GOLDBERG FIRED
DONOVAN PROMOTED
CHARLOTTE COTTON
10pm Damascus, April 24th, 2017
12am Van Nuys, April 24th, 2017
7pm Tuvalu, April 25th, 2017
Fake Newsroom Executive Editor Jim Goldberg's vanishing act.
In today's media-obsessed art world, it's hard to imagine one of its celebrities successfully disappearing without a trace. But believe it or not, the once bustling Fake Newsroom office today was a silent scene of pictorial devastation, with its second Editor-in-Chief, Jim Goldberg, nowhere to be found. The infamous “picture man” was last glimpsed at the Minnesota Street Project close to midnight on Saturday April 22nd, swiftly exiting the building’s service entrance clutching an animatronic cat “I’m the Boss” desk ornament and an unlit cigar.
According to one source, Goldberg “routinely” disappears, and allegedly went missing just a few months ago after his semi-professional karaoke team suspected that he lip sync’d his way through the 1984 Jennifer Rush ballad The Power of Love during a crucial tournament match. About three hours after fellow chanteuses had posted their "Karaoke Goldberg Is Missing! Reward Offered" amber alert, a sighting was tweeted of Goldberg well and fine, in Los Angeles. Hoorah for social media networks!
Two years ago, Goldberg disappeared for about six days after telling people he was going to Steidlville in Germany to print his next book. It remains unclear whether Goldberg spent the entire “lost week” in Chile acquiring the rare Araucana breed of chickens noted for its blue eggshell, or on an American road trip odyssey in search of its derivative, the Ameraucana - still a novelty breed at the time of the Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s original Newsroom in 1983.
Goldberg’s wildest “disappear/reappear” incident happened in 1991 after he was fired just one day into the production of Gerardo‘s MTV video for Rico Suave. According to Rolling Stone magazine, Goldberg was supposed to be escorted onto a speedboat from the remote set on Jupiter Island, but when the boat arrived in Miami, Goldberg was not on board. A concerned Gerardo discovered him about a month later, "living rough in Jupiter’s nature reserve, surviving on coconuts and turtles, along with his considerable personal stash of casava."
Throughout the Bay Area today, Goldberg’s friends and observers speculated on whether his disappearance is his cunning plan to swerve the prospect of a tough analysis of his editorship of the Fake Newsroom, or if a more sinister conspiracy is to blame. It is well known that Goldberg was determined to avoid the firing fate of his predecessor, children’s entertainer Jason Fulford. But the clues to Goldberg’s vanishing seem for many to constellate around Saturday’s late afternoon proceedings, following Robert J. Rosenthal’s impressively personal account of the trajectory of investigative journalism into our present day era of fake news. At 4pm, visitors and staff of the Fake Newsroom congregated to experience three remarkable female clairvoyant’s careful reading of the fake news climate. While these talented psychic seers were adamant that they were not able to predict the future, time and time again in their hour-long visualization they were prophetic of what can now be seen as the undercurrents that pushed Goldberg too far. One audience member recounted how the session began with “visions of puny stick men, gesturing wildly and compulsively trying to gain control of the muddy “ego pit” in which they were trapped.” Into this psychic reading of the Newsroom - symbolically filled with an awful lot of clutter left lying around by the diminutive man boys - a clarifying, intelligent, and generous female energy made its hopeful presence set against the sound of “millions of women smacking their palms against their foreheads”.
The post-clairvoyant atmosphere at the Fake Newsroom was highly charged, added to by the affect of the newsroom team’s conspicuous consumption of a serious amount of excellent donuts donated by the wondrous Kelly Sultan (who, significantly, filed her Fake Newsroom story by 5pm, having remained classily un-phased by the muddy mis-en-scene). Goldberg was found huddled in a corner erasing the newsworthy faces of present-day “men of mark” with whiteout paint and charcoal, in a disturbing act of erasure and expunging from history, perhaps signally Goldberg’s impending vanishing. At 6pm, pastor’s daughter Dru Donovan walked into the newsroom mayhem, bringing with her a we’ve-had-enough-of-these-boys-messing-about attitude and a transparent strategy for a “gynocratic coup d’état”. Expect an open house for the final week of the Fake Newsroom Femokratie.
[Photo: Ruby Goldberg]