nerd fantasies do come true aka what the fuck is david brooks yapping about part ??

in this part 6? 7? of what appears to be an infinite-part series, i again eric foner examines the latest and greatest david brooks column in the new york times and asks the question we've all been wondering: what the fuck is david brooks yapping about? 

i watched lincoln over the holiday weekend.  i was impressed by the narrative arc that kushner et al created over a legislative vote.  yeah, i know: if you can't create suspense and drama out of the abolishment of slavery and the civil war, then what hope is there for storytelling?  still, it actually focused on the legislative process, which i guess i especially appreciated given my line of work.  both tommy lee jones and james spader were highly entertaining.  but you know, i felt squeamish over all that rah rah america is great patriotism permeating the film.  i mean, yes, the thirteenth amendment was a monumental achievement, but c'mon, y'all had slavery to begin with.  let's not get too high on ourselves here.

throughout the movie i wondered what eric foner thought of this whole business.  i haven't read his lincoln book, but i remember him disparaging doris kearns goodwin's thesis in team of rivals quite a bit during his book tour.

even though nobody asked for it, over the weekend, david brooks threw in his pointless two cents about how lincoln the film reminds us of how great politics could be blahblahbla.  i kind of skimmed it, rolled my eyes, and moved on.

but what do i see here?  eric foner's letter to the editor of the times was published today--he puts brooks and his banal, insipid op-ed in their place by pointing out that its premise is based flawed history, which he then explains in his usual concise, economical prose.  i seriously have been dreaming about enlisting an authoritative voice against brooks--and here it is! 

David Brooks praises the new movie “Lincoln” for illuminating “the nobility of politics” and, he hopes, inspiring Americans to reconsider their low regard for politicians. The film depicts Abraham Lincoln’s arm-twisting and political maneuvering in January 1865 to secure approval of the 13th Amendment, which, when ratified by three-quarters of the states, abolished slavery throughout the nation. 

This was indeed an important moment in political history. But Mr. Brooks, and the film, offer a severely truncated view. Emancipation — like all far-reaching political change — resulted from events at all levels of society, including the efforts of social movements to change public sentiment and of slaves themselves to acquire freedom.

The 13th Amendment originated not with Lincoln but with a petition campaign early in 1864 organized by the Women’s National Loyal League, an organization of abolitionist feminists headed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Moreover, from the beginning of the Civil War, by escaping to Union lines, blacks forced the fate of slavery onto the national political agenda.

The film grossly exaggerates the possibility that by January 1865 the war might have ended with slavery still intact. The Emancipation Proclamation had already declared more than three million of the four million slaves free, and Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee and West Virginia, exempted in whole or part from the proclamation, had decreed abolition on their own.

Even as the House debated, Sherman’s army was marching into South Carolina, and slaves were sacking plantation homes and seizing land. Slavery died on the ground, not just in the White House and the House of Representatives. That would be a dramatic story for Hollywood.

ERIC FONER
New York, Nov. 23, 2012

The writer, a history professor at Columbia University, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for history for “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.” 

duh news of the week: korean edition

actual research was needed for these conclusions??

Korea’s typical CEO is in his 50s, is surnamed Kim, lives in Gangnam – Seoul’s most expensive neighborhood – and graduated from Seoul National, the country’s top-notch university, according to a report published on Tuesday by Korea Listed Companies Association.

He is also a Seoul native, majored in business management, and is likely to have founded the company he runs or is a member of a founding family. He goes to church on Sundays, and is most likely to be enjoying a round of golf in his spare time.

this video is two years old

but still hilarious!

lady matters

happy mother's day, moms and children of moms! a series of recent events have made me appreciate and think a lot more about women and moms. call it a latent awakening.

when i worked at the firm, one of the very prominent male partners started a women's initiative, which was designed to encourage the retention and promotion of women. some women objected to the fact that a man was in charge, though many others (including myself) thought the program never would have gotten off the ground or supported with actual resources without a male rainmaker championing it. whether it was actually effective remains uncertain, but at least the program existed and not just in name.

say what you will about working at a firm, but i was fortunate enough to have a male supervisor who included me in important conversations, sought to introduce me to his clients, and valued my work. i never once felt singled out or differentiated because i was female. in fact, he taught me to have confidence in my work and also that male bosses could be respectful. he was one of the few men who felt secure enough in his own masculinity to consistently work with--and be challenged by--intelligent women. i definitely appreciated it at the time, and i lament that he may have been an outlier.

