C/D LENA DUNHAM (THE DEFINITIVE POLL)

whatever

dudham (jk classic)

whatever

― space dokken (Edward III), Friday, October 5, 2012 3:08 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

I want you to know, the first time I fuck you, I might scare you a little, because I’m a man, and I know how to do things.

why

dud, sorry everyone

so classic

Don't understand the hate myself.

i'm not sure where i fall on this but was reading her thing about japan on 'this recording' and it's crazy to me that someone who wrote something that unspectacular & amateur is writing an HBO show/book (and that's aside from the all the questionable race stuff)

she is so close to what some white people want and yet so far

ha, otm

if the internet was what it was today when i was a kid, i wonder if i would have found & compiled a list of valid reasons to hate jake from squirt tv

i'll say classic - i really liked girls s1 an i love tiny furniture.

how could you not fuckin hate that little prick from squirt tv

have you watched the show j0rdan?

i've seen a few episodes... i wasn't enthralled but i didn't have a visceral reaction against it or anything like that

Have not seen her show/film or whatever, but have seen a photo of her sitting on a park bench. Will vote dud because I did not care for said photo.

she has a bit role in the innkeepers as a coffee shop clerk rambling about her romantic life and i really hope she keeps popping up in random movies giving monologues like tarantino in the '90s.

looool, what's her take on the homoerotic overtones of Top Gun?

i go between classic and dud

i totally understand if people don't need lena dunham in their life but if we're going to call her the worst because she's an obnoxious actor/director who doesn't come off great when it comes to race, we do need to consider woody allen, quentin tarantino and a few other dudes in the same light

classic easy

croup i think you're missing something - those guys have dicks

god just imagine the tweets QT would have given us in 1995

yep, that's certainly the reason why ppl don't like her. bc she doesn't have a dick. we've cracked the code!

"these jokes would be so much funnier if they had been written by someone w/ a penis."

i do sorta think the "pft girls whitewash" thing - which is totally valid! - was way more pronounced & interrogative because of lena dunham being lena dunham, & that the writer from vice who pointed out that bored to death, w/its similarly white brooklyn, attracted none of the same scrutiny was otm. LD is head & shoulders above, & way more interesting than, anyone in her peer group imo. there is a real value to her kinda 'generational' representation that sets it apart from everything else of its kind - ie the attention on frustrating, solipsistic sex; the grounding in convincingly domestic scenes; hannah talking about the her pants having weird stains & the gulf between this & like ~the ideal~ of pants that exists narratively elsewhere. she is really original i think.

Nice troll thread by the sarge.

i've seen a few episodes... i wasn't enthralled but i didn't have a visceral reaction against it or anything like that

― lil dirk (J0rdan S.), Friday, October 5, 2012 4:10 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya i just asked because the show is way less amateurish than her writing imo

i think "questionable race stuff" is more about holding the show to a high standard because it's good in many other ways that things that preceded it weren't, rather than anyone's actual reason to dismiss the show

yeah i mean that's what surprising to me because of what i've seen of the show it seemed totally in its league, so to speak, and that's despite whether or not i think it's good. but i feel like her writing is "college freshman gets his/her first student newspaper column" bad

xp

i agree that the show caught an unfair amount of shit for its racial makeup... i was referring specifically to that tokyo piece on this recording which has some low-level racism /xenophobia that would be banal if it wasn't so persistent

BTD was a very different show from girls

i think "questionable race stuff" is more about holding the show to a high standard because it's good in many other ways that things that preceded it weren't, rather than anyone's actual reason to dismiss the show

― flopson, Friday, October 5, 2012 5:29 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah otm. aside from the broader sense it's weird it almost seems like such a weird oversight, like even if the inclusion of people of colour on the show was not an organic, naturally written part of the process it's strange it didn't happen.

xxp yeah, haven't read that, not sure i want to

it wasn't staking so much on claiming to be zeitgeisty or relevant or anything. but it's locale & the guy's social web & environment was a really big part of it, that it was contemporary noir in brooklyn, it's still worthy of attention i think.

its locale. its.

i agree that the show caught an unfair amount of shit for its racial makeup... i was referring specifically to that tokyo piece on this recording which has some low-level racism /xenophobia that would be banal if it wasn't so persistent

― lil dirk (J0rdan S.), Friday, October 5, 2012 4:33 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah i just read it and i was like, damn, lookin pretty racist lena.

yeah i mean that's what surprising to me because of what i've seen of the show it seemed totally in its league, so to speak, and that's despite whether or not i think it's good. but i feel like her writing is "college freshman gets his/her first student newspaper column" bad

I have never seen Girls so I've based my opinion of her off of her writing, which is pretty awful.

ok this is really bad, haven't gotten to anything racist yet but i don't know how much more i can stomach

i've never seen 'girls' but 'tiny furniture' is really good.

Still have had no exposure cept her bit role as a nurse in Mildred Pierce

ah thx for reminding me that I need to watch that!

what the... she was in that?

maybe for a minute

yeah what? is that real/right?
i cant even imagine her looking 'period' for a sec but mayb thats hindsight after everything else

well ill be damned its on her wiki

never dreamed i'd see the mom from freaks & geeks naked

did she come up on another thread or something

why is this thread here

there was some emmys fashion thing i looked at that complained about lena dunham's dress v specifically in the terms of 'god she didn't even look that bad naked and she is really ugly naked!!', which is another THRILLING EXAMPLE of the GENERATIONAL (wtf does this word mean) problem of how you can have a really easy life, a charmed one, and also in some respects and impossibly difficult one. anyway, voted classic

classic

http://fashionindiemedia.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/o-LENA-DUNHAM-570-1-560x852.jpg

never dreamed i'd see the mom from freaks & geeks naked

okay wait where was this

also who is in that pic with Mo Tucker

okay wait where was this

― stop swearing and start windmilling (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, October 5, 2012 6:07 PM (32 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

girls s1e06

is Girls on DVD yet? feel like I should at least check it out to get what all the fuss is about but me no gots HBO

ships 12/11 according to the HBO store

she dreamt she showed up on the red carpet w/o pants only it wasnt a dream

I googled that for you; you're welcome xp

otm yah she can make her life easier by wearing pants

haha man i should be getting commission for the sales i'm making for hbo here

actually the no pants outfit was a couple weeks later and i think is generally considered a success

i watched the first few eps of girls and it was kinda funny but the problem is the characters are all really frivolous and boring and who gives a shit

you're probably too old

I googled that for you; you're welcome xp

thx couldn't decide if I actually wanted to google "Freaks and Geeks Mom Naked"

i'm continually amazed at just how Allison Williams can look a lot like her dad but also simultaneously be amazingly gorgeous

ha i didn't even know that dunham was the main actress on the show

man shakes, slow down tiger!

you're probably too old

― www.toilet-guru.com (silby), Friday, October 5, 2012 6:14 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you probably have bad taste haha faced

D:

careful googling anything with freaks+naked as keywords.

exactly

It's hard for me to imagine that what she does couldn't be done better by someone else, but thus far she seems to be the winner by default at ultra-realistically portraying her little millieux. I guess the ability to get out of the way of reality is a kind of talent. I don't love what she does but I don't hate it either. Wish there was a third voting button.

i'm the "right" age for girls and i think that's why i hate it so much. it's such a nasty look at ppl my age. if i were older or whatever i might not care (lol millennials) but i guess i feel upset that ppl might actually believe she's the 'voice of a generation' and that everyone my age is a vapid, self-obsessed, ungrateful asshole.

it was kinda funny but the problem is the characters are all really frivolous and boring and who gives a shit

yeah it's an hbo half-hour series

everyone my age is a vapid, self-obsessed, ungrateful asshole

fixed

most young people are self-obsessed, ungrateful assholes

i guess 'vapid' is a gray area

'voice of my generation' stuff is like the first criticism that GIRLS self-defensively pre-emptively addresses, wake up sheeple

also, tho i got off-board around the idk 4th or 5th episode, i couldn't help but feel like the show was pretty reactionary and conservative in its critique. that might have changed or developed since that ep tho, i wouldn't know.

i stopped watching around episode two because, i don't know, television

anyway i was just looking at some news stories about her that reminded me that the fact that she's a writer-director-producer who stars in her own show is totally unimpressive but the fact that she's willing to be naked on camera is really important, particularly when she's a bit large!!

