Thursday, August 11, 2011

Shopping list

Want.

On a related note, the latest episode of "Louie" is everything you need to know about renting an apartment in New York.

On an unrelated note, there's scandal, scandal everywhere about some very beautiful-in-a-grown-up-kind-of-way 10-year-old French model. Google the relevant words and you'll find this, but linking inevitably directs to not-especially-artistic shots of said model without her shirt on, and I, for one, can live without that. Like I've said about these scandals before, the issue is not - no matter how many times Jezebel or whichever other site tells us it should be - Think of the Children. (Somehow I doubt that even in France, pedophiles are buying let alone created by French Vogue.) It's always fundamentally Think of the Grown Women, who will never measure up if an ideal is defined as preadolescent. Turning back the ideal age for a model to that which precedes not only hips and cellulite, but also acne and angst, is probably an efficient way of marketing anti-aging goo to ever-younger women. (High school juniors, you're looking a bit rough around the edges). It's also a good way of turning otherwise interested women off fashion. I'd take a Belgian water-tower house over something I'm supposed to want to buy because a Fanning sister modeled it any day. Yes, watch me vote with my theoretical dollars (or euros as the case may be).

4 comments:

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

PG,

Guess we'll have to see where the comments go, but I suspect this is the bit that will hold their attention:

"They point to things like a swollen defense budget, subsidies for the ultra-Orthodox and the cost of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where the Interior Ministry said Thursday that it would build 1,600 units and announced plans for 2,700 more."

There's a contingent that responds to every article about Israel - political or not - by complaining that it wasn't entirely (or at all) devoted to the plight of the Palestinians, and to Israel's 110% responsibility for that plight. My guess is, that's the angle those readers will take.

It's certainly not going to be sympathy with Jewish Israeli protestors, who don't come across as poor, exactly, in the article (a 25-year-old Facebook-using filmmaker?). I mean, some will express sympathy, but anti-Semites, no. They might, however, respond along the lines of, these few rich Israelis control not just Israel but also America.

All that said, I generally try not to talk about that-which-could-potentially-inspire-anti-Semitism, because this gets read as hysterical. That said, I'll check on those comments later, so we'll see.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Here's one. There are others.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Oh, and a good one that doesn't shy away from the definite article.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

rshams,

No doubt, but PG was asking specifically how NYT-reading (i.e. probably American) anti-Semites would respond to that particular article, which is about strife in Israel re: their wealth gap. Some truly clever commenters find a way to make this the fault of rich American Jews, but for the most part, the response of that contingent is to say, Israel was never a land of equality, because its existence is fundamentally unjust.