. Unlike his Family Guy characters, every horny frog and lusty princess and sarcastic talking bear created for Cavalcade is owned by him, and can be deployed for future revenue. And for all this, he has zero financial risk.

*****

A couple of years ago, MacFarlane nearly worked himself to death. He collapsed at his desk and was rushed to the hospital. He was sick, he says, and "didn't have the time to stop." So he passed out right there under the Sound of Music poster. He ended up spending, as he tells it, "a lovely afternoon at the emergency room."

"We've been behind schedule on Family Guy since day one," he explains. "In reality, you can't do a prime-time animated show in the time allotted, so that always puts a glaze of stress over the whole process." He takes a breath. "I refuse to let that control my life. I did that in my twenties. Now I insist on a balance."

MacFarlane has handed off the day-to-day control of both American Dad and The Cleveland Show, and he is increasingly delegating on Family Guy. He reviews all the drawings and obsesses more than a little over the music -- there is some stuff he just can't give up. And what's easy to forget is that MacFarlane is also the star of Family Guy. Actually, several stars of Family Guy. He voices three of the six main characters, and is in virtually every scene, sometimes playing several parts at once. He's also the voice of Quagmire, a major secondary player, and hundreds of ancillary characters and one-timers. And, of course, he's the voice of Stan, the lead on American Dad, and almost certain to guest-star often on The Cleveland Show. This summer, he showed up as a voice actor in Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II and is very soon planning to step in front of the camera in live-action projects. He also intends to direct movies.

One afternoon in August, MacFarlane and two sound engineers are in the tiny control room outside the recording booths in the Family Guy offices. In strolls the actor Gary Cole wearing shorts and sunglasses. For a show that likes to pick on celebrities, Family Guy has little trouble attracting them, especially those whose résumés include the kind of wonderfully awful performances that ultimately get embraced as cult in-jokes: Drew Barrymore, Haley Joel Osment, Gene Simmons, Bob Costas, Phyllis Diller ... Michael Clarke Duncan was in earlier this morning. Richard Dreyfuss is due to arrive this evening.

Cole has done the show 23 times. Today, he's doing Mike Brady, reprising a role he played in The Brady Bunch Movie. In this script, Mr. Brady is verbally abusing Mrs. Brady in one of those trademark pop-culture tangents.

"You know, you can really go as loud as you want," MacFarlane says in director mode. "We've never heard Mike Brady yell before, so this is new territory." He then assumes the role of Carol Brady.

"Huh, I don't remember asking for a warm beer," Cole says, his voice quiet but seething.

MacFarlane, as Carol, flips out: "I didn't want to quit working -- you made me!"

Five minutes later, Cole exits and MacFarlane is off to the next thing, laying down lines in furious fashion, typically in three or four takes, which he then selects from on the fly. His sound engineers tag his favorite takes and move on. He swaps from voicing Stewie to Peter to Quagmire to various odd parts, including a bit as Paul McCartney and another as Vince Vaughn.

Next up: A writer is doing Patrick Swayze, who is not, as you might expect, the butt of a cancer joke, but rather a tight-jeans joke followed by repeated takes of the writer growling, as throaty redneck Swayze, "Roadhouse!" It's another one of those cult jokes, a little snippet of Dada theater.

"Even a hair more badass," MacFarlane directs, and over and over they go until that one simple word becomes absurd in its own right. You can already hear it as a ring tone.

Josh Dean wrote about the legal woes of Bodog CEO Calvin Ayre in July/August.


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