i think just from an entertainment stand point if youre going to make characters vapid, self-obsessed, ungrateful assholes they should also be like grotesque or maybe just clumsy or whatever, there has to be some interesting or funny aspect, her character seemed a lil more dynamic but everyone else was like omg i am trapped at this party, maybe this is supposed to be hyper realistic but i dunno just the law of averages would dictate that they would run into someone more interesting occasionally

also, she reminded me a lot of ppl i went to grad school w/ in nyc. that wasn't a positive thing.

i did enjoy the scene where she got fake high on tea and made her parents read her manuscript

yea there shd have been more of that

in tone & stuff

i think just from an entertainment stand point if youre going to make characters vapid, self-obsessed, ungrateful assholes they should also be like grotesque or maybe just clumsy or whatever, there has to be some interesting or funny aspect, her character seemed a lil more dynamic but everyone else was like omg i am trapped at this party, maybe this is supposed to be hyper realistic but i dunno just the law of averages would dictate that they would run into someone more interesting occasionally

this also reminds me that another tonal thing that bothered me was that they were so self-obsessed, ungrateful, etc, and then the show kept asking us to sympathize with them! it's one thing to be terrible ppl and then we laugh at how terrible they are, and another to be more serious characters with whom we're supposed to empathize, but i really resented being asked to empathize w/ these terrible ppl.

it needs to be like 10% more its always sunny in philadelphia basically

and whenever i complained ppl* were like: no, this is what it's like to be this age. which brought me back to the voice of a generation complaint.

* ILX ppl

i only watched the first two episodes, found elements of the first annoying, laughed at the second enough that i'm pretty skeptical of most critiques that go beyond "no thanks" to "this is exceptionally offensive."

empathizing with terrible people is one of the great strengths of fiction.... when it's done well

You know, there's 2 Broke Girls on another network, if comedy's more your thing.

girls for sure intended to be comedy. just terrible at it.

its a dramedy is kinda the root of the problem isnt it

was entourage a dramedy

tbh if it were true that it were designed in order to require the viewer to empathize with the characters in it without liking them it would actually be better than anything ever done on television

that scene where she was dancing to robyn bc all girls live adventurously after she found out she had HPV (sorry if i am not remembering all the details clearly) was just so inane that might've actually been the last ep i saw. my wife quit awhile before and refused to watch tiny furniture with me (which i kinda liked a little more), she thought it was too gross to bear.

this conversation is now just 3-4 people who watched between 0-3 episodes right?

i think i saw 4 and the movie

i also saw the one w/ the infamous "i will scare u in bed" whatever scene. that might've come later.

doesn't basically everyone in america have HPV

and the one where they steal the lena's diary and turn it into a song and then sing it to her and her bestie and they have a big fight

http://2brokegirls.maxupdates.tv/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2BrokeGirlsSeason1e04.jpg

was entourage a dramedy

― da croupier, Friday, October 5, 2012 6:35 PM (54 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

entourage was nothing, literally nothing, just a vast empty void stretching infinitely in all directions, w/not even any 18-34 y/o viewer watching

i think 2 broke girls is an awful show and yet i like the two protagonists about a million times better than any of the characters in girls

season 2 poster should be the four girls lookin' real glamorous on a brooklyn street with a close-up of a male hipster torso in the center

this conversation is now just 3-4 people who watched between 0-3 episodes right?

― boxall, Friday, October 5, 2012 6:37 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

feel like 3-4 eps is enough, thats how many they give critics right, were all critics here criticizing this shit

Did you guys see the Michigan episode?

i don't think so. say this for max (the kat dennings char from 2bg): she would never tweet something as saccharine and lesson'y as 'all adventurous woman do.'

that scene where she was dancing to robyn bc all girls live adventurously after she found out she had HPV (sorry if i am not remembering all the details clearly) was just so inane that might've actually been the last ep i saw. my wife quit awhile before and refused to watch tiny furniture with me (which i kinda liked a little more), she thought it was too gross to bear.

― Mordy, Friday, October 5, 2012 6:36 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah that might've been the show's lowest point. i didnt watch for a while after that too, but eventually i finished the season and it did turn out to be pretty good. i get your objections though

looking at quotes from 2 broke girls to see what she would tweet and damn she does not like hipsters

We've had this same conversation already on the other thread but when a person tweets four words that they heard in second-hand conversation, do you suppose they mean it genuinely or is there likely to be some irony there?

i think in that scene it was intended entirely genuinely.

contextually it was supposed to represent closure and coming to peace w/ the things that had befallen her. and then she expressed that sentiment thru ritually dancing along to a robyn song.

ya it was not ironic

or post ironic

it was that thing that doesnt fit in the diff categories of ironic, whatever its called

it's not called "genuine"

It always amuses me when ppl critique the ridiculousness/banality of some of the lines/issues/characters on that show as if its something LD is unaware of and not deliberately commenting on

can we talk about that ironic scene in tiny furniture when she has sex w/ the guy in the drainpipe? wtf was that about?

whats the comment, that she hates her friends xp

i am now watching my third episode of 'girls'

and i mean fine maybe so, still doesnt make for a great tv show to watch, or even good art if shes being more ambitious, its not even insightful! real life people are more interesting than her characters

That's OK because you only have to spend 30 minutes with her characters 8 times per year, I spent almost twice as much time with real people last year.

It was notable I think as the season went along how ppl's opinions in the GIRLS thread became generally more positive, iirc there was some collective eye rolling at how it collected 500 posts almost all negative before there'd even been 2 episodes.

fair, i did not take into account the standard real/fake time ratio adjustment

i'll admit that if it got better later on, i wouldn't know. my parents tell me that newsradio has gotten really good - another show i similarly checked out on early in the run bc of how bad it was. and sorkin afaik has a penis!

iirc i was halfheartly defending it on the other thread but now i guess i dont like it

there's already a GIRLS thread for talking about GIRLS specifically and not just talking about idk Lena Dunham's zeitgeistyness though there was lots of weirdness at the start of that thread too (before the show premiered)

shes done two things that both have threads right

twelve minutes in, this show is really good, what the hell is wrong with people

^^^

anyway she seems kinda ok, only super noteworthy thing abt her is she is v young m/l, im unclear why everyone wants to talk abt her so much, tho i completely get why ilx wants to talk abt her so much

I am cautiously a fan based only on the show, haven't seen the movie, and I don't know why this poll exists, did something happen this month other than J0rdan read a year-old possibly racist travel piece nobody even bothered to link to?

the movie is p clearly better than the show

more importantly, did he find that possibly racist travel piece bc we were chatting about thisrecording on the grantland thread?

I am cautiously a fan based only on the show, haven't seen the movie, and I don't know why this poll exists, did something happen this month other than J0rdan read a year-old possibly racist travel piece nobody even bothered to link to?

― boxall, Friday, October 5, 2012 7:09 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

nope. classic jordan.

I'm not sure if her Japan piece is racist, it was too boring for me to finish (her "I can't imagine having sex with a native" line is pretty o_0 tho)

ilx home of high level cultural criticism

best place for cultural criticism on the internet - maybe anywhere?

tweeting-then-dancing scene pretty funny, pretty affecting

pretty funny, pretty affecting show

also the lady in the show has a belly, which is brave.

are you being ironic, i cant tell

well there is a $4 million+ bidding war for her book going on right now, so it def makes sense for j0rdan to start this poll now

"something is happening, and you don't know what it is..."

I am cautiously a fan based only on the show, haven't seen the movie, and I don't know why this poll exists, did something happen this month other than J0rdan read a year-old possibly racist travel piece nobody even bothered to link to?

― boxall, Friday, October 5, 2012 7:09 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

well there is a $4 million+ bidding war for her book going on right now, so it def makes sense for j0rdan to start this poll now

― (whose paintings looked like (pink) vaginas) (The Brainwasher), Friday, October 5, 2012 8:03 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

damn cant believe i only bid $3 million+

ilx fund drive

books r so expensive these days

the 3.6mil thing seems to come from a deadline.com story that doesn't name any sources? that is obviously a pretty ridiculous number if it is accurate, but it honestly just seems like too many digits

Hollywood Reporter does reporting and says the same thing, puts it in the context of Bossypants getting bought for $5 million.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/girls-creator-lena-dunham-gets-376861

Life fail if you know enough about this person to have an opinion.

Because there's no substance, artful context, quality, age, masculinity...

