I'm still not entirely sure who Kim Kardashian is or why people know all about her

And Scott, I didn't mean that Kim is likely more interesting than the average person, just that I think she is deliberately suppressing her personality in order to be seen as an icon/ambivalent metaphor for our cultural moment rather than a person

Her affect is just so flat. She talks s o s l o w. It feels like a performance.

just that I think she is deliberately suppressing her personality in order to be seen as an icon/ambivalent metaphor for our cultural moment rather than a person

question of her 'blankness' was the subject of the papermag article/ interview with the infamous nsfw photos

nb nsfw

http://www.papermag.com/2014/11/kim_kardashian.php

huh, i hadn't read that before. thanks drash! This piece is very well written, i like the writer's prose style

I only read kk nsfw sites for the articles

The sex aspect of the sex tape makes people completely unable to form cogent arguments

She's not famous for fucking ray j on tape, she's famous for being beautiful — and there's a tradition of both women and men being famous for being good-looking that goes back probably centuries

she's not 'famous for' the sex tape, but it was a publicity coup that turned her into a public figure.

shes famous for being hot and having big tits and a huge ass

#lockthread

she's actually the American Putin, got big via behind the scenes coup, stayed popular by successfully manipulating the media / taking her shirt off

Kissed boy like kitten.

but can she wrestle a bear

i've been known to watch the kardashian show on occasion. i don't like it or dislike it, but the most interesting thing about kim, for me, is that she is by far the dullest figure on the show. kris, caitlyn (formerly bruce), khloe, scott, and the younger siblings are all way more dynamic and the plots of most episodes really deal with them. kim and to a lesser extent kourtney are more like spectators of the action. they have conflicts with each other and the other characters but they always seem emotionally flat, the kinds of people who will say "i am so angry right now" in the same tone that they would say "i am so happy right now."

This is so OTM. I really like the first two seasons of KuwtK before the fact they're super-famous and super-rich starts having visible effects on the way they live their lives (as in, it changes: the privilege at work is obvious from the start). The dynamic is fascinating. Scott using "Patrick Bateman" as a pseudonym in an early episode also makes me wonder just how self-aware the different characters ("stars" seems false in this context) of the show are.

Also I can't believe nobody has posted Kim's amazing* one-off venture into pop music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHp7sq1Tzn0

Wow, according to the YouTube annotations, that's a charity single ("all proceeds go to St. Jude Children's Hospital")!

the kinds of people who will say "i am so angry right now" in the same tone that they would say "i am so happy right now."

https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/hphotos-xfa1/t51.2885-15/s320x320/e15/11287784_1614846928759984_661900556_n.jpg

Kim's 17 year old stepsister Kylie over the past month or so has had her father undergo sexual reassignment and then find out her boyfriend has been romantically linked with a transsexual model spanning over the past 3 years.

To me, that makes for much more compelling reality TV than a bunch of sisters going to the spa or designing clothing lines for Target.

people went apoplectic that she was on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me a few weeks ago (the NPR show), threatening to stop giving NPR money, etc. Ridiculous; I'm more offended that Prairie Home Companion is still a thing that is on the radio. Likewise, she did this talk in the Bay Area referenced above, through the Commonwealth Club, and lots of people got pissed that she was being 'elevated' to some status.

My wife is armenian so I've known a fair amount about them and have watched all the shows because we watch a lot of crap TV. She is overexposed, no doubt, but I still don't get the hate since she has never been as outwardly offensive as Paris Hilton was in her prime. Armenians all claim to hate her but follow her every move; and she got some credit for bringing attention to the genocide centenial.

yeah i don't follow the kardashians much but recently it was like, kim is labelled as shallow but she's using her platform to talk about genocide and trans issues...

also she tried to break the internet...gotta admire that.

She said someone nice about my band once.

aw.

https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/3069340928

any explanation for how that happened?

Haven't read it in a while but Caitlin Moran's celeb column in The Times on Friday p/much had an item on Kim/Kayne every week - the whole column is hilarious but that's how I was made more aware of them than 'this is some person idk of as I'll never see the thing they are in', which happens with many people.

any explanation for how that happened?

Our bass player was working as part of Kim's media team* and ghost wrote her blog entries. Eventually Kim took over writing her own stuff** and one "hey, can you tweet something about my band" later... Isn't a high-level celebrity sponsored tweet worth 30 or 40 grand now? Anyway, that tweet translated into exactly two iTunes purchases.

*all celebrities at this level have social media teams that optimize all this stuff. Was told that "Team Britney" was to be feared.

**or switched teams (they are all "teams")

http://www.stereogum.com/1815850/sinead-oconnor-says-music-has-officially-died-because-of-kim-kardashian/wheres-the-beef/

Anyway, that tweet translated into exactly two iTunes purchases.

this is like a key insight to how the music industry and social media actually work in our time

Had the tweet contained a link, you might have gotten better results.

when you have the kind of huge platform O’Connor does

lol

http://www.missinfo.tv/index.php/kim-kardashian-and-kanye-west-for-system-magazine/

so what's going on here idgi

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/kim-kardashian-american-woman-cover-story-20150727?page=7

Kardashian has not extensively studied the knowledge found in schools; she draws money and power toward her by the force of intuition. On her show, she and her sisters have their own language on issues more complex than glam rooms: They don't know things, they feel things; they don't want something, they deserve it. At the same time that they have championed the waist-trainer product, which bears much resemblance to a Victorian corset, they also exhibit an attitude toward their bodies that can only be called revolutionary. Women have long asked for fair vagina representation in media, for their vaginas not only to be sexual objects but to smell and bleed and pop out babies, and on their show, Kardashian vaginas do all that and more, which is very different than other pop-culture vaginas.

