Back in December, Page Six reported that Discovery Channel's Into The Unknown host Josh Bernstein had been "disciplined" by Explorers Club president Lorie Karnath for accepting tickets from Rolex to his own club's annual dinner. Other members were furious and cited the move by Ms. Karnath as a power-play.

Today, an Outside Magazine piece (brilliantly titled "BATTLE OF THE BIG SWINGING PICKS" of course) further details the internal machinations and warring of the club, members of which thought the Josh Bernstein incident was yielded by another a "breaking point" in which Ms. Karnath reportedly desecrated the club's highest honors with favoritism (thus cheapening its legacy).

A number of club officials had been upset with Karnath for a while, stewing over what they call a capricious management style that has alienated members and sponsors alike.

Ms. Karnath is only the second female president in the club's history, and has reportedly brought it into the 21st Century. She has also, under her reign, seen The Explorers Club take their self-seriousness to new heights by inducing paranoia in members.

From the Outside Magazine piece (emphasis ours):

On a cold afternoon in early January, I met with a high-level Explorers Club official at a restaurant in Manhattan. This person, who asked not to be named, was worried that his cell phone was bugged. During our conversation, he kept glancing anxiously at an older woman several tables away, fearing that she could be a Karnath spy. “I’ve never seen anything like the way it is now,” the official said. “If you ask a simple question, you’re immediately thrown before the ethics committee or slammed down. What happened with Josh was a monkey trial.”

In short, the entire thing is nuts. It's like The Life Aquatic meets War of the Roses with some Archer thrown in for good measure. So today, seemingly in response to the Outside Magazine piece, The Explorers Club's 'Honorary Chairman' Jim Fowler sent a message to the entirety of The Explorers Club membership.

In the letter, Mr. Fowler calls the fiasco a "mess" that "continues to eat away at [The Explorers Club's] prestige and reputation" and that "something must be done quickly."

Also, "the bickering over 'who said what' and public exposure of the Club's disputed internal affairs (most would call it 'dirty laundry') must stop." We suppose the source who leaked this to The Observer would disagree. If anything is clear by the memorandum we've pasted in full below (emphasis ours), it's that a solution to the mess at The Explorers Club is worth further exploring, if there's anything left of it by the time their internal warring ends.

Highlights:

February 24, 2012
Jim Fowler
Honorary Chairman, The Explorers Club

A Call for Action to Our Members from Honorary Chair, Jim Fowler:

The mess at The Explorers Club has obviously not been resolved and continues to eat away at its prestige and reputation. Something must be done quickly, before the Annual Dinner in March, or else that important event, which should be a salute to our membership, will be adversely affected.

Above all, the mission of the membership, the President, the Board, staff, the Honorary directors, Honorary president and Honorary chairman is to protect the credibility of The Explorers Club first, not last. This has not been the case. The action of a few has seriously hurt the reputation of our Club. In fact, if one really believes in the value of The Explorers Club there can’t be anything more important than protecting the respect the members have for the Club, its prestige and long-term sustainability.

Our President has been unfairly criticized since the beginning of her first term, over two and a half years ago, by a small minority of board members who are apparently seeking personal gain. In spite of this negative atmosphere which no President should have to endure, Club events have been well organized, important improvements made to the Lowell Thomas Building, and a spirit of exploration backed by an enthusiastic membership continues. None the less the individuals who have initiated the criticism are apparently eager and willing to damage the reputation of the Club.

First, the bickering over “who said what” and public exposure of the Club’s disputed internal affairs (most would call it “dirty laundry”) must stop. If a board member of any club, corporation, institution or business anywhere in this country spoke out publicly against their organization or administration, they would be expelled forthwith. Discussions and dissent are, of course, welcome as long as the subject is expressed in an atmosphere of honesty and an attempt to solve problems, not to make them worse. Specifically, if a board member threatens to bring suit against the Club for whatever reason, he or she should resign from their membership immediately.

