quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

Leave it to the NYT to reveal the new Arcade Fire album cover.

For those of you who were wondering how long it would take the decor from Les Trois Garçons in Lonfdon to go overground...eight years.

funny how these antiquarians manage to avoid any brush with the classes of people who would have made up the vast preponderance of the eras they fetishize - sort of like how everyone's reincarnated from like, amelia earhart rather than ollie the baker

bet these guys go to a lot of World Inferno Friendship Society concerts

also, can't believe there's actually a store called Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and that it's located in Philly!

ok the line about the kid who grew up in a scandanavian-modern home and then "got fed up and rebelled"

really, what a luxurious way to say "fuck you, mom & dad! i want to romanticize the late-colonial ruling classes and you can't stop me"

Lutefisk is not a dessert! I'm outta here!

i can't even decipher wtf "authenticity" means to these ppl

I am angry that that one guy has completely misunderstood 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' but I think that may make me as bad as he is.

I don't buy puy lentils b/c I think I'd have to go to a specialty/"nice" store for them, but you can get regular ones in the GOYA aisle or in the beans & rice section. They only take about 15 minutes at a boil to be soft through and ready to eat. I don't know what is the deal with lentils that you have to cook for hours? For me, they're like the fastest recipe possible.

wait what?

Discussion up-thread about cheap grad student eats. I'm just a week late to the conversation.

lentils in the age of mechanical reproduction

I just took it for granted that the guy had never read the essay past the title xxxxp

our mass-produced quirky curios and t-shirts have more aura than those cheap trinkets from China, and ours cost more too, so you know they're unique

lentils in the age of mechanical reproduction

This is basically the theme of the big summer festival in my town.

I'd love to see a bunch of people fetishizing the past by living as members of the diseased, malnourished, downtrodden masses that 99% of everyone would have actually been a part of.

i'm going to be a tubercular prostitute operating out of gropecunt lane. ironically.

xp You haven't seen me in 90% humidity at 7am.

(His cellphone ring tone is Mouret’s “Rondeau,” the old Masterpiece Theater theme song, and his e-mail address is mrwooster, a nod to the P. G. Wodehouse character.)

i was a fan of monsterpiece theater as a kid!

Nothing particularly bad about this, but "Relying on the centuries-old principle that white objects absorb less heat than dark ones" is the kind of sentence you get when you let an NYT culture critic write about science.

More of an adjunct to this thread but even so:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/opinion/30wasik.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

... (As Jody Rosen described it, from 'the department of half-baked conceits')

ah yes, i remember when white objects started absorbing less heat than dark ones back in the 1600s xp

Meanwhile, another destination beckons, a place that courses with all the raw ambition and creative energy that the hard times seem to have drained from New York. I am referring, of course, to the Internet

(jaw all over keyboard)

that's it, im moving to the internet

The rents are too high for me.

They changed that, but you do have to look at billboards all day.

gold in them thar internets

a coney island of the web

ugh i used to live in the internet but its been gentrified beyond recognition at this point

Blog posts in the age of mechanical reproduction

The author is a writer living in vles.com

facts are funny things

this fucking nick mcdonnell kid makes me reach for my revolver

and the fact that the time so blatantly sucks his dick just...sickens me.

what'd you expect from a publication responsible for stuff like this:

Alessandra Stanley...a prolific writer much admired by editors for the intellectual heft of her coverage of television..Stanley was the cause of so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts.

Did anyone read the "Lives" thing in the back of the magazine this week, about the guy and his neighbors?

i did i did

lmao @ Alessandra Stanley
"The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work"

haha Mr. Que I am not even sure how to formulate my response to that piece

yeah me neither--usually i read like the first sentence of those things and then stop, but for some reason i pressed on

like did that guy expect the reader not to think he was sort of a dick before the part where he realized he was a dick and felt bad about it? or was he trying to encourage us to notice he was being a dick to prepare for his eventual shameful realization? are we supposed to feel good about him realizing he was sort of a dick, even though as far as I'm concerned he should have realized it way before and then not published an article about how he learned the important lesson not to be an asshole? and how do you write that without at all addressing any of the obvious things that problem contributed to your neighbor tension, like class stuff and city-versus-country stuff and sexual-orientation stuff? is it really possible to live next door to people and be the fussy meddling gay man from Manhattan and not be aware of the dynamics involved? (if so, is that a good thing?) so many questions.

the casualness of the whole "well, we couldnt live next door to them anymore, so we sold the house!!" was very

yeah but in some ways, i'm glad i read it. it seemed like a much better Lives column than normal, if only because it raised all those crazy questions that you mention? usually, if i read the whole thing i think "Why did I just waste three minutes of my life reading that."

on the other hand i was totally cheering on the German Shepard to attack the guy, and when he admitted he had never heard the swing set, i wanted to throttle him

ha, that's true, it definitely got more reaction out of me than anything back there in years. still, it seems wrong to give someone space in the back of the times magazine to talk about his important experience, as a presumably non-autistic grown man, of how not to get along with neighbors.

Thank u ILX for being (shockingly) an island of sanity. Someone I know is apparently friends with the steampunk/Victorian taxidermy people from last week, and was posting links on FB being all "CONGRATS TO CALUMERIA AND NICHOLAS CHATTAM-SMYTHE" or whatever.

the more I think about it, surely he was arranging the details in a self-deprecating way: he talks about moving their stuff off their own driveway, and finally flips out when they're making noise at one after a family wedding. I would like to think he's being self-aware there, but then I have trouble imagining a very self-aware person writing the thing in the first place.

almost like a throwback to 1970s style village voice confessional journalism (w/o the sexual TMI)