I was at a bookstore looking through the art section and I saw a spine that said The Camden Town Nudes which was interesting because this didn’t seem like the bookstore where I would ever find something like that and I wanted to have a casual look but like. This also wasn’t exactly the bookstore where you felt like you could look at naked pictures let alone just suggestive paintings of them, it’s a really small shop as well, so I was like right I’ll just take a quick peek, I’m an art student, I love history, maybe I’ll buy it. I looked both ways and saw the shopkeep had left momentarily and no one was about, so I opened it and found it was an entire book featuring nude Edwardian women all painted by Walter Sickert between 1905-1912 and it was actually quite a revolutionary set of paintings for its time given that it featured very raw depictions of working class nude women in dark London instead of the elegant, white bedsheet clad, Demure middle and upper class women usually depicted.
And of course RIGHT as I flip to this lady’s boobs practically taking up an entire double page spread, every customer in a 5 mile radius appeared from around the corners of the shelf including the shopkeep and immediately regressing to a wet, pathetic Edwardian man from 1908, startled, I dropped the large book which caused a giant SLAP on the floor in this already silent store thus causing all patrons to look down at me scrambling on my knees to close a giant book of Edwardian boobs and let me tell you it would not have been nearly as funny had I not immediately felt like some Edwardian local pervert who just tried to sneak a cheeky peek at the erotic book in the bookstore only to drop it dramatically causing a scene, red up to his ears trying to shove it back on the shelf. Like such a casual and normal thing in modern day but looking at Edwardian women suddenly turned it into this egregious act as I apparently became possessed by the spirit of a moustached man in a bowler hat and morning coat going Good Heavens I mustn’t gaze upon these images in public lest the constable haul me away!
I am literally begging people to understand that LA is not filled with “rich elites”. It’s mostly filled with people just like me – people with extremely modest success in an industry they’ve probably been passionate about for their entire lives; people who work hard and grind every single day to have (or probably rent) a home in one of 2 cities the nation where their dreams even have a microscopic chance of becoming a reality. Actors whose names you wouldn’t recognize, screenwriters who are writing pilots that don’t get picked up, camera operators for mid tier reality shows, musicians who have had one song in the background of a commercial, makeup artists who get hired for a C-list celebrity red carpet appearance once in a while. Just ordinary fucking working people with dreams.
I don’t think it’s likely anyone who follows me agrees with the fucked up shit I’m reading atp, but as someone who lives in NYC for my career and could just as easily live in those neighborhoods in LA (and I have almost moved there many times), it’s so fucking difficult to read comments about “rich people” and categorize the entire entertainment industry – which is largely comprised of exciting but otherwise average trade jobs – as “out of touch elites whose houses deserve to burn” when it couldn’t be farther from the truth. To wish such horrible things and have so little empathy to people just like me. For my peers, and my colleagues, and my friends. To be reading unfounded disdain about them (and again by extension me and everyone like me) everywhere, and to have the struggles of my industry be this misunderstood, have who we are generalized this much, have people laughing or not caring that these working people are losing their homes, losing their dreams, having everything they’ve made happen for themselves reduced to rubble… it is the absolute worst shit fathomable. It is fucking crushing to a degree I cannot even describe.
LA has a population of more than 4 million, anyone who thinks it’s a city inhabited exclusively by rich people, I have a bridge to sell you
I really hate that my neighbors are walking around without masks. The apartment manager and his brother walked passed in the courtyard and I said “You should really wear a mask there’s a lot of bad stuff in the air.” And the apartment manager laughed.
Like I’m not going to stand there and explain that cars and houses, really OLD houses – have burnt up and the air is full particles like: lead paint, asbestos, plastic and god knows what else.
Anyways – my fellow southern Californians if you can smell smoke you should be wearing a mask. Please stay safe. This sucks.
Conservatives really do doom themselves to an early death their their obstinant stupidity
ok call me when new york city is keeping tens of thousands of people in hellish underground prisons for decades with no trial and zero access to the outside world so when they’re freed they ask if they got liberated by notorious dead person of 18 years saddam hussein
i don’t think if you let people out of rikers they would ask if they had been pardoned by ronald reagan
American leftists really be like “America is the most evil, horrible country to exist and I am so brave for living through it, no other country could ever understand what it’s like to live under fascism”
And then deny the horrors faced by other people in other countries, have the audacity to compare shit like this – we have problems here don’t get me wrong, but most Americans have not and never will ever know what it’s like to live under regimes like that experienced by people in places like Syria. Oh you went to jail over night for driving drunk? Acab but let’s glorify the likes of Stalin, Assad, Mao, etc lmfao
I’ve been homeless, I have been in severe poverty most of my life, and I still know what I’ve gone through isn’t much compared to people living under dictatorships ya’ll are so fucking stupid
I have said and will continue to say that American leftists do not view non-Americans as people, especially if they’re non-Americans in any shade but lily-white.
We talk a lot about the dominant group victimhood phenomenon complex of the white Christian far right.
But the there’s an equally narcissistic victimhood complex at play among American left-wing authoritarians, which allows them to unironically make claims like the bizarre tweet in the original post*.
It takes a special kind of disconnect from reality to so flippantly trivialise the atrocities of the Syrian regime, and erase the suffering of its victims, by claiming that living in NYC is in any way comparable to persecution by al-Assad’s regime.
* part of me wants to think they’re pulling Poe’s law on us – it’s that atrocious – but I can’t honestly hold out any hope for that
Can we maybe stop making shows for people who don’t watch shows and writing books for people who don’t read books and making video games for people who don’t play video games and making sports for people who don’t like sports and making music for
ALT
amhrancas 