When you do time on the night city desk with a future Pulitzer winner, then you can be quoted in her chin-scratching Sunday essays.
Julia Keller puts my ill-formed opinions on a par with Alex Kotlowitz’.
Obligatory I-was-quoted-out-of-context disclaimer: The portions of my stream-of-consciousness e-mail — she asked for my take on Britney Spears’ delamination — that she chose to quote might lead some to believe that I was not an early participant in the Britney pile-on. I take full responsibility for making fun of a mentally ill person. Have mercy on my soul.
mouse said on March 4, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Nance-been away for a few days-I think the bar in Hicksville
was called Charlie’s.Great bar & a great guy.He bought a
bar in Waterloo in the 90’s-I use to drink a few beers with
him & talk of the old rock band days.I think he may be gone
now—took all those wild stories with him.
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Emma said on March 4, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Just finished reading your comments in Julia Keller’s article in today’s Tribune. Whether or not you were taken out of context, I thought you sounded right on. I am 26 and unfortunately corralled in with the “Lost” generation, although I managed to get through it with my soul intact, thank goodness. It is disturbing how much satisfaction people seem to enjoy at the demise of young people such as Britney Spears. The public’s current obsession with trainwrecks is reminiscent of the gladiator days of Rome… buy a ticket, take a seat, and watch a human get ripped to shreds. How “entertaining.” It makes me ill. Thank you for sharing your comments in Ms. Keller’s article – I hope more people begin to see the situation as you do.
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nancy said on March 4, 2007 at 1:54 pm
I wasn’t taken out of context, I hasten to add. But it occurred to me that a person might come away from that thinking this behavior — being part of the jeering mob — is something I’ve never, ever done before. And I have, and I’ll probably do it again.
But.
It’s so hard to break through the media/culture static these days that doing so seems an act of extreme singlemindedness, guided by steroidal publicists. In other words, these people ASK to be in our faces, they TRY to be public figures. And when they fall apart, it’s only to be expected that a fair number of us will pay attention to that, too. In this case, however, it seems Britney has passed well over the line into the real human-tragedy zone, and we ought to respect that, too.
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brian stouder said on March 4, 2007 at 9:43 pm
I liked your ‘people are people’ take.
If the worst thing about our 2007 culture is how people gawk at over-paid, over-indulged, over-exposed (so to speak) personalities; or if this ‘phenomenon’ merely qualifies as a genuine matter for concern….then really, we have come a long way.
Not so very long ago, our culture accepted as normal much, much worse; and as for gossip pages, read about past presidential campaigns – such as when Andy Jackson became our 7th president, amidst widely printed stories about how his wife was a bigamist! (she had been previously married, and then dumped. She never got a legal divorce, which nullified [so to speak] the legality of her marriage to Jackson…so they got married again two years after their first ‘marriage’).
The president always blamed her untimely death (right after the election, but before he took office) on the scurrilous, highly personal, and unending attacks of his political opposition and their willing hacks in the press…and this presidential bitterness had serious consequences
By way of saying – I really do believe that there’s not much new under the sun
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ashley said on March 4, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Did you have exclamation points at the end of every sentence!
It read that way to me…
And you’re a “cultural blogger”. Hey, a new title!
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nancy said on March 4, 2007 at 10:35 pm
No.
I only use exclamations ironically. Ironically, I say!
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brian stouder said on March 5, 2007 at 9:58 am
a pointless aside – regarding people we might make fun of: today at work we got a catalog request from a customer who indicated a town name in Virginia that made us think “surely not!” –
but when we looked up zip code 23302, we then wondered how the founders of that town came up with that name…
http://zip4.usps.com/zip4/zcl_3_results.jsp
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