I was standing right in front of Choire Sicha for moment apparently, and he took pictures of the same guy I was talking about.
They liked it so they put an Awl on it.
Well, at least there’s an Awl on it. Have a weekend, kids! Stay dry!
So NBC premiered two new comedies last night and I kind of liked both of them but I was struck by how generally similar they were in a whole economic/social/political/racial sort of way. The both feature “upper middle class” to filthy stinking rich (mostly) white people in high level media careers basically dealing with various “first world problems” like “work life balance” etc. Up All Night is the more obnoxious of the two on this score. If Applegate’s character really was the right hand woman of someone who’s obviously meant to be Oprah she’d be making kajillions of dollars a year and this is never even discussed as a reasonable tradeoff to her being on call basically 24/7. I thought the show might change things up (and acknowledge the “mancession” a little bit etc.) by making Will Arnett’s character a failed writer or something but no such luck. It turns out that not merely was he a successful lawyer but he ran his own big firm! (At least I think that’s what was being implied) assuring that there will be no non super rich/successful person represented on the show. The corporate publicists on Free Agents are way down the food chain compared to the characters on Up All Night but even they lead a lifestyle that the vast majority of Americans can barely dream of today. I realize entertainment has always had an escapist element even during (or perhaps especially during) bad economic times. Great depression era movies were often about the antics of rich people etc. And sitcoms have mostly always had to do with glamorous, successful people. (The characters on I Love Lucy were basically the equivalent of the characters on Up All Night with glamorous entertainment careers, fancy NYC apartment etc.) but I find it odd how little the Great Recession is being represented on TV at all and how out of step these two shows seem.
via michaelianblack:
A Poem for 9/11/11
Whatever you say about it will be stupid
But say it anyway.
Whatever you were doing doesn’t matter
But tell us anyway.
Whoever you are
Wherever you were
However much you try
None of it
Can replace any of what was lost
But try to anyway.
In a news year dominated by manic ranters, from Charlie Sheen to Donald Trump to the Rent Is Too Damn High guy (and even, on the extreme end, Colonel Qaddafi), we are quickly learning that agitation pays when it comes to maintaining a high profile in our seething media environment. If the old advice to electronic communicators was to speak in sound bites and keep things simple, to cut through the noise by being straightforward and countering confusion with consistency, the new winning strategy is the opposite: embrace incoherence and become the noise. The cool self-control that was once considered the soul of telegenic behavior has been turned inside out, and the traits that people used to suppress when they appeared on television—the contortions and tics—are now the best way to engage an audience. Attention-deficit disorder, remember, responds to stimulants, not sedatives.
Sheen was the spilled beaker in the laboratory who proved that in an age of racing connectivity, a cokehead can be a calming presence. His branching, dopamine-flooded neural pathways mirrored those of the Internet itself, and his lips moved at the speed of a Cisco router, creating a perfect merger of form and function. Trump, though his affect is slower and less sloppy, also showed mastery of the Networked Now by speaking chiefly in paranoid innuendo. The Web, after all, is not a web of truths; its very infrastructure is gossip-shaped. The genius of Sheen and Trump and other mediapaths (Michele Bachmann belongs on this list too) is that they seem to understand, intuitively, that the electronic brain of the new media has an affinity for suspicious minds.
” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-14-biggest-ideas-of-the-year/8556/2/Here’s one thing that confuses me about what coverage of it I have seen though: Why are the media not widely using the term “Civil War” or “War” to describe what’s going on there? Aerial bombardment, anti-aircraft guns, massive casualties, some cities held by the government others by “rebels”, this is a war no? Yet, most media I’ve seen are still using terms like “uprising” and even talking about “protesters” when it’s clear we’re well past the point of peaceful protests in town squares. At most, I hear some people speaking of the “crisis” in Libya or saying the country is “on the brink of war”. This seems a really odd way to frame the narrative. I have no idea what any of this means or whether there should be any sort of US or international response. I’m just confused about the language that’s being used.
