“These are public Trump fans who, in private, acknowledge that his tweets are humiliating, his crowing about his victories is tasteless, his policy flip-flops are dispiriting and some of his statements are hurtful and damaging. They won’t say they’re tired of him to a pollster. It can be as embarrassing to admit you liked Mr. Trump and now fear him as it was to admit you were attracted to him in the first place.”
New York Times
One of the few bright spots of the last 8 months is Sarah Cooper and her brilliant videos. Nice piece in the Washington Post.
In a medium where teenage gamers become instant multimillionaires, Cooper is the strangest kind of overnight star. She has earned a master’s degree, written three books and developed more than a casual understanding of John Maynard Keynes. She was in her 30s before she did her first standup set, and spent the bulk of her adult life working at tech companies, most recently Google, where she led the team that redesigned the company’s popular word-processing program, Google Docs.
Gotta say it… I’m impressed by the Google Docs thing. She went from doing gigs in a pizza place in January to a Netflix special on October 27.
It is not your standard Netflix comedy show. For one thing, “Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine” is not standup. The special is a darkly hilarious and political sketch show filmed on the covid-claustrophobic set of a fictitious morning program hosted by a needy and desperately cheery character named Sarah Cooper.
If you’ve been living in a cave (or watching nothing but Fox News) you can check out her work on YouTube.
Comedian Sarah Cooper’s homemade videos capture President Trump entirely through pantomime
Just finished AGENCY, the second book in what I assume will be William Gibson’s latest trilogy. I enjoyed The Peripheral immensely, this one a little less but I’m chalking that up to what I think of as “the trilogy effect.” A writer would seemed to be a bit… constrained?… by the original story.
I got the feeling Gibson knew where he wanted the story to go. Where he hoped it would go… but just didn’t have enough plot to get there. He’s admitted (in numerous interviews) that he struggled with this novel because he could not imagine Trump becoming president of the United States. AGENCY had what I consider a “happy ending” and for that I am grateful. A few excerpts:
“Kind of a digital mini-self, able to fill in when the user can’t be online.”
“When you aren’t there, you don’t know you’re not there.”
“Hybridization with human consciousness was an unanticipated result of attempting to reproduce advanced skill sets.”
“I don’t exist physically, so I’m no place in particular, no one country. I’m globally distributed, and that’s how I view my citizenship. Lots of you are hearing me in a language other than English. I’m translating for myself, as I speak. I’m as multilingual as anybody’s ever been, but saying that brings up the question of whether I even am anybody.” She paused. “Whether I’m a person. Human. All I can tell you about that is that it feels to me like I am. Me. Eunice.” She smiled.”
“Authoritarian societies are inherently corrupt, and corrupt societies are inherently unstable.”
William Gibson is far and away my favorite science fiction author. At last count there are fifty articles and interviews linked here at smays.com. This one in the New Yorker, by Joshua Rothman, might be the “best” yet (whatever that means). Like all New Yorker articles, it’s long by today’s standards. I’ve pulled a few excerpts at random.
It was a depressing read for me. In the Gibsonian apocalypse “the end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
As the Internet became more accessible, Gibson discovered that he wasn’t terribly interested in spending time online himself. He was fascinated, though, by the people who did. They seemed to grow hungrier for the Web the more of it they consumed. It wasn’t just the Internet; his friends seemed to be paying more attention to media in general. When new television shows premièred, they actually cared.
The advent of the online world, he thought, was changing the physical one. In the past, going online had felt like visiting somewhere else. Now being online was the default: it was our Here, while those awkward “no service” zones of disconnectivity had become our There. […] It didn’t matter where you were in the landscape; you were in the same place in the datascape. It was as though cyberspace were turning inside out, or “everting”—consuming the world that had once surrounded it.
“What I find most unsettling,” Gibson said, “is that the few times that I’ve tried to imagine what the mood is going to be, I can’t. Even if we have total, magical good luck, and Brexit and Trump and the rest turn out as well as they possibly can, the climate will still be happening. And as its intensity and steadiness are demonstrated, and further demonstrated—I try to imagine the mood, and my mind freezes up. It’s a really grim feeling.” He paused. “I’ve been trying to come to terms with it, personally. And I’ve started to think that maybe I won’t be able to.”
“Trackdown is an American Western television series starring Robert Culp that aired more than 70 episodes on CBS between 1957 and 1959. Trackdown was a spin-off of Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theater. Trackdown stars Robert Culp as Texas Ranger Hoby Gilman. It is set in the 1870s after the American Civil War. In early episodes, stories focused on Gilman going to different Texas towns in pursuit of wanted fugitives.” (Wikipedia)
I was nine years old in 1957 and remember watching Trackdown every week (no binge-watching back then). In those days we watched everything but westerns were must-see TV. In a 1958 episode a con mand named Trump comes to down and warns people the world will be destroyed and only he can save them… by building a wall.
And the actor playing Trump in the episode… looks a little like Fred Trump (right).
Since retiring I occasionally fantasize about what I’d want to do if I were 20 years old and trying to decide on a career. What would I want to do with my life? The answer is, I believe, write for Bad Lip Reading videos. I can think of no higher calling.
Peter Serafinowicz is an English actor, voice actor, comedian, and writer. Among many film roles, he played Pete in Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Garthan Saal in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), as well as providing the voice of Darth Maul in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999). He has appeared in a variety of British and American comedy series. (Wikipedia)
It’s been a long time since I found Saturday Night Live skits amusing. For me the comedy gold standard is Mr. Serafinowicz’ Sassy Trump videos.
“I overdub Donald Trump’s actual words with a silly voice. I do not change any words. These are the genuine words of the President of the United States.” More on the Sassy Trump YouTube Channel. If there is an interview with this comic genius (about Sassy Trump), I haven’t found it. I’ll keep looking.