Pitchfork’s impact and history. For you lazy-ass TL;DR types: “A Pitchfork review may ignore history, aesthetics, or the basic technical aspects of tonal music, but it will almost never fail to include a detailed taxonomy of the current hype cycle and media environment. This is a small, petty way of thinking about a large art.”
This is a really interesting post about the recent resurgence in faux-Native American fabrics and patterns, and the resentment it’s created:
Many Native Americans are less than thrilled that this so-called “native look” is trendy right now. The company that’s stirred up the most controversy so far is Urban Outfitters, which offered a “Navajo” line this fall (items included the “Navajo Hipster Panty” and “Navajo Print Fabric Wrapped Flask”) before the Navajo Nation sent the company a cease and desist order that forced it to rename its products. Forever 21 and designer Isabel Marant also missed the memo that the tribe has a trademark on its name; thanks to the Federal Indian Arts and Crafts act of 1990, it’s illegal to claim a product is made by a Native American when it is not.
“The problem,” says Jessica R. Metcalfe, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa and doctor of Native American studies who teaches at Arizona State University and blogs about Native American fashion designers at Beyond Buckskin, “is that they’re putting it out there as ‘This is the native,’ or ‘This is native-inspired’. So now you have non-native people representing us in mainstream culture. That, of course, gets tiring, because this has been happening since the good old days of the Hollywood Western in the 1930s and ’40s, where they hired non-native actors and dressed them up essentially in redface.
“The issue now is not only who gets to represent Native Americans,” Metcalfe says, “but also who gets to profit.”
It’s fascinating, especially since I had only the vaguest knowledge of Pendleton blankets:
“From the beginning Pendleton marketed the blankets to various native communities, but the designs themselves are not authentic,” says Bramlett, a founding member of the Vintage Fashion Guild. “What’s ironic is that the Navajo were making blankets for the white tourist trade, and Pendleton was making blankets to sell to the native communities. That’s kind of a weird twist, but that’s the way it was.
“And the Navajo designs were not even traditional designs,” she continues. “A lot of the motifs that they used were Mexican inspired. Or when traders came to them with oriental rugs, they’d use them as inspiration. So there are oriental motifs in some Navajo weavings, too. It’s just a crazy cross-cultural mix any way you look at it. You’ve got the Pendleton blankets which are a mixture of native and non-native colors and motifs. Then you’ve got the Navajo blankets, which are the same way.”
While CEO pay rises, thanks to repeated “above-average” contracts (via Yglesias). When San Jose police and fire unions did this, city government basically went bankrupt.
The short of this long article: forests store carbon, slowing global warming. Global warming kills forests, and could accelerate.
Since I seem to be one of the few people who has seen Bellflower and energetically disliked it1, I figured I should explain. But first, the good:
The movie does a good job showing the fear, rage, and misogyny of the nerdy, emasculated and powerless man-child (the last few years’ favorite new stock character), which most recent TV shows and movies have swept under the rug.
Although the reliance on super-short depth of field (seriously, it’s tilt-shift city) for the early relationship scenes initially bothered me, I think it works as a visual representation of head-over-heels, only-think-about-each-other new love.
The film is visually striking, and is surprisingly stylish, as long as your idea of style is “Instagram shaky-cam.”
Now, the bad:
Turns out, we already have a bunch of movies about powerless, undersexed man-children! And a lot of them are better.
The characters are paper-thin, one-dimensional and flat, and aren’t helped by the actors, who are nearly all stunningly awful. Director/lead actor Evan Glodell, who delivers his “happy” lines with the frozen smile and rising inflection of a Miss USA contestant, is particularly intolerable.
The movie’s cockeyed plotting, pacing, tone and continuity issues2 make the thing an absolute mess.
By the end, I would argue the movie has gone past portraying two damaged, possibly-misogynistic young men, and at least tacitly supports their worldview, if not outright celebrating it.
I’ll save spoiler-related criticism for a later post, but have to admit that I’m utterly baffled by the adoring critical consensus3. And critics acknowledge it–every positive review has some form of the phrase “Sure, it’s a mess, but it’s alive!” My response: Yes, it’s an inventive vision of an almost-post-apocalyptic world and the movie burns4 with passion, but it’s still horrendously onanistic, disjointed and, ultimately, a waste of time5.
I find most mumblecore borderline-insufferable, so keep that in mind. ↩
I’m not confused about the movie’s final third–there are a bunch of other issues I’m talking about. ↩
I didn’t actually read any reviews before going, but it wouldn’t have helped. ↩