I just wanted to see if I could troll harder than Jordan. 5 minutes to butthurt eazy is a new record

I mean, truth be told, I don't watch enough TV to justify paying for HBO, so

whiney trolls so hard it's like oh my GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWW

it's painful how out of the loop whiney is w/ contemporary culture

It's hard for me to imagine that what she does couldn't be done better by someone else, but thus far she seems to be the winner by default at ultra-realistically portraying her little millieux. I guess the ability to get out of the way of reality is a kind of talent. I don't love what she does but I don't hate it either. Wish there was a third voting button.

― has important things to say about gangnam style (Hurting 2), Friday, October 5, 2012 6:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is otm. to a certain extent she won the lottery, i don't think there's much of anything to distinguish her as a unique talent, comedically or artistically or whatever.

whiney, i think there's a lot of trolling yet to be done regarding lena dunham, and i think you may even be up to doing it. but if you want to troll w/ the big boys + girls you have to stop trying to troll ppl w/ these college-level 'lol you know about X,' 'lol you don't know about X' zings. i believe in u!!!

Yeah, I'm the king of butthurt on ILX.

whineys too confrontational to be a really good troll

can't still be standing at the door when it opens saying "yes, i'm the person who brought the flaming bag of dogshit that's here on your doorstep right now, you got a problem with that?"

Lol

It's hard for me to imagine that what she does couldn't be done better by someone else, but thus far she seems to be the winner by default at ultra-realistically portraying her little millieux. I guess the ability to get out of the way of reality is a kind of talent.

― has important things to say about gangnam style (Hurting 2), Friday, October 5, 2012 6:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is otm

― some dude, Saturday, October 6, 2012 11:22 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry but that... is really not otm post. imo she does not ultra-realistically portray her milieu, even if she did i think it takes a partic crude brand of, like, nerd misanthrope to dismiss that as, like, something 1 could just do, like "tolstoy was just the first person to ultra-realistically portray 19th c russian bourgeoisie all he had to do was get out of the way of reality"

if the world could write by itself, it'd write like lena dunham

flopson otm

dunham > tolstoy

thank god my generation finally has its tolstoy

*phew*

yeah because that was the point of that comparison

it's just funny that you went to tolstoy. happy hipsters are all alike.

her writing just seems like some rando's tumblr afaict but I feel like I have to support anyone on team millennial and her book deal is basically a $4m aid package for the brooklyn artisan economy...this will employ thousands of people really

i mean whether GIRLS is 'realistic' is kind of moot, there's a whole long-winded ~what is realism~ thing i could go into here but i don't really want to. but each episode of the three i can be bothered to watch, because i hate the experience of watching tv, demonstrates a really fucking remarkable grasp of how to set up and structure a thirty-minute script -- she has really high-level screenwriting chops, plus she's a pretty gifted comic actress

her writing on the internet is not very good but then nor is anyone's

mordy cant tell flopson and thomp apart, flopson cant tell dunhan and tolstoy apart, all melenials look the same to iatee, the falcon cannot hear the falconer

flopson + thompson

detective chars in tintin iirc?

Dunham is this generation's Maude Apatow

maybe this generation's douglas coupland

i guess i was just (mis?)reading hurting's post less as saying that realism is her stock in trade (Girls has a good amount of heightened reality in its more comedic moments imo) than that her appeal is a certain fidelity to a generational/cultural aesthetic or zeitgeist that, really, a lot of people are trying to capture right now but i dunno if it's such a big accomplishment to be the first to get there on the scale she has. like, being the first TV show to have an "agonizing over the word choice of a tweet" scene, that's more of a stupid flag-planting than a creative achievement.

i think that's otm. w/out getting into realism or whatever, i haven't seen anything from her that i think stands apart from the milieu + community she is writing about. we don't read tolstoy in 2012 bc he really captured what it's like to be 19th c russian bourg, but he wrote beautifully about being a human that happened to be situated in his own historical context. i don't feel the same way about dunham's work. i don't begrudge anyone who does feel that way, but i wonder if any of this material will resonate in 20-40 years the way it happens to do now in this hyper-zeitgesty way.

feel like the zeitgeisty stuff is just window dressing, does she having anything particularly to say abt how people really live in the 2012

no, we read tolstoy in 2012 because we like long descriptions of farming or because we're teenage girls who wear too much eyeliner

so here are the things 'all adventurous women do' does to set up and contextualise the climactic moment in which hannah horvath tweets something she heard one friend report that another friend say:

- 'yeah, go tweet that'
- 'sorry i passed you an std but i enjoy your quirky web presence'
- shoshana's line "jessa has hpv ... like a couple strains of it. she says that all adventurous women do"
- the dialogue with the gay ex -- he claims it's horvath's adventurousness that has given him the courage to realise he is gay; horvath's reply that yeah she's adventurous, and as an example of how adventurous she is she's gotten into a sexual relationship she's really uncomfortable with
- the climactic tweet

it seems tbh pretty clear that the show's perspective is 'it's pretty sad that the best and clearest route to solace this person has is fucking tweeting something her flakiest friend said'

and like it's totally fine to say 'yes but it's still a show which made a climactic moment of someone tweeting something and i can't descend to watching a show that does that', it's just that that's not really saying anything about the way the show constructs that moment or how it succeeds as art or at least as television: it's saying something about the kinds of person you don't like and can't bear to spend time with even in a fictional context. which is fair enough! but anyone i hear it from on ilx i'm pretty comfortable with putting it down to narcissism of small differences

and i don't think the dancing afterwards signifies that the show is endorsing horvath. there's a dance sequence at the end of inland empire iirc but i don't think that movie is endorsing being stabbed by a homeless person

thats where youre wrong

it's pretty sad that the best and clearest route to solace this person has is fucking tweeting something her flakiest friend said

this is kinda my take on the entire dunham phenomenon. there's a paucity of feeling + idk going on in her work. it all reads to me like someone tweeting something their falkiest friend said.

falkiest

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/Falkland_Islands_topographic_map-en.svg/300px-Falkland_Islands_topographic_map-en.svg.png

sad girl dancing to lcd soundsystem in the city

sad girl editing tweets

u guys i was quoting the nerd misanthrope strawman i had created in the previous sentence itp not my own opinion of tolstoy

also forgot 2 say this: lol @ the idea that there is any shortage of people "portraying her little millieux" (of brooklyn) u read ilx you KNOW how much stuff of this ilk already exists dont front

p.s. everyone's posts itt are terrible & not just the usual suspects

no way my posts itt r transcendent

it's saying something about the kinds of person you don't like and can't bear to spend time with even in a fictional context. which is fair enough! but anyone i hear it from on ilx i'm pretty comfortable with putting it down to narcissism of small differences

― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Saturday, October 6, 2012 7:33 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's not like i'm like "grrr people who tweet!", i have a twitter. but sure, this show has been under attack for so many stupid reasons that i can't blame you for assuming that's where i'm coming from.

p.s. everyone's posts itt are terrible & not just the usual suspects

fu i am going to post in depth readings of every episode now

so here are the things 'all adventurous women do' does to set up and contextualise the climactic moment in which hannah horvath tweets something she heard one friend report that another friend say

the climactic moment of that episode is where her roommate frantically masturbates to the thought of one of the lonely island guys fyi

yeah i am less interested in writing a lengthy defense of that

it seems tbh pretty clear that the show's perspective is 'it's pretty sad that the best and clearest route to solace this person has is fucking tweeting something her flakiest friend said'

that would be otm except for the sad part, the scene plays triumphantly, she dances her damn buns off to a damn robyn song.

people don't/can't dance immediately after having a 'crisis' or being in a bad mood or having sad thoughts? Sometimes people associate a song with dancing and hear it and want to dance, as somebody who really doesn't dance ever I can't believe I'm having to explain this to another human.

you know it's not a documentary, right?

I think I was coming into the show with the notion that she was some young person who didn't deserve to have a show and at best it was a zeitgeisty flash in the pan thing, but it turned out to be really funny so fair play to her.

do u honestly think the takeaway from that scene is meant to be 'hanna is so awesome for tweeting this'?

classic, but I couldn't remember who she was when I clicked on this thread

its not the tweet im focused on, its the dancing

do u honestly think the takeaway from that scene is meant to be 'hanna is so awesome for tweeting this'?

― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Saturday, October 6, 2012 9:43 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

do u honestly think the takeaway is meant to be 'shes so sad/pathetic'?

no i think it is ~multi-leveled~ and ~complex~

ok... good!!!

yeah!!!

or at least, you know, in the middle: this isn't much but we can be more or less okay with it. -- if it weren't for the dancing to robyn breaking the tension it'd be unbearably miserable. (dancing to 'dancing on my own' is annoyingly on-the-nose but so is the whole enterprise of deciding an episode of your half hour hbo show is going to build to someone writing a tweet so whatever.) anyway i mainly gave it a pass because i really enjoyed the logic of the 'i should have known, he only ejaculated like thirty percent of the time ... and acted really gay' line

haha this show is sooo bad and that description of it is why

so you don't like this show, is what you're saying

ending of episode seven (the warehouse party one ..) is similarly ... equivocal? hanna's slow motion grin in the back of the cab while marnie and adam smolder on either side.

similarly far too on the nose, it turns out, is the opening of episode eight

I want you to know, the first time I EXCELSIOR you, I might scare you a little, because I’m a man, and I know how to do LOLs.

― lag∞n, Friday, October 5, 2012 2:18 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in which hanna and adam are bonding over watching SUPER 8 FOOTAGE of him as a kid and we cut to marnie being SAD whilst going through FACEBOOK PICTURES of her ex and his new girlfriend

xpost

i would've probably loved that ep if it ended on the tweet! maybe she just goes and gets a sandwich afterwards. i dont think there was any tension that needed to be broken or that it would've been unbearable. dancing to 'dancing on my own' is what you stuff in there when you don't trust what you just wrote, imo

i think it's a really good show, just so that's clear

oh i think you're right, i'd probably like it more if ended tweet, sandwich. but i am engaged in mounting a defense here and all that

Lena Dunham l am about it. Dislike the ILX folk who might happen to click dud.

Chekhov wasn't Tolstoy either, nor is Ann Beattie.

And none of them are the towering young man that David Foster Wallace was, thank God.

Dudes ppl do get drunk and listen to Robyn it is like a thing that 20somethings do

[/lagoon]

that's pretty much the way in which she ultra-realistically portrays her little millieux

i am right now getting v angry about and trying v hard not to get involved in a twitter argument about girls (not yet actually an argument, more a string of people saying how racist lena dunham is), i guess i am in some way invested in lena dunham. CLASSIC.

gonna spend a few hours thinking of the perfect pithy tweet now.

Lindsey Weber ‏@lindseyweber
The 1st person to ask Lena Dunham a Q @ #nyerfest is a NYU student who wanted to tell Lena about her new boyfriend. She relates to Shoshana.

^this person is clearly the highest level new yorker

shes got it all: nyu, sex in the city, the new yorker, the new yorker fest, girls

tbf Shoshana is the best

the actress (son of mamet) is funny but the character is like half note

she's a good actress. i liked her a lot in mad men.

I'm voting "uh, who?".

she hasn't gotten enough screen time imo, there's flashes of the character's delightfulness in Crackcident and the finale xps

do they actually smoke crack should i download this ep

live tweeting the dunham nyer fest q&a right now !!! https://twitter.com/AnnaHolmes

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
"I think we made it too big." Dunham on the fake penis that Adam Driver used during masturbation scene in episode 5.

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
"The criticisms that disappointed me were the whole privilege and nepotism thing."

UH OH

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
Dunham is addressing critiques of diversity. "What I was trying to do was very specific."

specifically wite right ladies

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
On meeting @louisck at the Emmys: He said, "What you are doing is important."

comedians man

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
First audience question is not a question but giggly NYU student talking about herself. Embarrassing.

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
Some of these audience questions are coming from people who remind me of certain internet commenters.

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
I think she was serious!

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
Question from 20-something female: "What are you setting out to do with the show if not to portray my life?"

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
"The criticisms that disappointed me were the whole privilege and nepotism thing."

UH OH

― lag∞n, Sunday, October 7, 2012 2:34 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the nepotism shit that was flying around abt. the parents of the lead actresses was pretty sexist and gross

bad company was pretty sexist and gross tho

sure but on the other hand why is ever actor on the show a child of someone noteworthy, its weird!

and i mean lol plz

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
"I have plenty of counter-arguments to that but it's not elegant to say them."

Mobutu Sese Seko ‏@Mobute
DUNHAM: "People accuse me of benefiting from nepotism and privilege, and I have a lot of mega-owns to disprove that, but I can't say them."

I don't think that's really Mobutu Sese Seko's twitter

i will not engage w/yr argument ill just say im v disappointed in you <-- this is not at all a typically privileged behavior

Anna Holmes ‏@AnnaHolmes
"I've been in therapy since I was 7 so I figured I'd cornered the market on self-criticism." --Dunham on processing critiques of @GirlsHBO.

i have already dealt w/this through the proper channels

i got over privileged young new yorkers being overrated and talented when the strokes happened

c0reY aNN cLaRk ‏@coreyannclark
Lena Dunham is trying to be so edgy too fast someone tell her to stop this always happens to nice girls when they get a haircut

tell us more tweets

i am right now getting v angry about and trying v hard not to get involved in a twitter argument about girls (not yet actually an argument, more a string of people saying how racist lena dunham is)

how is she...not?

i mean i haven't seen girls and have no comment on it but the amount of questionable shit she's come out with outside of it is...more than most

In the latter category, Dunham revealed what Louis C.K. said when he hugged her at the Emmys: “What you’re doing is really important.”

...comedy

we may have seen overlapping conversations earlier, lex, and a great deal of it was based on fake quotes what was pretty clearly a piece of satire.

+from

Said it before on the Girls thread, but it's a good sign for society that a show playing off of Jewish/Gentile differences gets labeled as all-white.

(aka homogenous)

jews r white

http://images.betterworldbooks.com/081/How-Jews-Became-White-Folks-9780813525907.jpg

bah I still haven't gotten ahold of that to read it, curse my lack of a college library

it says we needed more whites, youre next latinos, welcome to the sweetest ass club in the world

we need more panblasians

it says we needed more whites

what won't white ppl do to keep up the side?

sweatiest ass club in the world

...comedy

― lag∞n, Sunday, 7 October 2012 21:14 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i love you lagoon but don't keep pummeling this how dare they speak of it in hallowed tones angle itt; it is too cynical to scoff at anyone thinking that comedy could possibly be important/art/significant/&c. i totally think LD's stuff is important. think about how profoundly & permeatingly Friends defined stuff & controlled the lens for relationships & shit for a whole bunch of people; having something remotely thoughtful on tv is a real big thing.

we may have seen overlapping conversations earlier, lex, and a great deal of it was based on fake quotes what was pretty clearly a piece of satire.

no, i know about the fake piece, and nothing i think is based on that

unless you mean the japan piece was satirical in which case um

yesterday was Learning About Lena Dunham Day for me and what I'm really left thinking is, WOW #WHITEPPL what are u like. sooooo many white people declaring what racism is and isn't and how talking about race is just SILLY. sooooo many

and - i'm not commenting on the show, because i haven't seen it, though i don't think it's inherently problematic if an individual writer doesn't include ~token minorities~ - the stuff lena dunham has come out with aside from that is a...pattern. there are more questionable public examples than most people manage ever.

tbh no one would care about the racial makeup of the show if it weren't originally presented as a feminist thing, by the media and also sort of by lena. if it were called, say, "friends," (or "bored to death") it wouldn't be the same. but (for ex.) calling yr show "girls" is a sort of statement in itself, like, hey this show is about young women and womanhood. presenting it like that and then apparently forgetting that not all female brooklynites are white is just like... going out of your way. and she seems so willing to criticize everything about her character, who is some sort of extension of herself, but she's not willing to interrogate this in any substantial way, instead just saying "i dunno how to write non-wite characters, what, why"

i'm not saying that this show is any more deserving of this particular scorn than all the other all-white ones, just pointing out why

i've also read ppl pointing out that her bit part non-white characters are usually stereotypical or exclusively 'the help' chars, and from the few eps i've watched i can see that

*just pointing out why it gets the scorn, i mean

anyway dud, haven't seen the movie but the show literally does nothing for me, esp make me laugh

oh fuck it's late why did i just post that i was supposed to stay out of this

oh white british journalists just nooooooooooo

http://eve-barlow.tumblr.com/post/33109972052/wtf-is-woc-weapons-of-colour

such fucking ignorance on display there i can't even

(and i HATE the term "POC" but omg @ a white person mocking it like that)

who the hell is this person and why are you on their tumblr!!

[Note: I’m NOT being racist against Chinese people, I’m just exaggerating shit to illustrate some nonsense that’s been going on regarding criticism of Lena Dunham’s show Girls and its apparent “racist” agenda with it’s lack of casting ‘Women Of Colour’. Don’t get all weird on me now.]

