Meme Report 11/19
I only really care about the Meadow Lane Disaster
Olivia Nuzzi
Well, I’m having fun. To some extent, this is what all this is for. The only reason any of us know any reporters by name is because we want to be there when the scandal inevitably drops. Olivia Nuzzi creates scandal wherever she goes and has built a career out of it, sort of. The first time something like this happens, it’s reprehensible; after that, it’s just fun. Some of us can enjoy fun like this, but others must let us know they don’t agree with anyone involved. Yeah. I figured. Every day, we are subjected to puritanical takes on gossip and how to properly enjoy it by people who don’t know how to shut up and say thank you when good gossip is dropped on their door. This doesn’t require a take. It requires a well-written joke. That’s above some pay grades. Gossip is good. It’s a pro-social activity, and it’s even more guilt-free when it comes first and foremost as personal essay. It’s even more guilt-free when it’s someone you don’t like. Sorry, do you want people you like to air their dirty laundry and breaches of ethics? To paraphrase someone who turned their own place in a Washington affair scandal into a career-defining work, Everything is gossip.
SpongeBob Big Guy Pants Ok
Oh, Ice Spice. We loved you way back when. You were the Gen Z artist. You were born January 1st, 2000. It was all so symbolic. The heralded mind of the new millennium. Unfortunately, the culture moves on, and while we will politely engage with your work after your moment has passed, it has to be as good as before. This most recent effort isn’t as fun or engaging. It’s nonsensical, of course, but it’s also boring, which is worse. It lacks the punch of her previous music and is instead indicative of every mean thing people said about her the first time around.
Vanity Fair Boys Issue
The Hollywood Issue of Vanity Fair this year is about our plethora of internet boyfriends, a term no one has used since 2017. But because white boy of the month doesn’t apply here, they had to go back to old reliable. They are correct that we are in a boy era and have finalized all of our boys. This photoshoot is to our present what the “It’s Totally Raining Teens” photoshoot was to the 2000s. Except this photoshoot has a few people missing (Josh O’Connor, Jacob Elordi, other boys whose careers I wish were doing better), so the era has not been perfectly captured, but we get the point.
What is interesting to me about our boy era is that it seems to exist in the wake of 2 things: the explosion of Timothee Chalamet and #MeToo, both of which happened in the fall of 2017. Ten-ish years later, and we’ve got boys everywhere. Boys were a safe investment in Hollywood then, and they still are now. There’s a boy for everyone, and we like them for their personalities as well as their looks. We call them boys because, to some degree, they have been defanged, and to another degree, they’ve got enough filler to keep them young for another 10 years, despite in some cases pushing 40.
I love internet boyfriends, and they’re fun to think about. There’s a kind of (somewhat) healthy public sexuality at play here that I’d like us to keep pursuing. However, I can’t help but think about our failure to invest in the women of this era as well. In our world of disappearing movie stars, women are losing an avenue to be iconic. We love our boys, but what about our girls? I think there’s a piece missing, that’s all I’m saying. In favor of all these boys, we don’t have the same or as big a pedestal for girls of equal talent. It’s not Vanity Fair’s fault that our cultural solution to misogyny in the entertainment and media industries was to make the boys the focus instead. We’re all doing our best, but at some point, someone should figure out a way to let women be movie stars again.
TikTok
Meadow Lane
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Over the weekend, a TikTok personality with too much money finally opened his gourmet grocery store in Tribeca. I had been eagerly awaiting Meadow Lane’s opening because I love stupid shit, and I knew this was going to be a disaster. The line was long, the store was mismanaged, and the chicken nuggets were RAW. We’ll see how it goes from here, but the beginning has been bad.
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Of course, this removes the intrigue from the TikTok account; we were only interested in Meadow Lane and its founder in an anticipatory fashion. Now that it’s here, who cares? The Story of the opening is over. So another person is removed from my for you page due to a collective lack of interest. Of course, in his wake, a new person takes his place, a woman who used to work for Amazon Fresh, who is giving us all the gory details of the grocery industry. The algorithm demands sacrifice. A life for a life.
Bill Clinton
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What do you want me to say at this point? Do you want me to have a take? It’s too crass, too vulgar, too lazy. You couldn’t write it, and even the most ham-fisted political cartoonist wouldn’t depict it. As for the reality, I agree with this take
Things Me and My Husband Have Stuck Up Our Butts
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The first one I saw was so well executed that all others paled in comparison. Everyone else has until the end of business tomorrow to wrap this up. The sex positivity police are already here to question the straight women posting these videos. I can see the discourse, and I don’t want to do it. This trend will morph and change, and we’ll get Thanksgiving versions where children will lie to their parents or gam gams, and I’m not excited about it. The fun has already been had.