The Bluestocking, vol 176
Monologuing and assaulting impoverished street-level criminals.
Happy Friday!
Earlier this week, Sarah Ditum asked on Twitter what ‘emotional purchases’ people had made to get them through lockdown. It’s been strange: I’ve stopped buying clothes, because there is no reason to wear anything other than thermal leggings, but my flower and scented candle bill has reached Elton John proportions. My reasoning is that if I’m going to spend 16 hours a day in a single room, I want to make that room as nice as possible.
I am very open to seeing pictures of other people’s WFHdesk/house arrest set-ups, just hit reply.
Helen
Thirteen Years And Three Months of Trying To Make Armie Hammer Happen (Substack)
Looking back at Hammer’s career, it’s fascinating to see just how much agency and independence he claimed for himself growing up, contrasted with how little he says he has had over his working life. He made the decision to drop out of high school; he made the decision to go into acting; he made the decision to not take money from his parents. Hammer liberated himself from his history and the duty that might accompany it, attempting to forge a path for himself the same way that any other actor would in Hollywood.
And yet, for all that personal volition, Hammer’s inability to make himself happen — until now — has never, at least according to him, been his own fault. To blame: the blockbusters he agreed to star in, the critics who panned his films, the activists who doomed his indie breakthrough. Not to blame: an industry calibrated to produce films for men who look like him, or his own judgment in choosing the films that he did, or the director against whom those claims were levied. Armie Hammer didn’t happen for 10 long years because, according to his logic, the system was stacked against him.
Well, of course it was: The “system,” whether Hollywood or American capitalism in general, is stacked against basically everyone. But a small few, including Hammer’s own grandfather, figure out how to manipulate and survive it. What seems to annoy Hammer, then, is that he struggled the same way everyone else — the way women and actors of color in particular — struggle: with shitty options, with publicity that pigeonholes you, with people who only care about your looks, with machinations beyond your control.
Anne Helen Petersen reflects on her 2017 profile of Armie Hammer (quoted above) and his angry response to it, which unleashed his fan army on her. It reminds of two things: 1) Dave Eggers in the Snark v Smarm piece, framing himself as the underdog, just as Hammer did to Petersen here; 2) The subjects I write about today where people privately tell me they agree with me, sometimes while publicly saying the opposite. Journalism doesn’t half give you an insight into humanity’s capacity for cowardice and hypocrisy. “Why weren’t we TOLD he was a monster,” say the same people who harangued anyone who tried to break the story.
I Miss The Thrill of Trump (Atlantic)
Last spring, I emailed the White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow to request a substantive conversation about his rosy view of the coronavirus pandemic. To underscore how substantive that conversation was going to be, I told him that I had no interest in his “fucking Netflix queue.”
In response this slightly spicy remark intended to get his attention, Kudlow actually sent me his Netflix queue. He said we were off the record, but I never consented to that condition, and because even a member of the “Lügenpresse” knows that both parties have to consent to an exchange being off the record, I can report that as the nation’s unemployment rate climbed to a nauseating 22.5 percent, the president’s top economic adviser was enjoying the following programs and films: Inspector Morse, Endeavour; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Ozark, Ford v Ferrari. As for the substantive conversation, it never happened.
Oh, to see a Venn diagram of “people on Twitter outraged that someone wrote a piece admitting they found the Trump era exciting in its awfulness” and “people on Twitter who spent the Trump era acting like their furious tweets were the only thing standing between us and fascism, while also building profiles and careers on the back of said tweets”. No one misses Trump more than the people who cast themselves as the Watchmen and him as Moloch.
Quick Links
The Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver once designed trousers to liberate the . . . well, you’ll see. (Twitter, NSFL)
‘Schumacher went on to make two widely panned Batman movies in the 90s, but “Falling Down” should’ve been his Batman movie. If Schumacher had channeled all the campy energy implicit in “Falling Down” and explicit in “Batman and Robin” into a satire about an absurd Dark Knight-errant who completely misdiagnosis society and spends his time monologuing and assaulting impoverished street-level criminals — oblivious to the structural advantages that delivered him billions while miring them in poverty — that would’ve been a groundbreaking comic book movie. I’d also love to hear Batman growl about Gotham’s ice cream parlors being turned into new-age shops.’ Falling Down Should Have Been A Batman Movie (Medium)
It’s so hard to work out what’s really happened in the case of the forced-out NYT reporter. (Another piece on the subject, from Vanity Fair, has a quote which is going to stay with me: “Newsrooms have long tolerated assholes because it’s a part of the culture. . .That tolerance for assholes is all but gone. You can frame this as the end of the asshole era at The New York Times.”.) The exec editor Dean Baquet has now retracted last week’s statement that “we do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” because clearly the paper prints racial slurs when necessary for accurately reporting what people have said. This story might seem like the most insider of Inside Baseball but it speaks to something vital in politics right now—the sense that no one knows what “the rules” are, which is driving anxiety and polarisation. The left needs to do a better job of explaining its shibboleths.
“Food tastes better. I didn’t see that coming. I guess it’s because I would always skim Twitter while eating & Twitter is kind of all-consuming. That’s why an hour can pass by on Twitter without you really noticing it.” On quitting Twitter. (Medium)
Glad to see this. I’ve seen some sexist reviews in my time, and this wasn’t one: any actor, no matter how good they are, can be miscast. It’s harsh but not off-limits to say so.
‘Sars-CoV-2 isn’t the only virus that can linger for an unusually long time within the human body. Ebola virus RNA has been detected in the semen of men a year after they recovered from the virus. Some people stay infected with norovirus – a common stomach bug that causes vomiting and diarrhoea – for more than six months. One man in the UK has excreted infectious poliovirus for at least 28 years. The man had been shedding mutated virus for so long that researchers writing about his infection said that he, and other chronic excretors, pose an “obvious risk to the [polio] eradication programme”.’ It’s a yikes from me. (Wired)
“To understand [Seth] Abramson, he says, you have to understand what he calls his “poetics.” Or what most people would call his personality.” A profile of Seth Abramson, the pioneer of “metajournalism”—aka stuffing other people’s reporting into grand conspiracist narratives, delivered via 9000-tweet threads. (CJR)
‘[Kehinde] Andrews derides what he calls the “white left” and its narrow focus. He dismisses the “Preston model” beloved by many Corbynite thinkers. “One of the cooperatives so praised in Preston is a coffee shop,” he writes, “and while we celebrate the benefits to the worker in Britain, the shop’s success is only possible because of the racial exploitation of the poor people farming the coffee beans it uses for next to nothing.” [. . .] His focus is on “uniting Africa and the African diaspora to create a true revolution, which remains the only solution to the problem of racism”, and for the African diaspora to return to a “promised land” in Africa. This seems to me to be a little more difficult than simply getting the Preston café to pay a fair and equitable price for its coffee.’ Stephen Bush reviews Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland and Kehinde Andrews’s The New Age of Empire. (New Statesman)
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