There’s Something Happening Here: Conservatives Are Catching On to the Culture!That would indeed be news. So, did they finally make The Joe McCarthy Nobody Knew or any of the other big-budget projects I've recommended to them? Don't be silly; "It’s not enough to have talented artists and good works," says Klavan, which is why instead of supporting any such specimens as exist they "catch on to the culture" by piling on a lefty artist they don't like -- and surprise, the target in this case is their traditional fantasy hate-fuck object, Lena Dunham.
Recently, my friends at Ben Shapiro’s website Truth Revolt did for Miss Dunham what the economy and ISIS have done for Obama. They introduced her to non-leftism, also known as reality. They quoted sections from her recent autobiography Not That Kind of Girl under the descriptive headline “Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister.” Miss Dunham threatened to sue the site for quoting her verbatim! Then she canceled parts of her book tour. Then she went on a “rage spiral.” Then she jumped up and down three times and went through the floor like Rumpelstiltskin. Okay, that last part is a joke — but only just.In other words, they kept Dunham's book, which if James Wolcott is any judge (and he is) has little intrinsic value of its own, in the headlines for a few more weeks. That's good culture-warring, soldier!
The whole thing is priceless but for my money this is the best part:
But the point is that the folks at Truth Revolt have recognized the revolting truth: liberty lovers need a cultural echo chamber of our own.Maybe he thinks a bigger and better right-wing echo chamber will work like a Large Hadron Collider to advance his Zhdanovite cause, instead of just increasing the maddening din of their Bedlam.
" Okay, that last part is a joke..." well, it resembles a joke, but is different from the funny kind.
ReplyDeleteBack up. I thought Eyebrows Shapiro was with Breitbart. Say not that there has been further splintering within the gitteratti.
ReplyDeleteAs for Dunham. I guess since she has been pegged as the current Ur-Feminist and It Girl for The Left (pace Jane Fonda), the fact that she has been introduced to reality means that all feminists have been introduced to reality, making this the eleventy-hundreth time that they've Won the Culture War against feminism.
Ooo. I'm afraid.
Oh, every wingnut hack has his own blog these days. It's not like their paymasters can think of anything better to do with their billion dollar war chest than clog the tubes.
ReplyDeleteAre you kidding? It's about She Who Will Always be Named. Comedy gold!
ReplyDeleteI also love "— but only just." Only just WHAT? I guess he's too heroically individual to submit to Editorial Fascism.
And what will they discover at the Collider? That their capacity for decency and self-perspective is as elusive as the Higgs Boson?
ReplyDeleteAlso, any reason to reference this.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIs5StN8J-0
Catapult the propaganda, Comrade.
ReplyDeleteAll right, let's take a look at this sexual abuse of which the honorable Ben Shapiro has made us aware:
ReplyDeleteOne day, as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn’t resist and when I saw what was inside I shrieked.
My mother came running. “Mama, Mama! Grace has something in there!”
My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina. This was within the spectrum of things I did. She just got on her knees and looked for herself. It quickly became apparent that Grace had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed them patiently while Grace cackled, thrilled that her prank had been a success.
Dunham was seven at the time.
Now, some liberals might insist that this is unfair and even distasteful. They might suggest that it's somehow offensive to liken one young child exploring the body of another young child to the horrors of sexual abuse. They might imply that this is a case of some aspiring hack trying to score points with a dishonest sub-Buzzfeed linkbait headline. Some might even postulate that this particular junior hack may have been assigned to read this book in search of something spicy (like a Hollywood heroin ring or a lucrative stake in black-marked abortion clinics) and, finding nothing, whipped up this farce to salvage his efforts.
But I'm not going to do any of that. Instead, I'm going to give Klavan shit for embedding his not particularly relevant YouTube videos in a sorry attempt to ratchet up his hit count. Oh, and someone out there in wingnut land needs to apologize for the auto-play video pop-under that suddenly started piping barely audible nonsense through my headphones. Yep, let's drag this shit back to '98, when at least the pop-unders knew to shut up.
Talented people in the arts tend to be liberal, and that's just not fair.
ReplyDelete"Actress, writer and Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Lena Dunham
ReplyDeleteis the Barack Obama of Hollywood: a mediocrity elevated to icon status
because she plausibly represents false ideas that make the left feel
virtuous."
