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RANDOM LINKS FOR 8/6/12

August 5th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

nytimes.com via nytsyn.com

As a fedora wearer since when fedoras weren’t cool, I frankly don’t identify with Montauk, NY’s demonizing of the midcentury style headgear. It has to do with the old fishing town’s backlash against being colonized by (what the NY Times story about it calls) “hipsters.” But (to use NY-area geographic parlance) the Montaukers aren’t really dissing Urban-Outfitters-clad, emo-listening shoegazers from Brooklyn, but rather Ralph-Lauren-clad, gourmet-cilantro-eating 1-percenters from the Hamptons.
What’s wrong with residents putting in a common sandbox for neighborhood kids along a “planting strip” between a residential street and its sidewalk? Nothing, except of course it doesn’t look boringly world-class enough.
Item: “Poll shows Americans are losing faith in religious institutions.” Comment: Oops, there goes another leg of the Republicans’ shrinking “base.”
On a related note, lotsa local Catholics love ‘em those activist nuns.
Following up on a topic discussed here previously, Jacob Silverman at Slate would like online book critics to be a little more, you know, critical.
You probably didn’t see “the saddest story in the Olympics.” NBC didn’t really cover it. (It involved the women’s side of a “second tier” Olympic sport (fencing), in a match that included no U.S. athletes.)
From Annie Hall to (500) Days of Summer (and even stretching back to Bringing Up Baby), there’s been a particularly American romantic-comedy heroine type which the AV Club’s Nathan Rabin has labeled the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” This is the sparkly, spunky force-O-nature who exists, as Rabin puts it, “solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” (The sitcom Dharma & Greg can be considered an MPDG premise stretched out.) I can attest that such women do exist in real life, and that relating to them, in my experience, is no trip to eternal bliss.
Local filmmaker Drew Christie offers a short “animated op/doc” (whatever that means) about Hollywood’s recent “allergy to originality.”