Is the New Yorker too hip for me now? I hated every syllable of that. Or maybe it didn't have syllables. Because of the time difference.
It's okay. Just think about what you have and haven't eaten for breakfast.
(I thought it was twice as long as it should have been and overdone in places, but it still made me laugh. The first paragraph's definitely my favorite.)
Who doesn't want a radiant sex-fairy?
I just though that people who wanted a radiant sex-fairy would be different from the people who wanted a French horn.
The">http://www.elleuk.com/life-and-culture/culture/news/a31103/the-best-twitter-reactions-to-margot-robbies-vanity-fair-interview/">The referent, I'm pretty sure.
Oh. that makes it less funny to me. YOU RUINED MY DUMB LINK, MINIVET!
So now The New Yorker is doing The Toast fanfic?
Dirtbag Tess of the d'Urbervilles was great.
I feel like I've gotten too old for the New Yorker's humor pieces. But at the same time they seem like humor for old people. How can this paradox exist?
I guess he spells it Jim Nabors. I never knew that.
Jim Nabors is a lucky man. He has lived long enough to be allowed to marry the man he loves, and he has lived long enough to see Moby spell his name correctly.
13: When you were younger you wanted to pretend to be one of the older more sophisticated people that got New Yorker humor.
Now that you're older you realize it's just stupid stuff for older people.
"An unfunny man pretending to be a funny man pretending to be an unfunny man"? It doesn't work as well as AWB's take on David Brooks.
"It's the new New Yorker! For millennials and other young people, all the comedy hijinks of your favorite blogs and Tumblr sites!"
I am glad to have visitors to my lonely planet where no comedy writing is ever, ever funny.
22: Unfogged comments never make you laugh? Or (he asked hopefully) is that an entirely different truck full of rain?
21 gets it right. What is the ETA of the longform Pokemon Go thinkpiece. Two weeks? A month?
I have laughed at comments. One can get a decent setup in a comment thread, it is true.
25: Not dead yet! And not that alone! Glad to hear that.
13 : I don't feel old, I just feel that the writer of the article exists in a completely different universe. There's no shared terms of reference. It's like reading a witty satire on the court politics of the Ming Dynasty.
I assumed the OP was self-parody until I read the link in 7. Either way, I enjoyed it. I get that the New Yorker's most worthwhile contribution to our culture is "Christ, what an asshole," but I didn't realize they were so horrible that we aren't even allowed to appreciate humor on the rare occasion they manage it. Something's wrong with all you people.
My home planet is just minding its own business out here. I don't think anyone's setting norms or withholding permissions, aside from the usual suspects with the overriding internal norms who talk like they're universal for the lulz. (No judgment! I know it's an ethos.)
And actually I may have lied, because I still laugh at the Toilet Training in One Day article, which should be fairly timely for the Babysplosionists.
Something's wrong with all you people.
Stating the obvious is usually a forgivable offense, but you could at least try to be nice about it.
no comedy writing is ever, ever funny
Correct. Are there exceptions? What's some funny writing, "comedy" or otherwise?
I like Mallory Ortberg making fun of owls and art, assuming we're sticking to current ephemera.
31: Most of the oeuvre of Douglas Adams? Christopher Moore?
The Clickhole often cracks me up.
not recognizing the name of a new sexy starlet is not a new thing for me; i have other things to do. it wasn't until i googled "Jane Neighbor" and learned that she wasn't real that i figured out that the piece was probably satire. exactly what it's satirizing is a mystery to me though.
it's as if the writer carefully designed something to make me, personally, feel old.
Clickhole is often funny. PG Wodehouse is often funny. This guy's twitter account is often funny.
exactly what it's satirizing is a mystery to me though.
Maybe you could find out by reading some of the first ten comments to this very post.
19 seems to me to be exactly right and also pretty much the only point of the New Yorker*. It's so you can put eight hundred copies of the New Yorker in your living room and then when people visit they'll know you're the sort of person who reads the New Yorker (even though, secretly like every other person who subscribes, you do not actually do much more than sort of leaf through it when it shows up, out of a sense of duty). The fascinating thing to me is that, maybe aside from people who literally live in New York and want to read the reviews/schedules for things because they watch like every movie and go out to two thirds of the shows there, that is literally its only purpose. You get to look sophisticated for being the sort of person who reads** the magazine whose only purposes is so sophisticated people can show they are sophisticated.
