Fwd: Hipsters of Brooklyn (NY) / RealityTV / NonUnion
| Casting Notice | |
| Project Name: | Hipsters of Brooklyn (NY) |
| Project Type: | Reality TV |
| Rate/Compensation: | na |
| Requesting Submissions From: | New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico |
Role Type: Principal
Gender: Male or Female / 19 to 32 / All Ethnicities
Description:
For HIPSTERS ONLY (a Hipster is not “Hip Hop”): They typically live in Williamsburg and are overeducated, snobbish, androgynous, intellectual, liberal, artsy, trust fund kids and dress funky…or at least fit this prototype! We are looking for great CHARACTERS…Hipsters that have HUGE personalities: If you are an obnoxious jerk and curse often please show this. If you are snobbish and mean please show this.
If you are supper intellectual and nerdy please show this. If you are a total stoner and are out of your mind please show this. If you are quiet, weird, peculiar and totally strange please show this. If you are a classy bitch that’s totally stuck up please show this. If you are a drama queen and over the top and narcissistic please show this. If you have tons of pain and angst in your life and cry often and are sad or angry at the world please show this. The more unusual you are be it good or bad-WE WANT YOU FOR OUR REALITY SHOW. IT’S BEEN GREEN LIGHTED AND WE ARE READY TO GO. WE ARE NOW HIRING THE TALENT. IF THEY USE YOU FOR THE SHOW YOU WILL BE A PAID. If you or anyone you know is anything like the above or something else like it….please submit a one minute video of you ….a confessional of some sort illustrating your personality. Polite with nothing to say…that is, being “normal”…will not get you cast. Please submit it by Jan 24 by 10pm. Please note above what a hipster is and how they dress. Please be in your 20’s…or early 30’s (age range is 19-32). If you don’t know what a hipster is than you are probably not one.
***
(Casting notice via my girlfriend)
The war against youth continues. The war against common sense and reason and healthy behavior. And oh yeah, the actual wars are probably happening somewhere too.
I really did like reality TV for a few years. Shows like America’s Next Top Model and I Love New York presented a new way of understanding and consuming fictional video narrative – one that was fast and loose and not super controlled. There was a feeling of randomness and a fresh myth about how personality that could bubble to the surface and express itself beyond scripting.
Last week I decided I would never watch reality TV again.
My mom spoke to me on the phone this weekend. “There’s nothing on but these stupid reality shows, I can’t watch them. They are the opposite of TV.” She seemed depressed. All the scripted shows are gone. We talked about the colder weather in New York.
Jersey Shore probably represented a breaking point. And yes, I did enjoy the show. I saw it has harmless. It was no worse than anything else. There is so much bad shit happening in the world. Why focus on TV?
The problem comes when studio executives attribute the success of a show to it’s format of cultural simplification and exploitation, rather than craft and talent. The new reality TV is about taking a segment of the population and forcing them to endure the tragedy of imposed metacultural drama. The formation of the State. Inside/Outside. The format crushes individuals and communities. It packages. Story becomes caricature. Absurdity and humor become forced agony, the rewards for suffering on camera. The premise becomes and straitjacket. We all go to the mad house: Twitter. Our couches pull us further into death. 11pm time to sleep. You kissed the screen and saw the devil.
I don’t understand anything much about the entertainment business. It’s funded by other businesses, yes? The kind that make things we actually buy? Soap? P&G? I do know that scripted shows take responsibility for themselves in a way that semi-scripted ones do not. There is something politically responsive about actually writing a show. Maybe? Lena Dunham knows this. Kathryn Bigalow knows this. Other American authors knew this. If you fully articulate a character or a justify theme with narrative, people are allowed to hate your politics. It’s invigorating. People hang themselves from the pressure, laws pass, culture moves.
This is like the difference in writing style between someone who uses language and someone who doesn’t. I’m not anti-alt-lit unless the writing is bad. Writing based on premise and not language….? Unscripted writing? Gchat new journalism? Does it always make sense to say less about less? Drugs, sex, adverbs.
