A love letter to “Almost Famous” on its 20th anniversary
There are songs that attach themselves to us with a sticky, uncomfortable permanence. They stick to us like splotches of chewing gum along a sidewalk you once vandalized with chalk. They play on repeat like a ballad you first slow-danced to.
For a generation aimlessly searching for meaning in the early 2000s, Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” is that song. Correction: “Tiny Dancer” is one of those songs. There are others, like the ghostly tambourine from The Shins’ “New Slang” transferring from Natalie Portman’s headphones into our ears in Garden State (2004). (“New Slang” is at least born and raised in…
One writer’s attempt to explain Lana Del Rey’s “question for the culture”
Lana Del Rey is the kind of pop star (and feminist) that Liz Phair said she had hoped to inspire. Del Rey would define her feminism as, “a woman who feels free enough to do whatever she wants.” It is precisely this definition of feminism that has made Del Rey such a “bad feminist.” But the division that exists between Del Rey and her critics isn’t driven by gender politics alone, but a complicated philosophical struggle between the aesthete and the activist. For her critics (i.e., …
A study of the racial humor contained in one of America’s most compelling family sitcoms
Every character in F is for Family occupies a room inside America’s tragicomic psych ward of gap-toothed bullies, racist pancake houses, chauvinistic action stars, and dads with enough emotional baggage to crash airplanes.
The result is absurdist humor that studies the sewage that once spewed across suburbia’s fumigated landscape. Like one of its progenitors, Married… With Children, F is for Family’s audacious willingness to turn trauma into satire produces the effect of looking at the funny pages during Bible study, or recalling your abusive father living vicariously through the faux-mojo of action TV stars.
This sort of colorful incongruity flickers…
In his new special, the comedian speaks up and draws the ire of his critics
According to Nietzsche, maximum nihilism is reached in the overthrow of old systems by actions that amount to total destruction; to be nihilistic, one must lack the capacity to go beyond obliteration. This is one interpretation of Nietzsche. At least since Lenny Bruce’s obscenity trial, this has been the role of the comedian: to search, destroy, and savage establishment institutions the bourgeoisie views as sacrosanct—usually without concern for progress or collateral damage. The problem is that we’re so polarized today that defining the establishment (especially in comedy) has become a dizzying affair.
For example, is Hannah Gadsby anti-establishment or part…
Art Tavana
I want to die with my blue jeans on