"In case you can't tell, i'm being SARCASTIC"

unless you mean the japan piece was satirical in which case um

o no, it seems with that she went in there with a faux naive blank slate and the results of that were unsurprisingly ~questionable~ in a way I don't have much interest in defending. But we seem to have an echo chamber effect where people have decided that she's racist on a bad reading of Girls (which is not just SHE'S WHITE WHAT OF IT like that terrible defence you posted, but is much more aware of the narcissistically self-enclosed milieu it's representing than any of the criticisms are willing to accept), and everything she does gets caught up in that. Hence the couple of hours yesterday where these very intelligent people were quoting from the ridiculous satirical article and expressing their outrage. It's not a matter of viewing her in a way that exempts her from critique, just judging her for what's actually there, which so little of the discourse around her does.

OTM. There's a witch-hunt mentality now.

that's because there are things to hunt that are really massive and obvious and it boggles my mind how her white apologists love playing the victim

that eve barlow blog, i mean, jesus christ it's fucking gross. i hadn't heard of eve barlow before last night but she seems to be a generally respected journalist and that post didn't get any sort of backlash til i tweeted it. no fucking idea how. what a div.

We don’t need to constantly pat ourselves on the back for living in a multicultural world, we can get on with enjoying it, enjoying being humans together. Because at the end of the day, that’s what we all are - humans.

#keepcalmandcarryon

ughhhhhh i am still fuming about this piece of shit article. what an absolute moron.

i liked how the all the @ replies to that tweet were white people saying "spot on!"

in a shocking development, also in agreement was that one woman who tweeted a while back that she wanted a miniature le1f to dance for her on her desk all day

like, i am at the TORY BLOODY CONFERENCE right now and nothing i have come into contact with here has been as straight-up offensive as eve barlow

the most hilarious thing about that post is that she starts off with an extended riff of the same tone of that infamous lesley arfin tweet which is just like, wow, once again, if you're a white person and you can't enter a conversation about race w/o assuming a sneering aggravation you should probably sit down and think about things a little harder

But we seem to have an echo chamber effect where people have decided that she's racist on a bad reading of Girls (which is not just SHE'S WHITE WHAT OF IT like that terrible defence you posted, but is much more aware of the narcissistically self-enclosed milieu it's representing than any of the criticisms are willing to accept), and everything she does gets caught up in that.

to be fair the charges of racism are based more on stuff like her and her writers' responses to criticisms of girls than they are based on readings of girls itself.

but you bring up something that kind of bugs me, viz the way girls defenders (and i am one, generally) handwave away the problematics of race and class &c. with "well its self aware." because, like, yeah, but... so?

self-awareness as pre-emptive defence for knowingly doing or saying a shitty thing is s0 old

i think the self-awareness thing is sometimes germane in conversations about Girls since the characters in the show, especially Dunham's, are often unsympathetic and unlikable or a vessel for satire, but people talk about the show like it's this unapologetic celebration of self. doesn't hold up as much w/r/t what we're talking about, i'm just saying.

it's funny to see this stuff flare up again now, though, i was hoping nobody would feel like talking about this show again until the second season started or at least when it comes out on dvd

incidentally "well its self aware" is also the defense for aesthetic critiques as well

xp, some dude seems to be saying something similar

i think its mostly a pretty well-written and quite beautifully shot show. that being said tiny furniture imo was much better a movie than girls is a TV show

also in the context of the kyriarchy i cant possible answer this question definitively

i love you lagoon but don't keep pummeling this how dare they speak of it in hallowed tones angle itt; it is too cynical to scoff at anyone thinking that comedy could possibly be important/art/significant/&c. i totally think LD's stuff is important. think about how profoundly & permeatingly Friends defined stuff & controlled the lens for relationships & shit for a whole bunch of people; having something remotely thoughtful on tv is a real big thing.

― unprotectable tweetz (schlump), Monday, October 8, 2012 12:57 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i love you too but imho generally comedy can be important but it shouldnt take itself seriously, and it shouldnt take other things seriously either, and more specifically i find this thing where were suposed to think these shows abt sad sack comedians are saying something super deep abt life highly dubious, im mean congrats and all louie ck your show is v good and you are a depressed self involved guy, but its not really super insightful re the human condition, and girls is way less so

the show grew on me by the middle of the season, but some of that goodwill eroded by the end

also now before every HBO show when they do their little network promo with a quick montage of shots from different HBO series, THIS is the scene they use to represent Girls:

http://cdn.stereogum.com/files/2012/06/lena-beyonce.jpg

and - i'm not commenting on the show, because i haven't seen it, though i don't think it's inherently problematic if an individual writer doesn't include ~token minorities~ - the stuff lena dunham has come out with aside from that is a...pattern. there are more questionable public examples than most people manage ever.

― lex pretend, Monday, October 8, 2012 2:18 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya its an industry wide thing for sure, the reason dunham is getting such shit is because she chose to place her show in the milieu most writers inhabit

'self-aware' is the new 'I was being *ironic*'...Dunham is weird to watch because I'm 20 years out of uni with trusta/intelligentsia spawn types just like her and you'd think some of the representation issues would have moved the fuck on. OTOH the fact that on TV, they haven't, should tell us a lot about the negative changes in social mobility WRT creative/artistic types over the past 20 years.

Eve Barlow is the new deputy editor of NME. That tumblr rant was the howl of a spoilt child IMO.

I've always given [name of writer redacted] benefit of the doubt for the gaps in her education and props for 'overcoming' impoverished origins but there comes a time in every feminist-identifying woman's life when women ten years younger than you show up to say feminism's moved on from the point at which you discovered it. The important thing, when on the end of these observations, is not to be the current incarnation of that dismissive person who dismissed *your* concerns when *you* were trying to widen mainstream feminism's net. This is the big fail here.

most of the hate comes from people who are basically saying "hey i resemble your bullshit"

i think it's only after that crime people care about the fact that someone is the daughter of bad company's drummer

The Girls thread suggests otherwise, with 500 posts before the first episode aired.

the reason dunham is getting such shit is because she chose to place her show in the milieu most writers inhabit

Also she is a young female producer/writer/director who named her show girls = still painting an enormous bullseye on yourself.

well yeah, that bullseye was in part people realizing she was living their social media savvy dream

Some people very outspokenly love the show and Dunham, so people who dislike it (or are otherwise indifferent about it) are going to feel compelled to explain why. Out of all the times I've complained about the awfulness of Animal Collective no one has ever accused me of jealously, or prejudice.

that's too bad

mordy would you deny either that the narcissism of small differences is in play in a lot of the girls-hate, or that america has tendency to get more outraged when a woman does something offensive that men have done for years

you don't have to make this a "harumph well i sir am not misogynist nor am i a hipster in a creative field my lord" thing if you don't want to

most of the hate comes from people who are basically saying "hey i resemble your bullshit"

― da croupier, Monday, October 8, 2012 10:09 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so does most of the love tbf

I should listen to more Bad Company

I think we examine privilege and heredity a lot more *right now* because social mobility has lessened so obviously and sharply. 'What's your name?/Who's your daddy?' only becomes an issue when resources and opportunities become less available to equally able people from different backgrounds.

hmmm

mordy would you deny either that the narcissism of small differences is in play in a lot of the girls-hate, or that america has tendency to get more outraged when a woman does something offensive that men have done for years

I think that Dunham's work means a lot to some people and those people understandably want to defend the object d'art that they love against criticism. Some of that criticism (like the Gawker recaps) certainly seems sexist and misanthropic. Much of it does not. Speculating as to the psychological motives of people critiquing a work of art seems like a dead end generally though, not quite productive discursively.

yes when people are being sexist and misanthropic it's important to rise above and not suggest the reasons they might be fixated on this particular show

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/lena-dunham-sings-book-deal-for-more-than-3-5-million/

this has got to be the largest tumblr book deal in history right?

More The New Yorker than Tumblr that sealed it, I think.

Yeah her NYer thing about real-life Elijah was good. Also she was profiled in Talk of the Town a couple years ago in connection with Tiny Furniture.

http://i.imgur.com/rdTNQ.png

any excuse to shame white people for being white

please refer to all whites as dunhams

i almost got to the end to that piece and had to stop. i dunno how she can be embarrassed about her mom referencing Lost In Translation constantly while in Tokyo but not be embarrassed about mentioning it 50 times when writing about the trip herself.

please refer to all whites as dunhams

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, October 8, 2012 3:02 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is so unfair, and on our special day too *dances to robyn*

I got that Bobby by the pound
Lena Dunham by the key
New Yorker think piece
the game belong to me

lol

how would you guys compare the reception of lena dunham vs the creator of that zooey show?

in terms of drowning?

