Day: September 2, 2018, 8:17 AM

Banning Fun

Chill Regular-ass Post

I haven’t seen this show yet. I might watch some of it because, having grown up in the South, I like shows that send it up.

This article got me thinking about something again that I was contemplating for a post the other day. The thought I had was that the left is essentially for banning anything fun. I don’t mean that they are explicitly supportive of this, but anything that is humorous or fun has to be transgressive in some way or other, and unless that transgression is very circumscribed the modern left is firmly opposed to it.

Gay and other critics don’t seem able to enjoy that nuance though, and I can’t really fault them for it. They’re stuck looking for brilliance in all the wrong places—formal coherence, good politics. Insatiable isn’t serving any of that. If it were, the show wouldn’t rapidly escalate from pregnancy scare to demon possession, or make one of the sexiest scenes of the show a baptism.

God, that sounds great. The modern left, though, doesn’t really do nuance any longer. The entire society is moving as a whole (both left and right) to authoritarianism so it makes total sense that the left can’t handle anything like this. And no one can seem to look beyond the surface of anything at all these days. Even supposedly-incisive critics like Gay can’t seem to have any more than two-foot-level view of anything.

No Freedom

Chill Uncategorized

There’s always room for more Miley on this blog.

(A singer is really good when there’s no reverb on the mic [often called a “karaoke mic” in the business] and if they sing really close in to the mic, which means that the voice isn’t deep in the mix and the singer is good enough to control her pitch and volume. Singers — good singers, anyway — get told to “eat the mic” because stage microphones like Miley is singing into here are passive, so the closer the source of the sound is to them, the better. But when you are a bad singer, it’s not to your advantage to eat the mic, because you’ll need to rely more on reverb, pre-recorded double-tracking, backup singers, and other techniques to make you sound better. Miley sounds great with no reverb and essentially a neutral mic and board. She has mega talent and perfect control.)

Freaking Spench

Chill Uncategorized

Ouais. The Arabic subtitles are also terrible and this is how terrible they are: I remember very little Arabic, but as I listen to more, more comes back, and through the show I’m like, “That’s not what she said!”

I could understand nearly all the French without the bad subtitles, except one dude who is apparently a fan of the mumblecore school of acting and I could not understand a damn word.

Note that these are the official Amazon subtitles, not some pirate effort. Who translated this? I wonder if it was machine translated from a written script. That seems likely.