For a Board Member or Club Member to put their own personal agenda before their duty to protect the prestige and reputation of The Explorers Club by going public with their inflammatory comments, shows they have lost perspective or do not respect the Club and its mission.

Several events that precipitated the current state of conflict simply show that some of these participants have lost their perspective and have allowed personal agendas to take precedent over protecting the welfare of the Club and its Members.

Bickering over who gets what medal is immature and unnecessary. This kind of discussion should be solved through thoughtful discussion and “give and take”, not through threats of resignation by the Flag and Honors Committee that could and in fact has hurt the Club. The bickering over the award of a medal to the point of threatened resignation diminishes the value and prestige of the Flag and Honors Committee and is therefore counter-productive.

Pursuing personal, extremely vengeful vendettas that result from minor conflicts such as “who is the main speaker at one of the smaller dinners”, is simply out of place and by “going public” does nothing but to help to destroy the Club by dissention.

Individuals who seek to create a “divided camp” should have had the better sense to know it would cause severe damage to the Club. By supporting those individuals who are so critical of their fellow members on the internet, or who “bad mouth” the Club to the press about our internal differences they continue to hurt the reputation and prestige of the Club. Put plainly, their actions jeopardize the Club’s credibility with our sponsors and weaken the support of our membership. Supporters who give credibility to those few who have gone public should know they, too, are hurting the Club.

A sensible solution to the problem would be for the Club’s Ethics Committee to request that these few Board Members resign from the Board and the Club before the Annual Dinner. That request should “clear the air” and underscore to all that the Club is once again functioning properly.

The derogatory remarks about the Club and its internal affairs, publicly, should never be tolerated. The honorable thing for the dissenters to do in this case, if they have any integrity at all, is to offer to resign. Their refusal to do so would again reflect their lack of respect for the Club.

It is my fervent hope our President will run for office again. When the facts become better known about the triteness of the dissenters, their methods and the serious damage they have inflicted on the Club, all Board members should vote for her. Lorie Karnath is devoted to the Club and has brought much success to it in spite of the few detractors and their hurtful actions. I am behind her all the way. Most importantly, we can’t sacrifice our reputation and lose members over this current state of affairs. We need to lose the people who caused the problem; the ones who went public.

"Long live The Explorers Club" and for all it stands.

Jim Fowler, Honorary Chairman

Huzzah?

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Illo: Zina Saunders

If you really want to hear about it, the first things you’ll probably want to know are whether gray is my favorite color, whether I’m more comfortable in briefs or boxers, and if I was the one who tweeted that crude portrait from coast to coast. Well, no, I prefer maroon, in loose-fitting boxers, and of course not. I don’t have a Twitter account, and I’m not on Facebook. I have no interest in being posted, tweeted or “liked.” (Have I even been “liked”?) My friends at the gym are all jealous. A lot of them yearn for this kind of exposure. But just because I’m attached to a public figure doesn’t mean I want to be out there like the guy on the cover of Sticky Fingers. Like my favorite authors, I hate having my picture taken.

A yfrog comes across the sky, and I’ve been screaming ever since. I haven’t been in this much pain since the day of our bris. You try to live your life with a certain dignity. You spend a lot of your days holding it all in, sacrificing your own comfort out of a sense of duty on the campaign trail or in some committee hearing. In private, when the lights are out, you try to stand tall when called to serve.

I can’t believe we missed Israel Day because of all this!

I’d just as soon we did resign. I hate D.C. You sweat too much. You forge marriages of convenience. You rally around the consensus, one consensus or another. Call it the consensus of the heather-gray cotton boxer-brief—the bipartisan compromise of the undergarment world. Nobody’s honest here. In fact, the day-to-day fakery is so rampant that otherwise upstanding individuals retreat to the Internet to say disgusting things to strangers half a continent away, dream up ill-fated mayoral campaigns and take pictures of parts of themselves that never agreed to be photographed in the first place.

