This is a pretty puffy profile (heyyyy) of Roseanne Barr, who can say really garbage-y things on social, but there was a lot in it I enjoyed, and I loved Roseanne more than anything. We STILL to this DAY do not have a realistic depiction of working class homes and meals and jobs on TV in this country that comes anywhere close to Roseanne. It was a really special show. Anyway, the parts of Roseanne Barr that are evergreen for me are still around:
Inspired by that, Barr has “always tried to do the right things with my privilege,” and recalls her first joke, written at age 3 or 4, was inspired by fury at a daily gender inequality she witnessed at lunchtimes.
“My grandmother ran around serving the men, they never said ‘Thank you,’“ she recalls. “One day my uncle had two or three bowls of soup. He complained every mouthful. ‘You put too much chicken fat in this,’ he said. ‘That’s what immigrants do.’ I did not like anyone messing with my grandma. ‘I said, ‘Well, if you don’t like it, how come you’re eating three bowls of it?’ And his face went…” and she widens her eyes… “because nobody had ever said that to any man in our family before. ‘That girl’s got a big, big mouth,’ my uncle said. And that’s still how I see the world: women doing the labor.”
ActiveHistory.ca has been running a series about Terry Fox for the 35th anniversary of the Marathon of Hope, and I have gotten something out of each of them.
ANI DIFRANCO, various theories as to why we do not listen to her as once we did:
Make Them Apologize Hypothesis.
Without an intersectional approach, her already-rickety second-wave feminist politics aged into obsolescence melting into defensive ignorance: cf. the Righteous Retreatgate of 2013.I Know this Bar Hypothesis.
Based on preliminary ethnographic research (i.e. having attended an Ani show as recently as 2011), we can report that her concert-going fanbase is about 40% guitar dads and 60% nostalgic moms, leading us to the realization that these modern day parental units were once pimply-faced Ani fans just like us, which further led us to the realization that WE ARE NOW MOM-AGED. Maybe it’s all our fault—we’ve ushered Ani into a certain type of momzone, a vast wash of Facebook status updates and bootcut jeans. RIP us.Revelling/Reckoning Hypothesis.
Too many unfortunate Righteous Babe tattoos.Not a Pretty Girl Hypothesis.
Too earnest, too makeupless, too patent-leather-platform-Doc-Martens. Lola asks, “Maybe because she wore these pants in 2008?” Meredith comments, “The year on that can’t be right.” But it is, Meredith.
This moment in Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s profile of Don Lemon:
I look up and down the menu and suggest that the sorbet looks promising, given his totally understandable criteria.
He leans in, big warm smile, not wanting to correct me, but needing to: “Sorbette,” he says, like a news anchor. “It’s pronounced sorbette.”
“Sorbette,” I repeat, shaky. I smile, not quite understanding the joke.
“Sorbette,” he says with the confidence of a man who informs hundreds of thousands of Americans each night about what is happening across this land as well as many others. “It’s pronounced sorbette.” Sorbette! Could he be right? I’ve been saying it like a French word for years, like a complete asshole. Have I, a native English speaker, a graduate of a four-year college, a frequent eater of frozen desserts, been mispronouncing it all this time?
Or we can leave room for the possibility that he is just plain wrong. This is Don Lemon, after all, the news anchor whose name has become associated with what might politely be called missteps,like asking an Islamic scholar if he supports the terrorist group ISIS, or declaring on the scene at Ferguson that there’s the smell of marijuana in the air, “obviously.” This is the guy who asked if a black hole could be responsible for the disappearance of Flight MH370; who asked one of Bill Cosby’s alleged rape victims why she didn’t stop the attack by, as he put it, “the using of the teeth.”
I don’t want to go to couples’ counseling but I DO want to sit on on Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard’s sessions!
I know a 20-something couple who started therapy before graduating from college (and ended up in grad school intact). I know a 30-something couple who never discussed marriage directly until they were on a therapist’s couch (and who realized their goals were incompatible and broke up). The actress Kristen Bell started couples therapy “right away” after meeting now-husband Dax Shepard. In a joint interview with Good Housekeeping, Shepard characterized it as a preventive measure: “In my previous relationship, we went to couples therapy at the end, and that’s often too late.” And sometimes, couples counseling begins because neither party wants to admit when marriage is explicitly off the table. I recently met a pair of 24-year-olds who had been dating on and off since their tweens. To learn how to let go, they went to therapy together.
On race and immigration in Britain:
Ed Miliband’s anti-immigration stance is odd: it’s hard to vote for a man who doesn’t have the confidence to defend his own existence. It seems that his main argument against immigrants is that his dad raised a befuddled fuckwit. Could you hand Labour’s “controls on immigration” mug to a guest? There’s nothing like jollying up a Macmillan Cancer Support coffee morning by making your neighbours feel like the pakoras were a little unwelcome. Let’s not forget where coffee and tea come from: this mug is bitterly opposed to its own contents. Unless you drink hot Tizer from a coffee cup, the drink inside that mug will be an immigrant. The logic of a receptacle for hot beverages provided by slavery and colonisation being anti-immigrant bears no more examination than a pair of homophobic Speedos.
I didn’t go to bootcamp yesterday bc I kept blowing my nose and no one wants to be part of that, so I went for a hike up the canyon instead. It was very pretty and I listened to numerous pop hits from the last year.
.@Nicole_Cliffe should have never told me about the Facebook legacy thing. Sorry @Lubchansky. pic.twitter.com/2wHefFiXQt
— Jaya Saxena (@jayasax) April 21, 2015
