36. Snake pervert party
Blue Jam, Slenderman and the Professor of Parody
A very warm hello to you all, especially this week’s new arrivals, whether you’ve come via Helen Lewis’s Bluestocking or Caroline Criado Perez outing me as a “snake pervert” (46 garter snakes sounds like a party to me). And a happy Super Bowl to all who celebrate! I hope you found it slightly less overwhelming than Taylor here — big up Ice Spice for bringing the true “girlfriend in the pub for the big match” energy.
This was Super Bowl LVIII, which counting fans may have spotted is XX Super Bowls on from Super Bowl XXXVIII, or in other words, the twentieth anniversary of the 2004 Janet Jackson half time show that became Nipplegate — the “wardrobe malfunction” that made Janet’s boob the most searched-for thing since 9/11, decimated her career (but not that of her co-star Justin Timberlake, the actual barer of the offending boob) and inspired the creation of YouTube (really). I had a chat with Jonathan Edwards of the Washington Post about all this, and what it has to do with the 2024 frostiness from some quarters about Taylor showing up to support her squirle-loving beau Travis Kelce (#crazy). If you want the full story, you’ll find it in Toxic.
Listened
Blue Jam (all episodes on YouTube)
I had a conversation with a friend recently in which we decided that Blue Jam is Chris Morris’s masterpiece. My theory of Morris is that he’s fascinated by how far people will go purely because they’re asked to do something — the basic gag of the Brass Eye interviews is always that, confronted by Morris in news anchor drag, the interviewees are incapable of departing from their role as talking heads even as it becomes obvious that they really, really should just stop. The mini dramas of the Blue Jam radio sketches play out that soft coercion, the characters fixed in escalatingly grotesque situations by nothing more powerful than the impossibility of contradicting another person. I still sing “chopped up man” at my sister in a Scary Little Maria voice when I want to make her laugh.
Watched
A Self-Induced Hallucination (Vimeo)
This documentary is a brilliant idea holed by one major problem: the most compelling Slenderman copypasta (the name for horror stories collaboratively authored on the internet) isn’t the videos, it’s the written stuff. But you don’t get any of that here, because this film makes a rule to use only extant footage on YouTube as it describes how a consciously invented myth could spill (horrifically) into real life. (The director has horror movie I Saw the TV Glow coming this year.) That limitation aside, it’s very effective and genuinely scary piece of filmmaking that ends up taking seriously the idea that humans generate our own bizarre realities. (There are parallels here to the murder of Brianna Ghey, or the case that inspired Heavenly Creatures.) Unsettling aside: when I was a child, there was a repeat character in my nightmares I called the Jam Man, who was tall, wore a tuxedo and had no face. I’m not saying I invented Slenderman, only that some of us might be early adopters when it comes to the collective unconscious.
Read
Martha Nussbaum, “The Professor of Parody” (New Republic)
I have been reading Judith Butler this week. This is a terrible mistake, because the last time I had to read Judith Butler, I ended up leaving university. Well, transferring institutions rather than leaving altogether, and it wasn’t just the Butler, but I can vividly remember sitting in a Manchester lecture theatre having Butler’s theory of gender performativity explained to me, and thinking: there is absolutely no way this can be the way I spend another two years. A relief, then, to go back to this absolute shellacking by Martha Nussbaum from 1999. “Butler’s abstract pronouncements, floating high above all matter, give us none of what we need.” GO OFF QUEEN 🔥
Gimme, gimme more…
ICYMI, I had some thoughts about the overdue split in gender criticism between the people who just wanted to do feminism and the people who want something else, and Janice Turner wrote her own response to the ultras of gender criticism.
The more I see Kanye grimly parading his wife Bianca Censori like an Amsterdam pimp, the more I add to my store of respect for Kim Kardashian’s steely resilience.
Surviving an assassination attempt has not enhanced Salman Rushdie’s tolerance for cowards and hypocrites. More on the fiasco at the Royal Society of Literature from Hadley Freeman here.
Came across this nine-year-old article about eating bones via the BARPod Reddit and I’m linking it here because I simply cannot stop thinking about it and you won’t be able to either: “I Love Sucking Them with My Mouth, Probing Them with My Tongue, and Crushing Them with My Teeth.”
When Helen told me she was going to watch “a reenactment of 120 Days of Sodom by actors with Down syndrome, performed in three languages with English supertitles,” I think I was silent for about five minutes and then decided it sounded like the most awful thing I’d ever heard of. Now I’ve read her on it, I think I want to see it?
YESSSS MISSY:
Here’s a link to Nussbaum’s article: https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody