Rogueish
Veep: Season One | TV Review | Slant Magazine→
05/12/12
Veep feels weirdly outdated, tired, and tiring. Politicians are lecherous, incompetent, irascible, and vain. Laws are filled with cheap, self-negating compromises. Leaders put on a politically correct face in public, but—get this—it’s only an act! Veep chugs along powered by such an elaborate, rapid-fire complex of clichés, received ideas, and commonplaces that even the most obvious of these shared secrets soon begin to feel false.
Although I disagree that Veep isn’t funny, I think this criticism of its reliance on cynical clichés rather than specific satire is interesting (particularly as I hate the trite pseudo-cynicism of a lot of current TV shows, from Glee to Archer). It’s particularly interesting in comparison with the British show on which Veep is based, The Thick of It, which is one of the most precise pieces of satire I’ve ever seen. The Thick of It has some nice little details about the UK government (which I particularly appreciated as I was working for the civil service when the show first aired), but more importantly it is satirical in its form. The obsession with language, the rapid-fire banter as form of positioning and control over message works very specifically as a criticism of New Labour, and the spin-off film In the Loop makes really clear the murderous consequences of this obsession with spin. I’m trying to think what an analogous formal satire of US politics would look like, and whether Veep embodies it. Arguably, the pathology of the Obama administration isn’t spin but wonkishness, a kind of half-smart political science student belief in the superiority of policy over politics, and we really don’t see that in Veep.
05/11/12
Was wowed by this on Popjustice a few weeks ago but forgot to write about it; it’s a really, really well put together song. The relentlessness of the accompaniment, combined with the fragility of the vocal and the tentativeness of the chord progression, which continually makes you expect a modulation into something more optimistic, all comes together to make the track beautifully bittersweet.
Kitty Pryde - Thanks Kathryn Obvious
05/11/12
Been listening to this a lot in part because it’s great but also because I keep trying to figure out who it reminds me of. I mean obviously there’s a bunch of people (Princess Superstar and Skeelo come to mind), but there’s someone else I’ve heard more recently who has a very similar bored teenager flow, and I can’t remember who it is.
Mad Men, Girls and Englishmen | Back to the World→
05/10/12
It’s what I hope Mad Men could use its time exploring rather than running down the clock with swingin’ Sixties cliches – the other side of the Sixties myth: the pain of adjusting, the melancholy of being left behind, the Zen of giving up on being cool, the possible benefits of getting very confused, the rehearsal for mortality that is falling out of touch.
05/10/12
I think the Brits on the thread went in pretty hard on the idea of laundry rooms but this may have been vengeance for the drubbing they’d got on the tipping thread.
Wait what how did the UK people lose on the tipping thread? The ubiquity of tipping, a.k.a. not paying people proper wages, is one of the stupider things about the US, certainly worse than having laundry rooms (which exist in the UK, too, they’re just called “utility rooms”).
DEATH KNOWS MY NAME: Žižek the Authoritarian→
05/08/12
In a post last week, I quoted Johann Hari on the myriad problems with Slavoj Žižek. Not surprisingly, fans of Žižek were quick to write to me about why Hari is wrong. The blogger at Interruptions, in fact, pointed me to an interesting piece by Graham Harman that serves…
This is an amazing article on the implicit authoritarianism in Zizek’s work, I would urge everyone to take a look.
ahaha what
Žižek: “Here’s an extended argument developed over the course of a number of books against the liberal criticism of Leninism as authoritarian.”
Liberal critic of Žižek: “OMG ŽIŽEK IS A LENINIST WHAT A TERRIBLE AUTHORITARIAN HE IS.”
It’s bizarre; this supposed criticism of Žižek literally fails to engage with anything he has written ever.
05/04/12
If there is one student attitude that most all faculty bemoan, it is instrumentalism. This is the view that you go to college to get a degree to get a job to make money to be happy. Similarly, you take this course to meet this requirement, and you do coursework and read the material to pass the course to graduate to get the degree. Everything is a means to an end. Nothing is an end in itself. There is no higher purpose. When we tell students to study for the exam or, more to the point, to study so that they can do well on the exam, we powerfully reinforce that way of thinking. While faculty consistently complain about instrumentalism, our behavior and the entire system encourages and facilitates it.
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Martin Covington at Berkeley is doing great work on this, including (and this is perhaps an especially important task) teaching a regular class to graduate students about how they can avoid promoting this kind of instrumentalism in their own teaching.
05/03/12
Oh yeah, also in last week’s Gossip Girl Blair wore this rather nice dress and this excellent coat, which I include here in animated GIF form to show off it’s full swirly brilliance.
05/03/12
Last week on Gossip Girl, Nate Archibald, crusading journalist, broke into Liz Hurley’s hotel room to steal some documents, then when she found him there he had sex with her until she forgot to ask why he was in her hotel room (it’s a legitimate journalistic method, OK? He learnt it at Columbia J-School). This week, he discovered that the documents were in code, so he called in Blair Waldorf, expert cryptanalyst. I was LOLing at this point, but it turns out that, in third grade, Blair was worried her mum was reading her diary so she undertook an in depth study of cryptography which is actually totally in character so fair enough. Serena was supposed to be working with Liz Hurley but, IDK, she got distracted by Blair’s cleavage or something and switched sides. Then they all went to a high class brothel and tried to blackmail Liz Hurley but she wasn’t having any of it. They tried to get revenge by leaking the information to Gossip Girl but she wouldn’t publish it and then Nate’s girlfriend was like, “wait, don’t you own a newspaper?” and then Chuck’s dad came back from the dead and in conclusion it was a pretty good episode.