That's funny... I don't recall anyone on the left elevating Lena Dunham to ANYTHING, but maybe that's just because I don't have HBO and unlike Klavan, I'm just EVER so far behind in my cultural knowledge. It's is kind of cute, though, the way Klavan and his pals just can't resist dipping Dunham's pigtails in the inkwell... it must mean that deep down, below the usual layers of wingnut bullying, they really like her, and just don't know how to express it. I can't wait for Klavan's next report from out on the leading edge of culture.
It's amazing just how dishonest almost any single random sentence by these right-wing hacks can be. Take this seemingly innocuous one:
ReplyDeleteThe recent season finale of Dunham’s HBO show Girls garnered under 700,000 viewers which, by television standards, is essentially none.
First off, I doubt most people would think of last March as "recent" but here are a few facts from Variety back then:
- The season three finale for Lena Dunham’s “Girls” delivered 1 million viewers across its three plays on Sunday, with the 10 p.m. airing up 6-percent from its season two finale.
- The HBO show had an average gross audience of 4.6 million viewers for the season.
- Last year, the initial 10 p.m. airing of “Girls” last year averaged 632,000 viewers.
- A fourth season of “Girls” was announced at TCA. It will begin filming in 2015.
I've never seen Girls, nor do I particularly want to read anything about or by Lena Dunham. But by all normal accounts, she, and her show, is a success.
Really, Klavan, it's pathetic.
He joined TruthRevolt at the beginning of the year, but is still afilliated with Breitfart & Co.
ReplyDeleteMore here.
700,000 viewers, or translated from Winglish to Normal = 90% more viewers than American Christmas Carol has ever received, even if you count people who watched it while tripping.
ReplyDeleteMore here.
ReplyDeleteMoar Shapiro - DNW!
What exactly is Truth Revolt revolting against?
ReplyDeleteObviously, they are revolting against the truth!
ReplyDeleteI thought taunting out-girls and cackling about cooties in the school corridor is something you're supposed to out-grow, not turn into a career.
ReplyDelete"Liberty lovers." What a marvelously deceptive euphemism for thinly-disguised fascism that is.
ReplyDeleteGotta give `em credit--they certainly do try hard, even if they end up looking silly in the effort.
Fortunately for the rest of us, the padded walls of their echo chamber don't reflect sound well.
ReplyDeleteWas Revolting Truth already taken? Was Revolted by the Truth too long?
ReplyDeleteOK, I haven't read his blog in a while (I went off him after he wrote a eulogy for Albert Goldman, the writer of sleazy biographies of Elvis and John Lennon), but I'm officially done with Wolcott after this:
ReplyDeletethe unforgettable but unrememberable manhandling she received at college, a groggy, painful bout that hovers somewhere in the hazy junction between rape and rough sex, coercion and a one-night stand gone bad.
Funny, when she was talking about her book on Fresh Air (which is probably a cardinal sin in other people's books, but whatever), Dunham was pretty clear that it was rape.
They quoted sections from her recent autobiography Not That Kind of Girl under the descriptive headline “Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister.” Miss Dunham threatened to sue the site for quoting
ReplyDeleteher verbatim!
Is he really that obtuse, or does he just know that his audience is?
Nice to see that Ben is so serious about upholding the high journalistic standards and common decency the Breitbart media empire is famous for.
ReplyDeleteYeah, but she's one of them feminists. They cry rape when they stub their toe, so you gotta have a responsible party review her testimony and rule on whether she was overreacting or just lying.
ReplyDelete"What a revoltin' development THIS is."
ReplyDeleteThey stink on ice. #good2BTheKing
ReplyDeleteAs was Revolting Cocks.
ReplyDeleteThe sad truth is that high school never really ends.
ReplyDeleteThere's no liberal Dunham that I can see, but there is an NYC obsession with Dunham, and to guys like Klavan, New York = liberal. The fact that Dunham has been namechecked in hundreds of barely relevant New York Times articles isn't proof that New York self-obsession is nearing critical mass, it's proof that all them libs love her. It's really hard not to overthink these guys in situations like this.
ReplyDeleteNot surprising. One of his favoritest things is the ballet, he knows dancers and yet still had this to say about Balanchine:
ReplyDeleteGeorge Balanchine is more
than the greatest choreographer of the twentieth century. He was godhead
creation incarnate, but not imperious, Faustian, hubristically willful,
mankind-scorning; he was witty, superabsorbent in his perceptions and
amusements, not stiff and full of dicta but adaptable and airily
pragmatic--a Mozartian genius, but one who lived long enough to elegize
and reconjure elegant phantoms of the past.
