(no subject)

[shadowkat]

1. Do you really want a review of 50 Shades Darker? I'm guessing not. Will just say this, it's not what I expected. The reviews lead me to believe this was a story about a college student deciding to lose her virginity to a sadistic guy into S&M, who introduces her into the BDSM world and somehow they fall in lust or intense love. It's not that. Not at all. Which makes me wonder about the reviewers. The one's on Amazon and Good Reads are actually more accurate. Note to the wise? Don't read books in genres you can't stand and then review them. It's stupid. It would be like an independent art film critic who can't stand blockbuster superhero flicks reviewing the Avengers. Every time I see somebody do this - I have to restrain myself from saying - well what did you expect? That review of Game of Thrones by the NY Times critic who hates fantasy novels...is another example. She just looked like an idiot. Of course she'd hate it. It wasn't written for her. She's not the intended audience.

Also, another thing, 50 Shades Darker validates my opinion that fans write better romances than romance novelists. Mostly because they go further and paint outside the lines, and play more. Romance novelists stick to a tried and true formula. Fans don't. This may be true to a degree of all genres, but having not read fanfic in the other genres - I really couldn't say.

2. Watched part of the second episode of the new HBO series Girls - which is weird for me to watch, because it is about a bunch of entitled 20 something women living in Greenpoint Brooklyn, and whose parents live in Park Slope. (I live in Carroll Gardens Brooklyn). In one scene the protagonist is at a job interview at a publishing house, with a guy my age. He lives in Cobble Hill - which she calls grown up Brooklyn. (cringe).
And they discuss clubs. (cringe). And ...I start thinking damn this is almost too realistic and reminding me of why I refuse to live in Greenpoint. It is. The lead character reminds me uncomfortably of a couple of people I've known. Not sure I can watch this - may have to stop for the same reasons I had to stop watching Sex in the City and Breaking Bad...too realistic and makes me cringe. When I watch tv nowadays, I want to escape the annoyances and stresses of everyday life, not be reminded of them.

3. Generation X - My Generation, otherwise known as the forgotten, silent, slacker, sardonic generation...that came of age in the 1980s, and looks at the two generations that bracket with a sort of sardonic contempt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/weekinreview/09aoscott.html?pagewanted=all

(Actually I don't know about you, but I've been having one for ten years now...would like it to stop.)

Cabin in the Woods about Pop Culture in the Millenium Age - it's a film oddly by a Generation X filmmaker.

Whedon was born in 1964. Generation X is 1964 to 1979.


Generation X doesn't want to hear it

Earlier generations have weathered recessions, of course; this stall we’re in has the look of something nastier. Social Security and Medicare are going to be diminished, at best. Hours worked are up even as hiring staggers along: Blood from a stone looks to be the normal order of things “going forward,” to borrow the business-speak. Economists are warning that even when the economy recuperates, full employment will be lower and growth will be slower—a sad little rhyme that adds up to something decidedly ­unpoetic. A majority of Americans say, for the first time ever, that this generation will not be better off than its parents.

— New York Magazine

Generation X is sick of your bullshit.

The first generation to do worse than its parents? Please. Been there. Generation X was told that so many times that it can’t even read those words without hearing Winona Ryder’s voice in its heads. Or maybe it’s Ethan Hawke’s. Possibly Bridget Fonda’s. Generation X is getting older, and can’t remember those movies so well anymore. In retrospect, maybe they weren’t very good to begin with.

But Generation X is tired of your sense of entitlement. Generation X also graduated during a recession. It had even shittier jobs, and actually had to pay for its own music. (At least, when music mattered most to it.) Generation X is used to being fucked over. It lost its meager savings in the dot-com bust. Then came George Bush, and 9/11, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Generation X bore the brunt of all that. And then came the housing crisis.

Generation X wasn’t surprised. Generation X kind of expected it.

And:

For some members of Generation X, the cohort sandwiched between the Baby Boomers and the so-called Millennial age group of many Occupy Wall Street protesters, the demonstrations represent a missed opportunity in their own youth to take up the cause of combatting economic inequality.

But for others, the Occupy movement is at best a showy rehash of similar recessionist angst they weathered with self-sufficiency and little more public display of disaffection than grunge rock and goatees — and at worst a reflection of a younger generation with a whiny, overweening idea of its own importance.

"Generation X is tired of your sense of entitlement. Generation X also graduated during a recession … and actually had to pay for its own music," declared Mat Honan, 39, a San Francisco-based writer for the technology blog Gizmodo.

He said by phone that he's sympathetic to the protesters' complaints about the financial system but felt a "generational disconnect" after reading a New York magazine story that portrayed the demonstrations as a response to a distinctly Millennial plight.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-12-18/generation-x-occupy-wall-street/52046498/1

And


Generation X Apologizes for Ruining Life for the OWS Millenium Crowd

Hee.

All of this reminds me a great deal of the Winona Ryder/Ben Stiller flick Reality Bites.
Also a little of Heathers. Yes, I watched the John Hughes films, but there were better ones out there that defined us. Darker, more sardonic ones. Hughes was too mainstream.