Revolutionary Ambitemporalism
Practitioner of the Contemporary
“It’s been a busy week for vegetables.
The baby-carrot industry tried to reposition its product as junk food, starting a $25 million advertising campaign whose defining characteristics include heavy metal music, a phone app and a young man in a grocery cart dodging baby-carrot bullets fired by a woman in tight jeans.
On the East Side of Manhattan, crates of heirloom vegetables with names like Lady Godiva squash were auctioned for $1,000 each at Sotheby’s, where the wealthy are more accustomed to bidding on Warhols and Picassos than turnips and tomatoes.
Both efforts, high and low, are aimed at the same thing: getting America to eat its vegetables.
”
Given the two examples, I strenuously dispute the premise in that last line.
School built before right now somehow fails to exist permanently in that previous time period
From the Times:
Benjamin Franklin Middle School conveys an earnest sweetness associated with an earlier era. Its 700 students attend classes in a low-slung building from the mid-’50s, complete with a bomb shelter and generous, shaded playing fields.
During cafeteria lunch duty, a guidance counselor runs a foosball tournament, attracting a throng of laughing, shouting boys. This year’s school musical: “Guys and Dolls.”
For all its charms, Benjamin Franklin, a sixth-through-eighth-grade school in a wealthy New Jersey suburb, also lives bluntly in the present. A sixth-grade girl dashes to class, wearing a turquoise T-shirt with bold sequined letters: “Texting Is My Favorite Subject.” The seventh-grade guidance counselor says she can spend up to three-fourths of her time mediating conflicts that began online or through text messages.
Thing that is now, is now. Nostalgia has, once again, failed to stop time.
From the same article, there is also this:
The sixth graders had “dated” for a week, before the girl broke it off. The texts she received that Saturday night were successively more sneering, graphic and intimidating.
I think that the use of scare quotes around “dated” is a bit quaint, but then I guess the article’s conceit is that this school is supposed to exist in the 1950s. Don’t know what the kids in the article did, but sixth graders do sometimes have sex these days, though I guess you could say that is not so much “dating” as “a bad idea.”
Every 13 year old boy is exactly the same
In the same thread I referred to in the last post, about where people found pre-internet porn, I found this:
I would watch a movie like, say , Gotcha!, and pause the tape at the nude scenes, then take a Polaroid shot of the television screen and keep the Polaroids in my room.
If the movie wasn’t on tape but on HBO or Skinni-Max, I would memorize when the nude scenes came on and time the photo. Sometimes I’d miss the scene by a fraction of a second, and I’d end up with a shot of a chest of drawers or a fish tank.
Which I’d leave lying around the house, much to the confusion (I’m sure) of my parents.
This is incredible, and I wish I’d been so clever. More than that, I wish I’d taken those polaroids and stashed them away somewhere so that I could find them again today and feel awesome. But I’m not that awesome, so all I have is this photo my brother took of a weird sex line station on satellite TV in Cairo:
“ Plus being cartoons the sexual possibilities are endless. With real women enema play is a letdown because of all the safety precautions one must take to avoid rupture and possible death, with my wives there are zero restrictions. I am free to ejaculate literally GALLONS of aphrodisiac semen from my firehose like tentacle phalluses causing my wifes belly to expand to the point where she appears 34 months pregnant and you can see the outlines of my tentacles wriggling on her belly which is fit to burst as she screams from a singularity of transcendant pain and pleasure. ”
WHOA. From a thread about where people found porn before the internet.
“ There was a run on Dr. Scholl’s callus remover this year due to its high salicylic acid content, making it the ultimate home peel for the face. Others swear by wart remover to lose brown spots. Even Preparation H is enjoying yet another renaissance. ”
From an article in the always-relevant Times T Style Magazine on off-label uses for various drugs.
More Twitter and the Times
The Times has published its 10,000th trend piece about Twitter, this time about groups of people whose twitter existence is devoted to correcting the spelling, grammar, and style of other tweeters. The profiled individuals, naturally, are obnoxious, but the Times doesn’t come away clean/ Towards the end of the article the writer delivers the inevitable equivocating line about how the trend may not actually be a trend but let’s just go ahead and call it a trend anyway:
It’s hard to tell, but the number of Twitter accounts devoted to pointing out other people’s language foibles does seem to be growing.
“ I mean, yeah, we get it. It’s funny to people on the outside lookin’ in, seeing two clowns rapping about space and shit, while floatin’ around in an orgy of screen savers. ”
Violent J, of the Insane Clown Posse, on the haters hating on Miracles.
“ [A jury consultant] advise[d] me as to what some of the issues might be concerning jury selection given the fact that my client is a Russian immigrant, Jewish Russian immigrant, that my client dresses differently than most… Her sisters who likely will testify wear wigs because they’re married and they’re pretty ugly wigs. I mean, they stand out… My consulting firm said I should be very cautious of Germans. ”
Trial lawyer Stephen Scaring, quoted in Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” in the New Yorker.
“ Although the total number of pirates is small, it has been estimated that 10,000 to 15,000 people are employed by the pirates indirectly in related industries such as boat repair, security, and food provision. (Other enterprising Somalis have set up special restaurants to cater to the hostages.) ”
