Project Runway Season 7 dress by Mila Hermanovski
On HU
Featured Archive Post: My illustrations for Wallace Stevens’ 13 Ways of Looking At a Blackbird.
Robert Stanley Martin on Patrick Modiano’s 2014 novel So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood.
Chris Gavaler classifies abstraction in comics.
I answered twitter questions about freelance writing.
Me on how women’s genre fiction doesn’t fit the Bechdel Test.
Robert Stanley Martin shows you the Pogo collection you could have bought in sept/oct 1951.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Playboy I wrote about Alan Rickman’s greatest performance on film.
At the Guardian I wrote about Project Runway and how you don’t need to be a superstar to make a living in fashion.
At Random Nerds I wrote about Paul Atreides and the Mary Sue power of being a white guy.
At the Establishment I wrote about Project Runway and the pettiness of making art.
At Splice Today I wrote about
—my favorite hip hop albums of the year, by Father and Death Grips.
—Hitler, Staling, and how the U.S. collaborates with ISIS.
Other Links
Adam Epstein on oscars so white.
This album by Fadimoutou Wallet Inamoud is amazing.
Smart little discussion of how television companies gender segregate their content.
The last link seems incorrect.
ack; sorry about that. Should be fixed now.
re one of the secondary points of the inspired Rickman piece: Die Hard is pathetically reactionary in terms of gender, xenophobic, and homophobic – but saying working class guys are awesome and don’t trust anyone else is, per se, the opposite of conservative. It may not be true, but it’s not conservative.
“saying working class guys are awesome and don’t trust anyone else is, per se, the opposite of conservative. It may not be true, but it’s not conservative.”
It’s sort of tricky in the US context…especially when the working class guys in question are (a) white and (b) police.
I think Die Hard works pretty hard to transfer possible class critique into white identity politics, which I’d argue is conservative, even though sympathizing with working class people in itself wouldn’t be.
Have you seen Black Sea, Graham? I think that’s a better example of a film about working class white guys which is coming from a progressive place (not coincidentally, it’s a lot bleaker than Die Hard.)
I would totally read your Ice Age Kangaroo children’s book. Also, “too weird” sounds like a dumb thing to say about a children’s book. Especially in a world where Axe Cop exists (granted, not necessarily a children’s story, but it was effectively written by a five-year-old, so the point stands).
It was an agent; I suspect she knows what she can and can’t sell. There are some weird children’s books out there, but maybe her clients aren’t the ones who are printing them.
I haven’t seen Black Sea. Philosophical question: If your movie makes a valid point but fails to make anybody want to see it, did it make a valid point?
Black Sea was pretty good! Not sure why it didn’t get any traction… I think sometimes making a valid point can interfere with marketing, unfortunately.