*Just like The Economist!
** "reads"
Also, nothing is funny if it is offered up as an example of something funny to a skeptical audience looking for unlikely evidence. IME. And plenty of nominally comic writing has virtues beyond making a person laugh out loud (elegance, cleverness) and shouldn't be condemned wholesale for failed craft.
Perhaps relatedly, I can't tell if 40 is a parody of something or not, although there are too many "literally"s for it to be serious. It might be too meta for my puny intellect. Sorry, MHPH, no need to explain the joke.
40: In college, I definitely prioritized babysitting jobs by what reading material would be left around. New Yorker plus knitting patterns = just stay out as long as you want.
Two is borderline in general, but yes, in context it seemed like a tell. Nice deadpan work, obviously.
39
no, i'm afraid that doesn't really help.
it's a response to an article by an author i don't know in a magazine i don't read about a woman i don't recognize from a movie i didn't see ?
like i said: it's trying to make me feel old.
||
The ekranoplan simulator is out! And only $12.74.
One user review in Russian (weakly positive) and one in French (pretty negative).
|>
45: you should feel young! "I'm too young to waste my time on that!"
it's a response to an article by an author i don't know in a magazine i don't read about a woman i don't recognize from a movie i didn't see ?
Yes, and "exactly what it's satirizing" is the article. Now you know. Have you seen the movie or read the article? No, neither have I, but I know what it's satirizing. I even know how to find out more if I want to.
I've seen this kind of parody better done, though having actually seen the Vanity Fair interview now, God knows it deserves parody.
For my money, Alexandre Erin really knows how to put the boots to a piece of self-indulgent drivel. (Reading the original brings home the lesson that it's funnier the less you have to exaggerate the source material.)
no, i'm afraid that doesn't really help.
I haven't read the linked article, but the Onion Stop jizzing all over journalism might provide more context.
The Alexandre Erin think Castock linked is very well done.
Uhhh The AV Club is not The Onion, Nicholas. Do try to keep up.
Something's wrong with all you people.
Mouseover text.
49.2: Maybe it's well done, but it's all too nauseating for me.
31. Thurber is funny in English. Terry Pratchett also. There is funny writing here pretty often, actually.
I think that parody with no other aim is pretty low on the ranks of humor.
The Roxane Gay tweet embedded in the link in 50 is both written and hilarious.
Just the other day I saw something (inspired by the same recent examples as AVC) that did a pretty could job of mocking (directly, not through satire) the awfulness of this sort of sexist profile. Don't recall where, sorry.
OK, I just looked at the original VF Margot Robbie piece. It's much funnier than the parody.
Just like a man. Never remembering feminist things.
Uhhh The AV Club is not The Onion, Nicholas. Do try to keep up.
I knew that, but I still mentally think of it as "The Onion AV Club." Which shows how out of touch I am, since, according to wikipedia, "in 2005--during a website redesign--its online identity grew and matured in ways that allowed it to have an identity all of its own."
60 is the first I ever heard of the separation.
56:
Agreed.
If you are going to fawn all over an actor, this is how it should be done: http://www.emilywrites.co.nz/i-saw-tarzan-and-this-is-my-review-after-some-wines/
This is the first paragraph of the VF piece. It's beyond parody!
America is so far gone, we have to go to Australia to find a girl next door. In case you've missed it, her name is Margot Robbie. She is 26 and beautiful, not in that otherworldly, catwalk way but in a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance. She is blonde but dark at the roots. She is tall but only with the help of certain shoes. She can be sexy and composed even while naked but only in character. As I said, she is from Australia. To understand her, you should think about what that means. Australia is America 50 years ago, sunny and slow, a throwback, which is why you go there for throwback people. They still live and die with the plot turns of soap operas in Melbourne and Perth, still dwell in a single mass market in Adelaide and Sydney. In the morning, they watch Australia's Today show. In other words, it's just like America, only different. When everyone here is awake, everyone there is asleep, which makes it a perfect perch from which to study our customs, habits, accents. An ambitious Australian actor views Hollywood the way the Martians view Earth at the beginning of The War of the Worlds. Which was Robbie. Auditioning and acting and studying from afar as she waited for the perfect moment, the perfect wave, which she rode from the beach in front of her town on the Australian coast all the way to the billboards along Sunset Boulevard, where her face is blown up to monstrous size in an effort to sell not one but two summer blockbusters
It is really remarkable than an editor received that and thought "yes, this is publishable.".
