Jérôme is longing to touch “Claire’s Knee” (1970).
I’m a strong cinemaphile. I actually ran a film society at Yale specializing in art films. And, naturally enough, I have considerable regard for the films of Eric Rohmer.
Rohmer’s films are beautifully photographed miniature studies of romantic incident in upper middle class French lives of the late last century. The sensibility, manners, and environment of his protagonists is gratifyingly exotic from the American perspective, and their worldliness is impressively sophisticated by our own provincial standards.
Rohmer’s ladies are generally charming; his males, on the other hand, are very, very French: vain, narcissistic, simultaneously predatory and uxorious, and tormented by obsessions and insecurities.
The Rohmer male, Hélas!, only too frequently tends to dress and wear his hair in Gallic versions of the unfortunate styles popular in the 1970s. Most of us would look upon all that as inevitable though regrettable, but leave it to the millennials!
GQ today served up a recent article by Sophie Kemp which identifies a distinctive “Rohmer Guy” style (consisting of dressing like a haute bourgeois 1970s frog ) evidently expressive of a hankering to be summering near Lake Annecy and flirting with chic French chicks.
Rohmer guy fashion is everywhere now. At men’s fashion week in Paris, Milan, and Pitti Uomo, there were many guys wearing lots of mustard yellow, which is a classic Rohmer guy shade. There were also plenty of showgoers wearing bell bottoms, fisherman’s sandals, and neutral-toned canvas jackets—all of which are very much in the visual language of Rohmer’s films. Stop by any downtown New York bar with a terrace, and you’re likely to see someone in a pair of corduroy pants and a deadstock button down with an oversized starched collar.
Alexander Si, an artist who works at a Chinatown gallery, identifies as a Rohmer guy. He started watching the directors movies as a teenager, and as an adult, he covets the lives of Rohmer’s men. For Si, being a Rohmer guy is more than just a way of dress—it’s also a way of existing in the world. “There’s no judgement on cheating,” he jokes. Said less in jest: “Everything is slower.” In terms of dress, Si likes how the characters aren’t particularly flashy and tend to be a little more utilitarian.
But why now? Why do guys everywhere seem to be dressing like chill lotharios named Pierre or Gabriel vacationing at a friend’s parent’s chateau circa 1975? Like so much else these days, it seems closely tied to our strange covid-but-not moment. Looking like a French guy on vacation is an aspirational way to go about getting dressed in a summer where a lot of people are still working from home, but where deadly disease is less of a threat. In this long summer where we’re all outside and hanging out together again, it feels kind of nice to dress for the life you want to have: one where all you do is hang out, and look good. C’est sympa comme ça.
Millennials are strange. They cover their bodies with tattoos; pierce their noses, ears, eyebrows, and places you don’t want to know. Despite their spectacular sissiness, they affect beards, dress like lumberjacks, and have adopted as a generational icon the plebian Pabst Beer.
Their latest weird thing is an obsession with Sea Chantys, a phenomenon apparently inspired by the video below which was uploaded to TikTok and which rapidly went viral.
Personally, I have a low opinion of the intelligence of people who go out in wilderness areas inhabited by large predators unarmed. His inane dialogue, “Dude!” had me rooting for the lion very soon.
If I were in his position, I’d have gotten fed up with that lion’s chutzpah early on and picked up a nice large rock or a stout stick and gone on the offensive. I suspect that lion would have run as soon as she saw a human bend over and pick up a rock. She certainly would have run if the human advanced on her with visible belligerent intent.
The nudists and vegetarians at the Mountain Lion Foundation, naturally, have rushed to defend that insolent lion’s behavior, and, of course, they think the millennial did exactly the right things. (groan!)
Some of you have done NOTHING with your life and you’re mad. You have a college degree & a smart phone with access to virtually *anything* and you can barely get out of bed in the morning while you spit on people who built a whole world with nothing but a horse, map, & axe.
You’ve made nothing with access to everything. You’ve conquered nothing. Hell you can’t even conquer yourself. So go tear it all down. Scream into the void how unfair it all is. It’s not that you’ve wasted your short time here. Surely not.