I guess he'd say ol' George's towering levels of sexism hovered somewhere on the hazy junction between venomous misogyny, sexual harassment and physical abuse.
Oh, man... I don't want to know what Ben was doing when he was seven...
ReplyDeleteTrue enough, if only because Klavan (and his nineteen regular readers) seem to be screaming, "she's popular and I'm not, and it's not fair!"
ReplyDeleteWell, Andrew, if you've got a problem with the public's perceptions of you, you might try not wearing your intellectual pants up around your armpits.
"Whataya got?"
ReplyDeleteThe good news is it's always 4:20 somewhere.
ReplyDelete"It’s not enough to have talented artists and good works,"
ReplyDeleteTrue, but it would be a good start.
Recently, my friends at "Okay, Have it Your Way: 1984 Really Is an Instruction Manual" quoted sections from Andrew Klavan's work at PJ Media under the descriptive headline "Andrew Klavan Fucks Pigs and Any Other Livestock He Can Catch." Mr. Klavan threatened to sue the site for quoting him verbatim!
ReplyDeleteIt's an absolutely outrage to suggest that Klavan has trouble catching livestock!
ReplyDelete"liberty lovers need a cultural echo chamber of our own." Are they complaining because some light still leaks over the top of the great wingnut wall? Between Fox news, CNN, the Sunday morning talk shows, I'm not sure where these alternate viewpoints are coming from. Are they complaining that they can find viewpoints that differ from their own if they actively go looking for them in the pages of books written by books of their opponents? Because if that's the case I'm not sure 'echo chamber' is the term their looking for. Maybe they want their own reality?
ReplyDeleteThere's Something Happening Here: Conservatives Are Catching On to the Culture!"
ReplyDeleteAnd here I thought Roy was kidding. Forget the antique reference to a Buffalo Springfield song, the spirit (and singers) of which Klavan was probably tendentiously opposed to. Just dig the second half.
What, Andrew (whose column is "Klavan on Culture"), was "Conservatives"' position before this catching-on began? Say, last year? Here, let me: "There They Go Again: Conservatives Are Tone-Deaf and Brain-Dead About the Culture!"
Conservatives who are catching on to the culture are like the dog who plays chess. Sure, he always loses. But isn't it amazing that he tries?
Throwing screaming, pound-on-the-floor tantrums whenever something didn't go his way, same as today.
ReplyDelete"need a cultural echo chamber of our own."
ReplyDeleteHow can he NOT know about fox news?
"Talented people in the arts tend to be liberal, and that's just not fair."
ReplyDeleteFixed
Oh, so close, Andrew, and yet so far. One little word change and some extra punctuation could have rescued the tatters of a valid point:
ReplyDeleteBut the point is that the folks at Truth Revolt have recognized the
revolting truth: "liberty lovers" need have a cultural echo chamber of our own.Because you guys have an echo chamber for everything. Which, truthfully, is pretty revolting. And adding sarcastic quotation marks to "Liberty lovers" avoids big government's EPA regulations about spraying unadulterated bullshit around.
Writing conservative opinion pieces and being called a boy wonder. That was when he started, wasn't it?
ReplyDeleteMaybe they want their own reality?Hell, I want their own reality. For them and them alone, so they'll stop beating the one we live in to death.
ReplyDelete**SHUDDER**
ReplyDeleteWe rule the media! The media is biased against us! We are all powerful! We are persecuted victims! We are in power forever! We are in danger of extinction!
ReplyDelete"I effortlessly fuck pretty much all animals, Mom."
ReplyDelete"Oh, dear!"
"Well, no, deer run too fast."
Singing songs and carrying signs that mostly say "hooray for our side."
ReplyDeleteThe premise apparently underlying all this foaming at the mouth about one young woman is that culture exists only to advance an ideological agenda. If you start with a didactic basis like that, it's no wonder that all your "cultural products" like novels, plays, films. etc., stink on ice.
ReplyDelete<Semi-obscure nerdery>
ReplyDeleteConservatives Are Catching On to the Culture!Sometimes I wish the Culture would catch on to conservatives ... and have Special Circumstances send some knife missiles to get them out of the way of human progress.
</Semi-obscure nerdery>
(In all honesty, given the commentariat around here, I debated not including the closing tag.)
