Four Thoughts

1. Lyrics to Britney Spears “Circus.” No lines in particular hit hard, but the jist:

"There’s only two types of people in the world
The ones that entertain, and the ones that observe..

All the eyes on me in the center of the ring
Just like a circus"

And the song itself. Kindamazing.

2. From the Manohla Dargis review of Baz Luhrman’s Australia:

"The usual line about kitsch is that it’s an affront, a cheapening of the culture, a danger. “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession,” Milan Kundera wrote. “The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”"

3. My new vision of a hipster: children playing with a stick and a hoop, looking constantly to see if anyone (their parents?) is watching, and having more fun from their reaction than playing with the hoop and stick. A tweak on Kundera's dual level explanation of kitsch. Not what's going on in the picture, but cute right? And anachronistic, another hipster specialty.


4. Ongoing: the relationship between postmodernism, hipster culture, and high/low culture, i.e. writing intellectual pieces about Britney Spears’ “Circus.” When I find one (and there will be one) I will post. Submissions accepted.

Obama now noun, not proper noun

When this happens, and it inevitably will, I just wanted to say I was there first. As a post-teen girl, and a writer, I think I lay claim to a demographic that frequently invents new terms.

Yesterday, describing my gyno to a friend over dinner (she is extremely loud and funny, and favors allusions like "your vagina is a neighborhood"), I wanted to commend her in some way for overcoming a hurdle, as well as give a nod to her race.

"She's an Obama."

File this in your head and let me know if you hear it again. I thought it seemed nice and unoffensive--from Wesleyan I hate mentioning people's race, since it implies that "white" is unmarked (whoever heard of someone referring to their white doctor? from the reverse, of course, Eminem was always referred to as a white rapper). In this case, the woman was a person presumably of white/black descent, and an underrepresented demographic in her profession.