but enough about me. almost.
Dishy scribe Zachary Woolfe muses on “The Bewitching Art of La Cieca” in The New York Observer. Our Own JJ is profiled, covered, revealed, reported, what he eats and what he wears and whom he knows and where he was, and when and where he’s going.
Yea I am Sanford.
separate but equal is not the same as equal
OK, yeah, but why is that “separate but equal” argument relevant? We want results, right – not some sort of semantic satisfaction? Practically speaking, there’s one way that will get benefits presto and then there’s plenty of time to knock onself out fighting over a word later. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Not -really- in this case, but just let me be a nerd-snob.
Alternative: Fight more and more – stubbornly – against a right-wing and/or religious bloc that will just stand ever more firmly against the “threat to the sanctity of marriage”. My way or the highway rarely gets things done. Alienation is probably going to occur at some point. People are naturally scared of what they don’t understand. Things like no-compromise is just gonna anger them more…compounding the problem.
This sounds stupid but it’s almost inevitable anyway. People my age [teens] are extremely liberal with regards to sex etc. Unless they grew up on the milk of rightwing/religion.
By the way I am very interested in talking about this but I don’t know if parterre is the appropriate place.
” … he even quotes Macbeth. Only in the opera world do people take pride in obscure nerdy lit-referential insults.”
Newsbreak, darling. Where some of us come from, MACBETH is not obscure or — god forbid — nerdy.
Don’t you darling me. Do you have better descriptors than obscure/nerdy to describe works that the vast majority of people won’t touch with a ten-foot pole?
nb. I think nerdy is great. God, please don’t forbid nerdy.
Darling (I persist): Are you truly under the impression that this site is frequented by those whom you appeal to — against Shakespeare’s short and very well-liked play — as “the vast majority of people”? As though people like me will be intimidated by your declaration that we are in a minority?
People are here because of their devotion to something that might be thought of as “high art.” Like, you know, MACBETH is. You may find that your triumphalist brand of anti-intellectualism will be more at home over at the Sarah Palin fan sites.
Really.
The separate but equal argument is relevant to those of us who are baby boomers and not merely, dare I say it, babies. I was came out in ’77 when people were regularly beaten up for being gay, and, in fact, a guy got killed last year in Brooklyn by several teens because he was walking down the street holding hands with a man as his attackers shouted anti-gay hate language… and the guy he was walking with was his BROTHER! And when the anti-miscegenation laws were overturned, it wasn’t the States that finally did it, it was The Supreme Court in 1967. And might I point out that we have a President who is the product of a mixed marriage, which would have been illegal prior to that in the majority of states.
#36 Oh, that’s right, I hate intellectualism which is why I like this blog. It all makes sense now. In fact, I am a proud pseudo-intellectual myself, just like you. If you claim to be intellectual, honey, you ain’t. Or you might be and just happen to derive self-worth from being more ‘cultured’ than the poor drooling philistines next door. Oh dear, they listen to pop music and read Harry Potter. What poor taste. Unfortunately, even I can’t suppress those kinds of thoughts when I think about the *others*. Those *people*, they don’t even like opera! How dare they listen to that populist filth on the radio these days!
What part of “I like nerdy” did you not understand? Oh my, next time I should just qualify everything. “If you’re Alto, please just take deep breaths and skip over what is below. Stay calm.” Moving along. Macbeth is alright, for the record – I guess. Though I would be lying to say I like Shakespeare more than I like more accessible playwrights such as Ibsen. Oh NO, now I’ve revealed my campaign against Shakespeare. How will I win anybody’s – I mean, any intellectual’s respect now?! Most “intellectuals” would be lying anyway to say they love Shakespeare [in before you claim that the "most intellectuals" I refer to is some backwater gun-toting slice of society]. Even among the predominantly uppermiddleclass metropolitan/suburban probably primarily white demographic that is parterre’s readership, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a significant amount of people who truly “appreciate” such work. It seems to me that most who have read a decent amount o’ Shakespeare have read these works out of some obligation – so that they can feel good about themselves in a frenzy of making and getting deep literary references. You can all laugh nasally after somebody mentions something from the vast shared cultural…information bank of useless knowledge. Sorry I couldn’t think of a better phrase than ‘information bank’. Suggestions?
