March 8th, 2010
March 2nd, 2010
thom yorke (via fuckyeahthomorke)
» Topeka, Kansas Becomes Google, Kansas
The city’s mayor today signed a proclamation that for the rest of the month, Topeka will be known as “Google, Kansas.” Yes, you’re reading that correctly — Topeka is now “Google.”
Now, to be clear, this isn’t a legal name change. Lawyers advised the mayor and the city council that they wouldn’t be able to change the name for just the month and then change it back (no word on if they also advised them that it would be well, stupid) — so instead their going with this proclamation asking people to simply call the city “Google.”
If I changed my name to Google Gal can I get job as a spokesperson for the company? I can pull off adorable and I have big boobs. I’m pretty sure that’s mostly how women get hired for things, right? Have a big rack and be a corporate whore. Does Topeka have a big rack, too?
March 1st, 2010
Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967, dir. Mike Nichols) (photo by Bob Willoughby)
“How sheepish one feels, realizing the movie is no work of genius. In fact, what was once an all-important signpost to adulthood is really little more than a simple romantic comedy whose ‘countercultural’ message, insofar as it has one, is decidedly retrograde.
Or perhaps The Graduate is really a tragedy, considering that what we thought we were watching was something altogether different than what’s actually on the film. (Women, in particular, may be disappointed to rediscover that Ben’s coming of age requires them to participate from the wrong side of the bed sheet.)
What’s alarming is that the film, which so perfectly captured its era, seems to have turned on us. No longer a blueprint for liberation, it’s practically an anthem to conformity.
In The Graduate we remember, Ben rebels against that model of the world, racing to steal Elaine away from the altar, beating off her family and her would-be future (and his) with a crucifix he pulls off the wall of the church. One of the first ’60s movie characters to say “Fuck You” to the Establishment, Ben lives in our memory as a rebel who hijacked his own awful fate.
On actual celluloid, it’s a different story.
You don’t need Nichols’ one moment of supreme, painful insight, that awful, final glimpse of the couple ‘escaping’ at the back of the bus, barely able to look each other in the eye, to see that nothing Ben does is particularly heroic. Rather than striking a blow for self-determination, he ends up with the exact girl his parents have picked out for him.
He barely knows her, but he pursues her because she’s everything her mother isn’t: respectable, safe, ready to forgive him for having no vision at all. ”
-excerpts from Robin Dougherty’s essay, Here’s to You, Mrs. Robinson