I’ll be happy when we’re back in Queens. I’ll be happy when my privacy’s restored in the private sector. Maybe then we can focus on what really matters in life: dignity, by which I mean having a social life healthy and genuine enough that those close to you are not tempted to resort to transcontinental electronic communication for gratification; seclusion, by which I mean nobody cares about you or what color your underwear is; and comfort, by which I mean constant proximity to a clean lavatory and some maroon silk boxer shorts.

editorial@observer.com

Lists. Lists of lists. Lists of the greatest lists of lists. Lists of the most powerful lists of the greatest lists of lists. Lists of the lists that shook the lists that shaped the lists that changed the world forever. I should make a list of these lists. Or someone should make it for me. I wonder if I could get an OmniList iPhone app for my BlackBerry?

Photography. Pictures. The image. It just has to pop. I said it before when I started Talk, and I'll say it again now, no one so uniquely embodies our present moment of revolutionary transformation--a moment like no other--as Hillary Clinton. She is the very metabolism of the now.

Paper. Ink. Pages. My favorite page in our new issue is the "NewsBeast/DataBeast" page. Isn't it beastly? Pages, in my experience, become more powerful and relevant the more slugs you stick on them. You've got to tell the reader what they're looking at, and avoid alienating them by making them feel beholden to read the text. The genius of the concept of multiple points of entry is to make the reader feel they've done the work of reading several articles merely by looking at a layout of headlines and doodads while reading precisely nothing. That is the philosophy underlying our entire "NewsBeast" section, and nowhere is it better realized than on the "DataBeast" page. Plus, I just wanted a page that said "Beast" twice, and so far there has been resistance from my staff to the idea of installing a regular feature on pets and wild animals called BeastBeast. Oh my! Beast! Beast! Beast! Beast! Beast! Beast! Beast! Crackling!

Hiring. Staff. People. Sometimes I sit up at night wondering, Who is the most brilliant hire I've made so far? Michelle Cottle? I love her Southern drawl! Whenever she drops into my office, it's like we have William Faulkner or Huey Long on staff. Andrew Sullivan? BeastDish! DishBeast! Dieasht! Peter Boyer? Since I hired him, I've received so many odd "Thank You" notes from New Yorker subscribers begging me to hire Malcolm Gladwell as well. I should do it. Malcolm is the one writer in English language who perfectly embodies my theories of multiple points of entry in his prose--you never have to look past the subhead to know what he'll say. Soon I'll have him. But what of my other electrifying hires? When you narrow it down, the going really gets tough! Howard Kurtz or Joanne Lipman? Howard Kurtz or Joanne Lipman? Howard Kurtz or Joanne Lipman? In Howie you have a genius of interviewing who knows how to make an interviewee say exactly what you know he's thinking even if he has no idea whom he's talking to. And Joanne created the brilliant, crackling, zeitgeisty, buzz juggernaut we remember as Condé Nast Portfolio, a masterpiece multiplicity of a 1,000 entry points of light. The only title you can talk about in the same breath is Talk.

Party time! I must be off! Somewhere on the Upper West Side there's an opening for a tin of sardines!

I will need an apartment. I have heard that the co-op boards in New York City are more of a pain in the ass than the prosecutors at the Hague. I do not need to be browbeaten about so-called human-rights violations, supposedly bombed airplanes, or the Munich Olympics by some imperious charity-lunch-going lawyer's wife who happens to have a sinecure as co-op president. People have told me it's best to buy a residence at the Plaza, preferably one with a private lobby. These start at $2.5 million, which for me is like eating a Happy Meal, or ordering up a squadron of Cuban mercenaries. I looked into it and found out that the Plaza itself can be had for $400 million. Fine--$59.6 billion left.