call me ignorant, but i really didn't appreciate how different it is to be asian and female in the professional world. thanks to the aforementioned boss, i was shielded from a lot of prejudices. i think growing up in a predominantly asian environment also helped; i never viewed my being asian as a handicap. hongcouver gave me the breathing space to try on different identities, free from the weight of having to represent an entire race or ethnicity. that's why when i got to college, i found it a bit laughable that i had to be part of either the gucci-clad asian mafia or the hymn-singing baptists to be sufficiently asian.

then i got to law school and i think at some point in my first year it hit me: i had never voluntarily spoken up in class. then i looked around in my section and realized that none of the other asians had either (though there were only like 6 of us out of 100 or so students). i thought all along that i just didn't like speaking in class, but this made me think, is it something about being asian that prevents me from speaking up?

before this turns into some gender and identity politics 101 term paper, let me give you a bit of context. this is not false humility, but i've always viewed myself to be somewhat asexual. and i don't mean that in a negative way, if that's possible. somehow i deluded myself into thinking that when people view me, they see just me, not asian. female. i've never felt the need to be overly aggressive to compensate for being female. i also don't tend to be the quiet, stereotypically subservient asian. then recently, i was interviewing this dude as part of my case, and he said something to me in a manner that immediately drew attention to the fact that i was the only woman in the room. it was fucking patronizing and unnerving. the senior male on my side came to my defense and subtly, but definitively, put this guy in his place.

over the following days and weeks, i started asking all of my female friends--who, by the way, are uniformly smart as hell and beyond accomplished--whether they'd been treated differently because they're female. they mercifully did not judge me for asking such a laughably naive question and shared their stories. while a handful of situations were a bit ambiguous and subject to interpretation, every single one had experienced discrimination and i appreciated their willingness to be matter-of-fact about their (sometimes emotionally fraught) stories. then it made me wonder, have i willfully ignored this subtext all along? maybe. it probably was some type of a survival mechanism. there is a fine line between recognizing this prejudice and allowing it to undermine your confidence.

what is the takeaway, if anything? a few things: this deepened my appreciation for two women in particular--my mom and hilary clinton. no, i'm not equating the two, you fools, though my mom was a pioneer in her own way. even though her own parents vocally discouraged her from pursuing any meaningful formal education, my mom defined her own way by building several successful businesses for herself by using her street smarts, instincts, and impossibly dogged work ethic. oh yeah, she had four kids on top of that, bitches! though she's not very traditionally feminine almost to a fault, she taught me many more valuable things than how to correctly apply make-up, cook an elaborate meal, or be a consummate (or even a middling) hostess.

then hillary clinton--i'm late to the hilary bandwagon. i always vaguely admired her for being tenacious and successful, but man, hilary...to make it in that fucking boys' universe! i cannot even begin to understand the degradation and humiliation she has had to withstand.

anyway, the above photo is for all of your amusement. happy mother's day.

ps. best recent purchase? huey lewis & the news's greatest hits. amazing.

this is too easy

adding to the din of those doubting the merits of a J.D., the times published a lengthy article on how law schools manipulate employment statistics. yes, turns out law schools are very creative when it comes to revealing their graduates' employment rates, and there is virtually no oversight or market correction.

the article highlights the tribulations of a recent graduate of thomas jefferson law school (wha? yeah, fine, i sound like an elitist here, but wha??) saddled with $250,000 of student loan debt and minimally employed. i really am unable to discern why this person agreed to be profiled because, frankly, he comes off as an utter idiot. let's see here:

1. hmm, well, at least he'll be marrying a fellow moron:

Mr. Wallerstein is chatting over lunch one recent afternoon with his fiancée, Karin Michonski. She, too, seems unperturbed by his dizzying collection of i.o.u.’s. Despite those debts, she hopes that he does not wind up in one of those time-gobbling corporate law jobs.

“We like hanging out together,” she says with a laugh.

oh yeah, big firms love THOMAS JEFFERSON LAW SCHOOL. the school's name doesn't even make sense. why is there a school named after TJ in san diego?

2. Mr. Wallerstein rented a spacious apartment. He also spent a month studying in the South of France and a month in Prague — all on borrowed money. There were cost-of-living loans, and tuition of about $33,000 a year. Later came a $15,000 loan to cover months of studying for the bar.

$15,000? how?

3. Today, his best guess is that he should be sending $2,000 to $3,000 a month in total, to lenders that include Wells Fargo, Citibank and Sallie Mae.

