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Religion is a bureaucracy between man and God.
– Bill Maher (via soupsoup) -
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The secret of Modern Family’s runaway success: it’s just a sitcom.
Structurally, Modern Family is pseudo-vérité, reality-infected, chasing its characters around their kitchens like an episode of Supernanny or sitting them down for chats with a never-heard offscreen interviewer. (Phil: “Claire likes to say you can be part of the problem, or part of the solution. But I happen to believe that you can be both.”) This is “mockumentary,” a once-radical form—pioneered by This Is Spinal Tap, refined by Garry Shandling and Christopher Guest, and popularized by Ricky Gervais—that has degenerated into a kind of postmodern whimsy. You see it all over the place these days. Round and round goes the camera, the un-Steadicam, artfully wobbling and puckishly zooming. The lens is two-way: the characters, rich in lovable foibles, peep through it and smirk or snuffle at the viewer, as if there are no jokes anymore, but only a single enormous Joke with all of us inside it, like the town under Stephen King’s Dome. Silence now encases the sitcom, the lovely, corny crackle of the laugh track having vaporized into little bathetic air pockets and farts of anticlimax. Enough, I say. This burlesque of naturalism has depleted us. Give me the honest joinery of The George Lopez Show, the fat gags and the cackles on demand, over Parks and Recreation or NBC’s ghastly version of The Office. Who knew irony could be so cloying?
Everything James Parker writes is absolute fucking gold. Read more at The Atlantic
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etsy:
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This is Rick, the NYPD “Hipster Cop.” I briefly met this guy while reporting on the Occupy Wall Street Radiohead concert that never happened. He was standing next to the Occupy Wall Street spokesman who had told me over and over that day that Radiohead would definitely be playing no matter what their publicist said, just come down.
When I met him, Hipster Cop was wearing a bright red Mister Rogers cardigan and a white button down with a clipped tie, grey wool slacks and spotless oxfords, a smirk on his face. He was the most sharply-dressed guy I had seen pretty much all week, and I work in Soho. Hipster Cop almost looked too well-dressed to be a Radiohead fan; like, maybe he only listened to LPs of obscure Japanese bands from the 80s. But I asked if he was bummed about Radiohead’s no-show: “They’re finished,” he joked. “Nobody’s going to listen to their music anymore.”
But he was a cop! Which I learned when he flashed a badge hooked discreetly onto his belt and shooed away the uniformed officer who eventually came over to move us from the street where we were chatting onto the sidewalk. You could tell she was embarrassed; guess he’s like that cool detective at the police station that nobody wants to talk to about movies or music or anything ‘cause he’ll scoff at them.
Since then, Hipster Cop has become sort of a meme at Occupy Wall Street. This woman even called him “infamous.”
What if all cops looked like this? What if pepper-spray cop Anthony Bologna looked like this? What if, during the 2008 NYC Republican Convention, CNN broadcast live footage of dozens of hipster cops charging through the tear gas behind riot shields with Pavement bumper stickers on them, beating protesters with vintage 1920s nightsticks they picked up at the thrift store, precisely-clipped ties fluttering behind them?
Update: This NYU student, Brett Chamberlain, just tweeted to me that Hipster Cop asked him out to dinner.
No joke he asked me out to dinner. his name is Rick btw. Community affairs / detective with
#NYPD precinct 1. I told him if he saw me in cuffs and let me out I would go to dinner with him. He missed his chance when I got arrested.I don’t know… It’s almost too good to be true. Gay hipster cop finds love at the anti-capitalist protest? #OccupyMyHeart
(pic via Lucy Kafanov)
!!!!1
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Boy With Balloons, India
Photograph by Kamala Kannan, My Shot
By photographing the shadow of the child running with balloons rather than the actual child, the photographer captured an image that immediately stops us in our tracks. Though the shadow is flat, it has so much movement and life. What is most surprising is how vibrant the colors are, and this is because the background is white/off-white. -
Create a place for inspiration | Richmond Times-Dispatch →
(via reneeejp)
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awesomepeoplehangingouttogether:
Tom Hanks, Tom Ford and Jon Hamm
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Cover for 10/18 edition of Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (Histoire de l’oeil) illustrated by Hans Bellmer
(via sashafrerejones)
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