When I first heard about the project it was before I was a heavy user of facebook myself and I thought that the prospect of any sort of film about the company’s history sounded incredibly uninteresting. Then I became (and still am) an obsessive user of facebook and as I heard the unending number of entertainment news stories about the project I still thought it sounded like a boring idea for a movie. While I thought (and still think) that a movie that somehow explored the facebook phenomenon could be great it seemed to me that a film that merely explored the business and legal disputes involved in the founding and explosion into hyper-profitability of facebook as a corporate entity sounded at best like fodder for maybe a couple mildly interesting articles in the business section. So, it’s a great credit to the (generally wildly over-hyped) writing ability of Aaron Sorkin that he was able to craft any sort of engaging narrative out of a not-innately-that-interesting business/tech story.
The other thing that struck me as strange when I first heard about the project was that it seemed like a really odd combination of writer and director. One the one hand you’ve got Aaron Sorkin and his fast-paced (I’m assuming generally described as a “rat-a-tat”) dialogue between self-satisfied supersmart liberals (and generally beloved by self-satisfied liberals of all kinds). On the other you’ve got David Fincher who’s generally at his best when he’s creating some sort of grimy, alien world (and dealing with themes of alienation). It turns out that Sorkin was the ideal choice to write the script. His love of having rich, educated people argue over power and money is perfectly suited to the material and I can’t imagine anyone else going through all these depositions and middling business books/articles and getting anything this engaging out of it. Fincher didn’t really come off all auteurist in this piece though and in fact, other than Trent Reznor’s score throughout, much of the movie didn’t really bear his stamp. The only truly Fincheresque sequence was the justly praised rowing scene, in which style and music were deployed to maximum effect to show the absurdity of these type of atavistic elite college rituals, which I know a little about.
But ultimately with all the insane hype about how great this movie was, and with all the talk about how zeitgeist-capturing it was and everything, a small part of me was hoping it would be a total world-defining film like Fight Club. Like maybe it would after all be a Fincheresque examination of the creepiness of social networking sites or of Harvard or whatever, and some of the early scenes - which showed the earlier, darker incarnations of the facebook/facesmash/facebook and the competitiveness, hedonism and brutal social order of fancypants college were kind of like that. However, pretty much the minute the action left Harvard and permanently stopped flashing back to it, the film became simply the story of an ultimately fairly straightforward business dispute; entertainingly told, brilliantly acted, with great dialogue (which is probably generally described as let’s say “crackling” this time) but ultimately no deeper or more timely than Pirates of Silicon Valley.
This makes it sound like I liked the movie a lot less than I did. In fact, I kind of fucking loved it. But I was predisposed to like it. I’ve been a huge fan of Jessie Eisenberg from the beginning of his career and I love how Tobias Funke-like he now gets to taste these meaty leading man parts right in his mouth! Also, I like Justin Timberlake as an actor. Some of the best one-liners, put-downs etc. are still going through my head days later and generally the style and feel of the film has stayed with me a lot more than has that of other hyped films of the moment I’ve seen such as the ridiculous Black Swan or the beautifully made, noble, but ultimately completely unoriginal True Grit. I liked The Social Network and even loved parts of it, but ultimately I just didn’t think it was the era-defining masterpiece it was hyped as, mostly because it was focused more on facebook as a corporation and not as a phenomenon.
Yes! Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes! The only people really freaking about this are people who fly all the time for business or for vacation i.e. rich people. This isn’t to say that the new procedures probably aren’t totally stupid, overly invasive, and don’t make us any safer. That’s probably all true, but to act like they’re some huge assault on basic civil liberties is ridiculous. There’s no fundamental, constitutional right to fly on a commercial airliner. It’s something I’m going go through all of 2010 without doing, because I am poor.
I realize that since the initial Gawker post I linked was posted there’s some evidence that public opinion has changed, but that’s most likely the result of the relentless push on this by rich people with high-paying media jobs. And even then, nearly two-thirds of the people in that poll favored the full body scans. It’s the pat downs that are the controversial, but you only get a pat down if you refuse the body scan for some reason, most likely because you’re worried about the radiation exposure because you fly all the time on business. Maybe spend some time at home with your children instead for once?
One of the things I loved about the movie version of Up in the Air is that the Ryan Bingham character loved his road warrior lifestyle, just embraced it. In the real world, one of the most annoying things about rich people is how they’re always whining about the minor inconveniences of their endless business travel (when they’re not randomly posting a string of airport codes in their status updates). Rich people, be like Ryan Bingham. Bang chicks on the road. Revel in all the perks and cash. Don’t be like fucking Penn Jillette.
