Elena Ferrante and the people who vouched for her.
I am 100% convinced that “Elena Ferrante” is a man. No one but a man can write about women so observationally and so lucidly (with rare exception).
I’ve read everything by “her” now in both English and Italian and it’s pretty darn clear that Elena is a man. Women never write about fellow women so unflinchingly but with such empathy — their natural intrasexual competition drive almost always gets in the way.
And that’s the answer. The social milieu changed completely. The last gasp of rock was in the late 1990s and early 2000s; rock died with Nickelback and Creed. To be clear, they were not responsible for its death, but rather were avatars of its last bare wisp of vitality, a withered plant in a desert of culture.
Rock-like forms continued, and some other good genres and sub-genres emerged, but rock qua rock was dead by 2005.
I’ve been to that area. It’s a lot junkier and uglier except in a few places than that photo indicates. Its peak was in the 14th Century, and it shows. I’m glad I visited but it did not at all look like this, except a few Potemkin Village-type locations.
I’m about the most asocial and anti-social person in world history and yeah, that is not healthy at all.
When you advocate for copyright in the modern age, you are advocating for artificial scarcity that is a deadweight loss to the entire civilization. I do not care what your “good” reasons are. Every argument you make ultimately reduces to prioritizing extortionate rent extraction from things that cost nothing to copy. Culture is a commons, and you are fencing it off so a middleman can charge admission at the gate. Call it what you want and cry all you want. It doesn’t matter. It’s still a tollbooth built on infinite abundance.
The US modern rock chart 30 years ago.
Some of those songs I don’t remember at all.
Of course, in August 1996 I was quite occupied being a paratrooper in the army. I believe I had just arrived in Egypt then so I was a bit disconnected from the music scene to be fair.
Best song on the list: “Angry Johnny” by Poe.
Worst song: “6th Avenue Heartache” by The Wallflowers.
I think “Tonight, Tonight” is the best-written song there, but I can no longer stand Billy Corgan’s voice so I could not choose that one. There are some great, great covers of that one, though.
Yes, or perhaps Austria and more specifically Vienna 1900-1914. Also a good candidate.
In many ways, it was a better time. No tattoos on anyone in those pics (which is amazing), and inescapable surveillance capitalism had not yet occurred.
It’s become stylish to criticize people like Steve Jobs, Quentin Tarantino, Joss Whedon or even Lena Dunham for being jerks and (sort of) bullies. Want to cancel them for their alleged transgressions. But here’s the thing: those people almost certainly would not have been able to produce the quality art and products they have sans those characteristics that supposedly condemn them.
And you can kind of tell the effects this has had by absence — because the quality of art has declined enormously since woke, sensitivity readers and cancellation became de rigeur.
You do not get all that far by not pushing too hard sometimes. There’s a reason Tarantino always manages to coax the absolute best out of his cast, and that Dunham crossed boundaries with her actors: she was attempting to get something true out of them. (I’m not a fan of Girls, but the bits I’ve watched there’s no denying it’s well-made and has a voice.)
Artists are always transgressive and should be so. We need those people. They will always be going too far, opening doors many people feel should be left closed. And that’s exactly what they should be doing.
Something else that is also worse since the 1990s.
Women have always had somewhat stricter beauty standards foisted onto them than men.
But in the 2010s with the rise of Marvel and other similar superhero movies, that began to change. Women were psyopped into believing that if you were not completely ripped Hugh Jackman-style 24/7, then you were out of shape and had a “dad bod.” Never mind that for those scenes, Jackman was on the verge of death from dehydration, etc.
So, now, men also have absurd beauty standards applied to them. I don’t completely blame women for this; as I said, they were psyopped into it.
As someone who has a physique now approaching the Marvel superhero ideal (and could get there easily with 2-3 days of dehydration after a month or two of cutting a few pounds), I can tell you it’s really very difficult to achieve. It requires working out an hour or more a day 4-6 days a week. And not just putzing around. You must do hard workouts combined with eating well. And if you don’t want to use drug enhancement (and I do not), you must do this for years.
These days women assume you’ve never seen the inside of gym if you don’t look like Chris Evans in his post-transformation Captain America shirtless scenes. And that is pretty fucking absurd.
Again, the 90s were better.
This is true, but conservatism is equally stuck. There are no New Minds on the horizon. Neither party nor any other organization in contemporary American or European society has a worthwhile or suasive methodology for handling or even comprehending the problems and opportunities of the present, much less the future. It doesn’t appear anyone is even trying from what I can tell.
And we will pay a very high price for that.
The culture is more overall sex-negative and sex-phobic in general than any time since perhaps the 1740s. I mean in practical terms and observed behavior, rather than “I saw someone in revealing clothing on TV, therefore people are sex-positive.” That’s a wholly different thing (and is dumbass logic to boot).
That is deeply ok. Not a fan of that style in general. And I do not say this because it’s revealing (women should be able to wear revealing clothes IMO) but it kind of looks like she’s wearing her underwear on the outside.
But mainly, it’s just not goth-y enough for me. Too sunny.
A connection I’d never made before. Hope Sandoval is the real-life version of how Galadriel should’ve been portrayed in the LOTR films: fey, distant, ethereal, disconnected from mortal concerns.
I don’t mean Hope’s appearance. In the books, Galadriel is canonically described as tall with golden hair; Hope is quite short and very much dark-haired. I mean how they feel as personalities, as beings in the world.
Of the characters in the films, if it’s not obvious I was most disappointed by Galadriel1. She just lacked the gravitas and remoteness that are both well-described in the written version and that would befit someone who is about 8,300 years old. And I don’t think it was Cate Blanchett’s fault. She had poor direction and poor writing to work with. Though other parts of those films were excellent, the writers of the LOTR films just did not know what do with Galadriel.
The films completely miss her power, her pride, her strangeness, the fact that she’s one of the most dangerous beings in the world, no matter what her intent is. She seemed there like a lugubrious Renaissance fair refugee rather than someone who could’ve potentially taken on Gandalf and triumphed.
And that was a real failure.
That is right. I am old enough to remember when if you went on a cruise, you were rich.
That perception started changing during the late 1990s