Comments | cris: ewoks, straight men and eldritch gods

cris

ewoks, straight men and eldritch gods

Dec 10, 2001 14:47

Friday night

Up on stage Douglas Rushkoff is talking about the power of narrative and its seductiveness in a world increasingly obsessed with larger-than-life events, mythic causes and neat endings. The lecture subject is Activism in a Post-9/11 World and he's spent the last 12 minutes talking about how everyone is shoehorning the tragedy ( Read more... )

Comments 9

ayun December 10 2001, 13:46:29 UTC

He got the most cool points for telling everyone they'd have Big Fun for going to the peace rally, and maybe they'd even get laid too, and there's us snickering near the back about how we can't, cause we're supposed to go to a war party that night.

cris December 10 2001, 18:21:36 UTC

I thought he also got cool points for pointing out that if we wanted to view this as an epic clash of Christian and Muslim ideologies what better way than to attend a talk hosted by three jews?
... and who says that Sept. 11th represented the death of irony?

crystain December 10 2001, 14:21:09 UTC

I can attest to the dread heft of the desk.

How's your back doing?

cris December 10 2001, 18:28:09 UTC

actually, my back is fine. my shoulder and leg muscles are sore in the way that I can't move without being painfully aware of every muscle group in my calves and upper body. It's kinda neat in a masochistic sort of way.

btw, after our dinner conversation, I went ahead and signed up for a membership at Cambridge Racquet and Fitness. Screw this struggling up stairs with hundred pound boxes of wood thing.

chaizzilla December 10 2001, 17:46:37 UTC

i resemble those remarks, 9/11 needed neither lube nor shoehorn to slip neatly into my agenda. but i'm better than most people anyway, so it makes sense.

i've been told (often by ewok-buggering """meme"""-doktorz) i have an irony deficiency, i'll check out Withnail and I.

cris December 10 2001, 18:31:23 UTC

truth to tell, I was sort of struggling for a good straight man comedy (and didn't want to resort to Odd Couple references -- though I did mention that to her too) Withnail is good, and the interplay between McGann and Grant is great, but there have to be better examples out there.

chaizzilla December 10 2001, 21:07:44 UTC

will al chuck em.. shoot i swore i could compose a sentence of names..

synwave December 11 2001, 06:42:02 UTC

I always thought most the wit came from the straight man. To counter the zaniness of the weird friends that surround him/her.
Have I been doing it all wrong up till now? *gasp*

In other news: I think that 3P0 summed up their war better than our news men have managed with this latest confrontation.

mishak December 11 2001, 09:38:12 UTC

"So, I remember being a young kid and watching Return of the Jedi, the "real" Star Wars episode III, and ..."
"oh my god," Ann whispers by my side, "he's making Star Wars references. This is so Gen X."

Soon after we started going after Bin Laden, one of my first thoughts was how I'd like to find a picture of him and photoshop it into an Empire Strikes Back still of Boba Fett loading the Han-sicle into Slave One, putting Osama in place of the hapless Captain Solo.

It would be cute; I'm sure it would garner much hawkish approval from the "Let's go get that mutha" crowd, and I wonder if any of them would stop to remember exactly who Boba Fett was working for, and that, for all metaphorical intents and purposes, we are the Empire.

I wonder.