Word: lovelies
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...think that the greatest example of casual, social cruelty I can imagine is laughing at a sincere love letter. It is the moral equivalent of knocking change out of the hand of a beggar: a pointed and cynical response to declared vulnerability. What prompts us to mock sentimentalism in the public sphere--what makes it morally acceptable to make fun of Celine Dion's music, for instance--is the suspicion that such music is itself a form of cynicism, a manipulation of America's overwhelming urge towards the saccharine. You get the sense that when Dion and her kind...
...behavior. His Harper's Magazine review of Jedediah Purdy '97's first book, For Common Things, is one of the most vitriolic and least clever put-downs I have ever read; when its negativity is contrasted with Purdy's obvious and infectuous enthusiasm for the many things he loves and praises, the review also begins to seem strikingly sad. In his preface, Purdy boyishly admits that his book is "one young man's letter of love": it is this vulnerability that makes Purdy a moving and an effective narrator. That Purdy's sincerity can become overbearing, that it can devolve...
...pervasive cult of irony whose brand Hodge wears, to whom "Believing in nothing much, especially not in people, is a point of vague pride, and conviction can seem embarrassingly nave." In response to the culture of irony that mocks because it does not have the faith to believe or love, Purdy resolves to "speak earnestly of uncertain hopes." The fragility of hope in the ironic world, he asserts, is not a reason to give up on hoping: "I have written this bookso that I will not forget what I hope for now, and because others might conclude that they hope...
...Things resides not in the originality of Purdy's thesis but rather in the not-at-all-incidental portrait of Jedidiah Purdy. The book is filled with autobiographical detail, and with confessions that spring from a mind uninterested in artifice and concealment: it is the example of Purdy's love of common things, rather than his sometimes boring case studies in the downfall of public culture, that proves effective...
Beneath the pop trappings, Stereolab remains Stereolab. The band's Marxist ideology (with a strongly feminist bent) still reveals itself in Sadier's lyrics. The poppy sounds offset the lyrics nicely: it's Marxism to fall in love...