Don’t bother with your own legacy you’re busy shitting on the long dead who aren’t here to care. Go burn down every Starbucks. That’ll show them. Torch the Target. Tear down every monument. Deface every memorial. But what have you built? What do you leave behind?
So take your benzos. Watch your porn. Get Uber to drop off your dinner. Buy an adult coloring book. Have sex with strangers to ease your crippling anxiety. It’s not you. It’s the system really. It isn’t fair. Go cancel someone. Dox someone. They deserve it. You’re the good guy.
Don’t write an epic novel worth building a statue to remember you. Go troll seven year old problematic tweets ever on the hunt for the boogeymen. See now you’ve accomplished something. Cancel everyone. You’re a warrior now. A real hero.
And lastly whatever you do never ever take even a moment to self reflect on your own failures. Never own them. Never take a hint of responsibility. Remember you’re just a helpless victim of circumstances beyond your control. This all means nothing. Its like you weren’t even here.
Awwww. This is heartbreaking. Please, somebody tell her #Bernie needs another house in the south of France. Surely he’ll run in again in 2024. Until then she should buy a kitten. pic.twitter.com/y82bi9PKbQ
Molly Fischer, at the Cut, defines for us the millennial decor paradigm and wishes it would go away.
You walk beneath a white molded archway. You’ve entered a white room.
A basketlike lamp hangs overhead; other lamps, globes of brass and glass, glow nearby. Before you is a couch, neatly tufted and boxy, padded with an assortment of pillows in muted geometric designs. Circles of faded terra-cotta and pale yellow; mint-green and mustard confetti; white, with black half-circles and two little dots — aha. Those are boobs. You look down. Upon the terrazzo nougat of the coffee table, a glass tray trimmed in brass. It holds a succulent in a lumpy ceramic pot, a scented candle with a matte-pink label. A fiddle-leaf fig somewhere looms. Above a bookshelf (spines organized by color), a poster advises you to WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE. In the far corner, within the shrine of an arched alcove, atop a marble plinth: one lonely, giant cartoon jungle leaf, tilting from a pink ceramic tube. You sense — in a way you could neither articulate nor explain — the presence of a mail-order foam mattress somewhere close at hand.
M
All that pink. All those plants. All that white. It’s so clean! Everything’s fun, but not too much fun. And there, in the round mirror above the couch: It’s you. You know where you are. Or do you?
The Telegraph has today another of those stories that makes you want to launch some Hellfire missiles from a drone at another elite university.
Cambridge University Students’ Union has said that having military personnel at freshers’ fair is “alarming†for attendees and could “detrimentally affect†their mental health.
Students voted to ban any societies from bringing firearms along to the fair after Stella Swain, the welfare and rights officer, argued that some people may find them “triggeringâ€.
The motion said that the presence of firearms and military personnel at the fair shows “implicit approval of their use, despite the links between military and firearms and violence on an international scaleâ€.
Ms Swain, who proposed the motion, pointed out that CUSU had previously committed to supporting efforts to “demilitarise†the university, and that freshers’ fair should not be a place for “military organisations to recruitâ€.
“The presence of firearms and military personnel at freshers’ fair is alarming and off-putting for some students, and has the potential to detrimentally affect students’ mental welfare,†the motion said.
Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of the British Forces in Afghanistan, labelled the motion as “pathetic, to say the very leastâ€.
1899 – Yale installs its first president who is not an ordained clergyman.
1926 – Mandatory chapel-service attendance for Yale undergraduates abolished.
1958 – Communist William Sloane Coffin appointed Yale Chaplain.
2019 – In an apparent bid to stave off marginalization and irrelevance, the Yale chaplain’s office offers undergraduates access to a toddler-style bouncy castle.
“Check out our new Bouncy Castle for your anxiety relief needs. Bring a friend and bounce out your stress. We’ll be up around campus when the weather is nice. Follow us at #YaleChaplainsBounce”
Esteban Elizondo is only a senior at Yale, but he’s indignant enough to be an alumn.
