Comment Archives: stories: Blogs: The Measure
Re: “How to Save Money Like a Boss”
Wow- Nailed it. I never thought of skiing more cheaply before. That solves all my problems!
Re: “The 5 Best Songs from Twin Peaks”
For my money, "The Pink Room" and "Bookhouse Boys" trump all of these. But it's one man's opinion.
Re: “Lena Dunham Is In Playboy”
The Onion wasn't belittling feminism. It was pointing out the absurdity of Girls trying to suggest that naive, infantile, narcissistic behavior is normal because it's acted out by a person who has an average looking body. Hannah, the character, is not normal. The actor playing her may have a "real body" but it's a mistake to assume she is a real girl.
The characters on that show play into young women's identity fantasies (which are not limited to women alone), into the self-aggrandizing, hyperbolic worldview that everybody and everything is high drama and borderline surreal, that every event has to be as intense as the well-edited narratives we see on reality TV. That's the brilliance of Leah Dunhams writing - she's conviced girls who believe they're more than average that the girls on Girls are regular girls. That's what the Onion was calling out.
Re: “Lena Dunham's 2007 Web Series About A House Full of Horny Art Students Has Been Unearthed”
Please check out the teaser for a new web series that I think will appeal to my fellow Lena Dunham fans. "Anna Danova" is about a neurotic indie musician awkwardly negotiating her way through a relationship one misstep at a time. She finds her footing by breaking into overly truthful songs in inappropriate moments. Please watch the teaser and share:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTlCxr_yVDQ…
Re: “Lena Dunham Is In Playboy”
"But what it's parodying here is a female artist's ability to express herself without fitting into the pervasive stereotype of what a young woman should be. And that is the kind of juvenile humor that I thought was beneath the Onion. I guess not."
That "Onion" headline encapsulates the show brilliantly, unlike picking apart random Dunham quotes and acting like she is super interesting. I wouldn't ask Lena Dunham what her opinion on juvenile humor actually is, since it's clear that both the author and the woman herself don't understand it when they see it.
There is a huge difference between the ability to express oneself without fitting into stereotypes and creating a character stereotypical of Brooklyn hipsters. She's not creating a bold genre, she's creatively being a bold, naked joke.
Re: “Today's 17 Best Tweets From Racist FDNY Commissioner's Son”
For the record, your headline should read "FDNY Commisioner's racist son." I don't think anyone is accusing the commissioner of racism. Words, and the order in which they are placed, matters.
Re: “Today's 17 Best Tweets From Racist FDNY Commissioner's Son”
It was reported for spam and deactivated by Twitter haha check ya sources bud
Re: “Today's 17 Best Tweets From Racist FDNY Commissioner's Son”
This isn't joe cassano's twitter, this was created today and only has 60 tweets. His actual account has over 1000 tweets and was deactivated... This is a fake
Re: “5 International Bands Coming Through New York This Week On Their Way Home From SXSW”
Thanks for the tip, nnekbone.
Re: “5 International Bands Coming Through New York This Week On Their Way Home From SXSW”
Learn the entire history of rock & roll in your browser at your own speed free with the Historyscoper at historyscoper.com.
Re: “5 International Bands Coming Through New York This Week On Their Way Home From SXSW”
You forgot about Hiatus Kaiyote...they're performing a couple of shows; one on Thurs (3/21) at Brooklyn Bowl and the other on Friday (3/22) at Le Poisson Rouge...they were, by far, one of the best bands at SXSW this year....just sayin'
Re: “Snapchat: Bad for Sexting, Good for Art”
Taking snapshots of our daily routines may be a great art. But sending nude pictures to show how creative you are is very much different. Teens misunderstood this. They sext because they thought its fun. They sext because they want to take revenge someone, but I can't imagine my child to be arrested because of this immaturity. So, before it will happen, I have this service, pgguard. I am using it to make sure I monitor my child's social networking accounts. I found my daughter's smartphone and saw her sexual nature. I am afraid she will use her smartphone to sext. Pgguard informs me on such suspicious incidents regardless of the device my daughter uses. You can check their website at www.pgguard.com.
Re: “Hipsters Don't Actually Exist”
Reading these comments, I realize once again why I left New York to return to Flyoverlandia. The venom, the endless recycling of old hatreds, the total absence of compassion, the snap judgements, the street-fighting macho posturing. You're welcome to it, you "real" Brooklynites.