But the point is that the folks at Truth Revolt have recognized the revolting truth: liberty lovers need a cultural echo chamber of our own.
ReplyDeleteBetter not light a match in that chamber, then.
Physical abuse? What physical abuse?
ReplyDelete"Eyebrows Shapiro" — Now that is prime Dashiell Hammett material there.
ReplyDeleteBack up. I thought Eyebrows Shapiro was with Breitbart. Say not that there has been further splintering within the gitteratti.
ReplyDeleteNot enough upvotes on the internet for this.
I want to gently wax this comment's eyebrows, then give it a deep facial massage while softly humming to it.
Recently, my friends at Ben Shapiro’s website
ReplyDeletethese are the seven saddest words i've ever seen.
fuck me gently with a chainsaw, haystack. does klavan look like mother teresa?
ReplyDeleteFirst you have to find someone who will admit to having watched American Christmas Carol.
ReplyDeleteBetter to light a match, then curse the resulting sewer-gas explosion.
ReplyDeleteShow of hands... do any of you card-carrying leftists even like Lena Dunham?
ReplyDeleteI've never seen her show, and I think her plan to have non-paid entertainers at her book events was truly shitty.
Or Chester Gould...
ReplyDeleteNever seen her show, never read her book, never even read any article about her. In fact, if it weren't for all the right-wing whining about her, I'd have lived out my days blessedly ignorant of her existence.
ReplyDeleteThe worst part of it all is knowing that all of the Breitbrats were furiously rubbing one out while reading those excerpts.
ReplyDeleteCan I upvote this while you pass me the hand sanitizer?
ReplyDeleteThe Streisand Effect strikes again. I'd never heard of Saul Alinski until the righties turned him into America's Emmanuel Goldstein.
ReplyDeleteIf your hate-boner lasts for more than two minutes, seek professional help.
@marcthiessen:
ReplyDeleteMy new Washington Post column.
Thanks to Jonathan Gruber for showing Americans what liberals really think of them
http://t.co/REQRl46uVe
She's the liberal voice of her generation, and a child molester.
ReplyDeleteYou need to take a Valium, Neo. It can't be that bad for you.
ReplyDeleteGruber provides comments Obamacare was strategically built with deception and ABC/NBC have yet to run a single story and CBS took four days.
ReplyDeleteUFB.
She did a GOTV ad that was also pro-Obama. Not sure which was the bigger sin among the wingonauts.
ReplyDelete@FriedrichHayek:
ReplyDeleteLeftist Democrats nonsensically hyping impeachment are doing an Alinsky move, painting Constitution protectors as anti-Constitution radicals.
Obama's health care plan did everything he attacked McCain for allegedly proposing. HT Gruber.
ReplyDeletehttp://t.co/xHDufDHwMk http://t.co/FUO5YMeAh9
You live for the copy and paste, DA.
ReplyDeleteYou were always the first guy to raise his hand when the Geography teacher asked if anyone knew AV, weren't you?
Lena Dunham is the Barack Obama of Hollywood because she is not from Hollywood, much like Barack Obama is not from Kenya, despite right-wing lies.
ReplyDeleteand these are all words.
ReplyDeletePass the Purell on the left-hand side.
ReplyDeleteI thought he didn't write columns until he was twelve, after his Batshit Mitzvah.
ReplyDeleteScore! After that sentence, I'm only a single Benghazi away from making Wingnut Bingo!
ReplyDeleteJonathan Gruber, Saul Alinsky, Lena Dunham and Barack Obama: The Politburo of the Liberal Hivemind.
ReplyDeleteSuperabsorbent? Balanchine, it's a choreographer, and A cleaning product!
ReplyDeleteWhy, this adaptation of The Nutcracker is fantastic, and my floor has never sparkled like this before!!!
Muzzle tov!
ReplyDeleteWake me up when they find the picture of Dunham posing with the Viet Cong.
ReplyDelete@charlescwcooke:
ReplyDeleteObamacare Is Still Extremely Unpopular
http://t.co/o8wtdG2zP1
Read the whole thing. You'll be glad you did.
But that last Benghazi is always the hardest to get.
ReplyDeleteFuck, you beat me to superabsorbent.
ReplyDeleteSomebody call Wingnut Central. One of their trolls has gone rogue. Thinks he's in an Obamacare thread.
