Category: Poseur Alert

"As a crowd gathered outside, the Bachmann children took out their cell phones and snapped pictures of each other with their grandmother, in pairs and threes, to remember the moment. After a few minutes, campaign manager Ed Rollins greeted the crew, holding brief court in the cramped, carpeted aisle. He was pleasant, gracious to the family members for their work, but also subdued, almost quiet. He, like Marcus Bachmann in the back, was pleased with the outcome but also comforted by dusk. A very long day had ended well and now, finally, they could rest, if but for a few minutes. Indeed, the sight of Marcus Bachmann relaxing, watching his children savor the moment, will stick with me. His wife had more interviews, more events, more everything to come. She had just won a major political victory. But even in the big leagues, it’s the small moments, the light laughter of his college-age girls and eldest son, that make him beam," – Robert Costa aboard Michele Bachmann's campaign bus.

"I'm a libertarian (specifically a geo-minarchist, but that isn't important)," – a commenter at The Economist.

From "Men's" "Fashion" Week – from a Beast slide-show.

“F [Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson] is amazing. I’ll be, like, complaining about my music-video director, and he’ll just put everything in perspective by being like, ‘The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego—what I have been calling the waning of affect. But it means the end of much more—the end, for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brush stroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction),’ or something, and he’s right," – Ke$ha.

Update: It appears to be parody. A reader writes:

The Ke$ha-Jameson "friendship" is a silly joke, responding to a silly hoax-rumor yesterday – incredulously reported by the NY Post – that Lady Gaga and Slavoj Zizek have some sort of deep "friendship".  The "Gaga-Zizek" friendship is fake, as is the Ke$ha-Jameson connection.

Our name for the Arty Bollocks Generator, a site that saves you the trouble of writing artistic statements like this one:

My work explores the relationship between postmodern discourse and skateboard ethics.

With influences as diverse as Nietzsche and John Lennon, new tensions are created from both traditional and modern layers. Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated by the traditional understanding of meaning. What starts out as triumph soon becomes corroded into a dialectic of power, leaving only a sense of nihilism and the inevitability of a new understanding. As spatial forms become frozen through boundaried and critical practice, the viewer is left with a glimpse of the possibilities of our condition.

A poem picked from the da-da minimalist stream of consciousness that is now Jon Huntsman's campaign website:

The Politician.
It's an unusual animal.
The firm handshake. The frosty smile. So often driven by ego alone.
They stand in a line and few stand out. They read the same written words. Words that have been repetitively spoken for decades.
They tell us they love us. Respect our families.
That all will be well. But, nothing is ever well.
We forget we elect them to represent us.
America can do so much better.
Maybe someday.

"At first, Ascension sounds like a muted, grayscale version of Conqueror’s heavenly pressure and kaleidoscopic apocalypse. But as new elements like acoustic guitar and radically submerged vocals begin to fuse with meteoroid riffs and celestial melody, the album reveals a barren sense of triumph," – Jason Heller, AV Club.

"What the F? Where the hell is the FedEx? The reviewer charges at the steeply overflowing mail bin, where the screeners and everything make a tall heap. The mail pile is a mystical tower from whence a series of UPS logos glint like the shields of a sun-addled phalanx and DHL bubble bags cushion deep mysteries–a perilous structure built unthinkingly by the PR girls of the noble publishing houses of Midtownne (creatures more enchanting than the maidens of Ephesus), who despatch little brown envelopes and big random invitations and such. Its packages sigh with Time Sensitive Material. Where the F is the FedEx with the new TV show?

The edges of the envelopes rise helically, like the worn stone of a spiral staircase curving up to a tuffet-strewn turret. But here the steps lead only to the widow's walk of an L.L. Bean catalog, and trembling frustration. O HBO. . . ."- Troy Patterson, reviewing the new series "Game of Thrones".

A reader writes:

I feel compelled to inform you that the Mr. Small book reviews are an ongoing Amazon.com joke. Many many products have similar reviews (the Tuscan Whole Milk reviews spring to mind). David Pogue posted on this meme a while back. So even stating that it's "knowingly poseurish" misses the point that all reviews of the Mr. Men books are jokes.

Well, yes, that seemed clear. But a good joke, no? Another reader points to a round-up of 50 mock reviews.

Well, it seems knowingly poseurish in a grad student kinda way:

Mr Small tries a succession of jobs for which he is woefully mismatched – they are all manifestly too big for him. He lacks the basic knowledge and skills to hold down any of the occupations he attempts. Does Hargreaves here break from his usual social conservatism with a damning indictment of an education system that is not adequately preparing the workforce for increasingly skilled and mechanized labour? And in this does he further express his frustration at how his own fictional potentialities have been manacled and constrained by this state of affairs?

Indeed, Hargreaves himself seems to give up on Mr Small – in a wry narrative flourish of course. Beneath the surface positivity of the ending, we at best encounter stoicism, with a definite undercurrent of fatalistic dread at what the very near future holds. The shadow of the impending Thatcher years is already falling across the world of the Mr Men. If Hargreaves has deprived him of revolutionary socialism in Mr Uppity – or even the more modest protection of the centre-left – there is nothing Mr Small can do but passively accept his situation. Mr Robertson, a literary personification of statutory intervention, is ultimately powerless to help him. The collective sentiment of the workers – embodied by a friendly postman – offers nothing practical, just sympathy. The only job that Mr Small proves fit to do is recount his story to the author. (Contrast this with the earlier Mr Bump, who successfully finds a job compatible with his idiosyncrasies as a character.)