Re: “Girls Recap: Don't Ash In My Mermaid”
I find Hannah an irritating pain in the arse! Anyone agree with me?
Re: “The Nadir of Writing About Girls Has Been Reached”
Stop talking about Girls!!
Re: “2 Amazing Things, and 5 Troublesome Things About This Kickstarter-funded Veronica Mars Movie”
Really good, smart article from this young man… very thoughtful. Now… what did you guys do with Nate, for Chrissakes?
Re: “2 Amazing Things, and 5 Troublesome Things About This Kickstarter-funded Veronica Mars Movie”
Yeah, it might very well be a one-off, unique situation, but I guess the take away is that the possibility of crowd-sourcing major things is still in its infant stages as an idea, and right now truly funding unknown, worthy projects still seems elusive?
Re: “2 Amazing Things, and 5 Troublesome Things About This Kickstarter-funded Veronica Mars Movie”
I agree that this raises a ton of questions and I understand people feeling like a big-studio project just elbowed into Kickstarter and got a bunch of attention like it's some grassroots start-up, not a major(ish)-network TV show that already logged about 60 episodes and will now get a bunch of fans to spend upwards of forty or fifty bucks just to watch the equivalent of two or three more.
THAT SAID, the release they've described on the Kickstarter page (and I'm sure this could change -- as could the supposed "fans pay the production budget, WB just pays for releasing it" arrangement) sounds like the releases the Kids in the Hall or Mystery Science Theater 3000 movies got back in '96 -- major cities, wider than a lot of arthouse movies, but probably not even 1,000 screens, likely far fewer. This is not being set up as a big hit movie; this is being set up as the kind of mini-movie WB doesn't often bother with. That brings up a whole other issue, which is that a company like WB (which shuttered its arthouse division a bunch of years ago) not being interested in movies that can't play on at least 2,000 screens (even Sony and Universal and Fox have their arthouse divisions) is pretty sad and stupid.
V-Mars also stands out because yes, it's wildly more popular than most things that try to get a Kickstarter campaign going, but it is also a very low-budget exercise. When the show was airing, it was, if I recall correctly, one of the lowest-budget shows in prime-time. I imagine this helped get it to three seasons largely because it did not cost a lot to produce (and as a sidenote to the bottom-dropping game of network ratings: just six years after VM left the air, a show on the CW posting similar ratings would be a near-lock for renewal). So you can make a Veronica Mars feature that looks WAY more expensive than the show for far, far less than the budget of any major WB movie this year. People talked about Pushing Daisies or Firefly in the wake of this project's success, and I'm like, hold up: a decent-looking Firefly movie cannot be made for $3 million or even $10 million. Given that, it does seem kind of weird that WB would deem the P&A costs to be worthwhile "if" other people put up the $3 million (or where-ever this lands at the end of the month) budget, because $3 million is, as you point out, pretty much nothing to a company this huge.
But that also sort of dings the argument that WB is going to make a ton of money off the backs of the fans. Obviously they think they can make money or they wouldn't agree to do it. But most likely, the amount of money this will make would normally fall into the "sorry, not worth it" column for them. I mean, if they thought this movie could make even as much as Whedon's Serenity movie, they might have considered fronting the $2-3 million budget themselves.
And it's also a rights issue: they own the rights to the show, so whether you're raising money to buy those rights back so Rob Thomas can do an indie feature or actually involving WB to basically distribute an indie feature... seems like more or less the same thing.
I also take exception to the idea that it will become easy for fans to become "bilked" into underwriting crap like a Big Bang Theory movie or whatever. As popular as The Big Bang Theory is, I don't imagine a lot of its fans would pony up $25-50 or more for promise of a movie. The demand isn't there because the show has been on for years, will be on for more years, and is a big hit precisely because it appeals casually to a lot of people (rather than fanatically to a few). And if they did, would that be bilking? Or would that just be people throwing away their money on something stupid? I do think there's a difference.
Anyway, I guess my point is that this kind of thing is sort of self-selecting, at least right now.
Re: “SPONSORED VIDEO: Easy In, Easy Out With the Samsung Refrigerator”
So basically, if you don't want monkeys to raid you, don't buy Samsung
Alvano
http://www.bergenrefrigeration.com
Re: “Photos: At The New Museum's Summer White Cocktail Party”
Summer White Party NYC www.randbreloaded.com
