Here is a shitty cell-phone video of Tim and Oakley playing with some dancing puppets last night. Here also for some entertainment value is the Internet Identity entry from Dec. 27, 2011.
Boardwalk Empire is basically a HBO superband. The best actors from The Sopranos, Deadwood and The Wire with a big writer from The Sopranos, like a superband it does nothing special. “He fall into shoe polish?” a line from the second episode.
After reading the Young Manhattanite piece on Marie Calloway involving a discussion between these people regarding the “controversy,” I can’t help but think that it is all really just a bunch of kids trying to seem smarter than each other. It is all just petty gossiping in defense of people broadcasting their lives on the Internet. It’s like reality shows and trying to ascribe deeper meaning to these people, which means absolutely nothing, that meaning is not there. People like Ms. Calloway are just sharing stories that are completely normal. Why the scandal? They would say the scandal perhaps is in the prose, which is straightforward, introspective but not to the point of it being navel-gazing. The real issue is not with Calloway or the piece, it is with the people who are scandalizing it. When people spiral into their bias on the matter, the entire thing blows up into an argument that is usually more interesting than the initial topic because the defenders try to value their meaning in the hot topic to justify their know-it-all attempts at wisdom. The truth of it, however, is in the fact that these defenders (or offenders, depending on how you look at it) are using their identity to put on display their Internet Identity to perpetuate themselves, making it a wholly selfish endeavor. Really it is all just a pedantic argument because someone is wrong on the internet. Absolutely no one is immune to this; I do it too.
So is there a value to this kind of personal-online commentary? It’s hard to say. I’d like to say that it is important, but to do so one must remove one’s thoughts that have a bias; of course this is impossible for humans to do, inevitably things lose focus. In this case, it creates this self-perpetuating discussion and controversy that is really meant to enhance the identity of the people doing the commenting on the topic itself. It’s not actually about the work and usually it comes off as a bunch of hipsters commenting on something that is really actually very normal. For me the kind of fervor that has collected around—this time—Marie Calloway, is more interesting than the initial topic.
