a brief word on this portrayal of duchess kate’s white fragility

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whew, PEOPLE. if ever there was a day built for rage?! and it is not yet noon US EST!

between the horrifying story of a police officer murdering an unnamed Black man in minneapolis, the video of amy cooper calling the police on a birder who asked her to leash her dog, the president of notre dame’s op-ed in the times about the risks we must all sustain for the education of students (ie. the continuation of american football), AND the president of purdue’s op-ed in the post about moral responsibility of reopening in the fall (ie. capitalism and the continuation of american football), i would like to go back to bed and spend the day reading my trashy novel about a kept woman falling madly in love a rake with waterloo PTSD while teaching him how to cheat at vingt-et-un in regency england.

ALAS, NO. i cannot do that, because today is also the day that the daily mail posted this nonsense.

which, if we’re in some sort of white supremacy/white fragility/white tears carnival time– and that does increasingly seem to be what was meant by “reopening”– hardly ranks supreme. but it is nonetheless, stupidly consistent with this broader alignment of the racist stars and worth a gander, especially due to the subtlety of the pandering and the broader agenda of thumbs up-ing white femininity. (please, lawd, this is not the gemini season i wanted.) Continue reading →

are we really being mean to melania?

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it’s funny- not ha, ha funny, but, like, oh the whims of life funny (which is, maybe, really just an optimistic spin on super depressing)- how you can study culture for ages and then still be surprised by it.

still be like, oh look at this gross thing i’ve seen! yay cultural analysis and phd-level thinking! huzzah! and not realize that, in seeing that gross thing that one time, you will now be seeing that gross thing EVERYWHERE ALL OF THE TIME. because that is how culture works and this gross thing is now something you’ve trained your eyes to see.

remember those magic eye posters in the 90s? where if you squinted hard enough at a mosaic of 1000 pictures of al gore or marilyn monroe, a dolphin would emerge.

i could never see the dolphin.

i’ve always resented that so i tend to lean heavily on this metaphor to boast about the things i can see.

it’s small consolation. honestly, sometimes i’d rather have just seen the dolphin.

that is all a wind up to the buffet at which we find ourselves, in the neighborhood to which i never wanted to go. we have been here before. and before. and a few times after that as well. (if you are like, oline, wtf are you talking about, go forth, catch up, come back. i do not have the energy to recap.)

lest this give you the impression that i love this party, let me be clear: i do not. i am tired of these leftovers. i would like to go home.

alas.

Continue reading →

the pathos of elvis rings (emotions via britney)

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oh hello.

i know, i know. long time no words. forgive me. in a life of approximately 9,000,000,000 projects (give or take a few), it is sometimes hard to remain a word factory in all available venues.

but yo, i’m back!

the world is a pit of drear and suck. let’s talk about totally superficially meaningful things.

ELVIS JEWLERY. Continue reading →

jackie, janet and lee: “women who existed only to captivate the world’s richest and most powerful men” (emotions via britney)

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today, class, a close reading of the DM’s article of 16 february 2018, entitled: “Sisters who competed to snare the world’s richest men: Schooled by their mother to seek out power, a new book reveals the jealousy between Jackie O and sister Lee and how they both bedded JFK.”

i mean, just right there, yeah?

Continue reading →

a change is gonna come… we hope… maybe? (emotions via britney)

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ok, ya’ll, let’s do this. and to do this we (obviously) need my emotionally incontinent face twin, ms britney.

a lot has happened since we last spoke.

for example, the new york times published this piece on harvey weinstein.

the new yorker published this substantially less well written piece on harvey weinstein.

the new yorker published a follow-up story on harvey weinstein.

the new york times published a follow-up story on harvey weinstein.

many, many women posted on social media about their own experiences of sexual assault and sexual harassment.

there was some exceedingly valuable writing on the matter from all over the internet which i will not even attempt to condense here.

buzzfeed published this piece on kevin spacey.

assorted other venues posted articles on kevin spacey.

to say nothing of brett ratner, mark halperin, leon weiseltier, george hw bush, ben affleck, dustin hoffman, etc.

or russia.

so, like an amazingly enormous amount of stuff happened. but we’re not here to talk about that. Continue reading →