It’s not the “gun culture,” it’s the thug culture. And in that regard, as Bryan Preston points out, Bob Costas is part of the problem.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
Take More Than Five
Hope they have pianos, and not just harps in heaven, for the likes of Dave Brubeck. He was a revolutionary when it came to time signatures, at least in terms of popularizing quirky ones. My sister went to music school with his son, Chris, in Ann Arbor.
A Celtic Christmas
I didn’t know that Ross McKitrick was a piper.
This seems like a good cause, particularly if you’re partial to Celtic music.
Cyber Monday
I know that it’s Wednesday, but Amazon is extending the deals all week, including lightning deals that change every hour. Also, check out the Christmas (not “holiday”) Corner
.
I appreciate the purchases that folks have made through the site so far this month, particularly the iPod Touch and Kindle. Also, I notice that someone bought Jake Tapper’s must-read new book on Afghanistan. I hope that more do. Here’s an interview with him about it over at National Review Online.
Death
Girls
…there’s an important difference between Apatow’s work and Dunham’s, and that is that Apatow tells and re-tells stories of growing up, while Dunham shows a group of women who stubbornly refuse to do so. Apatow shows characters learning the importance of responsibility and morality, while Dunham’s characters are largely devoid of the former and uninterested in the latter.
The show’s main character, played by Dunham herself, embodies all of this. In the first scene of the pilot, when her parents tell her they won’t be paying her bills any more, she loses it, and informs them that instead of pushing her out of the nest, they should be grateful she isn’t addicted to pills. Her friends are equally appalled by the prospect of a 24-year-old paying her own phone bills, and, for the most part, they’re equally reckless. For instance, in the second episode, one of them misses her abortion appointment because she’s busy having sex in a bar. And their romantic relationships — unsurprisingly — come in about every possible iteration of dysfunction.
…You can almost argue that Lena Dunham sees President Obama as the perfect surrogate for everything missing in her characters’ lives: He’s their gentle lover, supportive parent, and empathetic friend. He’s special. He won’t let them down. He’s Prince Charming. And that kind of defeats the purpose of feminism.
You’d think the feminist elevation of agency would result in women who take pride in being responsible for their own bodies. You’d hope that telling women that they can do whatever they want would imply that they’re responsible for what they do. You’d think serious feminists would argue that true empowerment is something you lay claim to, not something the federal government dispenses in all its benevolence. But for Dunham, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Because feminism was hijacked by the left back in the seventies, despite the fact that campus leftists were some of the biggest male chauvinist pigs around.
Prometheus
The Lileks review (scroll down). He’s not impressed. I’m pretty sure I’ll never waste time watching it.
Cyber Monday
If you’re doing your shopping on-line at Amazon today (or any day), this site is an affiliate, and your click-throughs via the box at the left (or links in this post) help support me. They have a lot of deals today, including half off the entire Battlestar Galactica
series.
The Gods Of The Copybook Headings
We Are All Hawkeyes
Today, Maize and Blue are cheering black and gold. #iowahawkblog