ReplyDeleteFor him, it's always Shame-A-Tova!
ReplyDeleteDennis,
ReplyDeleteWhatever name you're using at any given time, your feedback is welcome, but maybe you can take a hint from my removal of the previous flurry of comments that were just links with anodyne tag lines (like this one!). Comments are for reactions to the post or to the discussion, not for carpet-bombing spam.
Last warning.
The absence of talent and unwillingness to do work render such a thing impossible for them. Thus leading to what we see from them everyday: Whining about someone else's talent and good work.
ReplyDeleteWell, she did use innuendo effectively in that GOTV spot, and this put the slutshamers in high dudgeon, which had to be have been good for plenty of hate-wanks of near black-out quality. Now they're just trying to get that old magic back, and we all know how well that works.
ReplyDeleteIt just hit me... Lena Dunham is the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" of the right-wing Id. She exists solely in the fevered-imaginations of conservative bloggers to serve as a focus for their misogynistic rage.
ReplyDeleteMuddled toff!
ReplyDeleteThat's what unpaid interns are for.
ReplyDeleteI provided a link, Den-Den, how is that copy and paste?
ReplyDelete“I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about.”
ReplyDeleteI always thought their Manic Pixie Dream Girls were Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and Joni Ernst.
ReplyDeleteJust need to throw this one out there. In the winger's fevered imagination Obama is Bond villian and Gomer Pyle...
ReplyDelete...
As snappy comebacks go, that was right up there with "I know you are, what am I?"
ReplyDelete“But Noodynaady's actual ingrate tootle is of come into the garner mauve
ReplyDeleteand thy nice are stores of morning and buy me a bunch of iodines. ”
Thanks for sharing. Now get back to production, like a good office drone.
ReplyDeleteHis understanding of satire is somewhere between 0 and the square root of -1.
ReplyDeleteSinging songs and carrying signs that mostly say "hooray for our side. ARGLEBARGLE SOTERO FREEDUMB GUNS DON'T TREAD IN MEEE!!"
ReplyDeleteDennis never got to play Doctor when he was a child because he always insisted on getting the co-pay first before proceeding.
ReplyDeleteDennis still thinks girls are icky and have cooties.
ReplyDeleteDennis is the conservative voice of his generation, and a goat molester.
ReplyDeleteThere are only two types of conservatives, those who are obtuse and those who pretend to be obtuse.
ReplyDeleteYou had to have stolen that from somewhere. I'm going to find it and out you.
ReplyDeleteUnlike you Dennis, we are capable of creative witticisms, you wouldn't understand because you have never had an original thought in your life.
ReplyDeleteDennis lives to eat paste.
ReplyDeleteWell then, can you answer this?
ReplyDeleteConservatives Should Explain Exactly What Jonathan Gruber Tricked Us All Into Believing
or do you just want to scream about whatever manufactured bee ess you've been told to scream about?
Seriously. What physical abuse? This is the first I'm hearing of it.
ReplyDeleteNo, gc, you don't understand, this is DA we're talking about here. Wit is just not in his repertoire.
ReplyDeleteIf by that you mean I didn't go spelunking in my baby sister's lady parts for marbles and masturbate in bed next to her, then yeah, gc, I'm kind of glad at that age I did think they were icky.
ReplyDeleteDid you think what Roman Polanski did was not rape rape, too?
We read these reconstructions of rightwing commentary, and it's easy to think "Come on, nobody can REALLY be that stupid, can they?" And then, along comes Dennis.
ReplyDeleteDamn, I have this scene playing in my head of Jonah bellowing: "I didn't leave a breakfast Hot Pocket unfinished on my desk on 9/11 just to hear this bitch bad mouth my country!"
ReplyDeleteAnybody got an in with Comedy Central? I have a show to pitch.
I saw maybe the first three or four episodes of Girls and decided it wasn't for me, and beyond that don't really have any real opinion about Ms Dunham one way or the other. I'm half convinced that the reason she's become such a perennial wingnut hate-object is simply because they know that most of their audience has no real first-hand experience of her beyond a vague notion that she's some unattractive chick who gets naked and swears a lot, and that the straw-liberals haunting their brains all adore her just like they adore Saul Alinsky and Ward Churchill and all the other left-wing bogeymen they're forever going on about. If I wanted to credit them with some intelligence, I'd say they learned their lesson when Dan Quayle picked a fight with Murphy Brown -- you can't get away with making stupid claims about pop cultural artifacts when the fact that they're obvious bullshit is right there on network tv for all to see, but when it's just some niche item your target audience won't be watching anyway, you can make up anything you like.