64 Does anyone actually read celebrity interview pieces? Editor's conclusion suggests that the answer is probably not.
65: Favorite reading material of professional parodists.
I will call it the Onion AV Club until the day I die. Or forget about it, which will probably happen first. (I suspect that by September the site will be forgettable anyway.)
48
yes, but do you know how to miss the point completely?
65. An old friend's little brother just wrote a celebrity profile piece on Bryan Cranston for the United airlines magazine. I read it and thought that it was pretty good.
I feel a duty to flip through people or InStyle when the supermarket line is long as a way of keeping in touch with my culture.
Last night I stayed up super late, watching Graham Norton clips on youtube, which was mostly celebrities, and then also various celebrities including Slavoj Žižek walk through the criterion collection's DVD racks talking about favorite films. So: yes, I read celebrity profiles, and in doing so I'm not that different from the target audience of the sloppily written Margot Robbie piece excerpted above. It's a coarsening of register rather than a difference in kind that's making everyone object.
46: The ekranoplan simulator looks like everything I dreamed such a thing would be. Excelsior, comrades!
63 is pretty amazing and does not need parody, now that I've seen it. And I thought the parody was funny.
yes, but do you know how to miss the point completely?
I'm sorry, I hadn't realized you were dropping in solely to flaunt your deliberate ignorance.
75: though only the earlier, funnier stuff.
40: That's taking it way too far. Yeah The New Yorker has come down -- what hasn't -- but not close to Economist level pseuds corner quality (see Fallows on the Colonial Cringe). And some of the TNY criticism is an ill-informed as when people used to say that Time magazine was all shit when Robert fucking Hughes was writing its art column.
63 is awful, but I liked the response better when I thought it was just hyperactively random silliness.
I love The New Yorker. The articles are great. The humor is not.
fuck fuck fuckiry fuck thus fucking year!!!! just got opponents' asinine pitch for high court review denied duck out for celebratory decaffeinated coffee because insomnia hello and absolute shit news from nice. fuck this year.
I haven't read regularly in years, but certainly up through the late aughts, Shouts & Murmurs was funny more often than not, and occasionally brilliant.
That said, we've talked about declining returns in comedy many times here. Humor moves fast, and your generation's brilliant, edgy comedy is the next generation's weirdly slow, off-tone comedy. What everyone is bemoaning may be nothing more than TNY being temporarily stuck where they were 10 years ago and/or fumbling towards the au courant (as I suggested in 10). There's nothing essential to TNY that means its humor can't be great (although it will almost always have a certain character that won't appeal to all; that's the essence of the thing).
I did watch The Wolf of Wall Street and have no memory really of Margot Robbie, probably because she's not American next door enough, or maybe because I got bored and probably wasn't paying much attention.
What the hell happened in Nice? Or are you referring to Keith Emerson, because that's old news.
I did watch The Wolf of Wall Street ... maybe because I got bored
I also found that movie strangely, incredibly boring.
That was me. I wanted to see a wealthy, respectable wolf.
Walk in the door with my brother and my two nephews to see my father watching the news on Fox. First words out OF my 13 year old nephew, "Was it Muslims? Of course it was Muslims." Fuck this year indeed.
ONCE AGAIN, IT WASN'T WOLVES
89: UGH.
Maybe you could pull up some old tape of OKC. Or Santa Barbara. Or Charleston.
Jessye Norman, Place de la Concorde, 14 juillet 1989: https://www.youtube.com/embed/1QQ2k3UpHwQ
I think that is my favorite crazy marseillaise especially for the cut aways to the bushes although there's also a fabulous version by Mireille Mathieu at Sarko's victory rally where he basically cuts her off when it looks like she's going to go on and on and on ...
