kamelred posted:what i was trying to object to is this traditionally quite useless exhortation to wallow in guilt and culpability that sometimes skirts by as a sneaky provocation--appearing superficially to act as a systematic critique but limiting strategies for resistance to the individual. is that just an obnoxious re-formulation of "not all men" on my part?
Kind of, yeah, at least in terms of your defensiveness and how it's affected your interpretation of the message. I'm not sure where you're getting the "limiting strategies for resistance to the individual" from. She's obviously calling for self-reflection from men, but that hardly precludes systematic change. On the contrary, it seems a vital step.
toyotathon posted:i probably wasn't making my point well, or maybe i was and it was just shit-- it was just to consider the audience and her relation to it, whether it was a good medium for her to make her point. i think the medium actually worked against her, despite her self-consciously pushing against it. her point was that she was continually broken by male trauma and forced to introspect and rebuild herself, she was both an object of comedy and a survivor. and her liberal audience basically responds to stories of trauma by individualizing them (both perpetrators and victims), not systematizing them, and barely feels safe generalizing them without a poll or study to back it up. so it's a one-way medium, where she's telling mostly autobiographical stories, in which she's alone+defenseless against multiple men, literally half a world away. when she turns it around on masculine culture, is the critique effective, or is it incredibly easy to individualize or ignore? i think kamelred meant to disagree w/ me but yeah i actually agree that it'd be insane to feel accountable for her life. i don't think i learned much except how uniform the anglosphere culture and culture industry is
yeah normally the format for this kind of thing is a more intimate setting, and the event isn't just a one-sided performance, there would be a guided discussion period afterwards sharing thoughts on both personal impacts and broader political structures. moving it into another medium (not only the mass broadcast, but the giant auditorium) not only dampens the poignancy but removes the prompting for personal and political engagement with the subject.
when i watched Nanette it was with a bunch of people because watching TV alone is sad and we did have a good discussion afterwards, so while I don't think the original purpose of the form is completely erased it definitely is mangled. can definitely see it being an experience of distant voyeurism for many, prepackaged emotional distress and empathy, catharsis with the prompting for personal engagement excised entirely. which is a gross distortion of what the form was originally developed to do.
Petrol posted:She's obviously calling for self-reflection from men, but that hardly precludes systematic change. On the contrary, it seems a vital step.
agree with you here, but i do think that the discussion of what systemic change would look like and how people can organize and enact it is conspicuously absent from Nanette in a way that it isn't from other performances in this vein, replaced by shallow prods at american electoral politics.
i don't think this is even anything that should be held against Gadsby, imho what she's done is quite innovative and it's perhaps premature to say that the kind of intimate political engagement i'm missing is impossible in a broader medium, but it needs to evolve more free of the media business constraints of hype or die. the selection pressures of capitalist media pounced on her as an opportunity to sell a form of performance that had previously been untenable for them to market, and will do its damnedest to keep it from developing beyond this safer early stage lest it become unprofitable.
Petrol posted:kamelred posted:what i was trying to object to is this traditionally quite useless exhortation to wallow in guilt and culpability that sometimes skirts by as a sneaky provocation--appearing superficially to act as a systematic critique but limiting strategies for resistance to the individual. is that just an obnoxious re-formulation of "not all men" on my part?
Kind of, yeah, at least in terms of your defensiveness and how it's affected your interpretation of the message. I'm not sure where you're getting the "limiting strategies for resistance to the individual" from. She's obviously calling for self-reflection from men, but that hardly precludes systematic change. On the contrary, it seems a vital step.
i certainly hope not! i couldn't disagree more, actually. i hope im not misunderstanding you but im imagining here a chicken and egg sort of question. much about the current national conversation about women and related developments seem actually to have their origin not in any kind of consciousness-raising efforts but in a very specific set of developments related to the global economy that altered already (although not perfectly or completely) the national politics and course of history before the first blogger arrived on the scene
i dont want to do like a point by point thing and there are bigger questions im skirting around that could merit their own thread so let me just say i accept your diagnosis here and i'll shut up and go away. i did not like the show very much at all but i recongize being on perilous ground as someone who did admit to liking Detroit: Become human and i therefore sympathize with your dilemma
elias posted:boots reily was on democracy now and said tianamen was about students protesting for the right to be managers at slave factories. they nodded politely. but then when amy goodman described him as an anti-capitalist activist he interjected to say “communist” and she was taken aback for a second and corrected herself “you’re a communist marxist” and then he interjected again to say like “Well i don’t know about that, didn’t Marx himself say he wasn’t a marxist
”
nice.
shriekingviolet posted:Petrol posted:She's obviously calling for self-reflection from men, but that hardly precludes systematic change. On the contrary, it seems a vital step.
agree with you here, but i do think that the discussion of what systemic change would look like and how people can organize and enact it is conspicuously absent from Nanette in a way that it isn't from other performances in this vein, replaced by shallow prods at american electoral politics.
I really don't think the 'prods' were meant to stand in for political exhortations and strategy, they were simply illustrative of symptoms. It says something about the US that Trump was elected even after bragging about having committed sexual assault with impunity. It says something about standup that Monica Lewinsky, a woman preyed upon by a president, was nothing more than a punchline to comics.
shriekingviolet posted:i don't think this is even anything that should be held against Gadsby, imho what she's done is quite innovative and it's perhaps premature to say that the kind of intimate political engagement i'm missing is impossible in a broader medium, but it needs to evolve more free of the media business constraints of hype or die. the selection pressures of capitalist media pounced on her as an opportunity to sell a form of performance that had previously been untenable for them to market, and will do its damnedest to keep it from developing beyond this safer early stage lest it become unprofitable.
Frankly I think it would be foolish to look to art for the kind of next step you're talking about, and in fact it's a crucial part of Gadbsy's message about the problem with art in general, and standup specifically. There's a reason behind her art history rant and I don't think it's just about trying to wheel out a decade old degree to look smart.
Petrol posted:Frankly I think it would be foolish to look to art for the kind of next step you're talking about, and in fact it's a crucial part of Gadbsy's message about the problem with art in general, and standup specifically. There's a reason behind her art history rant and I don't think it's just about trying to wheel out a decade old degree to look smart.
well, except trauma storytelling is already an art form developed and performed by marginalized women with an explicit political element. i'm not some starry eyed drama student who thinks Art will save us, but i've seen art and performance be a big part of bringing together communities and guiding the kinds of discussions that prompt people to organize. and I can't help but compare Nanette to similar events lead by rad orgs that really left an impression on me. like, her critique of art history is good, and the examination of the power dynamic of marginalized people in standup is excellent insight. but the art history bits leave a big elephant in the room, the fact that her own performance is not unique but participates in a contemporary and marginalized feminist form of performance, art history happening now, and i think Nanette compromises the objectives of that form by how it has been presented in the mass distribution medium.
calling attention to the contradictions and limitations of her own performance (which toyotathon mentioned) is pretty cool but the conversation around Nanette throws under the bus all of the other women doing artistic and political work, organizing at the same time that they tell their stories, without getting payed by Netflix. and again, I don't blame Gadsby for that, there is a bougie culture scaffolding that has erected itself around her work and like with Chapelle, once you see it for what it is, once you realize what has bought and paid for you and why, what the hell do you do about it?
anyway i'm treading on thin ice here, i try to avoid going all in on this stuff without running it past the perspective of rad women who i trust and am reaching the limit of my confidence in that so i'm gonna try to slow my roll for now
Watching this old BBC series (really good) and just thinking about how the people need to take the theatre back. Shakespeare himself represented a progressive strain of the bourgeois class at a time before it gained control over the relations of production, and now the bourgeoisie have claimed him wholly for themselves. Bring back the smelly theatre full of people ready to pelt fruit if they get bored. Scorn Tom Stoppard and all latter-day bourgeois “playwrights”. And (burst of static, then in a mucg deeper, distorted voice) Have the female roles played by cute guys in wigs
Edited by Ruzbihan ()
TG posted:finally got around to starting peaky blinders and im glad i did. they say the word "communist" in it a bunch so it must be Good
yeah, it's pretty good. they play a pretty big role, and their portrayal isn't very negative. it's an entertaining show, with decent actors.
shriekingviolet posted:yeah sure it's peppered with occasional throwaway lame liberal politics, if she was a radical marxist feminist it wouldn't be on netflix, that parts pretty boring and obvious.
We still got sorry to bother you somehow. I saw it at a theater in the morning the same day boots had a screening and in person q&a at night, but that was sold out before I noticed it. The movie was cool. Beat the shit out of you was kinda like an idiocracy joke but that’s ok. The movie was good
gay_swimmer posted:what I interpret as an allusion to the seminal Korean-American video artist Nam June Paik.
Just so there's no confusion, by this I mean, there's a part where his pants fall down
gay_swimmer posted:also he does all sorts of deconstruction of stand-up and talks about art history but there's no trauma narrative to go along with it so ultimately it's of no value
see, what gay_swimmer has done here seems like an unfair negative comparison designed to rile the nanette boosters, i.e. me, but what gay_swimmer doesnt realise is that i am in fact a stewart lee fan, and since i waited until after watching his show to reply to this, i can now say that i "get the ref", and can appreciate gay_swimmer's post for what it really is: an unfair negative comparison designed to rile the nanette boosters, i.e. me, with a stewart lee reference thrown in.
Petrol posted:gay_swimmer posted:also he does all sorts of deconstruction of stand-up and talks about art history but there's no trauma narrative to go along with it so ultimately it's of no value
see, what gay_swimmer has done here seems like an unfair negative comparison designed to rile the nanette boosters, i.e. me, but what gay_swimmer doesnt realise is that i am in fact a stewart lee fan, and since i waited until after watching his show to reply to this, i can now say that i "get the ref", and can appreciate gay_swimmer's post for what it really is: an unfair negative comparison designed to rile the nanette boosters, i.e. me, with a stewart lee reference thrown in.
this is an elegant parry of an attempted own, on the subject of nanette, the australian stand up comedy show on netflix
stewart lee is great
ADMIRAL PICARD: [settles into space chair] It’s great to be back running the Enterprise. Now I can finally do the most important thing in the history of space: find Captain Benjamin Sisko.
MAJOR GARAK: I warn you, this is going to take a lot of homosexual tension and well-acted scenes between people who are not student council dorks from Starfleet.
CAPTAIN DATA: “Dork”. A variant of a 20th-century Earth term for male genitalia. I am uncertain
PICARD: [presses button on armrest and Data gets shot into space] You know what to do.
CAPTAIN GARAK: Ah, Commander Worf. Would you please be so kind as to set course for the Romulan Gun Factory.
[BANDITOS by THE REFRESHMENTS plays from the top as ENTERPRISE Ω jumps away]
What a stupid term. "Yeah I create content"
Even more depressing is that for every person making a living doing it there are 10,000 people doing it for free, effectively subsidizing the wages of the PewDiePies because even the tiny 1,000 person channels end up making some ad revenue.