Arbitrary Self-Rules, Ass Denied, and the End of Middlebrow
Your Weekend 'Round the Web also looks at Jesus' actual job.
A cool thing about having my own site is that nobody is imposing rules upon me. Except me, and sometimes, boy, that side of me needs to be shown something. For example: who says a Weekend ‘Round the Web column has to run only on a Friday or Saturday? Perhaps logic does, but why must logic always apply? Here, the only thing enforcing such consistency is my say-so. And this time, I say it’s a long weekend. Since I generally work Saturdays and not Mondays, it feels that way, anyway.
So, let’s do one of these, because I have been enjoying reading lots of other work recently, and I’d like to share. Writers deserve that. If I want it, I have to give it, and the beautiful thing is that I want to anyway.
We’re going to cover a lot of topics here. Let’s start with an investigation into whether Jesus was actually a carpenter, a topic we generally assume mostly because Joseph is described as one. Scholar Tyler Blaine Wilson dives into the issue:
Alessandro DiGirolamo has created a mailbag column, in which, thus far, he’s answering questions he wishes readers were asking. In this one he takes on the idea that a post-zombie apocalypse world would be any sort of fun. That’s mostly a libertarian fantasy cooked up by people who cosplay as military on weekends and think they’re barbarian ronin or somesuch, rather than people who’d likely die of an untreated infection or eating tainted roadkill if the shit really went down. Anyway, the tone reminds me a little of Rob Bricken’s old FAQs at Topless Robot.
Before Trump term #2, I had conservative-ish centrist friends try to make the case that actual misinformation was free speech, and the Biden administration cracking down on it was fascism. Now that the redhats are cracking down even harder on speech they don’t like, most of these Free Speechers aren’t saying a damn thing. I like Mike Masnick’s take on it.
Tom Knoblauch takes on some of Quentin Tarantino’s more annoying pretensions, like his weird, arbitrary self-limitation of making only ten films. I honestly think recent Tarantino has been some of the best — of his “alternate history trilogy,” only Django goes on too long. Inglourious and Once Upon a Time are two of my favorite of his, precisely because of the ways they step outside what feels like his comfort zone. The former is a movie about the different ways people interrogate in their conversation; the latter a blatantly, knowingly idealized fairy tale/wish fulfillment of “What if history happened the way I imagined it at the time, rather than what I know now to be true?”
I agree, though, that Tarantino setting arbitrary rules for himself is hurting him. He isn’t Lars von Trier loving the masochistic challenge.
Moving off of Substack for a moment, you are missing out if you don’t free-subscribe to Dave White’s SLUGGISH. He has always been one of my favorite writers, and has taken to the newsletter format in a way that never fails to entertain. Take his latest, which he calls “a tale of ass denied”…
This is a note to the dude with the sign.
Your sign said, “LET ME EAT THAT ASS.”
You were standing outside the Mobil station on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was about 5pm on Wednesday afternoon. The sign was cardboard. About 12 inches tall and 15 inches wide. All capital letters in big black marker. You were smiling and holding up the sign at passing cars…
You seemed to be offering your service for free. You were not in a median asking for money. There is no median for that. You were on the sidewalk, just wanting to taste an ass. The traffic was intense. It was also at a standstill. Perhaps not enough of a standstill to allow for any one driver to consent to your request right then and there. Definitely enough to make eye contact with your chosen ass’s keeper. Did we share a glance? Were you choosing me?
I’ll wrap things up for this roundup with another Substack, this one from Rodrigo Brancatelli, on one of my favorite topics to vent about: the death of the monoculture. With everyone now choosing self-imposed bubbles of taste, news, politics, and so forth, there’s rarely a shared common reality like there used to be, and corporate entities that catered to the middlebrow mainstream are going away as everything becomes more expensive. Shared spaces are as necessary as safe spaces, and we’re losing them. Exploring this thesis with the examples of mainstream rom-coms versus A24 is a very film critic way to do so, so of course I approve.
As the world outside remains horrible, what have y’all been reading that’s good?
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