The New And Improved Fashion Board

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
That must be a New York thing. In California we distill people down to the kind of automobile they drive.

I use the much simpler "me" and "them"

[patentparanyc]

Originally posted by Spanky
Racism and prejudice is a fact of life in every human community in the world. People use ethnic, racial and religious differences to create subclasses in every country of the world. When I lived in Japan, when you tried to rent a house they would list which races were allowed to rent a certain place in the newspaper. At certain night clubs they would have a sign on the wall which listed which nationalities they would let in. Unlike most countries of the world, in the US we try and do something about these problems.

A black person in the United States has much less racial barriers to deal with than a Masai tribesman almost anywhere in southern or eastern Africa. In the African American community in the United States, lite skinned African American denigrate and hamper the progess of the dark skinned African Americans.

What that Kramer idiot did should ruin his career. What he did should not be tolerated from a person of any ethnic persuasion to any other person of any ethnic persuasion. When you give a certain ethnic group a pass, you are really telling the whole community that you are not serious about trying to deal with the problem.

The problem is not four hundred years of racial prejudice towards African Americans, the problem is the inclination of humans towards tribalism. The goal is to make this country a pure meritocracy (obviously unachievable but it is the pursuit of that goal that counts). No deviations from that goal should be tolerated because of some group's past victim status.

While the Kramer incident was quite unfortunate and unacceptable, however the gentlemen that the ivectives/insults were hurled at lose some credibility when they try to turn it into some type of payday based off of a "victim" mentality. They would perhaps be more credible if they insisted that he {Kramer} give funds to a charitable organization committed to stopping racsim. While obviously a humiliating, horrible experience, Kramer's effective ending of his career will serve as a much more lasting punishment than any other attempted payout.

Also, for your weekend perusal I bring you Svetlana Metkina.

http://www.photorazzi.com/store/cate...lana%20Metkina

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Spanky
The problem is not four hundred years of racial prejudice towards African Americans, the problem is the inclination of humans towards tribalism. The goal is to make this country a pure meritocracy (obviously unachievable but it is the pursuit of that goal that counts). No deviations from that goal should be tolerated because of some group's past victim status.

I'm not sure what deviations you're talking about, but if you say

1) we should try to become "a pure meritocracy" but admit

2) that most people favor their own,

doesn't the fact that those in positions of power (I don't mean government, I mean the owners of businesses, the heads of your lawfirms, etc.) are a certain group make it tough for people in other groups to be treated fairly?

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
I use the much simpler "me" and "them"

I use a variation of this. I assume I'll like everyone, then decide when I meet them whether I should hold onto that assumption. I find the assumption holds for about 30% of people.

The other 70% of people are atrocious.

Racism is intellectually offensive to me. To hate a type of person on such an invalid basis while there are probably a million valid reasons unique to that person to dislike or avoid him or her after meeting him or her makes no sense to me.

I insist on knowing a person before hating him. The exception being Duke fans who didn't go there.

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Jack Manfred
This is probably messed up, but I remember seeing the movie Bad Boys (the Sean Penn one, not the Will Smith one) in high school and feeling a weird ethic pride upon hearing the slur "Mick." Until then, I didn't think we Irish even rated a slur.

The only problem is, it's hard to take a slur seriously when it's used as an adjective on every third word in "Grey's Anatomy."

That's the Scot "Mc" and not the Irish "mick," ye bog-dwelling, potato-eating, drunken sot.

Oy vey, iz mir.

[patentparanyc]

NY Times Review: For Ty. I am sure you already saw this but...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/bo...d=1&ref=review

And who will carry me when I am sick? A befuddling anti-feminist complex article that rails against working mothers. I had to digest it a bit and still am not sure how I feel about the article. she has some okay points but misguided mostly.

http://www.elle.com/featurefullstory...-flanagan.html

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by patentparanyc
NY Times Review: For Ty. I am sure you already saw this but...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/bo...d=1&ref=review

The non-Pynchon-obsessed among us may have missed this new release:

• Book Notes
  Sunday, November 26, 2006; Page BW11
  
  Pictures of Pynchon
  
  All of Zak Smith's obsessions, he says, trace back to his teenage years in Prince George's County. "The same sort of projects are interesting to me," he explains. "I liked girls then. I like girls now." He also likes comics and big philosophical novels. Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow has long been his favorite book.
  
  Here's where the obsession comes in: In 2003, Smith spent nine months holed up in his Brooklyn apartment drawing Gravity's Rainbow page by page. In the process, Pynchon's images popped out at Smith in ways they hadn't when he was just reading the book for pleasure. "I noticed that grids or graphs or grid-like shapes were in the language a lot," he says. He also ran across a lot of challenging pages containing little more than two people talking.
  
  "You're like, I don't know what I'm going to do with this," he recalls. And the book hardly ends with a visual bang: "The last page is the same two people talking!"
  
  Smith trained as a fine artist at Yale and Cooper Union -- his specialty is portraits -- so it makes sense that the end result of his endeavor is less an illustrated novel than a series of eerie, high art interpretations. None of the 760 images contains any of Pynchon's text, for example, though each is numbered to match a page in the novel's Viking Press edition.
  
  When the Whitney Museum displayed the series in its 2004 Biennial show, it took up an entire wall. Pynchon fans hovered around it pointing out their favorite spots. There was Pirate among the banana trees! There was Slothrop in the pig costume! There were the B-57 bombers!
  
