Reading that, I got an inkling what it must have been like to be a Muscovite in 1812: some brouhaha at the distant borders, and maybe even some inroads will be made in the short run, but ultimately one can have faith that Mother Russia will swallow the interlopers whole.
eh, it still comes off as less dweeby than the typical DC party (which is like a student council mixer). And both readers and the writer would I think be well aware of that.
On second thought, 2 had a false tone of urbane jadedness. It's not like I've been to enough DC parties to really know the lay of the land.
These guys sound like the edgy kids from Olivet.
Do I see an interesting assignment in Monica Hesse's near future? She already has experience in covering "passed out in vomit" and "Dupont dives".
...or you can read it as a take-down so effective that no one can attend an UnfoggeDCon again.
Unfogged doesn't strike me as the kind of crowd where anyone will pass out in their own vomit. And thank god for that.
Unfogged doesn't strike me as the kind of crowd where anyone will pass out in their own vomit
[oblig]Someone else's more like[/oblig].
6- That's right, they vomit and keep right on partying.
Tangentially-
cops can book anyone with a blood alcohol content over .01
That's messed up. You can get that level by eating tiramisu for dessert. The BAC calculators and tables I found won't give a level below 0.01% if you've had one drink in the last 5 hours.
Looking at the article, what's especially good about the photo is the guy with the incipient bald patch/ratty comb-over right in the center foreground. Nice composition there.
Last year, I didn't throw up until I made it back to my hotel room the next morning.
Black leather pants? With a racing stripe? And some of the women at their parties might say yes to a cigarette? Man, those Libertarians are such hedonists. I just don't think I can hang with them.
Too many DC women smoke. It's much more common than on the west coast.
It's always been cool to shit on poor people and minorities.
We're not about [self-pleasuring] to Ronald Reagan.
Anymore. He's dead!
Look Stras if anybody besides semi-pathetic not-really-young white dudes really knew how to party maybe we would'nt have all these poor people and minorities.
It's always been cool to shit on poor people and minorities.
Libertarians don't shit on poor people, the poor choose to be shat upon. Neither do libertarians shit on minorities: they are just objectively more likely to be selected for shitting given some of their other behaviors.
Their first try was at some pseudo-Irish pub, and drew staffers from both American Prospect and the Weekly Standard who eyeballed each other from across the room like at an awkward middle school dance.
I would feel better if it ran "as if at an awkard middle school dance".
Still, one can't say no to gamine young women.
So true. All ideological differences are forgiven, where are the gamine young women!
I will go with a combination of 1 & 2. In fact it is hard to imagine anything that would make me more sympathetic to the Reasonoids than a WaPo profile like this. Several other times each month, Reason brings culture in the form of an afternoon roundtable, or a wine-and-cheese Q&A with Someone Controversial. Capitaliztion: for when scare quotes aren't quite enough to convey the superior ironic distance.
I must say that Roger Stone certainly would have been interesting to hear ... not that you should a believe a word he said, but he would provide an interesting glimpse at the shape of the lies as they are being formed right in the Mother Lode.
I vote for option 4: You can read it as a newspaper falling victim to a PR firm's hype. The overriding sense I got was the invisible hand of somebody positioning it. Maybe it was an editor, or maybe a PR firm, maybe just the reporter herself.
(Also, what does "young, majority Democrat Washington" mean? Is that even vaguely true?)
re: 18
and
Their first try was at some pseudo-Irish pub I'm not really getting the disdain re: the pseudo-Irishness of the pub.
Let's face it, outside of Ireland, a couple of places in the UK, and arguably a few places on the east coast of the US, all Irish pubs are 'pseudo'.
There will be Reason libertarians and some of their gamine women at UnfoggeDCon so you can see for yourself if it's all true.
Politically-agnostic friends took me to a party this summer, I only now realizing it to be a Reason party, or even politically sponsored. It had ok dancing, a stand-out in DC. The article will certainly be a take-down.
The Post was exposed a few years ago for staging theme parties for stories. They would buy food, decorations, etc., for events that ordinarily would have just been keg parties.
Actually, there probably are some edgy kids from Olivet at those parties. I know of one insufferable young man who now works for Cato. My contacts report that he pops the collars of his polo shirts.
In fact, the Irish themselves are pseudo, especially the Gaelic speaking ones. Has Flann O'Brien taught you people nothing? Does the name "James Joyce" mean nothing to you?
gamine and mischievous
Bwahaha. It's entirely true.