Lena Dunham vs. Amanda Palmer

well, Dunham wouldn't be getting nearly as much attention if she wasn't also the star of her show. New Girl occasioned a LOT of chatter about Zooey Deschanel and what we think of her and what her success means etc etc but not so much for Elizabeth Meriwether, who's mainly just the woman who created the Zooey show. (xpost)

do you think zooey was a kind of hate magnet that allowed merriwether to escape that kind of scrutiny?

well, people had problems with Zooey more than the show itself, which actually won over a fair number of Zooey skeptics (including me)

Only New Girl episode I saw had Zooey's black friend getting an earring and Zooey calling him "Black Jack Sparrow" and "Black George Michael."

would it make sense to say that being represented by people who project a certain amount of oblivious privilege like zooey and dunham is what is offending people? like maybe a mormon kid's reaction to seeing romney in the news?

PROGRESS

Cece comes to the bar dressed in a beenie and big sweater: Jess: Why's she dressed like a womens studies major?

Jess: Hey guys, you remember Paul Schmidt: Mercedes Gens!! Winston: Genzel Washington! Schmidt: It's the gens of the world as we know it Winston: All right everybody put down your gens and your gencils Paul: Hey Schmidt...uh hey Washington

Schmidt: You backslid all the way down the hill and back into the parking lot. Take off your skis and wait for your family in the lodge Jessica Day.

On Winstons new earring: Jess: Take it easy black George Michael Schmidt: You look like you were standing in line to a Shaquille O'Neal birthday party

and "Black DJP" (xpost0

i mean, at least new girl has a black character about whom the other characters can make infrequent awkward race jokes

what race (nonwhite) best represents new york

jew

wait a sec

Not just awkward race jokes, but of course since he's the black guy he'll be the one to riff "Genzel Washington!"

well we're too late, she managed to procure fuck-you money before being shot down by ilx:

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/lena-dunham-sings-book-deal-for-more-than-3-5-million/?hp

$3.5 mil for one million viewers. Good luck Random House!

linked upthread

low level TV star fame is pretty much equivalent to high level publishing world fame

theres no way thats actually the real number tho, just press release bullish

Bidding war...

she was paid in twitter followers

who project a certain amount of oblivious privilege like zooey and dunham

Oh come the fuck on, whatever you might say about Lena Dunham, she is not oblivious to her privilege.

i don't think zooey is living in a dream world either, and mitt romney probably doesn't actually want to kill pbs but that's what they project.

i think he means LD doesn't project obliviousness about privilege in her art -- like the Girls pilot features her character being a spoiled brat who tells her parents she should be live on "only" $1100 a month. and you'd have to be kind of dumb to associate LD with the obliviousness of the character she played rather than the writer who made up the scene, which is knowingly played for laughs.

why do you think she is begrudged her success then, if not for similar reasons that people begrudge it for zooey and romney?

because she's a young woman

accelerated aging is a dear price to pay for manic pixie dust...

"the burden is on YOU, sir, to explain how exactly criticism of a TV actress differs from criticism of a presidential candidate"

Made the Amanda Palmer comparison before her book deal was finalized, but now I'm sure there will be stern lectures about how exactly she should and should not spend her new money.

she's going to invite fans to guest tweet while she's on her book tour

when romney marries neil gaiman the circle will be complete

Oh come the fuck on, whatever you might say about Lena Dunham, she is not oblivious to her privilege.

― Andrew Farrell, Monday, October 8, 2012 6:03 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ehhh. she recognizes her privilege in a pretty superficial way i think. this is what i meant before -- she doesnt get a free pass just because she recognizes she comes from a rich family and is self-involved. i think sometimes girls is pretty rigorous in its self critique and sometimes its a very perfunctory thing, a kind of "this is horrible behavior but i recognize that its horrible so who cares." which might as well be obliviousness

"oblivious" seems like kind of an absolute word to me, i dunno if you can be just pretty oblivious or practically oblivious

it is possible to be aware of certain privileges and oblivious to others

"self-aware"

http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/60/6006/3WGB100Z/posters/tom-cheney-look-it-s-not-you-it-s-me-o-k-new-yorker-cartoon.jpg

and sometimes its a very perfunctory thing, a kind of "this is horrible behavior but i recognize that its horrible so who cares." which might as well be obliviousness

that's the part that's REALISM!

i've said it once and i'll say it again: Lena Dunham is a genuinely rad individual, a person I used to share dinners and secret conversations and all sorts of other shit with. We still trade text messages with joeks in them.

That said, the process of writing a television show, much less one that is funny, has very little to do with being a good long-form essayist or memoirist. I mean, that piece in the New Yorker horrified me, not only because I knew everyone involved, but also because it just wasn't all that interesting even after stripping away that very personal knowledge.

The show, and Tiny Furniture, though, are great, and I am truly happy to count her as a friend. A very funny one, at that.

xp How publicly aware of her privilege does she need to be? I see the phrase "unacknowledged privilege" a lot now and the people who use it set the bar for acknowledgement pretty damn high. Mumford and Sons - they're oblivious to privilege. Dunham seems far from oblivious.

she needs to score at least a 7 on Stullman-Führbulgerr scale

actually i think the this-piece-available-to-subscribers abstract of the new yorker thing may be the damningest thing:

ABSTRACT: PERSONAL HISTORY about the writer’s college boyfriend. On August 17, 2010, the writer received an e-mail from her ex-boyfriend’s mother. Its subject heading was “Goodbye from Nancy and Bill,” and the message informed her that her ex-boyfriend’s parents were blocking her on Facebook. The writer was dumbfounded. She promptly unlinked her Twitter and Facebook accounts. The main result of Nancy’s Facebook rejection was to send the writer down memory lane in a pretty disconcerting way. The writer had met Noah, her ex-boyfriend, in her junior year at Oberlin. He had recently returned from six months in India and wore hemp cargo pants.

we really are overdue for a 'the strange bathos of new yorker article abstracts' thread

lmbo table

He had recently returned from six months in India and wore hemp cargo pants.

applause

xp How publicly aware of her privilege does she need to be? I see the phrase "unacknowledged privilege" a lot now and the people who use it set the bar for acknowledgement pretty damn high. Mumford and Sons - they're oblivious to privilege. Dunham seems far from oblivious.

― Get wolves (DL), Tuesday, October 9, 2012 5:54 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think when youre writing semi-autobiographical narrative fiction you need to be pretty aware of yr privilege -- & when yr being bandied about as the voice of a generation or an Important Young Feminist Voice or whatever, that need is increased.

maybe 'not that kind of girl' will display the voice of a smarter, older, wiser lena dunham

...

i think he means LD doesn't project obliviousness about privilege in her art -- like the Girls pilot features her character being a spoiled brat who tells her parents she should be live on "only" $1100 a month. and you'd have to be kind of dumb to associate LD with the obliviousness of the character she played rather than the writer who made up the scene, which is knowingly played for laughs.

― some dude, Monday, 8 October 2012 23:37 (Yesterday) Permalink

I guess I haven't seen the show enough. When I watched Tiny Furniture, I honestly just could not tell whether I was actually expected to feel for a returning college student who found it "hard" to briefly not know what to do with herself while living in her parents' awesome NYC loft and working a boring but undemanding day job for a couple of weeks.

The show has a lot more awareness.

And the dramatic climax where she *realizes* she doesn't want to just be a day hostess or w/e was so groany (yeah no shit, your parents are famous artists and you went to an expensive private liberal arts college!), and again, if it was supposed to be poking fun at the angst of a person who has life easy, it was done in a very deadpan way.

i didnt think you were suposed to feel bad for her circumstance in tiny furniture, you were maybe supposed to feel bad for how embarrassing she was

you were supposed to feel embarrassed at how tiny the furniture was. I mean, who could be expected to sit in such a tiny chair?!