I just recently got an e-subscription to the New Yorker. They got me hooked when they temporarily ungated everything.
The Jacobin article on Pokemon Go also approaches self-parody. It reduces Marxism to a subspecies of grouchy-old-man-ism.
I don't altogether agree with this but I enjoyed it a lot: https://medium.com/@jeevesmeister/dear-wearetheleft-you-are-not-the-left-d01355f274d5#.rux6658ht
97: Haven't read the whole thing, but perhaps you can direct me to the part that isn't stupid as shit.
It's interesting that terrorists haven't routinely used vehicles themselves as weapons,* since they're obviously the most lethal thing most easily available to everyone everywhere. They care more about spectacle than results, presumably.
*I guess for lack of access to weapons in China. They do kitchen-knife attacks too.
Missing "The Uighurs have been doing it for years* but seemingly no one else until now. *"
-*. FFS. I don't even have a phone to blame.
There was a case of terrorism by driving over people in Chapel Hill not very long ago. Nothing of this magnitude in terms of deaths, but the same MO.
So much for the access-to-weapons theory.
100- I am capable of empathy towards someone having an emotional reaction. If you aren't you won't be able to understand.
So now I've read the whole piece linked in 97, which is as silly as my quick skim suggested. And I've also read the article to which it is responding.
That article is pretty interesting.
This was a nice point:
Attacks on "identity politics" are not progressive. They are identity politics -- an openly conservative identity politics, aimed at delegitimizing marginalized people's concerns, and centering white, straight men in perpetuity.
That seems about right to me.
105: He may be just an exception. He didn't manage to kill anybody.
Scotland saves the UK once again. It must feel like riding a rollercoaster* over there.
*Run by clowns on acid.
Access to incompetence is universal.
97: Can I say "a pox on both their houses"?
I got like two and a half paragraphs into what you linked - that is, about 5,000 characters and what would be four printed pages, because that guy, Jeff Kunzler or Jeeves Meister or whatever, sure likes his big words - before I decided that I should read the original piece before I read the reply to it. So I followed the link to We Are The Left.
I felt like it was a good argument, very badly made. It took a scattershot approach and mixed a bunch of genuine problems in with a bunch of nutpicking, exaggeration, sob stories, completely unverifiable urban legends. It intermingled microagressions with just plain aggression, and in some sense they're the same thing, sure, but in another more relevant sense they aren't. One specific example jumps out at me: "When she confronted him... he responded with anger, dismissiveness, and gaslighting." "Gaslighting" has a specific meaning, and while it's not technically impossible to do in the middle of a panel discussion with a stranger, it would be very very hard. (Maybe that instance took place outside the original context - but in that case, bad writing.)
So I went back to Jeff/Jeeves, and I don't say "Christ, what an asshole" only because it's a completely different kind of assholery than the New Yorker produces. We Are The Left spent literally only 2 sentences on the current Democratic primary and made it clear that they weren't blaming one faction or the other, but apparently Jeff/Jeeves read an article which was 98 percent about the primary and is wounded unto death by it. To him, apparently history began when Sanders entered the race and ended when he left it. I've been a Sanders supporter around here and had a much higher opinion of his faction than most people seem to (for a specific example, in a previous thread someone said that condemnation of Elizabeth Warren is a litmus test for derangement, and the most vehemently pro-Sanders anti-Clinton guy in my Facebook feed just said that he still loved Warren and respectfully disagreed with her), but this guy makes Tigre or whatever pseudonym he's using this week look totally justified.
For the record, I agree with We Are The Left's actual substantive points and am totally aware that my reaction probably has a lot to do with my place of privilege, but gut reactions and all that. On consideration, my reaction is not "a pox on both their houses" but more like "lay off the circular firing squad, and I should address this to one of those two parties specifically even though pointing fingers is part of the problem of a circular firing squad, and in that case nine out of ten of those fingers are pointing at Jeff/Jeeves."
106: I can empathize with the guy. In my own life, I have been stupid as shit. And, of course, it's worse for him because he has chosen to make his idiocy public, apparently under his real name.
