Thomas Friedman seems to have embraced his latest mantra. While not as catchy as “the world is flat,” it’s equally simplistic: Degrees, resumes, and credentials don’t matter, he argues. It’s just the skills you acquire yourself that do.
Too bad that in his effort to prove his thesis all he demonstrated the exact opposite, that going to Yale matters…particularly if you room with the daughter of a Times column.
Look, I’m neither Siskel nor Ebert. But I’m beginning to think that just as we’ve in a golden age for television drama, we’re in the Dark Ages when it comes to documentary films.
I’m a person who gravitates toward non-fiction — I’m a journalist, after all — but too often these days I leave the theatre disappointed. Documentary filmmakers seem to be either polemicists beating the drum for their cause or fanboys, also beating the drum for their cause. What they aren’t: storytellers.
Case in point, the movie I saw tonight, Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s, about the iconic department store. We can agree on that much. But what about Bergdorf Goodman’s? Well, it definitely wasn’t about the department-store doorman, highlighted in the bait-and-switch intro, never to be seen again. Was it a history of its past and founders? A celebration of the buyers and creative directors and the designers whose careers they helped make? A frothy confection as celebrities shared their favourite memories? A peek inside the inner workings of a distinctly American institution? A feature about the months-long process of designing their marquee Christmas windows? (The last third was certainly about the latter…)
I guess I don’t understand. Is it that, with digital film and iMovie, the bar is so low that any schmo who can hold a camera (sort of) steady can make a documentary? Because clearly there’s no premium placed on plot or character or arc or story — as if somehow those things don’t matter because this is Real Life. I suppose it makes me grateful for documentaries like the Up series…which has managed to carry a coherent concept across five decades.
I’m sorry, New York Times, but I’m failing to see exactly how most of these companies are exactly de-sexing their underwear ads. Yeah, we’re talking four-packs instead of six, a dusting of chest hair, and a general lack of lack of oiled-up torsos, but it’s not like we’ve tried to reproduce, say, the Dove ads for men’s boxer briefs.
Dear English Language,
Fuck you. We don’t care if you employ a certain internal logic. Fie to your principles! We will add consonants willy-nilly, without apology or rationale (you know we’re kidding about the desire to make words “bouncier”). We are,
The New Yorker
When I was a part-time lifeguard, my coworkers and I had three main topics of conversation: the local radio station’s lousy music selection, the lousier parents who showed up as much as a half-hour after closing time to collect their little brats, and if we could get tattooed, what tattoo we’d get. This was a time, back in the Olden Days, when high-school kids didn’t get tattoos, and there’d be no way in our claustrophobic little town that we could’ve gotten inked without running into someone we knew anyhow. My mother, for instance, spotted my friend Sally surreptiously buying condoms in the drugstore downtown, and I never heard the last of it. So, the tattoo discussion was very much hypothetical, but no less entertaining. The consensus was that Erik had the best idea, to get a speck of food tattooed on the side of his mouth, just big enough to be noticeable. It’d be hours of amusement, watching people try to discreetly get him to wipe his mouth, we figured.
But eventually we’d circle around to the same point: Wouldn’t that gag get tired after awhile? Might a facial tattoo be awkward in a professional situation? What if it became discoloured or lost its shape? Those seemed like obvious concerns to us, that our bodies would crease or sag or change and that any permanent marking probably wouldn’t stand the test of time. We weren’t necessarily the most mature and wise — we also enjoyed cajoling kids into doing cannonballs in front of the opposite guard stand and after hours jumped off the pool’s sloped glass roof into the snowdrifts — but we understood that tattoos were for a lifetime while our lap-toned bodies were not. Which is why this piece, which treats the idea that Tattoos R Forever as some kind of revelation, seems sort of naive.
Then again, that might be the right word for someone who gets a tattoo of a unicorn.
Indonesia is fast becoming a consumer culture — they love Facebook and 7-11, so why not Tupperware, too? I fully expect the next Tupperware maven will speak Bahasa.
But I have to admit that the most amusing part of this article is this journalistic conceit — imposed mainly by copy editors, I’d say — in which the writer spells out the definition of the most obvious item, individual, or trend. Thus, Tupperware are “plastic containers for leftover beef stew and baba ganoush at house parties world-wide.” But here’s the thing: Would you read an article about Tupperware if you didn’t know what Tupperware was?
Case made.
Why do cupcakes nag so?
Their cutesy-ness? Their trendiness? The irritating nature of those that would eat them?
No matter. Apparently, the cupcake is dead. Or, at least its stock is falling.
I know I shouldn’t get all nitpicky at a time like this, but please explain this paragraph:
“I’m still kind of shell-shocked,” said Arthur Webb, of Santa Rosa, Calif….A runner with 100 marathons under his belt, he said he has never witnessed anything like what happened in Boston.
Right, because he happened to pick the 100 other marathons without terrorist bombs exploding at the finish line?!
If IEDs were a regular feature of road races, I suspect Arthur Webb, of Santa Rosa, Calif., like the rest of us, would find another hobby.