It would be my preference to decorate it with the work of a truly revolutionary artist; I'm told a blue period Picasso goes for $100 million. I will take 10. I will need to be amused in the city by games of sport, so I will budget $858 million--Fred Wilpon called me to borrow the sum when he was first interested. I like to have an emporium at my disposal, so I will take Macy's for $10 billion. About $38.6 billion to go.

Propaganda has always been crucial to me, and I find newspapers more effective than this thing called the Web. What better than The New York Times for $2 billion. First thing I do is fire David Brooks, then Sam Tannenhaus, then Maureen Dowd, and I hire a bunch of pliant Nation interns to run the op-ed page. A year's worth of one digital display in Times Square costs $87 million. I will take two dozen. That leaves $34.6 billion

My living quarters should be sufficient, but I like to have a place to camp out in my tent with my family and about a hundred nurses. I have priced Central Park at $528,783,552,000. That is too much, by a factor of 10. But I am told the Tavern on the Green can be had for a mere $20 million. That should fit my family. As for my loyalists and my garrison, I have secured them Stuyvesant Town for $6.3 billion and the Intrepid aircraft carrier for $4.5 billion. Your Mayor Bloomberg is worth $18 billion. I am three and a half Bloombergs. I will buy five of your elections for a mere half-billion dollars. After all this I have $23.5 billion left. Seven billion dollars should be enough for ground zero, and with the rest I can construct the world's fanciest mosque.

My crotch is a zone of mystery. It is at once a locus of force and a void. It is the site of the eighth type of ambiguity, one William Empson could never have dreamed up. My crotch is not a metaphor; you can't say that it's like anything else. It is not a place where meanings are resolved or a context that connects two ideas for which there is one word, like box, which can mean container or punch. My crotch will never make clear your complicated state of mind. You'll always be as confused as the writers who write about me, like Camille Paglia, who called me the end of sex, when I am merely its continuation, or at least my crotch is. Or is it? My crotch is silent on the matter, and no idea you invent will help you. My crotch and I are united, and the ambiguity is endless.

I am the vanishing mediator, but the lady never vanishes. My vulgarity is polished enough to abolish class. My ass manifests itself in stages of subjection, alienation, paranoia, narcissism and revolution. Its functional value is scatological, its exchange value colossal, its symbolic value conjugal, its sign value nonsensical.

Some have called me a crypto-normativist, clutching tight to the very Enlightenment I claim to be tearing to shreds. The truth, or should I say, the Real, is otherwise. What little is left of the so-called Enlightenment lies prostrate at the mercy of me.

Either all that, or I'm just a nice Catholic girl who went to Sacred Heart.

The principle components of "James Franco" are:

1 Screen actor "James Franco": original source of multi-Franconian notoriety predicated on pseudo-Fonz-ian television role on abortive but retroactively nostalgia-inducing proto-Apatovian vehicle Freaks and Geeks. Yields: subsequent roles in major non-Apatovian motion pictures including superhero franchises, romantic foil opportunities involving fame-enhancers Julia Roberts and Sean Penn, and lately Oscar-friendly leads portraying pre-famous literary genius (see below) and hardship-endurance via self-amputation and ensuing sympathetic disability. Hazards: superficiality and lingering unrequited crush on circa-1999 Linda Cardellini.

2 Fiction writer "James Franco": author of largely unread story collection often enlisted by legitimate mentors (cf. Gary Shteyngart), garnered at prestige-bestowing institutions, in attempts, desperate on their part, generous on our part, at mutual self-promotion. Yields: reputation for "authenticity," opportunity for student to live under constant low-level scrutiny within a major metropolitan area drawing media attention merely for pursuing previously glamorous vocation. Hazards: a ream of negative reviews, one citation for "embodied bizarreness" excepted, and status in the literary consensus as "vastly inferior to Tao Lin." 

3 Entertainment mogul "James Franco": purchaser of options on trendy literary works. Yields: gratitude among less attractive impecunious author peers. Hazards: large sums of wasted money.

