Je Téléphone à La Police
Happy Bastille Day, enjoy the rest of the before-times!
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Happy Bastille Day, when we celebrate a chaotic mob of fanatics storming a government building and killing a few cops. They accomplished nothing, but created an irresistible symbol; it’s the French revolutionary version of what January 6th will be to fascist America under the New Founding Fathers. Anyway, Jair Bolsonaro has had the hiccups for more than ten days. So sad. 🤡
But here in what’s left of the before-times, Safy-Hallan Farah pinned down the most essential quality of Gen Z’s post-main-character hyperreal individualist style which is its un-pin-downability. Namechecked: Dave Eggers, Pierre Bourdieu, Naomi “Be” Klein1, and Stuff White People Like, among others.
Aujourd'hui en Film: According to Variety’s Michael Nordine, the deranged looking Nicolas Cage vehicle “Pig” is not a “John Wick” style revenge thriller, as the trailer hints it might be, but is somehow… good? I assume Cage manages to say “put the pig back in the woods,” or what’s the point of even casting him. Also the pig has a treasure map hidden on its belly. Meanwhile at Cannes, Valérie Lemercier debuted her lightly-fictionalized Céline Dion biopic2 “Aline,” “in which,” writes Peter Debruge, “57-year-old Lemercier insists on embodying the megastar—rechristened Aline Dieu—from age 12 to present.”
In 2008, Lemercier played the title character in “Agathe Clery,” “a Gallic rehash of Melvin Van Peebles' "Watermelon Man" that's also, for better or worse, a musical comedy,” a role which she performed largely in blackface.
And E.J. Dickson reports that the “Fast and the Furious” musical in development on TikTok is coming along splendidly. Don’t miss Peter Rugman’s Jason Statham audition and then… [music swells] ’AV A BANANA!
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Laurene Powell Jobs, the Jigsaw of prestige legacy media, signals that The Atlantic only has four or five years to climb out of the huge pit of debt she threw it down, reports Dylan Byers. Gabriel Snyder’s long-in-development NYC media newsletter project finally has a name and a website. I’d tell you, but it’s Off The Record. Alex Hern just launched a tech newsletter at The Guardian, and the first issue is about artificial intelligence centaurs. Are you burned out? What if you took a week off and came back to two weeks of work, would that fix it? Ed Zitron on the burnout bullshit factory.
Finally:
Are there any people under the age of 40 who have ever thought markets were something besides a casino? Meme trades aren’t the cause of widespread distrust, they’re the symptoms of it.
—Liz Lopatto on the Robinhood IPO
To be radiating joy as someone stitches up your obliterated crotch is the real miracle of childbirth.
—Susanna Wolff in The New Yorker, “My Slightly Unreal Pandemic Pregnancy”
Today’s Song: Vince Staples, “Are You With That?”
~And the tabs don't change but maybe the names~
Yesterday I fed my bookmarks folder to a GAN trained on all of Tumblr, I hope you enjoyed and/or were utterly baffled by the results. If you’re new here: uh, sorry? Not really, tbh. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. Today is a lot more normal, whatever that means.
We’re pronouncing this “bye-AWE-pick” now, rhymes with “myopic.” New shibboleth dropped, get on board.