“Hollywood, with its Jewish roots, did not experience The Passion as a transcendent religious and emotional event, as so many other viewers did. Some haven’t forgiven Gibson for even making the film, let alone forgotten his father, Hutton, and his inflammatory statements about the history of the Jews. ‘I’ll tell you why The Passion won’t be nominated,’ snaps one industry executive. ‘Happily, there are too many people in the Academy who believe the Holocaust actually happened.'”
Will Oscar Listen?, Sean Smith, Newsweek, Oct. 25, 2004.
Category: Shallow
Categories
A Woman Without Qualities
These titles were already taken, but are just as good:
Fuck You Too
Bitch
Skinny Women Are Evil
If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single?
Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash
The Ultimate Book of Useless Information
Sleaze
Please Kill Me
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It’s a Simple Formula, Really
‘World Police’ Creators Say Anger = Publicity
Easy as ABC!
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Last Derrida Post Ever
We couldn’t help but notice that since we issued our “modest defense” of Jacques Derrida, various arms of the media empire seem to have rethought their initial scorn towards the late French philosopher and his work. This critical reappraisal is most apparent in the New York Times, which offers this panegyric, revealing, among other things, that Derrida gave carnival masks to young children of American academics.
The Guardian has a more diverse sampling of opinion from across the pond, some pro and some con.
Less hagiographically sympathetic (and somewhat saucier) than the Times op-ed is Marco Roth’s piece in the upstart literary journal n+1, which has the virtue of describing a hot chick with whom the author attended Derrida’s lectures in Paris:
…I watched the raven haired girl who always wore a miniskirt and a fur coat, the sort of Parisienne I fantasized about meeting before my trip. She filled line after line of graph paper in a neat miniscule hand, never stopping. She seemed to be able to take him down verbatim. At the end, she would dash out of the hall. Where?
To sum up, the new media consensus seems to be “Derrida: Not Necessarily A Pernicious Nihilist Who Threatened The Very Foundation Of Western Society And Cutlture.” And, as always, dear reader, you heard it here first.
EARLIER: Confessions of a Teenage Deconstructionist
EVEN EARLIER: Jacques Derrida, 1930-2004
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Why… Is Michelle Malkin the New Jadakiss?
Malkin and Kiss… Why?
The many questions of Michelle Malkin:
How… many hate crime anecdotes does it take before the mainstream media spot a trend?
But what… happens when the targets are the wrong kind of victim?
What… happens when conservatives and Republicans are on the receiving end of discriminatory threats or harassment or worse?
Hello…, reporters?
Is… anybody home?
Is… it my imagination or do I hear pins dropping in the grievance corners of America’s otherwise victim-friendly newsrooms?
Can… I get a hair appointment and pedicure before appearing on Scarborough Country on Friday?
Will… The pedicurist be an immigrant?
Should… I cancel it if she is?
Why… is my Amazon rank so low?
The Internets are on fire today, man. As they say in Latin, ¡en fuego, hombre!
First comes this excellent article from a newspaper called The New York Sun that not only tells us about blogs, but finally—finally!—explains that “jumping the shark” phrase our 15 year-old cousin always uses. (It has something to do with Happy Days.) There’s also an excellent little primer about a show called Oz, which we’re definitely gonna watch this week.
The article, by a writer named Eric Wolff (remember that name!), is all about a website called Gawker, which we plan to check out after we have our morning coffee! It also answers the age old question: Who gives the best soundbites, Condé Nast editorial assistants, or ‘cyber-hostesses‘? (It’s a draw! They both bring the noise and the bite!)
Then there’s this Tom Scocca piece from The New York Observer about a guy who runs a site called The Minor Fall, The Major Lift (definitely gotta check his stuff out) who was once annonymous but is now going by his real name, Alex Balk! Plus, he’s now writing for The New York Times! Like other bloggers! (Memo to self: Pick up the Times this weekend on the way to brunch!)
What’s exciting about this (and warrants all these exclamation points!!!) is that we can now see that far from being an annonymous wag, this Balk fellow was actually hiding in plain site all along, submitting to a website called McSweeneys and playing along on the Slate News Quiz with Emmy-winning TV writers and producers! Next Major Lift, Hollywood!?!
Phew! This entry has fairly knocked us out (we topped off our exclamation point quota in the second paragraph!), and now we’re off to go figure out how to get one of these blogs set up. Our 15 year-old cousin is great with computers, and we think the “domain” JackieHarvey.com is still available!
As they say in Latin, Excelsior!
Categories
Rooting for the Overdog
As gratifying as it is to win these games, they have become so excessively fraught that to watch them is emotionally taxing in the extreme. I thought I’d be able to relax and get some work done when the Yankees opened up an eight run lead, but the Red Sox regrouped, metastasized, and emerged with a deadlier-than-ever assault. Clearly, they pose a threat that requires constant vigilance. Some day, they will win — perhaps tomorrow. It’s not a question of if, but when.
It may be unpopular and controversial to put it this way, but I think we have to get back to the place we were, where the Red Sox are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. We’re never going to end this rivalry. But we’ve got to reduce it to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.
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We’re Hiring
Please send all resumes in MS Word format.
We all have our youthful indiscretions, those young and irresponsible things that we did when we were young and irresponsible. Senator Robert Byrd, for example, was in the Klan, while George W. Bush was a cheerleader at Andover, and, most seriously of course, John Kerry was a war hero.
My own modest indiscretion is that I Was A Teenage Derridian. Yes, as a literature major in the early 90’s, I was inundated with the “critical theory” associated with various continentals from Adorno to Deleuze to Foucault and most of all, Jacques Derrida. And let me make it clear that I was not merely the victim of all this theory; in fact, I eagerly sought it out. Indeed, some witnesses even report that I had Derrida’s famous statement “il n’ya pas de hors-text” [“there is nothing outside the text”] stencilled upon my cap at graduation.
[Long, boring article follows below the break.]
Where do you live, Jimmy Fallon? From left to right, the SNL wunderkind on the cover of Paper‘s November 2001 issue; and the star of Taxi featured as “Man of the Week” in the October 18, 2004 issue of Us