4 Graduate student "James Franco": candidate for Ph.D. in English, Yale; enrollee, Rhode Island School of Design. Yields: mastery of theories useful in instilling the belief that multidisciplinarity is a form of excellence. Hazards: increasingly unreadable prose style.

5 Performance artist "James Franco": exploiter of previously mentioned identities on daytime television. Yields: ironic repurposing of identity 1 before mass audience of lonely housewives. Hazards: mounting confusion.

6 Sleeping "James Franco": dreamer of dreams more terrifying than you'll ever know.

I get a little wistful when I think of my teenage home, Athens, birthplace of democracy--a system betrayed on a daily basis by our politicians. Of course, every house in Athens was run by a vast squadron of slaves. The Huffington Post is by contrast far more egalitarian. We have dozens of salaried employees; all of my assistants are paid a living wage; and those bloggers who blog without pay do so on a voluntary basis. I do not force them to blog; they are compelled to do so by the force of my charisma, and they are compensated--in memes. If you need any further evidence that they are not slaves, let me assure you that I could not sell them to Nick Denton or Carol Bartz or Tim Armstrong if I tried.

The greatest Athenian to come before me was perhaps Socrates. The journalists of his day were known as sophists. Their business model sent them in search of rich, fatuous and impressionable young men who would pay the sophists to tell them how to live, as if they were buying some kind of subscription. In a tremendous revolution, this model was overturned by Socrates, who created a new media called philosophy. Instead of asserting lessons, he would ask questions, just like a good blogger. He held his discussions in the agora, ancient Athens' version of the Internet. And his conversations were memorialized in dialogues, roughly similar to today's comment sections. His saying, "The life unexamined is not worth living," was one of the world's first memes. Socrates, however, died before he was able to monetize his revolution. Why take hemlock when you stood the chance to sell your little agora act for 315 million drachmas?

In Greek we have a wonderful word, eleutheria. It means freedom--what could be better? And under the new dispensation, AOL and the Huffington Post can offer our bloggers so many freedoms. They are free of the whims of editors. They are free of nit-picking fact-checkers. They are free of the contracts shackling so many magazine writers. They are free of the burdens implied by the payment of a wage. They are free, free at last, of the burdens of deadlines, style and grammar that turned so many journalists of the last century in places like Fleet Street and Times Square into hacks.

So much for the pharaohs, always sleeping with their daughters, erecting mausoleums and having themselves mummified in the hopes of lingering as long as I have. Alexander the Great came here under the impression that he was the son of Zeus-Ammon rather than of a Macedonian polygamist named Philip. He died in Babylon at Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, 32 years old. I don’t remember if it was poison, malaria, typhoid fever, typhoid fever complicated by perforated bowels, meningitis, pyrogenic spondylitus, West Nile virus or just too many years of heavy drinking. It doesn’t much matter. All men wither and die. Even great dictators. And especially two-bit penny-ante dictators who survive by doing the bidding of their occidental masters. Which is why there’s not much point in clinging to power when all of Egypt rises up against you. Get out of the desert, retire to Switzerland. I’ve never been there myself, but Napoleon told me it was nice.

My favorite was always Cleopatra. I may be a wretched half-breed with the head of a man and the body of a lion, I may be built of stone and crumbling, and my nose may have fallen off centuries ago, but I still have eyes that can appreciate beauty. And Patty—that’s what I called her, she called me Inky—had so much more than just a pretty face. Her mellifluous voice, soft as a sand dune. Her wit, as pointed as a pyramid. But for Patty power was everything. And back then power meant Romans. She slipped into Caesar’s house and seduced him. Then of course there was Antony, doomed father of her twins. Today would she set her sights on an American and woo the uxorious Barack Obama? Or would she turn to the East for a consort whose nation’s growth is accelerating, like Hu Jintao?

