This is the saddest story I’ve read in a long time.
An eight-year-old boy has been found hanged in his bedroom in Lancashire.
Joshua Aldred was found unconscious by his grandmother in Lytham on Thursday night. He was taken to hospital in Blackpool but died a short time later.
Joshua’s mother and grandfather had recently died from cancer …
On the one hand…
The film takes everything that was unsettling about the series — gratuitous materialism, deliberate elitism, cafeteria feminism — and re-serves it up in a grotesquely glittered confection, in which posh real-estate, $55,000-diamond-rings, and gaudy designer bags serve as unapologetic proxies for relationships, and even the main characters’ children are reduced to accessories. This visual orgy comes with fewer of the redeeming elements — the occasional recognition of hypocrisy, the chatty histrionics, the schmaltz — that swaddled and padded and helped us forgive the irritating unrealities of the series. And since so much of Sex and the City’s success was in its structure — episodic therapy, 30 minutes a week, over six long, tumultuous years — there’s a sense in which the filmic format (here dragged out to two hours and twenty minutes) betray the show’s stumbling essence.
On the other hand…
And yet, and yet — the delightfully confused, giddy-but-torn, no-but-yes feeling that washed over so many women as they took in the series is there in the film as well. Despite its annoyances, it’s often funny and almost always fun, and its length is a strength as well as a weakness, since it provides more of what makes women return to Sex and the City: Not the happy endings, but all the messy ambiguity beforehand. The willingness to wallow in the mess, rather than racing ahead to happily-ever-after, explains why the Sex phenomenon has provided more fodder for the post-feminist culture wars than any television series or movie before or since — and why it will be a long, long time before any other pop culture phenomenon usurps its role in those debates. So those wringing their hands over its legacy might as well take their cues from Carrie’s fictional Vogue editor, Enid: “Spare me a week of faux-soul searching, and just say yes.”
Talk about having it both ways.
I won’t be going, btw. My teenage daughter’s seen it and even she was underwhelmed.
From James Fallows, writing in The Atlantic…
The Clinton team doesn’t worry about hurting Obama’s prospects of winning in the fall, because they assess those prospects at zero. Always have. Obama might not win if he leads a bitterly divided party, but (in this view) he was never going to win. Not a chance. He would be smashed like an armadillo in the road by the Republican campaign machine, and he would be just about as ready as the armadillo for what was coming.
When Clinton still had a plausible shot at the nomination, this assumption removed all guilt from beating up on Obama. As in: “I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.” By whittling Obama down, the Clintons were saving the party from a suicidal mistake.
And now that Hillary Clinton no longer has a plausible chance, she (and Harold Ickes etc) don’t need to wake up in the middle of the night and worry: Oh no! Maybe we’re paving the way for George Bush’s third term! They are sure that Obama’s nomination means exactly that, no matter what they do. So by definition they can’t be making things worse. It is like sticking pins into a corpse — you’re not really hurting it any more. And if these efforts in fact make Obama’s victory less likely — well, then, reality will conform to their preexisting view…
As it happens (and as Fallows belatedly acknowledges) others got here before him.
“Maybe he is interested in some subject, but it isn’t a subject we teach here.”
From one of Lord Snowden’s school reports during his time at Eton.
Hooray! The Telegraph is reporting that “Sales of popular family cars and 4x4s slumped last month amid growing fears among motorists over the impact of sharp rises in road tax due to be introduced next year.”
… in 1944, the Allied landing at Normandy got under way. Wonderful, sobering account of it here.