But you're right that there are limits to my empathy. The whole Trump phenomenon is driven by people "having an emotional reaction." Fuck 'em. And fuck this shithead. Christ, what an asshole.
May just met with Nicola Sturgeon and made encouraging noises about not triggering Brexit until they had agreed a "UK-wide approach". Could be good news.
I didn't even realize that the piece in 97 was a response to 107, which I read the other day, because it's... untethered ranting? It's certainly not remotely a serious effort to address anything in the original piece.
It certainly captures exactly what I have heard as the fundamental message of a lot of Sanders supporters all along: "Shut up, bitch, this has nothing to do with misogyny."
111- There are circular firing squads and then there are necessary inter-party fights, and then there are just good rants. Sometimes it is hard to tell these things apart, but my sympathy is with the fighting left even if I generally hold back myself.
114: Reading the full statement, it sounds like waffle rather than anything material. It's also framed as "I've already said" rather than a new position.
And this from Gethins sounds remarkably fanciful: "You can find a solution whereby Scotland remains in the European Union within the United Kingdom, there are ways you can do that." No, there really aren't.
97: FFS. Yes, 'tis the soul of a "true Left" to post bitter rambling whinges about the travails of having to work inside a "big tent" in Democratic politics -- in response to a campaign against quite obviously very real misogynistic bullying in progressive circles no less because how much classier could you fucking get, really -- because building actual solidarity and understanding with other progressives is just too fucking hard, innit. Much easier just to accuse them of being neoliberal sellouts for the eeeeevil $hillary and be done with it. Boy Howdy, the "true Left's" mama must be proud.
(And like, RTCB keeps posting ridiculous shit like this and then seeming mystified when people regard the faction of dead-ender Sandernistas it represents as a bunch of infantile whiners with all the self-awareness of a Baby Jesus buttplug.)
It's a game called "trolling" played by a pathetic man with nothing else going on in his life. Surprising!
And the editorialist is practicing politics,
As the neoliberals slowly get stoned.
Yes, they're sharing a drink they call trolliness,
But it's better than drinkin' alone.
121 is actually great enough to outweigh the shittiness of this election.
Apparently, the FBI is going around telling people not to go to Cleveland. I feel that's stepping on my turf.
Whoever wins, America wins. ("God Bless America" starts playing in the background.)
So wait, roger, "let's you and him fight" is your overt and considered position per 116?
New topic. This placard on my train advertises secondhand wares "always up to 90% off." What else is in the class of things that are "always up to 90% off"?
BUT NOW AMERICA YOU LOSE
What else is in the class of things that are "always up to 90% off"?
My clothes, when apo is in the room.
Hm, I guess that's more "always at least 90% off".
Really, isn't everything not more than 90% off "up to" 90% off?
126: In ninth grade, my science teacher wanted our class to make a slideshow as a class project, about "The Universe". We started by brainstorming about possible topics that would be properly included under that rubric.
126- I just mean that I'm still voting for HRC even though many of my friends and family won't. Sometimes I wonder if they're right, is all.
128: The grappling gloves always stay on.
129 was my first thought, but then I figured there were situations (vendors) where no discounts above, say, 30% would ever be offered, so the condition as written was more restrictive. But "it's getting relatively hot in here/so take off up to 90% of your clothes" is much more interesting.
And with that, and with no hard feelings, I am checking out of here for two months. I am way over my personal limit of not-shutting-up and I need to focus on more demanding RL shit. Be well, all of you.
I've marked my calendar -- 9/15 -- Lurid Keyaki returns to Unfogged. Do you need us to yell at you if we catch you here before then?
In case you're already gone -- take care and best of luck!
Write if you get work! And remember to hang by your thumbs!
Be well Lurid. Looking forward to your return.
I don't understand what you can hang from by your thumbs.
Except for a rack in a dungeon or something. But you don't want (or need) to be reminded to be tortured.
Reading the sidebar, the titles of the 2 posts sort of ran together and I read them as "Sexy like a truck full of late stage capitalism".
Truck Full of Rain isn't the best Counting Crows album but it's up there.
Immortan Joe isn't really my type, but whatever floats your boat, AL.
