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

In the room the women come and go,
eating couscous and talking about Adderall...

(or so)

that article J0rdan posted damn

classic NYT lede:

AT Easter time, when the shops erupt in a pastel frenzy of chocolate bunnies, candy eggs and marshmallow chicks, I try hard to resist. Unless I’m buying an artisanal rabbit made from single-origin chocolate, most of the confections look a lot better than they taste.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/dining/20appe.html

― I DIED, Saturday, April 16, 2011 12:21 PM Bookmark

This person needs to DIA(artisinal)F

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703856704576285450222313000.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

wsj but still, choice quote:

"Now, with so much of his or her compensation at risk, the prospect of the banker toiling deep into his 50s or even his 60s is very real."

It's hard to lift those heavy sacks of money in your 60s.

Oh nos working until 60!

TOILING

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/science/earth/28solar.html?_r=2&hp

Nancy and Eric Olsen could not pinpoint exactly when it happened or how. All they knew was one moment they had a pastoral view of a soccer field and the woods from their 1920s colonial-style house; the next all they could see were three solar panels.

“I hate them,” Mr. Olsen, 40, said of the row of panels attached to electrical poles across the street. “It’s just an eyesore.”

giant telephone poles with wires and boxes on them are part of a "pastoral view" but DON'T MAR THEM WITH SOLAR PANELS

I live near their and they're not so bad, kind of cool. fuck these people in the goat ass imo

They have special... goat asses?

yes, if you want to live in new jersey you need a goat ass...don't you know?

lol easterners with above ground cabling. it looks TERRIBLE whether there's solar panel or not.

Fucking Ridgewood can fucking bite me, I HATE that town.

If Bergen Country fell into a sinkhole, we'd have solved like 70% of our "evil and hated people on Wall Street" problems and we could just cover the whole thing over with solar panels. Win/win.

i think fairfield cty is gonna have to go to then

I wonder if there's some astroturfing involved with the opposition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/garden/28moby.html

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/04/28/garden/28moby-span/28moby-span-articleLarge.jpg

'Moby, once the ultimate downtown New York musician, now lives in a 1920s castle in the Hollywood Hills.'

yeah, i saw that this morning and retched a bit

ultimate downtown NY musician

well, he typifies an era for sure

along with 50, one of the last of the final generation of big money musicians except he was supposed to be part of an anonymous movement

i went to his apartment in nolita to interview him once, it was nice, hes a very nice guy

my memories of "downtown moby" is that there were always a lot of girls hanging out with him, and they generally seemed shorter than him. it's weird what i remember. like, why that?

isn't he an environmentalist or something, why would he live in a castle

my one-on-one experience with him has been that he's kinda snide and a bit of a jerk but when you do these minor peeks into somebody's life it's hardly definitive
he did kinda screw around with a friend o mine tho and it didn't end pretty

i like his tea tho
also next is the e

I wonder if he still does that party game where he tries to touch people with his penis

from what i have heard about the mobester, you should steer your ladyfriends clear of him.

cough

I worked at a bar with a girl who went to NY for the weekend and wound up meeting "A DJ" who you moved to NY to be with. Years later I found out it was him and that he'd bought her a tea store/restaurant downtown or something and running that is what she now does. Their courtship didn't last afaik though.

"who you moved to NY to be with"

"who SHE moved to NY to be with"

Was the girl Kelly?

Yes.

?

I was just curious, I assumed he only started one tea place with an ex, but you never know!

Oh I just googled them - I didn't realize they'd written a book together and stuff. ha. It was funny because she was very hush hush about it at the time just mentioning this DJ guy she'd met but not telling anyone who. I think I put two and two together years later while reading some article about the store online and then seeing a picture of her or something.

I guess the Mag article last week by a film critic who is bored by movies that don't have constant action and sensation (eg Meek's Cutoff, Tarkovsky) doesn't qualify.

NOT MUCH

Man that article was so STUPID and offensive both to people who DO like long movies in which not much appears to happen, and people who need explosions.

Also, if you need to watch a difficult movie to feel like you "did" something, then GET OFF YOUR ASS AND ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING.