  Now fans who missed the show can join the fun: Tin House has collected Smith's drawings into a volume called Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated, which will be released November 28th, just a week after Pynchon's new novel, Against the Day, hit stores.
  
  It's not likely that Smith will take on that 1,085-page book, though. "All my work is very labor-intensive," he says, "so I don't like to do the same project twice." In fact, his last big series, "100 Girls and 100 Octopuses," was conceived as the "anti- Gravity's Rainbow." An arrangement of 98 surreal paintings, each showing a woman in a room with an octopus, the series has no narrative in it at all. Only when he was deep into the project did Smith realize he'd been foiled: The image of the girl with the octopus appears in Gravity's Rainbow, too.

100 Girls and 100 Octopuses here. Should be Octopi, I'm thinking, but I'm no artist.

To give the project an FB angle, Smith also appears in porn movies under the name "Zak Sabbath."

(spree: work-safe, but links to stuff that decidedly isn't)

[Alex_de_Large]

I just watched today's Barca/Villareal match. Great game alla round, but Ronaldinho's goal in the 88th is as good a goal as you will ever see. It's not on you tube yet, but I will post the link when it is.

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
The non-Pynchon-obsessed among us may have missed this new release:

• Book Notes
  Sunday, November 26, 2006; Page BW11
  
  Pictures of Pynchon
  
  All of Zak Smith's obsessions, he says, trace back to his teenage years in Prince George's County. "The same sort of projects are interesting to me," he explains. "I liked girls then. I like girls now." He also likes comics and big philosophical novels. Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow has long been his favorite book.
  
  Here's where the obsession comes in: In 2003, Smith spent nine months holed up in his Brooklyn apartment drawing Gravity's Rainbow page by page. In the process, Pynchon's images popped out at Smith in ways they hadn't when he was just reading the book for pleasure. "I noticed that grids or graphs or grid-like shapes were in the language a lot," he says. He also ran across a lot of challenging pages containing little more than two people talking.
  
  "You're like, I don't know what I'm going to do with this," he recalls. And the book hardly ends with a visual bang: "The last page is the same two people talking!"
  
  Smith trained as a fine artist at Yale and Cooper Union -- his specialty is portraits -- so it makes sense that the end result of his endeavor is less an illustrated novel than a series of eerie, high art interpretations. None of the 760 images contains any of Pynchon's text, for example, though each is numbered to match a page in the novel's Viking Press edition.
  
  When the Whitney Museum displayed the series in its 2004 Biennial show, it took up an entire wall. Pynchon fans hovered around it pointing out their favorite spots. There was Pirate among the banana trees! There was Slothrop in the pig costume! There were the B-57 bombers!
  
  Now fans who missed the show can join the fun: Tin House has collected Smith's drawings into a volume called Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated, which will be released November 28th, just a week after Pynchon's new novel, Against the Day, hit stores.
  
  It's not likely that Smith will take on that 1,085-page book, though. "All my work is very labor-intensive," he says, "so I don't like to do the same project twice." In fact, his last big series, "100 Girls and 100 Octopuses," was conceived as the "anti- Gravity's Rainbow." An arrangement of 98 surreal paintings, each showing a woman in a room with an octopus, the series has no narrative in it at all. Only when he was deep into the project did Smith realize he'd been foiled: The image of the girl with the octopus appears in Gravity's Rainbow, too.

100 Girls and 100 Octopuses here. Should be Octopi, I'm thinking, but I'm no artist.

To give the project an FB angle, Smith also appears in porn movies under the name "Zak Sabbath."

(spree: work-safe, but links to stuff that decidedly isn't)

Yalie porn star? str8?

[LessinSF]

Originally posted by Spanky
Racism and prejudice is a fact of life in every human community in the world. ... What that Kramer idiot did should ruin his career.

In the crassest sense, to preserve his career, he should have siad something like this:

I'm a racist. I was raised being taught racist beliefs, and I grew to intellectually reject those ideas, but they still linger in my subconcious. The beliefs I was taught by my parents and community influenced me, and I intellectually reject them, but, sometimes when I am under stress, they come out. I am ashamed, un-proud, embarassed, etc. about my reaction and statements, but I do not blame my parents, community, church, or whatever created this ugly bias in me, but recognize that it is there in me, and I am doing my best to overcome my prejudices, yada, yada, yada.

He could have survived that. Oprah would have had him on. The "I am not a racist" defense fails on its face. You are. The so-called proof here is in the video.

[patentparanyc]

Originally posted by LessinSF
yada, yada, yada.

Was that an intentional or unintentional pun?

[dtb]

Originally posted by NotFromHere
That Stefani bitch helped you move?

Why, yes, as a matter of fact.

[Alex_de_Large]

Originally posted by Alex_de_Large
I just watched today's Barca/Villareal match. Great game alla round, but Ronaldinho's goal in the 88th is as good a goal as you will ever see. It's not on you tube yet, but I will post the link when it is.

Here it is...

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by dtb
Why, yes, as a matter of fact.

Had that Stefani bitch carried my books up the stairs to my fifth-floor penthouse, I would no longer call her a bitch.

[dtb]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
Had that Stefani bitch carried my books up the stairs to my fifth-floor penthouse, I would no longer call her a bitch.

I would.

But I was speaking in the M sense.