I’m also not anti-alit-lit really at all – because wasn’t it just a joke originally anyways? Like reality TV?
People need to say something. Something important. Or nothing. We can get by for a little longer on silence.
Things that are unwritten are like things that are unspoken. They are smoke. They are mirrors. Bankers in suits pulling decimals. Social media operators moving signs and symbols. Corruption so fundamental we call it “too big to fail.” It’s obvious and horrific. The culture becomes design based. We loose our voices. We evolve down into screens that show us ourselves. We eat our own shit because it tastes like our nightmares. There is nothing more gratifying than fear, agony, powerlessness. Ask a hipster. Ask someone who seeks all this collapsing everyday.
There’s no way to hate smoke. Nothing unsaid gets quoted. Imagine a crowd-sourced US Constitution: advertising today. It would be shorter, that’s for sure. And more optimistic. Checks and more checks. Today, if a congressman chooses not to vote on a measure, he’s a saint for questioning the process. The fuckers passed fewer bills last session than any previous session since the Second World War. Reality Congress. React to the marketplace. Waste. Mirrors, screens. Baudrillard with reverb laughing at us, echoes, literary fashion editorial in a glossy political webzine. Content you want. One trillion new views. I’ve interviewed at Buzzfeed, and let me tell you, the offices are beautiful.
If you say something, if you create something based on an idea or belief, rather than a meme or trend, you better watch the fuck out. Someone’s going take what you love and explore related themes and variations.
Is sports “reality programming” (because they’re constrained but unscripted, so the drama is “real”)? is political-economic/cultural commentary?
Not sure saying that ‘entertainment is funded by businesses that sell things we actually buy’ is close enough. Entertainment is surely the occasion for speculation (‘investment’) and advertising, but I pay directly for tv, movies-at-the-movies, books, magazines, and the internet (as well as indirectly, by buying advertised products), and “funded by” sounds too charitable compared to, say, hustled by. Does the income of entertainment altogether actually pay for most entertainment?
I don’t think too many people think the apparent legislative inaction of the 112th is the result of ‘thoughtfulness’ (in the sense of ‘thinking about one’s support for and/or resistance to the principles and consequences of some particular piece of legislation’). Whether praised or condemned for it, the positive activity of the GrOPe House is widely understood to be purely reactive (and, many think, personal or at least personalized) obstruction.
the house republicans fail to pass legislation because their newest members were elected to destroy government – it has less to do with obstruction and more to do with implosion
if the GOP created a representative unit of government that that was based on their values, rather than o just rebelling against the entire concept government (worker power, written compromise, regional consolidation), their ideology would better maintain itself by re-producing a tangible material context, making new supporters
the current paradigm is a collective distaste for any form of productive activity, a denial of power relationships, ignorance of function: silence, decay
I don’t think the masters herding the Tea Klan actually want “to destroy government”–that’s just the sloganeering that wins votes from lemmings who think that Ronnie’s “‘government’ IS the problem” is somehow coherent.
Big Carbon, banks, insurance companies and medical-‘provision’ corporations, raw-material extractors: their brains want two “government” things: a) they want to govern privately–directly through the exertion of accumulation; and b) they want public sponsorship (and permission, that is, electoral legitimation) in cases where they don’t have the ability to marshal resources.
For example, oil-company managers understand that they need roads for their business to make sense, but they’ll not pay to build them. So they conceal their support for socialized infrastructure in (sometimes oddly communitarian-sounding) rhetoric — say, by distinguishing between “individual” and collective benefits (so food stamps are out but road building is in).
The Ted Nugent stuff, (as you say) denying both function and concrete reality of “government” as a matter of, I guess, “ideology”–that, in my view, is a matter of spectacle manufacturing consent for the transfer of cost–not abolition of activity–of government (transfer of cost, that is, from hyperaccumulators to some ‘middle’).
[…] article, “Alt-Lit is for Boring, Infantile, Narcissists,” the HTML Giant piece “Fwd: Hipsters of Brooklyn (NY)/Reality TV/NonUnion” and Harrient linked Independent article on Sharon Olds‘ new volume. The connection […]