I didn't read the article but it sounds like the work of a writer who has just discovered CHALLOPS

I did read another frustrating article about Solaris recently which had the same "nothing happens" kind of complaints -- it was criticizing it for being not very good at being sci-fi, which seems sort of like criticizing Romeo & Juliet for being not very good at being softcore porn.

lots of people are too proud of casting off anything that isn't easy to deal with when tbqf it seems to me life is only enriched by meeting art on its own terms, especially the works that aren't hyper-immediate and perhaps even "slow" or "difficult."

I don't know if your read the article, omar? But the writer basic glorified "difficult" movies throughout almost the entire thing, even though he clearly didn't like or understand them, as a way of aspiring to be someone "smart" and "intellectual" who WOULD like them. Not until like halfway through page two did he kinnnnnd of admit that maybe it wasn't necessary to force yourself to "eat" your "cultural vegetables"?

I'm not even sure what his point was in the end, tbh. All the assignments of value and assignments of lack of value were just wrong and beside the point all the way though so it kind of doesn't matter.

Like, of COURSE people should ("should") always be looking for interesting things that will move them forward, take them to visit new ideas, inspire thought, but works of art/entertainment do not gain those qualities JUST from being difficult or inaccessible. That doesn't make them better or worse, it just makes them more difficult.

You don't get some kind of cred for sitting through something that honestly bored you; neither is there anything wrong with doing so. It's not a basis for a whole article either for or against.

btw, the guy identified himself as a film critic, so he DOES have to eat his veggies sometimes, but this explains a lot:

"Dan Kois has worked as a film executive and a literary agent."

yeah i read it, i kinda get what you got from it too laurel, i guess the fact that he called them "vegetables" was hilarious to me, as if other people couldn't possibly regard them as slow-cooked pork with a side of sweet potatoes and a pint of beer and rather regard a fast and furious sequel or transformers 2 as the veggies they need in order to keep up with the cultural conversation and not be left behind (if you feel me.)

That's what I meant by assigned values being all wrong! Yeah, I'm with you. He was convicting himself for not liking stuff he didn't like, because he had assigned a bunch of implications to WHAT KIND OF PERSON IT MADE HIM TO LIKE STUFF.

To that guy, I say: Get out of your own head once in a while, and get that head out of your ass.

In college, a friend demanded to know what kind of idiot I was that I hadn’t yet watched Tarkovsky’s “Solaris.” “It’s so boring,” he said with evident awe. “You have to watch it, but you won’t get it.”

He was right: I had to watch it, and I didn’t get it. I had to watch it — on a laserdisc in the university library — because the intimation that there was a film that connoisseurs knew that I’d never heard of was too much to bear. I didn’t get it because its mesmerizing pace was so far removed from my cinematic metabolism that several times during its 165 minutes, I awoke in a panic, only to find that the same thing was happening onscreen as was happening when I closed my eyes. (Seas roiling; Russians brooding.) After I left the library, my friend asked me what I thought. “That was amazing,” I said. When he asked me what part I liked the best, I picked the five-minute sequence of a car driving down a highway, because it seemed the most boring. He nodded his approval.

Last spring, I wrote about the first season of the HBO series “Treme,” David Simon’s jazzy ode to post-Katrina New Orleans, which unfurls at an unhurried pace, interspersing scenes of high drama with long stretches of everyday living and snippets of live music. Just before the first season ended, I defended it, loudly, in a published debate with another writer, as a good show whose slow development was a welcome antidote to the context-free dramas surrounding it on television. “I really like these characters,” I wrote. “I don’t mind that they are low-key. I don’t mind that the stakes are low . . . because the actors are convincing me of how high the stakes are for them.” Give “Treme” a chance, I said. One day it could be great.

Then what happened? I was out of town for the season finale of “Treme” and didn’t get around to watching it right away. And then months went by, and I never felt like watching that episode, even as news of a second season began to trickle out. I finally deleted that season finale, unwatched, from my DVR, as well as my season pass for the show. “Treme” returned last week. The space the second season might have taken is now going to be filled by a solid dozen episodes of “Phineas and Ferb.”

all this just tells me the guy has mild late-onset ADD.