This was a great assignment and I can only assume Monica Hesse pitched it on her own prerogative—the Style section editors aren't so plugged in. A missed opportunity, though. Hesse built in a lot of after-the-fact quotes from Gillespie and failed to consult the more colorful personalities in the room. Surely it was Julian Sanchez rubbing her shoulders. And why not consult Kerry Howley (or one of the other few women editors in attendance) on the ways and wiles of all the District's libertarian stag stable?
On the plus side, Hesse manages to reasonably assess the place of Reason in the population, or rather quotes the editors ably. I think the other thing to say about the magazine happy hours is that they serve as a de facto happy hour for all local libertarians; since everyone who works at Reason has worked at Cato and to a large extent vice versa, it's hardly the oddity who manages the few blocks from the Cato Institute to wherever Reason's doing their thing. And because the happy hours are indeed fun, journalists of all stripes come out (art critics included).
Speaking as a young male DC writer with some pretensions of hip, there are few more obvious events to meet like-minded folks, male and female. On the maybe three occasions I've talked to a woman at one of these things, the conversation has turned at some point to arts & culture after which follow the odd and inevitable expressions of praise for art dealer Charles Saatchi—who holds some Howard Roark–esque place in the libertarian imagination about the art world.
CityPaper & Wonkette on the more selective Late Night Shots wonky social scene was better.
11. Maybe it's just that I've been in California all my life, but somehow I can't be terribly shocked by the idea that someone might be smoking pot at a party. And what's with the "has a French wife" phrasing?
31: Hesse was employing what the French call le style indirect libre, I assume.
31: Having lived in North Carolina all my life I can't help but feel like it isn't a party to start with if there isn't a joint getting passed around somewhere and I don't even smoke pot. I would even go so far as to hazard that for an at least significant minority of America this has been true for forty years. It is possible that my personal history has skewed my anecdata dangerously in one direction or another but I couldn't really choke down the manufactured salaciousness whether or not it's meant to be mockery.
Hesse is describing a happy hour, not a party. It's certainly rare that people light up at happy hours IME.
I have actually been to parties in my life. I think there might have been pot at one of them. But I ran with the good kids.
Growing up in the rural South was too boring to allow for good kids.
My reaction might be rooted entirely in having lived here all my life. I have no concept of how a Happy Hour - something which did not exist in my tiny little town - differs from a party other than that it's shorter. When I read the article, that sounds to me like a party.
The happy hour she describes was at Big Hunt, a bar on a street with a lot of pedestrian traffic near Dupont Circle.
Armsmasher is an apologist for Hesse, whom he's clearly trying to seduce. We might as well make him work for it. I hear Hesse went home with Gillespie that night.
What are any of us in DC but remora circling the tiger shark that is Nick Gillespie?
Wait, you mean you want to suck on him?
I was actually going to invite Angela Valdez to the DCon, but I chickened out. She's a family friend. We could have had a comparative sexology of the whole political spectrum then.
A/V's a good friend. I think she's coming.
34: Well, that explains why they snuck off to the stairwell to toke up instead of doing it out in the open. Still, it sounds like this was Reason renting out the bar and having a private party.
art dealer Charles Saatchi
ouch. The 80s are really over, aren't they?
46: Not if you're still (self-pleasuring) to Ronald Reagan.
39: I assumed that his new associate was a libertarian.
Wikipedia tells me that Saatchi was born in Baghdad. And now I realize that his name is really Sa'atchi.
It looks like Hesse last worked at AARP, so she must know hip. I think the problem is that back in the small town, being a liberal was vaguely subversive. In DC liberalism is AARP. But she's right, there is something fogeyish about the libertarians.
the women who do arrive look gamine and mischievous, and like they wouldn't say no to a cigarette. At a recent event, Emmanuelle, Welch's wife, wears black leather pants with a yellow racing stripe running up each leg.
I want to thank the WaPo author, the libertarians of Reason magazine, and the gamine, mischevious libertarian ladies for finally making me want to embrace--nay, run gratefully into the arms of--dignified middle age.
too bad they are in jail now for drugs
as i heard
I love read's YouTube links. Thanks read!
really? i'm glad
that was a drunken, high party description
with very funny lyrics
run gratefully into the arms of--dignified middle age
Come to papa.
Matt and Emmanuelle are terrific folks. Just sayin.