I know its abt the 12th thing to focus on in that excerpt, but "not extensively studied the knowledge found in schools" is so cringey and terrible how was it not re-written

Gross

people went apoplectic that she was on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me a few weeks ago (the NPR show), threatening to stop giving NPR money, etc. Ridiculous; I'm more offended that Prairie Home Companion is still a thing that is on the radio.

Oh God, I knew that she was on Wait Wait, but I didn't realize that it had inspired such outrage.

Those people are dumb.

Nice response from Peter Sagal:

First of all, I just want to clarify something. I wasn't on the show that week and some people think that I was somehow boycotting my own show because of Kim Kardashian. Not only is that not true — I had a prearranged thing to do elsewhere — but I wanted Kim Kardashian on the show and felt really bad that I couldn't be there to interview her. We tried to change the date so I could, but she's a busy woman, so I had to miss it. My only regret about the whole episode was that I wasn't there to interview her, but that's selfish because I think (guest host) Mike (Pesca) did a fine job.

Somebody wrote in and said, "Oh, the whole deal with Kim Kardashian was so awful, I couldn't believe it," and I said, "What did Kim Kardashian actually do that bothers you so much?" Is it that she did a sex tape? Rob Lowe did a sex tape and went on our show and nobody protested. Is it because she's in the gossip columns for her romantic life? Well, so is Scarlett Johansson, and she also poses in negligees, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for people. Was it that she does reality TV? Well, we had on Andy Cohen from Bravo and he invented the modern soap opera reality TV show, the Real Housewives thing. He made it all possible, you know. So what exactly is the objection to Kim Kardashian? Nobody can tell me.

People imagine that she represents something that they oppose. I think our listeners think that there's our world, which is literate and charming and intellectual, and then there's Kim Kardashian's world, which they don't know but they assume is dumb and superficial and is somehow destroying this country. My attitude is — let's assume there are two worlds, let's assume they're right, that Kim Kardashian lives in and represents a completely different world than the one in which we and our listeners live in — why wouldn't you want to talk to her?

For me, that's exactly the reason you would want to talk to her. Oh my gosh, there's this whole other world out there that's interested in things that we don't know anything about. "What is it like to be in your world? Tell me about your day, tell me about your life, let's get to know you." If an alien came to earth, you wouldn't say, "Oh, you're from another planet." You'd say, "Tell us about your planet, what's it like there? What makes you happy? What's a day like on Planet Kardashian?"

My attitude — and this is very much why I wanted to have her on the show — is that she is perhaps one of the most unique people in the entire world. Who else lives like her? Who else has had her success? Who else has had her exposure? Who else has had her life? I can't think of anybody.

pop culture vaginas

I can't think of anybody.

Paris Hilton?

Is the writer short-circuiting?

once, a boy would kick a ball in the street

http://www.rageon.com/products/kim-kardashian-human-centipede-t-shirt

needs more kanye

posts like Yeah this is what I know about her but I also know she has instagram followers or I don't have any real opinions about that but celebrity culture is super vapid or I know there's like a plus size model I saw holding a sign I wasn't following the point or even the thread title itself have a tonal similarity to things Paris Hilton or KK would say themselves - extremely detached but with a hint of curiosity that's quickly dismissed or flattened-out then falls off.

http://www.rageon.com/products/kim-kardashian-human-centipede-t-shirt

― tayto fan (Michael B), Wednesday, July 29, 2015 5:47 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this site is like the hypebeast spencer's gifts

idg why it isn't just a bunch of Kim Kardashians

It's Kardashians all the way down

When someone claims total ignorance of Kim Kardashian, my main takeaway is that they do all of their grocery shopping at Whole Foods or Trader Joes. It seems impossible to have walked through a standard supermarket checkout line and not know things like who she's married to, who's in her family, what she looks like, etc.

That's a US thing, I think? Supermarkets over here are more likely to have a magazine aisle and a bunch of sweets in the checkouts.

Saw a couple of boys staring open mouthed at the Rolling Stone cover yesterday - I think they might have realized then that a whole new world was out there.

this is from someone OUTRAGED about the decline of Rolling Stone, but I like it because it looks like Lennon is reacting to the photo of KK

http://www.feelnumb.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/first-issue-rolling-stone-john-lennon-kim-kardasian.jpg

https://menwillpause.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/image4.jpg?w=300&h=224

there's something interesting to the kind of anxiety KK (or someone like Paris Hilton) provokes that goes beyond misogyny (while be 100% an expression of it). or maybe it's just that a woman is more likely to invoke the kind of signifier without a referent in a patriarchal culture. like, pictures of John Lennon are themselves a kind of empty iconography that only really attain authentic "meaning" when juxtaposed to an image that signifies only its own image-ness, if you will. the KK haters kind of need her, in that case.

I'm just tired of seeing the face of someone I'm uninterested in all the time tbh, wouldn't go so far as to call it an "anxiety"