“There are a bunch of others,” he says. “I’m not really good at keeping records.”

no, c'mon dude. as someone presumably seeking to stay as an attorney, please do not announce to the world that you lack one of the profession's most fundamental skills.

4. “It’s a prestige thing,” he says. “I’m an attorney. All of my friends see me as a person they look up to. They understand I’m in a lot of debt, but I’ve done something they feel they could never do and the respect and admiration is important.”

5. “Bank bailouts, company bailouts — I don’t know, we’re the generation of bailouts,” he says in a hallway during a break from his Peak Discovery job. “And like, this debt of mine is just sort of, it’s a little illusory. I feel like at some point, I’ll negotiate it away, or they won’t collect it.”

BriWi is reading my mindgrapes!

moronsayswhat?

yes, i get that states have to pony up quite a bit of cash to ensure that these high speed rail lines are actually built, but c'mon:

Republicans running for governor in a handful of states could block, or significantly delay, one of President Obama’s signature initiatives: his plan to expand the passenger rail system and to develop the nation’s first bullet-train service.

agh. so so infuriating. oh well. considering my obsession with public transportation and complete lack of desire to ever own a car, i am probably a communist.

challenge

c4ts, will you please go see this movie so that we can keep our streak of disagreeing over virtually every film ever made?

also, in case you were still sad over the closing of "ethnic creations" in ann arbor (yes, such a store existed and yes, it closed our 1L year), worry not.

finally, is it bad that i considered de-friending anyone who showed any enthusiasm about this movie's release on facebook? please, don't let me know such things about you.

remakes that aren't remakes

yeah ok, so i've seen the poster of "karate kid" starring son of will smith jaden and jackie chan. i just assumed that jackie chan was cast as a japanese man. chinese, japanese--not going to quibble here about details. also, jaden smith was a cute little kid.

then someone told me to read the imdb plot summary of this movie:

12-year-old Dre Parker could've been the most popular kid in Detroit, but his mother's latest career move has landed him in China. Dre immediately falls for his classmate Mei Ying - and the feeling is mutual - but cultural differences make such a friendship impossible. Even worse, Dre's feelings make an enemy of the class bully, Cheng. In the land of kung fu, Dre knows only a little karate, and Cheng puts "the karate kid" on the floor with ease. With no friends in a strange land, Dre has nowhere to turn but maintenance man Mr. Han, who is secretly a master of kung fu. As Han teaches Dre that kung fu is not about punches and parries, but maturity and calm, Dre realizes that facing down the bullies will be the fight of his life.

this isn't the work of some dork imdb user - it's the official plot summary from columbia pictures. china? kung fu? are we going to pretend this makes any sense?

also, the al-tipper separation counts as a death of sorts, no?

is this thing on?

dude, what's new, aside from the whole too busy to blog because you're a new father thing, i mean.

as the quagmires in the middle east and the koreas each deepens, the gulf of mexico turns to black and the summer of death 2010 begins, i raise this most relevant question: have you read any of the reviews for sex and the city 2? you really should! you can tell that the reviewers really leaned into challenge of describing their horror and disgust as vividly as possible. how else to explain amazing lines like, "Though the sequel is a welcome return of the four women we know and love, it's tough not to acknowledge that if we were all friends in real life, at this point we'd probably stop taking their calls." zing! or "Some of these people make my skin crawl." aaaand "The only thing memorable about Sex and the City 2 is the number two part, which describes it totally, if you get my drift."

also, are you watching party down? wha? why not?!

ps. the above image is from an exhibit i saw recently, where i also saw john lithgow eating lunch with his family. he is very tall.

things that are easy to despise

- asian mystic?
- black bff?
- upper-middle-class white lady finding herself in india?
- julia roberts?

why couldn't this book just remain a passing fad that once was in the hands of every 20s-40s woman on the subway? why must it live on?

omg y'all eric foner!