*takes a sip of water from a glass*

i dont remember tiny furniture really being that angsty

btw the k funny thing abt how everyone on the show is a child of fame is dunhams mom is not actually any sort of art world star, i mean sure being a working artist is noteworthy, but almost no one complaining abt this had heard of her mom before and lena is way more famous than her now

well now, hold on, she had a show in japan

*shes big in japan

Anyone outside of New York will tell you that it's hard to know when New Yorkers have a certain "awareness" of their context. Work from Cassavetes to Allen to Spike Lee to Dunham is so specific to New York that it can show a kind of narcissistic obliviousness about the "priviledge" of being a native New Yorker that, with Dunham and Allen, gets confused with obliviousness to class and race.

the race-related criticism of dunham is also about statements she and writers on the show have made

I missed Dunham's statements but I remember that writer's tweet.

seemed like she basically said in that nyer fest interview that she was mortified by that writers tweet but didnt really want to start beef and that they already were not working for the show anymore anyway

shes never said anything quite as racist as the lesley arfin tweet, tho the whole episode where she put on a shawl and called herself a fundamentalist was a iffy at. but in particular im thinking of something like where she said it "never occurred to her" to add black characters, or whatever. that doesnt sound like someone fully aware of her own privilege!

plus the interview where she talked about how there going to be black characters who revealed that the problems of the girls characters were "white people problems." like she is really unfortunately tone-deaf about race, her self-awareness doesnt really seem to extend beyond a recognition that she is rich and lucky to go to a good school and stuff

she doesn't seem to have much creative ambition to go beyond where she started out in life, so not exactly a shocker if she hasn't worked to gain a broader prospective on humanity.

btw the k funny thing abt how everyone on the show is a child of fame is dunhams mom is not actually any sort of art world star, i mean sure being a working artist is noteworthy, but almost no one complaining abt this had heard of her mom before and lena is way more famous than her now

― lag∞n, Tuesday, October 9, 2012 10:08 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I guess. I knew who her dad (Carroll Dunham) was before I knew who she was, and my wife who is more art-savvy than me knew who both of them were. They're not household names on a Damien Hirst or Matthew Barney level, sure. I think it's less about being a child of fame than being born with the keys to a rarefied world.

sure but brian williams! david mamet! uh the drummer for bad company, some lady who photographs miniature furniture - its a super group not a tv show!

this doesn't sound like it "never occurred to her"

I am a half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs. Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting ... Not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience that I wasn't able to speak to. I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me. And only later did I realize that it was four white girls. As much as I can say it was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, "I hear this and I want to respond to it." And this is a hard issue to speak to because all I want to do is sound sensitive and not say anything that will horrify anyone or make them feel more isolated, but I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can't speak to accurately.

In an interview with HuffPost TV in April, Dunham expressed concern that "Girls" would be viewed as an example of "hashtag white people problems." She explained, "We really tried to be aware and bring in characters whose job it was to go 'Hashtag white people problems, guys.' I think that's really important to be aware of. Because it can seem really rarified. When I get a tweet from a girl who's like, 'I'd love to watch the show, but I wish there were more women of color.' You know what? I do, too, and if we have the opportunity to do a second season, I'll address that.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/07/lena-dunham-fresh-air-girls_n_1496780.html

she sounds totally self aware there

http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/09/13/844891/lena-dunham-junot-diaz/

if she doesn't have the experience, she shouldn't bother because it's prob going to be horrible.

how does dunham grow up in NYC and not know any POC is the real question

We really tried to be aware and bring in characters whose job it was to go 'Hashtag white people problems, guys.'

http://www.operationorange.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/nuclear_button_rz.jpg

In an interview with HuffPost TV in April, Dunham expressed concern that "Girls" would be viewed as an example of "hashtag white people problems." She explained, "We really tried to be aware and bring in characters whose job it was to go 'Hashtag white people problems, guys.'

this is not something a self-aware person says!!!

Because it can seem really rarified. When I get a tweet from a girl who's like, 'I'd love to watch the show, but I wish there were more women of color.' You know what? I do, too, and if we have the opportunity to do a second season, I'll address that.

duh max

i mean "it was an accident" is about the same as "never occurred to me." like she doesnt seem to even realize the show was entirely white until critics started talking about it

haha wait what? what did you prove

when lena dunham is saying that shes going to introduce characters of color to show white characters how petty their problems are, i cant say i really trust that shes not oblivious abt race

oh, so it sounds like you're talking about when she *wrote* the show she wasn't self aware? i guess i can see that, sure.

seems like she gets it, i don't know. i was just goofing with the duh part.

she should introduce a neighbor character who is a black single mother of two working three jobs just to scrape by, they meet when she angrily asks lena to turn down the robyn, but later become friends when dunham helps her oldest son w/his english homework

i mean she gets it in that interview, which is the interview you referenced above

also great idea icey

when lena dunham is saying that shes going to introduce characters of color to show white characters how petty their problems are,

where does she say this??????

"We really tried to be aware and bring in characters whose job it was to go 'Hashtag white people problems, guys.'"

i assume she was talking about white characters????

why would white characters tell her characters that their problems are white people problems?????

anyway iirc that statement is in reference to her nonwhite gyno in the first episode

i would be really on board w/ s.2 if all donald glover did was come on screen rt before the credits and say "Hashtag white people problems, guys"

why would white characters tell her characters that their problems are white people problems?????

― max, Tuesday, October 9, 2012 11:31 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

perhaps they're based on ilx posters

Girls S2 Preview:

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/28063045.jpg

Can't wait for this poll to be over

She needs to watch The New Girl and learn how a group of girls can call their black friend "Black Jack Sparrow" and "Black George Michael" and call him Shaq and have him talk about black things because that's what black people do amirite.

I think in series two she should go to Privilege Awareness night school and get lessons from ilxors.

EP 2: "The Ronaldinho Bottle Opener"

it's funny how instead of saying "alright, this show is basically lena dunham staring in the mirror, let's shout for and support more inclusive shows than that," so many internet folk are just basically waiting to see whether season 2 of girls lives up to their demands.

basically, she travels in a mostly white milieu. That's The Way Things Are. People wrote throughout the '90s how Woody Allen's New York was too white, and what they ended up with was Woody asking a funny black prostitute dressed in pink vinyl (in his last really good film, actually) to hit him and tie him up.

i think the thing that grated most about this whole thing is that lena dunhams melieu ISNT as white as it mightve been 20, 30 years ago -- one of the better pieces about the whole issue was written by a black woman whod been in dunhams class at horace mann and wrote about how she knew that dunham had ppl of color in her social circles, etc. it just makes the absence even more baffling

She needs to watch The New Girl and learn how a group of girls can call their black friend "Black Jack Sparrow" and "Black George Michael" and call him Shaq and have him talk about black things because that's what black people do amirite.

― pretty even gender split (Eazy), Tuesday, October 9, 2012 12:17 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idg what the point is here, theres room for many different shows to be awkward about race in many different ways

also this is probably for a different thread but i think youre really overstating the extent to which winston is a prop for race jokes

I'm sure that's true max, but that gap is probably reflected by where her mind is postcollegiate as opposed to collegiate, and having to write passably convincing characters for an HBO show.

It's possible she's even holding herself to too high a standard re I-can't-write-a-character-who'll-be "black enough."

yeah. i would just as soon not have lesley arfin write for a black character anyway

i do think if lena's going to employ a writers room she really doesn't have the excuse of "how can i speak for others"

really the magnifying glass she's under is half-complimentary. just as knocked up was a pretty ironic choice for The Manchild Movie To Hang-Wring About Roles For Actresses Over, it suggests the show isn't too conservative to watch, but too conservative for some people to watch without complaining about.

lol "hand-wring"

Curb made a few seasons from WASP/Jewish contrasts (Danson/David) before bringing in Leon.

i have non white friends but i think of them as white so when i cast my tv show ill prob just cast white people

Season two: Dunham brings in a female Leon, is taken aback my reaction. "Jeez, what's everyone complaining about now? I have a black friend and she's hilarious!"

how many nonwhite semi-regulars were on S&TC? I realize they're allegedly striving for something less fantasyland here, but maybe not as much as believed.

Ask an Elderly Black Woman as Depicted by a Sophomore Creative Writing Major

feel like if girls had a do over the best thing wouldve been to cast the brian williams daughter character as asian and have the wites make occasional comments abt them thinking of her as wite then she looks at the camera like jim from the office

also they ask her for help w/math and she looks at the camera like jim from the office but then she always solves their math problems because she is actually good at math and the violin

haha icey did you see the office this week?

uh oh no

http://www.hulu.com/watch/409168#i1,p0,d2

ha!

I am literally lmao'ing at that onion article

max + junot diaz

imo if you're not confident yet in your ability to write characters that are not just facets of yourself you shouldn't be confident enough to write an HBO show

er, max + junot diaz otm

I'd agree but I think the show is really good so I guess I don't.

i think the show is p good too

Lena Dunham could easily write the character of the one black friend from Oberlin.