Revolutions aren’t so special. It seems to me they happen all the time. A regime falls, and a frenzy of hope ensues. But after a while the streets empty and people go home to eat and sleep and love and lie. Soon enough a new order emerges and with it the same corrupt spirit that pervades all human affairs. Injustice persists in prisons, palaces and slums. Avarice gnaws where it may. But none of this lasts. Tyrants are again destroyed, and empires never fail to fall.

Here’s a riddle for you: What is red, white and blue and will someday be so much dust stuck to a tourist’s shoe?

Then there's my health. Cancer could come back at any moment, but there's another, more pressing issue that-forgive me, Joe Biden-is no joke. It cuts straight to the heart of my campaign, to who I am, to what this country is all about. A specialist in thematic and historical neuropsychiatry has recently diagnosed me with a rare form of Tourette's syndrome, a strain so extreme and unprecedented that I am its only known sufferer. I've been to all the specialists and they only confirmed the original diagnosis. It is unlike typical cases of the disorder in that I suffer no motor tics and the condition developed only late in my life. Indeed before the tragic last days of my mayorship, this affliction was not possible. But there was a lot we didn't know was possible back then. We had our guard down. We were playing defense instead of offense. We had not experienced the horror of-I have been diagnosed with 9/11-Tourette's syndrome.

I cannot discuss any subject without the impulse arising in my brain, then passing to my jaw, then my tongue, compelling me to relate whatever is at hand back to those horrible attacks, or the bravery of our firefighters, or the nihilism and cowardice of the suicidal perpetrators. What do I think of Obamacare? Well, it doesn't do much to prevent the threat of another attack like those of September 11; in fact, wider access to health care may attract more potential terrorists to our shores. What do I think of the Tea Party? Well, they're fighting the good fight, putting us on offense rather than defense, and even if a few of them are a little crazy, it's nothing compared to the Islamist insanity that brought us 9/11. Sarah Palin? I don't think she can spell 9/11, let alone count it. When I'm in bed with my wife, Judith? Well, there was something undeniably phallic about the twin towers. This new show Skins? I tell you, those kids are too young to be doing those things on TV; I swear, some of them might not even have been born on 9/11. Have I seen Spider-Man? I have not, but it seems hazardous, and if there's one thing New Yorkers learned about safety on-I am a sick man.

We are born falling. We are conceived in the heavens and die in your sewers. In our presence you can never deny that beauty is terrifying. All that glows could soon grow dark. What is pure and white will soon be the filthiest puddle. You watch us fall, watch us glow in the morning sun, watch us be soiled and turn to muck, watch us melt and dribble down the drain. You watch all this and you glimpse the secrets of your own fate. You too will fall, you too will shine, you too will melt.

We are beloved by your children. The innocent know nothing of the world’s rot. Purity is for them a natural state. They fashion us into your image. Yet nothing could be as beastly as a snowman. The only thing they prefer to playing God is to plummet in their sleds, to simulate the ultimate journey--into the abyss. We break their fall, and it’s all a day in the park. But as the little ones pack us into balls and toss us in the air, as they learn the cold art of aggression, are they engaged in anything but a dress rehearsal for a carnival of carnage like the world has never seen?

You call us flakes. We hardly ever arrive on time. And when we do show up, we bring too many of our friends.

Sometimes we make you feel romantic. Walk with your lover down a street stepping a foot deep in our blanket. Fall with her into us. We are cold, but she is warm. Will she still love you when the spring comes, or will her love turn to slush? Is love like a tall tree, sometimes bright with leaves, sometimes glistening in ice, but always stable and strong? Or is love like a snowplow, something crude and blunt and always in short supply? The truth is, love is like the salt they toss on the steps. It’s coarse and unsightly, and it leaves you dirty and dry.

We are a metaphor for death. If we have not yet convinced you of that, it seems time to state it outright. 

When you look out your window upon a landscape covered by our white legions, do you think of cocaine? Do you want to get high? If so, you are a drug addict, and we sincerely advise you to seek professional help.