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i love this dude

we return to our regularly scheduled programming

no no, not whining. that will resume at some point, but not now.

someone recently gave me grief over my increasing interest in the wall street journal. what can i say? they're trying to become a mainstream paper instead of a stock ticker with hedcuts and yes, i have totally fallen for it. (minus their op-ed page, which i realize is certifiably insane most of the time). their in-depth treatment of the feud between england and snoop was fun to read and not just out of an overdeveloped sense of irony. it actually raised some fairly real questions about the scope of governmental powers and the business consequences of england's actions. the paper also has a rather smart and practical section with advice for small businesses and entrepreneurs, way better than anything the times offers.

also, did you know that if you google the title of a subscription-only wsj article, you can read it for free? apparently this is one of the reasons why murdoch is trying to destroy google. considering murdoch completely overpaid to acquire myspace, i don't think the google is losing sleep over murdoch's instincts about the internet.

new york magazine has a sort of tedious article on murdoch and his quest to conquer his old enemy, the new york times. and as with a lot of new york magazine articles, there is a ton of pop psychology and melodramatization (is that a word?) of family relationships. the threat of patricide is always lurking.

anyway, the point of this entire post is that i discovered this factoid through that article: did you know that james murdoch, aka heir to the murdoch megabillions and probable future of newscorp, founded rawkus, the label responsible for both talib kweli and mos def? that kind of blew my mind a little.

pants on the ground

someone over the weekend told me that this blog is a part of her google reader list. whaaa?? i was so seriously honored. thanks, yo.

anyway, this may cause you to remove us from your google reader feed, but i'm willing to take the chance.

huffingtonpost or someone else posted a rather puzzling video of brett favre shouting "pants on the ground" in the locker room whilst slapping his fellow players' butts. yes, can it get any more homoerotic? perhaps if they were wrestling.



anyway, so i had no idea what this "pants on the ground" business was and, of course, it's from american idol. so here you go, google readers, a stirring rendition of "pants on the ground," courtesy of civil rights activist (i kid you not--it was a part of some MLK celebration on the view today) Larry Platt.

superfluous and belated moview review of the month--rachel getting married

oh wow, that moment of excitement was a little much. back to our regularly scheduled programming. we at interweb detritus offer 1 channel: grumbling.

indeed, at our friend rachel's wedding, a bunch of us entered into a heated discussion over the movie rachel getting married. to no one's surprise, c4ts and i disagreed on this one. i think c4ts kind of wanted to agree with me since the movie seems so obviously annoying, but found himself actually liking it. you can't fight fate, c4ts!

anyway, so i'll vent. i don't think i've ever walked out of a movie. not even "shallow hal" or that second bridget jones movie where she goes to thailand or whatever. my usual thought is, i'm going to wait for that one redeeming moment. there were none in RGM. if i hadn't been sitting 5 deep in my row, i would've barged out. every one of the so-called poignant moments rang completely hollow to me. ok fine, i'll give you this. jonathan demme directed documentaries about the talking heads and neil young and the screenwriter is sidney lumet's daughter. perhaps spontaneous bohemian-ish band playing with robyn hitchcock and unattributable displays of ethnic clothing are the norm in their worlds, but certainly not in mine. this urgent desire to flaunt some semblance of authenticity, diversity and depth was so false on every single level. if i had rolled my eyes any more my contacts would've popped out.

ok, breathe. let's focus my annoyance:

1. connecticut? is there a yaddo in greenwich or fairfield that i'm unaware of? the closest thing connecticut has to minorities and/or artists is 50 cent (or 50 cents, if you're mike bloomberg).
2. saris? wtf with that?
3. yeah, ok, so nobody made a big deal about the groom's race. how come nobody made a big deal of the fact that he had negative personality? it only drew attention to his race. like, why couldn't they create a fully-drawn black character? the white people in this movie certainly had personality to spare.
4. and why did the groom ruin that neil young song for me?
5. i would pick on that dishwasher scene except that apparently it was taken directly from the screenwriter's life. it occurred between like sidney lumet and charlton heston or something equally implausible. (my badz, bob fosse--see? who has a life like this?)
6. don't forget: kYm. barf.

anyway, c4ts, the floor is yours. i'm sure you'll mount a lengthy defense of the movie. all's i gotta say is, someone should've told me that the director of philadelphia--my least favorite movie of all time bc it's the fakest--was involved. i would've saved my $12 or whatever.

oh yeah, this new yorker article: mind ~~blown~~. most disturbing article since that one about solitary confinement that still gives me goosebumps.

learned apathy

i suppose this story should inspire some sense of outrage. politicizing terror alert levels? what next?! but then again, after falsely leading a country into war, torturing prisoners, obliterating the economy, and canceling arrested development, what's a little screwing with your sense of mortality? just another day in the office. nicely done, rumsfeld. i hope he writes a tell-all memoir some day.

anyway, i thought about looking for an apt photo, then i realized that i'm kind of bored by these "revelations" from former bush administration officials (notwithstanding what i just said about rummy). isn't that panda dog messing with your mind?

so...what have you been up to?