ReplyDeleteNo connections but a fertile imagination...Need a co-writer?
ReplyDelete...
He might if it were true, which it isn't.
ReplyDeleteIf you can call a constant state of hissing and drooling "living".
ReplyDeletePanic Mixie Nightmare Girls
ReplyDeleteFixed
Derp
ReplyDeleteThe "winger's fevered imagination" is, for those that can read, first paragraph of "A Tale of Two Cities" on feedback loop.
ReplyDeleteDo they communicate through JournoList?
ReplyDeleteBuggrit, buggrit, buggrit! Millennium hand and shrimp!
ReplyDeleteLow audience figures for a performer prove that she is a liberal icon and liberals are forcing everyone to watch her. Or something. My head hurts.
ReplyDeleteSo new... and yet so old.
ReplyDeleteWhat exactly is Truth Revolt revolting against?
ReplyDeleteWhaddaya got?
I guess he'd say ol' George's towering levels of sexism hovered
ReplyDeletesomewhere on the hazy junction between venomous misogyny, sexual
harassment and physical abuse.
Now, I do think requiring women to be highly trained athletes and rail thin is the opposite of kind and nurturing behavior. And sane and reasonable behavior. It certainly isn't healthy or much fun for the dancers. But if I'm really charitable and assume he honestly had no idea that anorexia and athletic endeavors are a bad mix for women who dance, I can say he hovered in the hazy junction.
His empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch.
ReplyDeleteThat's not what the words "physical abuse" mean.
ReplyDeleteDennis, you have to try harder here. You're not in Kansas anymore.
ReplyDelete. . . hate-wanks of near black-out quality.
ReplyDeleteI want to read dirty novelettes to this comment while it busies itself under a blanket.
OK. Since you want to take those two words out of context, let's go:
ReplyDeleteHow do you define requiring people (specifically women) to adhere insanely high appearance and performance standards?
Try a gyroscope, Dennis. It worked for Glenn Beck! (Batteries not included.)
ReplyDeleteor Ben Edlund -- Chairface Chippendale, The Deadly Bulb, Eyebrows Mulligan, Headless Henderson, The Guy with Ears Like Little Raisins, Stalingrad, Sarcastro, The Evil Midnight Bomber What Only Bombs at Midnight
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thetick.ws/tvvillains.html
If only Chris Farley had lived...
ReplyDeletesadly, that bingo will only win you a full length copy of the recent movie version of Atlas Shrugged. Of course if you don't win you get Atlas Shrugged and A Christmas Carol, so it is indeed better to win
ReplyDeletei, i, i shot the sheriff, but i didn't shoot the deputy
ReplyDeleteI thought the sign said
ReplyDeleteGet A Job, Moran!
That is Generation Kaus
ReplyDeleteThree quarks for Mr. Marks.
ReplyDeleteHis punch is as powerful as an empty cup.
ReplyDeleteLeftists are only "hyping impeachment" in the "Please proceed, governor" sense.
ReplyDeleteThat's an odd way to put the question. In the first place any field that breaks boundaries for human achievement entails certain risks and demands insane performance standards, and in ballet appearance is part of it because it is about movement, unlike, say, opera, where what matters is what you hear, and La Traviata, dying of tubercolosis, can raise her two hundred pounds of weight up off her deathbed for one last ear-splitting duet without taxing the viewer's credulity or sense of appropriateness. In many instances it's because the risks are not yet known, e.g., Richard Feynman dying of cancer years and years after exposure to radiation during the building of the bomb. Or the risks are known, and yet for some reason people still want to do them. They make the simple calculation, "Would I be happier not doing this thing? Absolutely not. Then I will take the risk." People do this all the time, for far far less. To be a professional ballet dancer at the level of the NYCB under Balanchine must have been one of the easiest things in the world not to do. It's not like being, say, a coal miner in some corner of West Virginia where there's no other work and you have no choice.
