{"id":563,"date":"2007-08-15T11:08:33","date_gmt":"2007-08-15T16:08:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/2007\/08\/15\/reduced-to-quirk\/"},"modified":"2007-08-15T11:33:05","modified_gmt":"2007-08-15T16:33:05","slug":"reduced-to-quirk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/2007\/08\/15\/reduced-to-quirk","title":{"rendered":"Reduced to Quirk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Hirschorn<\/a> in this month’s Atlantic<\/a> reduces my generation’s entire cultural zeitgeist to a single word: quirk<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s easy for David Cross\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s character on Arrested Development to cover himself in paint for a Blue Man Group audition, or for the New Zealand duo on Flight of the Conchords to make a spectacularly cheesy sci-fi video about the future while wearing low-rent robot costumes. But the pleasures are passing. Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the \u00e2\u20ac\u212290s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair\u00e2\u20ac\u201da self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t require you to take creative responsibility. Just because you can doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean you should.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hirschorn makes a fair point which, I think, can be restated that much of the content I enjoy is really just candy.<\/p>\n

The Atlantic seems to have recently figured out its readership (or at least figured out me<\/em>). Hard to Swallow<\/a> (by B.R. Myers<\/a>, who more typically writes about Korean issues) is a pointed moral critique of modern food lovers (chowhounds<\/a>?) and food writing (including Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals<\/a>, much read by my contemporaries). If I weren’t already a vegetarian, I might take umbrage.<\/p>\n

“Insider baseball” pieces on Karl Rove<\/a> and Michael Gerson<\/a> are also excellent, and in the case of the former quite timely.<\/p>\n

To wrap up this encomium, props to the magazine for its clean new website design<\/a>, which I believe premiered today, and for including an embedded Youtube video in the online version of the quirk<\/a> article.<\/p>\n

<\/hints><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Hirschorn in this month’s Atlantic reduces my generation’s entire cultural zeitgeist to a single word: quirk. Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s easy for David Cross\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s character on Arrested Development to cover himself in paint for a Blue Man Group audition, or for the New Zealand duo on Flight of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18,12,38,11,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}