Brian's Posts
Stuff I find interesting
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Check out this unfiltered moment on the GIRLS Facebook app. Create your photo here.
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Photo reblogged from The New Yorker
Lena Dunham: Unwatchable in the Best Way
There is a history of television comedies about young women triumphantly taking on the big city. “That Girl,” starring Marlo Thomas, seems out of memory-reach for the world of Dunham’s show, but both “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Sex and the City” are explicitly referenced in the script—and explicitly subverted. These older shows were laughably fake in their depictions of city girls: they were designed to buck up women viewers, to give them pretty bachelorettes who were stumbling but still smiling. Marlo Thomas’s effervescent Anne Marie twirls a parasol at Lincoln Center and flies a kite in Central Park, and Mary Tyler Moore tosses her hat in the air with unrepressed chipperness (in the opening credits of “That Girl,” Marlo Thomas appears to be weathering stronger breezes and hangs on to hers). These programs from the sixties and seventies were far more conventionally feminist than “Sex and the City,” paying closer attention to a young woman’s professional efforts than to her shopping and dating. But they did not dare present real unhappiness, or real anything at all.
In the opening montage of “That Girl,” Marlo Thomas sees a twinned version of herself in a store window, and the mannequin looks down and gives her a you-go-girl wink. There is a bit of this narcissistic wink in Dunham’s work, without which it might be unwatchable. And I mean unwatchable in the very best way. “You couldn’t pay me enough to be twenty-four again,” says Hannah’s doctor, examining her patient for an S.T.D. Dunham has teleported herself into the future in order to see herself as a survivor—a pre-survivor, not yet quite survived—of a terrible time. It’s what true comedic artists do.
- Lorrie Moore on Lena Dunham’s “Tiny Furniture” and new HBO show, “Girls”: http://nyr.kr/GX0E3U -
Photo reblogged from ari j. greenberg
arig:
“If it wasn’t for this tiny fence, I’d make a run for it.”
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At the landmark hotel, an invisible fence has curtailed the roaming territory of Matilda the cat in order to keep the health department happy.
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Photo reblogged from Young Manhattanite
“You know, I feel like I’ve heard someone else use this argument to duck a charge.”
“Nah, we’re good.”
Stop oppressing privileged, white men!
It’s nice when off-duty cops show up to exercise their free speech rights, and their right to intimidate every person alive that might testify against them.
It’s like Boss Tweed still was around! Super nostalgia overdose.
Well, paired with the “It’s Been Going On Since The Days Of The Egyptians” signs, maybe they’re just offering a brief history lesson of the struggle of the Jewish people.
Scary scene. Not for Halloween though.
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Consumer debt and government spending are what really drive economic growth, not private investment.
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Photo reblogged from NPR Fresh Air
In their new video for “Calamity Song,” The Decemberists recreate Enfield Tennis Academy’s round of Eschaton from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
David Foster Wallace on Fresh Air