ReplyDeleteIn the second place anorexia is a disease, it's not the same as being even ballet-dancer thin. I've watched hours and hours of the NYCB on film, going back years, and there aren't any anorexics on stage. There are different body types and some dancers will have an easier time keeping the extra weight off than others. But if you look back over years you notice that lots of Balanchine's leading dancers did not have the so-called "Balanchine body." Doubrovskaya, Violette Verdy, Maria Tallchief, Merrill Ashley, for example. Even Farrell was a little bit plump when she was younger. And just as in any other field keeping up is too hard for some people because of their temperament or other limitations and there's not a thing wrong with that.
One of the things that is widely attested by Balanchine and his dancers is that their capacities did a lot to shape his choreography. And the dancers just kept getting more agile and slimmer and faster and stronger and more daring. A lot of this was because of the Balanchine technique, which enabled them to do more (it is hardly recognizable as specifically Balanchine's because now it is just THE technique in most places). It was a mutually reinforcing thing and it was, for them, about dancing. This is true for the men and the women, by the way. The former dancers all talk about this aspect of Balanchine's working method with enthusiasm and pride, because they were serious artists and they were answering the call not of some personality but of the desire to realize the artistic, expressive possibility and challenge that they recognized in what Balanchine was doing with ballet. And if you are a serious artist you go for it, you make the sacrifice, because it is living more intensely, more attentively, more alively, it's making something happen, it's defying gravity. These were strong, smart women, who were deadly serious as artists and they wanted to be part of taking ballet to the very high place that Balanchine took it to. All you have to do to see it is watch something like "Jewels" especially the "Diamonds" variation and compare it to some of those old interminable 19th-century clunkers like Sleeping Beauty. What I mean is that these exacting standards of athleticism were things the dancers wanted so they could dance, not only dance themselves but advance the very idea of dance. If you don't know why people would willingly do this, why they would happily risk knees, hips, backs, metatarsal bones for it, you may want to consider whether you possess a sufficiently complete picture of human motivation.
Not worth it bringing my A-game when you have all these Mädchen für Hitler moderators here all up in my chimney, T.
ReplyDeleteSPOON!
ReplyDeleteFree Ezra!
ReplyDeleteThe Truth stinks on ice.
ReplyDeleteI remain convinced that there are at least two (if not more) posters being identified as 'Dennis'; the original, or Dennis-Prime, if you will, is the genuine article, an incredibly ignorant, profoundly deluded right-wing troll, and then there's the imitation Pseudo-Dennis poster(s) written in the manner of Andy Kaufman's straightfaced performances to explore the inherently ridiculous elements of far-right ideology. However, the gap between satire and absurd reality being pencil-thin, the creation of a sort of wingnut Turing test -the Dennis Test, say - is needed in order to differentiate between them.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who has been reading these comments for years, what I've seen has been a 'Gentleman's C' level game at best.
ReplyDeleteSmut, I love you, can I do your dishes?
ReplyDeleteThat's going in the next quotes post. ^_^
Charmed, I'm sure, G. C. L. Your reference, strange as it was, was tip-top, bringing color to a thread that had bottomed out, leaving me feel down. Now I'm up jumping for joyce.
ReplyDeleteHe's a devoted follower of Hell-acha.
ReplyDeletethe square root of -1.I know you are, but what am i?
ReplyDeleteIn general, yes. On the other hand, I'd suggest a few extra points for "Mädchen für Hitler moderators here all up in my chimney."
ReplyDeleteProbably the work of one of more self-aware
ReplyDeleteDennises (Dennizens?).
If conservatives are catching on to the culture, I suspect the culture is Staphylococcus.
ReplyDeleteI can already detect high values of Strangeness but no Charm.
ReplyDeleteBen Edlund is my god. He also wrote Smile Time (Angel) and Jaynestown (Firefly).
ReplyDelete"Miss Dunham threatened to sue the site for quoting her verbatim!"
ReplyDeleteBecause everybody knows that direct quotes are only "personal attacks" when the person being quoted is conservative, duh.
Well, he has been complaining that someone took his stapler. So don't expect much dronage outta him any time soon.
ReplyDeleteNeeds moar BENGHAZI!!1!!
ReplyDeleteConservatives Are Catching On to the Culture!
ReplyDeleteClams Got Legs!
(now there's something semi-obscure)
Heh. Disturbing, if true.
ReplyDelete(tl;dr)
Comrade, please!
ReplyDeleteSo I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now to
ReplyDeletetake the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of
bumblebees on them. Give me five bees for a quarter you'd say. Now
where were we, oh ya. The important thing was that I had an onion on my
belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions
because if the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow
ones.