Last weekend, 148 students stormed the field at the Harvard-Yale game to protest climate change, causing a 50-minute delay and forcing the players to finish in the dark. The Post editorial board called it “the college-version of a toddler’s meltdown,†and that is exactly right. As a current Yale student, I am constantly stunned by the childish behavior of my peers, who are voting-age adults attending what is supposedly one of the most prestigious colleges in America.
At Yale, there is seemingly a new protest every week. Each protest carries the same juvenile self-righteousness, enabled by a university administration that never dares to challenge its student body.
Yale “first-years†arrive on campus curious and mostly capable, but the university quickly proceeds to bubble-wrap their young minds, eliminating any trace of discomfort from their college experience. Rather than allowing students to learn through adversity, the administration creates a safe space where students are never told “no.†Instead, they’re provided with amenities ranging from therapy puppies to sandboxes — more fitting of a day-care center than a university.
Rather than confront its student body with uncomfortable truths, the university creates an alternate reality, where the only opinion that matters is yours, especially if you’re a leftist. Earlier this month, a group of students painted their faces white and began wailing outside a classroom as part of a protest against professor Emma Sky, whom they lazily branded a “war criminal†because she once served as an advisor to the commanding general of US forces in Iraq and the commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.
To be clear, professor Sky has dedicated her entire adult life to peace in the Middle East, and her calming influence during the war no doubt saved countless lives. But the students made no legitimate attempts to academically engage with her and claimed this was “interdisciplinary research†on the “ethnography of power.†Incredibly, this antic was part of a student’s senior project that was awarded both funding from a residential college and school credit.
The Harvard-Yale football protest, meanwhile, called for both schools to divest from fossil fuels, as though this could actually solve climate change, when the real answers are far more difficult and complicated. Apparently, America’s most academically successful students believe that conducting juvenile demonstrations is a more effective way to fix problems than proposing actual solutions.
But at Yale, there is little interest in challenging infantile thinking, because doing so would not advance the university’s objective: making sure students stay happy in school and get employed after graduation to satisfy its paying customers (parents). As a result, Yale undergrads spend four years totally detached from the rest of America and graduate without the skills needed to become future leaders who can meet the complex challenges of the 21st century.
In Yale’s defense, the college and other “elite†schools are successful at placing their students in influential positions. And we are now beginning to see the consequences of these graduates entering the real world. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, for example, was stacked with Ivy League-educated staffers, including Robby Mook (Columbia ’02, campaign manager) and Amanda Renteria (Harvard MBA ’03, national political director).
However, acquiring a good job and being good at that job are not the same thing. In the same way that Yale students believe in progressive ideas about climate change and intersectional politics with a religious certainty, Clinton’s campaign arrogantly assumed that voters from Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would never pull the lever for Trump. Had Clinton’s team questioned their beliefs, as the best colleges once taught its students to do, staffers would have made her visit those states rather than taking victory laps in October.
Listening to the latest Democratic presidential candidates — whose ideas were mostly forged in ivory towers — suggests this won’t change anytime soon. Given their academic pedigrees (14 of the original 24 declared candidates attended Ivy League schools), it isn’t surprising how out of touch they are. Promising to eliminate private insurance and advocating for open borders does not endear oneself to the average American.
This sense of immunity from the real world could be heard at last Saturday’s protest, where some students shouted “My father is a lawyer!†to police officers trying to persuade them off the field. These protesters did not sound like people who have faced true hardship or even learned the basics of a proper argument. But then again, why would they? They were taught to avoid all that at Yale.
John Ziegler, at Mediate, argues that the bad behavior of those left-wing millennial snowflakes at last Saturday’s Harvard-Yale Game is exactly the kind of thing producing the opposite results from those the perpetrators desire.
[T]he annual Harvard-Yale football game, known as “The Game†as one of the most storied rivalries in all of college sports, was delayed for about an hour because of students protesting “Climate Change†on the field at the end of halftime. No big deal, right?