I just spent about 20 minutes trying to find out what Hugo Schwartz did to Women of Color. Still very unclear to me.
146: Among Hugo Schwyzer's many disreputable activities there was apparently a large amount of awful behaviour toward non-white feminists which was alleged to have been largely ignored at the time by the white feminist community. Which is not implausible, though the details of all the various academic controversies involved are pretty inside baseball and link-rotted now. It is not super-helpful that the #WeAreTheLeft letter references it as if they think the details are common knowledge.
Scream From the Shadows Univ Minn Press 2012
"Setsu Shigematsu is assistant professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is coeditor of Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific "
In recent decades, the hypervisibility of women who have authorized and sanctioned massive forms of imperialist state violence has been notable. On the global stage, Madeleine Albright's (in)famous public statement that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children, even prior to the official invasion, was "worth it" was followed by the prominence of Condoleezza Rice, and now Hillary Rodham Clinton, as the advocates of U.S. foreign policy. These stateswomen serve as the most visible apogees of the convergence of liberal feminism and imperial power. Given how liberal feminist political goals for women's equality has largely enabled the rise of such elite women and has created the institutional space for women, myself included, to enter and occupy positions in the U.S. academy, I am disturbed by the relative hesitation, if not reluctance, of feminists to theorize the capacities, complicities, and desires for power, domination, and violence in women.Informing this book's trajectory is a concern about the capacity of feminist subjects-- including feminist- identified scholars and activists and those sympathetic to and informed by feminist politics-- to engage with the questions, manifestations, and modalities of violence constitutive of our political horizon. Haunting the writing and completion of this book are thus unresolved questions that arise through a confrontation with the ways in which hegemonic (liberal and radical) feminist paradigms and particular kinds of feminist discourses have contributed to U.S. domestic and imperialist state violence.
No, they (107) are not (all of and the only) Left.
(Weird 148 not showing well. Showing only in preview. I'll check tomorrow.)
More from intro to Scream From the Shadows by Setsu Shigamatsu. Woman, feminist and postcolonial scholar. After reading "We Are the Left" and recognizing the particular aggressive discursive techniques of what I call the "Weaponization of Victimhood" I thought of pointing out how it is done, but believed no one here would be able or willing to listen. Maybe y'all will listen to SS, but unlikely.
While recognizing the paradigm- shifting contributions of feminist movements, it is imperative to problematize how certain feminist discourses have rendered paramount (if not unassailable) the victimhood of women as one of its universalizing discursive tendencies.I wish to emphasize that a delimited focus on the concept of women's victimhood may prevent us from taking seriously the problem of women's complicity and agency in the perpetuation of violence against other women, children, and men and how these circuits are maintained and reproduced geopolitically through gendered and racialized economies. Arguably, the relative feminist mutedness about violence among women (intrafemale/woman on woman) might be symptomatic of a problematic desire and discursive tendency to posit women as the perpetual victims of patriarchy and sexism, obscuring or eclipsing differences of power and how such a discourse has sanctioned violence against men, particularly men of color. I suggest that universalizing discourses of women's victimhood may function to obscure and forestall an adequate theorization of women's
differential power, agency, and shifting investments in perpetuating systems of violence against the other. This underrecognized condition of women's ontologies in and of violence remains a shadow subject of feminism and a vexing problematic for those concerned with the future efficacy of feminist politics.
|| There was a big fight tangential to it here, but I couldn't tell what were people's opinions of it -- should I see Right Now Wrong Then? ||
I know nothing about it, but that's my default answer to going to see stuff.
Also, if anyone happens to run into Kim Min-hee, give her my number. I'm sure she'd be interested in meeting me—after all, we share a birthdate.
If you go see any movie this week and don't also see Ghostbusters, you're helping sexism in Hollywood.
Well, I was going to see Notorious, but I guess I'll change my plans.
155: Thanks, nosflow! And if see Kim Min-hee is at the screening, well.... I don't have your number, but I could give her your email address, if that's ok.
MY LOVE FOR YOU IS LIKE A TRUCK
RAINSTORM
Giant Bomb plays the Ekranoplan simulator