Nota bene: ‘Useless’ doesn’t mean I despise it. As I’ve said before, I do read these things. It does not mean that I pretend to enjoy them more than I do or claim to appreciate them in a great hoity-toity artistically aware manner.
Many so-called intellectuals feel that it is their duty to painfully work their way through the ‘classics’ and take pride in just how many names of dead white European men they can toss around. “Ah, Erasmus, yes I’ve read his Praise of Folly. That was after I finished Gibbon’s Fall and Decline. Light reading, ah but I haven’t finished any of that Joyce yet. I’m too wrapped up in the Ante-Social-Constructionist thinkers [insert stilted self-deprecating laugh here].” ‘Intellectuals’ get a virtuous kick out of reading things they think they ought to like. And I say this from personal experience. So stop pretending that it’s all out of pure appreciation and artistic sensibilities.
Lastly, it’s pure fakery/snobbery to act as if one spends one’s life devoted to ‘high art’, whatever that is. What a martyr you are, suffering away on the easy armchair, slaving away at those pages for the sake of ‘high art’. That one cannot be bothered to dip down into, oh, the kind of mindless trash the masses enjoy. Too good for that, huh?
#37 Okay, Sanford, I read that story on your blog about the man getting beaten to death in NY…yes, hate crime definitely exists and so does discrimination. Have you considered that legalizing marriage to your semantic satisfaction might exacerbate anti-gay hate/violence?
After hypothetical marriage legalization, it’s easy to say, “They’ve committed a crime against God / violated the sanctity of marriage!” and egg people on. It is harder to say, “Look, they gained equal legal status! Kill ‘em all!” Do they [anti-marriage people] even have an argument against equality under the law? No.
Separate but equal with respect to race was NOT equal, obviously. I am too lazy to dig up statistics, but consider how facilities [bathrooms] etc. were not equal. Equal in name not in actuality. That was the issue. Is that relevant in this case? If union & marriage were equal under the law, that would be ‘truly’ equal.
Example of ‘separate but equal’ that is irrelevant to my argument: Women’s sports and men’s sports are separate for obvious reasons. Okay, not exactly equal but what can you expect? There is less funding AND less interest [from women themselves in participating].
I guess what I wanted to prove from that example is that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Can you explain why marriage as the word is so very important? What’s wrong with a secular ‘marriage’ [i.e. civil union if/when it gains equal legal status]? I guess the marriage thing would be relevant if both people were practicing Christians or something and wanted that label as a personal preference…
OK one more thing to 36, lmao at the Sarah Palin dig. She’s stupid, if by intelligent you mean the people on parterre [not saying nothing disparaging. We're book-smart but how much does that really count for?]. Doesn’t mean she isn’t a viable candidate for the Republicans in the future. So she can go and run and we can all sit here whining about how stupid she is. I’m sure she cares. I’m also sure her supporters care what a bunch of bitter ‘intellectuals’ think.
Even though I hate everything Palin stands for – well that was too strong. Disagree with her on just about everything, she’s something special. At least something new – breaking the mold of sexless, monochromatic-mansuit-wearing female politician. [Clinton/Pelosi]. Before, it was such a faux pas to be “as feminine” as Palin. I find it hilarious that Clinton/Pelosi studiously DON’T employ “feminine wiles” because that’s unfair. They try too hard to be masculine and then play the gender card repeatedly and whine about being discriminated against. For the record, I agree with Clinton/Pelosi platform, not Palin’s. Just so you know. Oh, and, Palin’s image could all just be a smartly crafted caricature [like 99.99% of politicians] but at least the machine is being CREATIVE.
I don’t know what the f#%k that was, but it wasn’t a good look. Besides, I thought nerds were too busy playing World Of Warcraft while Twittering to read an actual book.