i made a tribute to 30 rock. in the dark.



i cloned myself and made the worst video ever. because i hate myself.



then i tried to determine whether this video was cute, clever or just pointless.

but will i like a blaffair to rememblack?

i was on the phone with my mom the other day and i said something along the lines of, "i still have a hard time believing i'm 30; i forget my age sometimes." my 60-plus-year-old mom replied, "oh, that doesn't stop. i do that to this day."

sure, we all know the common signifiers of Bona Fide Adulthood, like child-rearing or homeownership, but nobody tells you whether Adults should enjoy bacon'd! (which i did. immensely. and felt kind of guilty about it afterward) or watch gossip girl (which i do not, only bc i feel a little lech watching such young-looking guys, but i think i'm alone in this). bc y'know, this stuff isn't productive. Adults belong to kiwanis clubs, know how to fold fitted sheets, make their own kimchi, figure out tax deductions, etc.

anyway, do marketers know any better? we all know we're being manipulated even though we'd like to think we can rise above it. the new yorker this week has a detailed and sometimes unnerving article about the marketing of movies. i think the studios' mantra is,

“If we weren’t making decisions based on marketability, John Malkovich would be in every movie,” a top studio marketer says. “Great actor, but not someone you want to see half-naked in the sheets next to Angelina Jolie.”

yowza. they don't have to be so mean about it. i'm sure some people would love to see that.

and man, they've got all of us pegged:

Marketers segment the audience in a variety of ways, but the most common form of partition is the four quadrants: men under twenty-five; older men; women under twenty-five; older women. A studio rarely makes a film that it doesn’t expect will succeed with at least two quadrants, and a film’s budget is usually directly related to the number of quadrants it is anticipated to reach. The most expensive tent-pole movies, such as the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, are aimed at all four quadrants.

women above twenty-five are automatically OLDER WOMEN? dear lord. well, i'm game. let's see whether they can put baby in a quadrant. here's what young women like, according to marketing experts:

friendship - check
pop music - check
fashion - check
sarcasm - duh-really?
sensitive boys who think with their hearts - omg check!
and romance—but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it) - it's like they interviewed me for this shit.
They go to horror films as much as young men, but they hate gore; you lure them by having the ingénue take her time walking down the dark hall. yeah i hate gore, but i also hate horror movies. i'll pretend this is me, though, since who doesn't like dark halls?

whew. so it appears that i'm not a total hag as of yet. but what about the OLDER WOMEN? what do they (we?) like?

feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies - hell no
they are the core audience for stories of doomed love - maybe?
triumphs of the human spirit - ugh, no again
They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men - who doesn't?
they hate seeing a child in danger - i can take or leave this one.

but just when i'm feeling good about myself, i read this:

Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most “review-sensitive”: a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at older women can increase the opening weekend’s gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them.

maybe this is why i've been hating so many movies of late. bring on the Form 1040.

happy holidays

mo money mo problems!

dear loyal reader(s?),

as we close out yet another banner year here at interweb detritus, we would like to wish you happy holidays or "whatever you choose to celebrate," as my neighbor said to me the other day.

2008 was a crazy fucking year. the economic bottom fell out from under us; america finally got rid of bush and managed to not replace him with someone even stupider; bernie madoff made marc dreier look like someone stealing a kid's lunch money; pavement reissued brighten the corners and i'm probably not going to buy it.

like c4ts, i was going to compile some awesome best/worst of 08 lists but if you haven't figured it out by now, i'm fairly lazy. here, some gift ideas for the procrastinators out there. i always aim to inform.

what the fuck is david brooks yapping about - part 5 (?)

in this part 5 (?) of what appears to be an infinite-part series, i again examine the latest and greatest david brooks column in the new york times and ask the question we've all been wondering: what the fuck is david brooks yapping about?

i knew today's david brooks column was going to be awesome as soon as i read the headline: lord of the memes. holy shit guys, TWO references in one pun-LARIOUS title! it also began with my favorite david brooks literary device, the Q&A. who's supposed to be kierkegaard, you daavid brøoks?

anyway, i didn't really read this shit in depth, but here are some choice quotes:

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.

(In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)

Maximum status goes to the Gladwellian heroes who occupy the convergence points of the Internet infosystem — Web sites like Pitchfork for music, Gizmodo for gadgets, Bookforum for ideas, etc.

those are NOT WORDS. i know this is his attempt at humor or something, but seriously, who is this guy's intended audience?? is anyone laughing?