, November 11, 2015
Daily Bafflements
For true purists, the fact that there's an image of the Bedford Avenue stop sign probably means Williamsburg is dead. / Roman Königshofer
• “It’s, like, Laguna Beach meets Girls,” wrote Kristen Yoonsoon Kim over at Complex. She’s referring to the latest in straight-to-YouTube reality television, The Bedford Stop, a show about—wait for it—boring, stereotypical, entitled millennials. (Full disclosure: a millennial is writing these bafflements, and she’s not self-hating. This ain’t yo’ momma’s generational warfare.) Its creator is insistent that it’s an earnest portrayal of women in Williamsburg. Here’s a snippet:
“So you really want a Tinder headshot?”
“Yeah.”
“You really need it?”
“I mean, like, I’m going to use it as, like, a hybrid, like, LinkedIn-Tinder profile picture.”
Of course, as Todd Vanderwerff noted in The Baffler no. 25, ”If reality TV is ever going to approach its artistic potential—or even render the ‘reality’ part of the genre name something more than a punch line—it’s going to have to confront how the form’s very existence skews the narratives it presents.” So far, The Bedford Stop doesn’t seem like a promising example of that.
• Spending Veterans Day bemoaning the state of independent publishing? Maybe that’s a daily ritual for you? Either way, LitHub has a great round-up of inspiring origin stories for twenty-one fantastic independent publishers.
• Over at The Toast, Dr. Seuss meets pickup artists: “Females can be sad or glad / But females are all very bad / Why are they all sad, glad, bad? / Human nature. Ask your dad.”