A Brooklyn Culture Mafia

sus

sus

Moderator
@IdleRich apology accepted.

For one, this piece exists because the subjects are friends with a lot of well-connected culture/arts/journo PR agents

Two, this piece is a deliberate skewering, and as you say, a skewering of anyone's easily done
 
sus

sus

Moderator
The levels of bluff/double bluff involved is a good frame for it, that the NYT is not a neutral party objectively reporting social facts, but a collection of socially interested, socially embedded individuals who are engaged in a larger social game, of which they cannot help but be a part. You're getting a move in the game as much as a reporting of moves. Especially when the NY media anaconda starts swallowing its own tail, covering its own.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
my point was the Times writes mostly straightforward articles on people, but in certain instance where they choose to highlight a a person who, for whatever reason, is slightly cringeworthy (as pretentious, privileged white people can be), they sometimes do it in a mocking way. in that instance, you could say that if anyone is getting "played", it's the subject being profiled by the Times, not the reader.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
But I thought for a minute - or I wondered for a minute if it were possible - that people were deliberately skewering themselves (or at least manoeuvring themselves into position and arranging the skewering) and then laughing at people who were so dumb that they were believing it to be a real skewering. And I was struggling to see the advantage in that kind of play....
You see, like you I've heard a lot of people talking about four dimensional chess (or more, I'm sure the Donald is up to about twenty dimensions by now) in which these super-geniuses who control our lives think so far outside the box it seems unrelated to the topic which is ostensibly at hand, and naturally they are countless moves ahead too. Now, as I say, I hear about it a lot, but normally the context is that it is used to explain some even more inexplicably moronic action than usual by a politician who is already renowned for being a moron. And the phrase itself is usually being used by the only people dumber than the politico in question, that being his followers. So sadly these examples of 17 dimensional chess turn out to be... not multi-dimensional chess.
But then I thought you, Gus (not a moron). was telling me about some person who worked behind the scenes pulling strings, to arrange for the NYT to write an article about him, and then that this frightening prodigy (as I write this I can feel his glowing megabrain momentarily focus on me and after deciding that I will never advance beyond pawn magnanimously choose not to utterly obliterate me and move on) was manipulating the hapless writer who, unbeknowest to them, was merely a glove puppet being mercilessly but invisibly fisted by this unknown grandmaestro of the secret world and ultimately being used against their will to produce a hatchet job on the very clandestine Carlsen who had them in his pocket. The purpose of this entire system of plans within plans, wheels within wheels, never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel was to fool a hitherto unaware public into hating this bloke. And thus being played.
And I was like... fuck, now that is some multi-dimensional chess shit right there, even after it was all explained (and I realised that claiming that phrase was witty, was of course, another red herring - just a bit too implausible that one) I didn't understand it at all - why the fuck did people want to trick the public into hating them? Crazy. But yeah, in the end it was just me being crazy, I'll stick to noughts and crosses from now on.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
Spenna have you got a physical copy of it? Is it any good? I think irreverence is valuable and if this is the new vice, more power.

And I like how it's a newspaper and not online.

But I'm not really the target market anymore so the tut tut approach might work better for me.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Leo said:
my point was the Times writes mostly straightforward articles on people, but in certain instance where they choose to highlight a a person who, for whatever reason, is slightly cringeworthy (as pretentious, privileged white people can be), they sometimes do it in a mocking way. in that instance, you could say that if anyone is getting "played", it's the subject being profiled by the Times, not the reader.
Click to expand...
Well, the reader is getting manipulated into an emotional reaction, so both?
 
sus

sus

Moderator
catalog said:
Spenna have you got a physical copy of it? Is it any good? I think irreverence is valuable and if this is the new vice, more power.

And I like how it's a newspaper and not online.

But I'm not really the target market anymore so the tut tut approach might work better for me.
Click to expand...
I have a copy of Civilization coming, but nobody I know in NY can secure a copy of Drunken Canal, I've asked around, it's impossible!
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Leo said:
there's always been a thing with some wiseass tricking media in covering some made up bullshit, just for the lulz. One of the best was when a Times style section writer got suckered into reporting on "grunge speak".

https://www.oregonlive.com/trending...e-lexicon-embraced-by-the-new-york-times.html
Click to expand...
Also that fad with "long lost" records, when someone turns up this surprisingly modern sounding ultra-rare twelve that basically means we have to reconsider the entire story of how recorded music developed "Wow, it's amazing to think that at roughly the same time that Robert Johnson was selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads, this fellow - hitherto unknown as his tribe only recently made contact with modern so-called 'civilisation' - had made this ground-breaking footwork record with a synth that had fallen from a UFO and a drum machine built out of coconuts and an ingenious system of strings pulled by tortured slaves captured from another tribe - and he didn't have to risk eternal damnation to do it!"
I mean it is cool to build up some mystique or something every now and again, but it felt at one point as though every mediocre electric record coming out had a made up backstory - normally cos the record only had any merit or originality if you could make people believe it came out before all the stuff it shamelessly ripped off.
eg this one that sets out to tell you that krautrock was invented in Wales....


Although actually that is a pretty nice tune (you can hear another one from the same EP on our latest mix in fact come to think of it).
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
suspended said:
Big news, Eli & Anna are havin a kid

View attachment 6613

> On the February 13, 2021 episode of The Tim Dillon Show, Khachiyan announced she was eight months pregnant.[25]
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She was like and he was like and they were like and then we were like

this is another reason to stay off twitter, a) because of the inclusion/exclusion role in building a clique, b) I can hear the vocal fry even in the text and c) who honestly gives a fuck that people they’ve never met are having a kid?

@suspended are you a fan here to regularly dose this shit? Wtf man, cringe may be a passé term but I’m developing a psychic itch (@WashYourHands dont open this cesspool again)
 
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