Junot Diaz's startlingly wide range of protagonists aren't a variation of himself?

junot diaz doesn't write four characters in every book that are all shades of him, as lena said

not saying lena's protag can't be an extension, most of them are

i dont really love that diaz quote, i think male writers tend to overestimate how difficult it is to write from a female pov just as white people overestimate how hard it might be to write a black character

when it comes to dialogue, a writer mostly has to have a good ear, not empathize her way into another skin. When it comes to action, maybe a diff story, though ppl seem to give more leeway in dramatic wting and maybe esp TV.

why would white characters tell her characters that their problems are white people problems?????

I wasn't aware that white people didn't do this, I'm going to have to update ilx_race.xls pretty extensively now!

Also this is literally Ray's only job in the first episode!

like i said above that white people problems quote was in reference to her nonwhite gyno. & in any event the issue is not really WHO is saying the WHITE PEOPLE PROBLEMS thing its the whole concept of "white people problems" which is a stupid un-aware formulation of privilege anyway

don't really agree with that diaz quote either -- i can think of plenty of male writers who write great female characters (for some reason jaime hernandez was the first one who popped into my head) and it seems like a somewhat different issue than the challenge of writing about someone with a different ethnic, social, or cultural background than you. it's weird to me that he singles out murakami, whose female characters usually seem like bs fantasy projections, as someone who does it well.

Lena Dunham's male characters seem pretty real to me.

haha women don't get praised for writing 'convincing male characters', are you insane

or was that your point

are u bleedin mad mate

the issue is not really WHO is saying the WHITE PEOPLE PROBLEMS thing its the whole concept of "white people problems" which is a stupid un-aware formulation of privilege anyway

― max, Tuesday, 9 October 2012 19:42 (1 hour ago) Permalink

otm

imo if you're not confident yet in your ability to write characters that are not just facets of yourself you shouldn't be confident enough to write an HBO show

― zachylon (zachlyon), Tuesday, October 9, 2012 3:18 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

larry david is p unconfident

prit-tee, prit-tee unconfident

I guess David Chase did hang out w/ mob guys for research, then

Still haven't seen Dunham's show but the male quotes everyone latches onto are Horrible Things Men Have Said to Us About Fucking.

lol it is really not that hard to teach yourself how to characters from different perspectives and backgrounds! that's the point

how to write

haha

just read her story First Love, from Aug 13&20 issue of New Yorker - a book publicist i work with, who is in his early 60s, recommended it to me! he loved it! - great writing and funny/ridiculous too. so: more classic.

summertime sadness is a really nice song!

oh whoops, this isn't the Lana Del Rey thread.

ha

nice.

I thought there was some three-dimensional-chess sarcasm going on there.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

here's "first love". I love Lea but i thought this was only okay. nothing special.

http://pacificcollegiate.edlioschool.com/ourpages/auto/2012/8/14/48082720/DunhamFirstLove.pdf

Lena

I can only compare it to the feeling of opening your cupboard to grab a cookie, but instead of getting a cookie you get dick-slapped.

the worst

i'd usually prefer to get dick slapped than have a cookie.

every 3-year micro-epoch of pop culture gets the diablo cody it deserves

loved this piece a lot

aka fuck all yall

Two times!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Look at all those racists

"That woman is a grownup, and you are a child."

We should do this poll every five years until she is a grande dame of screen and belles lettres.

And this is part of what they're paying her all that money for, folks.

http://thisrecording.com/today/2011/3/19/in-which-we-regularly-play-ping-pong-with-the-princess-masak.html

And this is part of what they're paying her all that money for, folks

They're paying her for a book of new material. And I don't think a year and a half old blogpost is the best Lena Dunham writing sample out there. This is a little embarrassing. She's done much better stuff, like those pieces for the New Yorker.

Also, she's 26. Based on her show and the handful of more recent essays out there, her writing has matured/is maturing pretty quickly.

Also, she's 26. Based on her show and the handful of more recent essays out there, her writing has matured/is maturing pretty quickly.

― America's Mobile, Monday, October 15, 2012 11:57 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No, fuck this shit. "Hey she's pretty good for her age $1.5 million" does not compute.

ilx is really a crepey douche about LD IMHO

^^^^

that new yorker piece is a couple years old. also not really very good imo. shes a much better director/screenwriter i think

otm

Xp

ilx is really a crepey douche about LD IMHO

― His avid reading taught him things before he had not found (stevie), Monday, October 15, 2012 4:05 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

LD is a crepey douche about japanese people and muslims tbh

there are legitimate aesthetic/artistic/political reasons to dislike dunham's work!

the other half of ILX is very capn save-a-dunham though

LD is a crepey douche about japanese people and muslims tbh

― lex pretend, Monday, October 15, 2012 12:18 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

hehe

there are legitimate aesthetic/artistic/political reasons to dislike dunham's work!

― Mordy, Monday, October 15, 2012 4:19 PM (11 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

absolutely!

i don't see what's really all that douchey or creepy about ILX's response to lena dunham. she's a highly visible public figure with a show on HBO and a book deal worth millions of dollars. any/all criticism comes with the territory and i don't think it's rooted in sexism here.

That "Lost-er in Translation" article is the worst and nobody should read it

tiny hands like paper cranes

hands like paper cranes

who gives a fucking shit how much she's getting paid

If book advances were prizes, then James Patterson would be the toast of the town in Stockholm.

i guess i think its weird when people fixate on how much money she's getting, based on a (dumb!) blog post and her TV show. yeah it's a shitload of money, sure. but she put a book proposal together, shopped it, and is now cleaning up! why pick on her for that? you may not think she's worth it, but there a bunch of people in the publishing world who disagree with you.

she's a highly visible public figure with a show on HBO and a book deal worth millions of dollars. any/all criticism comes with the territory and i don't think it's rooted in sexism here.

what you do, see, is contrast the person being discussed with others in similar situations, and then consider what other elements are creating differences in the degree of dissection. sexism obviously isn't the only issue at play here, as there are other reasons Lena Dunham isn't Jonathan Ames isn't Louis CK isn't Chelsea Handler isn't Larry David. But it's also stupid to think sexism doesn't play some part in why Girls gets more shit than Entourage and Bored To Death, and you can acknowledge it without pretending there's some false binary where either you're a fan or you're sexist.

ime no show has ever gotten more shit than entourage

Entourage just wasn't talked about.

girls is a critically acclaimed show. entourage is a punchline.

Entourage just wasn't talked about.

That's the thing. it's not necessarily that people think more of the men who do similar bullshit, it's that they're not stared at and discussed. imo there's always an extra degree of IS THIS A JOKE, I CAN'T BELIEVE WE HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS in discussion of women in culture who are guilty of shit men do as well (i.e. Sarah Palin and George W Bush) and you can admit that without having to encourage the Palins of the world.

entourage - douchbags. girls - trustfund twits. bored to death had ted danson, so i think that's why it got a pass.

That's the thing. it's not necessarily that people think more of the men who do similar bullshit, it's that they're not stared at and discussed. imo there's always an extra degree of IS THIS A JOKE, I CAN'T BELIEVE WE HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS in discussion of women in culture who are guilty of shit men do as well (i.e. Sarah Palin and George W Bush) and you can admit that without having to encourage the Palins of the world.

― da croupier, Monday, October 15, 2012 12:51 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wait what? How was the reaction to George W. Bush not "I can't believe we have to put up with this"?

i just don't think that's true, tho. no one talks about 2 broke girls really (or whitney), even tho it's clearly more despised than girls. i think the quantity of discussion is due to the provocative nature of the material and that ppl have such different reactions to the material. if everyone hated girls i doubt anyone would discuss it. but it's simultaneously praised and reviled which produces the attention given to it. also, GWB was and is hated hated hated maybe more than almost any other human being alive, male or female. xxp

you don't think palin was treated as a more absurd notion than bush?

i think no one has ever accused palin of colluding to attack the united states and kill innocent american civilians

That's the thing. it's not necessarily that people think more of the men who do similar bullshit, it's that they're not stared at and discussed.

this is totally true tbh - from what i've seen of LD i dislike her immensely but as a non-TV watcher the fact that the conversation around her has been of such volume etc that i've noticed her at all is testament to this. whereas i don't know wtf entourage is

Everyone I knew considered W to be a gigantic joke until he won the election

lex, do u know who kat dennings or what 2 broke girls is?