The shimmering vision of womanliness seen above is Mr Lucy Rose Shaftain-Fenner, a filmmaker whose films are, it turns out, chiefly about himself, and whose interests include the “liberation” of Palestine, violating women’s boundaries, and “taxing wealth.”
When not declaring his personal hotness, Mr Shaftain-Fenner engages in many feats of radicalism, including cutting up Harry Potter DVDs in an attempt to reduce the number of future Harry Potter fans, intruding in women’s toilets, denouncing the misogyny and catcalling he allegedly endures, and listing his quite numerous mental health shortcomings.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including mole relocation; the smoking of toad venom; and Japanese people encountering Marmite.
All this and more.
I Bring You Modern Scenes
Unsolicited Population Surplus
But remember, citizen. Feelings of foreboding are not permitted:
Clearly, these immensely vibrant young men are merely using other people’s cars to start fires of neighbourliness. Arson being the universal language of warm feelings.
It’s all one big expression of gratitude.
And when the uninvited newcomers swarming through your streets start desecrating your ancestors’ graves while hurling rocks at you, it’s just a sign that they want to get to know you better.
On progressive euphemism, and the sudden arrival of rather boisterous new neighbours.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including sweaty pleasures; the doing of finger-math; and a tale of atomic mishaps and melting people.
All this and more.
I Couldn’t Help Noticing The Shouting And Crying
On racist gardening, and the somewhat doubtful benefits of polyamory:
And we mustn’t forget the tale, via New York magazine, of the Brooklynite comedian and podcaster named Billy, his girlfriend Megan, and his girlfriend Megan’s other boyfriend Kyle. An exhaustingly self-consciousness three-way entanglement resulting in a series of grimly farcical situations that were framed, rather coyly, as “relationship difficulties.”
The above, I should add, was one of several attempts by New York magazine to portray unfaithfulness and cuckoldry, and the consequent anxieties, as the very zenith of a progressive lifestyle.
As when a betrayed husband, Michael Sonmore, boasted, unconvincingly, that he “finally became a feminist” thanks to his wife’s nocturnal sexual adventures with a chap named Paulo. A wife who was “embracing herself” and becoming empowered, we were told, while her children, aged six and three, wondered where their Mommy was.
All this and more.
I Bring Thee Art
New Ideological Hemlines Announced
Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly:
The role of status-seeking in political opinionating, whereby a person’s professed beliefs function as a kind of social jewellery, the latest must-have, has cropped up here quite frequently over the years. Along with the inadvertent social gaffes that can arise if you’re not particularly interested in whether your views are perceived as suitably modish and high-status.
And you wouldn’t want to be seen wearing last season’s opinions.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including a hardcore combover; a three-way interspecies negotiation; and life in a one-loo village, circa 1970.
All this and more.
On Competence And Other Sins
From the clown quarter of academia:
According to Dr Donna Riley, academic rigour and the expectation of competence are “exclusionary” and tools of “privilege,” and are unfair to women and minorities, for whom rigour and competence are presumably impossible.
As Dr Riley complains that expectations of rigour generate both inequality and “white male heterosexual privilege,” presumably she would rather we erased distinctions more broadly, between ability and mediocrity, and between diligence and half-arsedness. Though her own so-called scholarship, and indeed her employment, suggest that these wishes may already be coming true.
But Don’t Mention The Mental Illness
Think of it as a test of patience. You may want a stiff drink to hand.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including why dogs don’t rule the Earth; diversity occurring; on Kubrick’s many takes; and Hopkins and Foster rewatch Silence of the Lambs.
His Rampant Manliness
On competitively progressive parenting advice; on academics whose paycheque depends on propagating failure; and a lecturer in “critical whiteness studies” apologising, at length, for his heterosexuality:
Professor Yancy goes on to denounce, on behalf of all men, “our sexually objectifying gazes… our pornographic imaginations.” Our “dominant phallic economy.” Indeed, he continues, “we are collectively complicit with a sexist mind-set and a poisonous masculinity.” You see, being aroused by women, while not quite rape in itself, is nonetheless, as it were, rape-adjacent, and constitutes “a violent, pathetic and problematic masculinity.”
One wonders how a species of suitably corrected human beings, purged of such heterosexual inclinations, might propagate and flourish. Such that we can indulge the theatrical sorrows of lecturers in “critical whiteness studies.”
All this and more.
Clientele
It occurs to me that if you’re running a “trans-owned LGBTQIA+ bookshop and coffee shop” – “queer books, queer haircuts, queer coffee” – yes, queer coffee – and your patrons have to be reminded, via “guidelines displayed on each table,” of how to behave like even minimally civilised people, then you may want to seek out a better class of patron.
On the laugh-a-minute world of ostentatiously “queer” venues.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including the autonomous bins of tomorrow; some mid-boom miniatures; and a brief history of the toilet.
All this and more.
Please Suspend Your Disbelief
Where Doing The Obvious Is Out Of The Question
On radical flouncing; on the self-induced panic attacks of an empowered feminist; on being bare-arsed in a terribly radical way; and how to deter muggers with tiny bits of cardboard:
The cards, we’re assured, are “a concrete way to deal with an unsafe situation.” Perhaps we can look forward to the issuing of “I am being stabbed” cards. And some “The man next to me is masturbating” cards. It does have the makings of an unhappy board game.
You see, by issuing little cards, they’re creating “new social norms.” To supposedly address the problem of having created other “new social norms” in which punishing criminals is deemed unjust, racist, and terribly old-fashioned.
All this, and other progressive wonders.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including a real-life zombie nightmare; Satie on a bandoneon; a museum of antique tubas; and the pram of the future, circa 1971.
All this and more.
Oh, and should you be inclined to help keep a blog afloat, it’s fundraising week.
Question Asked
I Paid $5 For This Magic Cardboard
At which point, sharp-eyed readers will notice that the direction of all this effort is away from the actual problem.