oh, hee.

via Mighty Girl, who has this wondrous blog the linking function of which confuses me not a little:

Anyway, I know that Sex and the City occurs inside that milieu, the Vows milieu, where people attend things, like weddings, operas, and charity benefits, and are served by attendants, who take their keys and coats. I assume that the dialogue on the show is snappy, written by snappy-dialogue professionals, shot with lots of quick edits and good camera work. But I prefer to imagine the show as a black-box play from the 1970s with Beckettian overtones, three women on an empty stage, looking at the audience, speaking in monotones:

1: I doubt I am fecund.

2: I have eaten so little.

3: Where are the men?

1: There are no men.

2: I will pay a woman $40 to caress and decorate my toes with varnish. I will wear shoes that cost more than the weekly wages of a restaurant worker, with tips.

3: What kind of tips?

2: Not on the shoes, for the restaurant workers.

1: I am hungry. I will not marry.

2: Talk about the shoes.

3: The shoes!

Unison: Shoes.

The theme of the show, I understand, is the search for love, love gained and lost, and the means of attaining your ends is consumption: what must I buy, how must I look, what must I become in order to find the community and love for which I yearn? Love is nirvana, a good match is the unattainable goal, the choice of handbag a meditation towards a particular enlightenment.

It's by Paul Ford, one of the fine strange people who write for FTrain, which, you know, I live on [the route of], but he's at the other end in Brooklyn.

how do you really feel?

It's rare to see Williamsburg hipsters looking genuinely dumbstruck, and I will credit the electroclashsters for this Ñ the regular mesh cap and sweaterbelly hipsterati crowd seemed to waddle around the narrow hall confusedly looking for a wall to lean on, bumping into each other and perpetually ending-up in the bathroom line Ñ while the electroclashsters gathered like soot-covered lemmings around the music (I dare not call this a band) bobbing and waving, eyes closed and hands aloft ala Ganesh. Since this is such a 'groundbreaking' and utterly original 'movement' I have only one anchor of pre-hipster comparison from my past: the electroclashsters are just a bunch of pasty-face new wave and Goth wannabes with fashion mullets. Many looked like standard mesh-caps hipsters that had been literally tarred and feathered. The girls all seemed to be bruise-eyed bathroom-stalled coke-sniffing art school cockstuffers who talk right into your ear like they're about to bite it off. And the guys, well, here's the conversation I had with the only one I talked to:
"Hey," he said.
"Hello," I said.
"So, uh, are you like, into this music or what?"
"What," I said.
"I said, are you into this music?"
"No. It was a joke. I heard you the first time."
"Oh. Uh. What?"
"Nevermind," I said.
"Oh, uh, cool. Do you have any coke?"
"No."
"Oh, uh, cool."

I feel like an early adopter - the last anti-hipster rant was published in one of our local "alternative" (well, it's a vanity thing for a rich guy, but hell, so is the Post) papers.

Did I mention that I work with these people?

blogging will be light...

getting ready for HM's party, which means buying gnocchi and craft supplies and trying to get this place cleaned up (no, the party's not here but I'm tired of living in a big mess).

Her room, thank all the little household gods, is still fairly clean. Mirabile dictu.

ringring

Husband: Yes she is.

Me: Good morning, mother

Mother: [Question about party]

Me: [Answer]

Mother: I'm going to buy [X]. Now, they do [thing we already discussed in some detail and I said no to in definite terms and in some detail] at the bakery. Shall we do that?

Me: Fine, go ahead

Mother: Well, we don't have to. I was just asking.

Me: What we don't have to do is fight about this. I already told you that I really didn't want it, and you keep bringing it up like it's not a settled question. That's not just asking, that's not taking no for an answer, and somehow you think it's not aggressive. I just don't have the energy.

Mother: OK, we'll do (the other thing).

Me: No. Let's do [the thing I said no to]. I really don't want it to come up again.

Mother: We speak a different language.

Me: Yes, mother.

-----

Polygon the Dancing Bear has this, which is neat:

I have received the latest issue (#100) of Derogatory References, Arthur Hlavaty's highly regarded personalzine. Arthur, who has turned 60 but disdains the title of Curmudgeon as "too flattering," has turned many a brilliant phrase in DR, and this issue doesn't disappoint:

A major function of the mass media is to deflect envy away from those with power to those with ability. The way most people use the word elitist shows how well it's working.

[Andy] Warhol represented scrap irony, the cheapest kind of negativism.

I think this whole "Silence Is Consent" meme is a bad one. There are times one is trapped in a situation where that is true, but that is the pathological case. Silence Is Consent goes with a lot of bad ideas, from blaming everyone in a country for the evils that go on there to feeling obligated to tell strangers on the street that they are too fat or don't really need their canes.

apparently you can subscribe to the email edition, which I have now.