To most observers this seemingly minor development was viewed as somewhere between a source of mild amusement and trivial nuisance. But to me, it was a total outrage, and symbolic of how liberals losing their damn minds is paving a path, via extreme political correctness, for President Donald Trump to somehow win reelection.
First, let’s lay out the situation. These protesters, who had apparently been planning this stunt for months, took the field at the very end of the halftime intermission (as opposed to the beginning of it) for the expressed purpose of causing a delay to the game and therefore getting more media attention.
It appears that the authorities at Yale, where the contest was played at the venerable and historic Yale Bowl, were well aware of what was going down. They treated the students, who were clearly trespassing, with the kind of kid gloves which this generation, one that has spent their childhood receiving trophies they never earned and being constantly protected from having their feelings hurt, has come to fully expect.
These spoiled-brat demonstrators apparently thought nothing of selfishly disrupting the most important game of the year for their fellow students, many of whom were playing the final football games of their lives, and all of whom had worked their asses off to prepare for it (Yale was playing for at a least a share of the Ivy League championship). In response to their terroristic tactics, the administrators of each super-liberal super school were clearly terrified of disrupting their political statement, which was completely irrelevant to anything having to do with football, or really even Harvard and Yale.
After taking quite a bit of time to allow for the changing of the diapers of the student protesters (apparently many other woke students, never wanting to be left out of an attention-seeking act of virtue-signaling, joined in from the stands as the demonstration dragged on), the authorities then decided to grant the request of many of the activists to be arrested. All of this caused the teams to go back into their locker rooms, thus creating further delay because they had to warm up all over again once the field was finally cleared of all the remaining wokeness.
It should be noted that there seems to be zero doubt that, because being against climate change is considered by liberal elites to be inherently good, the protesters were treated vastly differently than if they had somehow decided to champion a conservative cause. Does anyone serious believe that if a group of “Pro-life†students had done the same exact thing to protest abortion (an issue over which a college has a heck of a lot more control than climate change) that they would not have been immediately kicked off the field and probably suspended, or worse, from each school?!
On ESPN, which was broadcasting the game, the coverage of what was going on was about as liberally biased as it would have been if MSNBC had been doing the commentary. Led by former network political analyst and anchor Jack Ford, the whole fiasco was treated as if was simply a weather delay without even a hint of condemnation of the students for the significant chaos they had caused to the game (by the way, the weather for the game was absolutely perfect for football, so perhaps climate change isn’t really so horrible).
As it turned out, the anarchy provoked by the protesters had even more impact than would be initially understood because of a perfect storm of circumstances. You see, the Yale Bowl, built in 1914, has no lights, and New Haven, Connecticut is one of the very first cites on the East Coast to lose sunlight this time of year.
Consequently, when Yale made a furious comeback to send the game into overtime, the most critical plays of the game ended up being played in near total darkness. Had Harvard pulled off just one more good play, the lack of light would have forced the game to be declared a tie, thus costing Yale the share of their league title that they would eventually win.
I get mocked on Twitter all the time whenever I mention a crazy episode like this helping Trump’s re-election efforts. Obviously, no one is going into the voting booth next November with this debacle on their minds (though, now that this horrible precedent has been set, I can see stuff like this happening more frequently and becoming a prominent news topic).
Instead, what I mean by this is that there is a whole group of key voters, particularly in critical states, who are more than willing to ditch Trump as long as that doesn’t mean giving liberals the power to completely mess with their lives in a radical way. Seeing a major college football game almost destroyed because of this kind of liberal nonsense and overt hypocrisy is the exact type of story which makes those voters very nervous about handing everything over to a bunch of lunatics.
As I have said many times before, Trump’s political rocket-ship is fueled by the extremely negative reaction Middle America has to political correctness. What the kids at Yale did was just add a bit more gas to his tank (which is ironic given their protest of fossil fuels).
The funny part here is that I am quite sure that these children are all quite proud of themselves today. But in reality they did more to help a man they hate than they did to combat climate change.
