lizzybennet

Un Chien Andalou

lizzybennet

lizzybennet

Ms. Rich, 33, was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Now at The New York Times, also as a reporter. She graduated summa cum laude from Yale and received a master's degree in English from Cambridge University in England. She is the daughter of Junko and Peter Rich of Petaluma, Calif.

Junko, not Jacko, not Yoke

Un Chien Andalou

lizzybennet

But they still have a need for authenticity. So on the lowest level you have kids wearing preworn shirts and clothes based on realities they never knew or understood. Bands they never saw years ago adorn t-shirts they just bought a week ago. Children of privilege wearing working class clothes despite the fact that few of them ever did manual labor outside of playing with a toy toolset as a kid. And on the higher level, you have kids who are truly twisted: White Jewish suburban kids pretending-and sometimes even believing-they are black and other similar things.

It basically all comes down to a disconnected world filled with kids who are the victims of neo-overbearing parents and their "good intentions" trying to find some authenticity to their cleansed existence.

You want to avoid stuff like this? It's simple. If you're poor, then don't pretend you are not. And if you are rich, then don't pretend you are not. Be yourself on every level and then the need to lie and manipulate the way Margaret Seltzer, James Frey, and Laura Albert have done.

And let's not even get on the subject of people faking Holocaust and other genocidal tragedies in their lives. Those people should just rot in hell.

Jack S

Sherman Oaks Indian Tribe has displaced Crips and Bloods in South Central L.A. Turf War. Mad Ronald relinquishes power to Chief Starbucks.

Un Chien Andalou

GeorgeBabbitt

Un Chien Andalou

People found that, while she was a fictional character, there was a kind of empathic unsettlement they felt nonetheless...and a subsequent collective mourning. While she was fictional, there was something they wanted to be/felt was real in her loss.

Err.....yeah.

Theda_Bara

SarahHeartburn

rosaluxembourgeoise

I'm so glad Mad Ronald's been found, you we're beginning to obsess about the OFG (Original Faux Gangster)

Chorus:
You down with OFG (Yeah you know me) 3X
Who's down with OFG (Every last homie)
You down with OFG (Yeah you know me) 3X
Who's down with OFG (All the homies)

Fabricator by Nature

Un Chien Andalou

I'm taken aback by the public response elicited by Madd Ronald's Youtube clip, eg "you ever heard of rollin 20s nigga? since i was 16 nigga.. you know what im sayin? frosty? spoon nigga.. we fucked dwarves in the ass."

A great many other comments, although they don't speak directly to the dwarves issue, would seem to suggest that Madd Ronald is himself some sort of impostor or "gangsta wannabe."

These dissenters offer what appears to be compelling evidence that Madd Ronald doesn't really know much at all about gang culture in Los Angeles.

HAVE WE REACHED YET ANOTHER LEVEL OF DECEPTION???

EPIC FUNKADELIC REALISM LIVES!

LONG LIVE FUNKADELIC REALISM!!!

Hamud Ibn Hamud

mutatis mutandis,
outstanding,outstanding parry

pas de touche

mouche; bouton

Un Chien Andalou

shout out to ronald - the rest of us already know "how gang banging affects mind, body, and soul". we have you.

suzyO

Madd Ronald's myspace:

"My name Is Ronald Chatman, Most people know me as O/G/B MADDRONALD. I am currently INCARCERATED working on my Book due to be release in the near future. I am OG of the Rollin 20s Neighborhood bloods and my purpose on here is to touch as much people as I can. I want to educate the world on how gang banging affects mind, body, and soul. All is well, I am also looking for a publisher anyone with information contact me. I am looking for pen pals mostly females also my homeboy from Leuders Park Piru needs some hit ups, so look out Bloods. Keep in touch and check out the page once a week for new writings. Keep it Rollin Bloods. O/G/B Maddronald Westside Neighborhood Rollin 20's Blood."

Sigerson

+ Watch video

Sigerson

SheWalkedWithAZombie

trojanhorse

Michael Jahn

rocked

rosaluxembourgeoise

I think you might be selling foriegn knock-offs, Trojans don't come in 15 packs.
We're way off topic. This should be under the American Apparel thread.

Un Chien Andalou

notthatpopular

"A former fashion writer for The Times of London, [Emily] Davies had signed a contract with Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, to write a memoir tentatively titled "How to Wear Black: Adventures on Fashion's Front-line." But according to Publishers Weekly, the book, acquired by Sarah McGrath, the editor at Riverhead Books who shepherded Ms. Seltzer's "Love and Consequences," was canceled when a story in Women's Wear Daily discovered numerous fabrications and plagiarized passages in the book proposal."

Seeräuber Jenny

trojanhorse

I think you should write Madd Donald's autobiography, in the spirit of Alan Sokal's 100% bullshit pomo piece that so delighted the editors of Social Text; that is, until Sokal gleefully announced he'd snookered the clueless dipshits.

That's off the record.

rosaluxembourgeoise

I agree with what you said, she said.
Can I come over so we can read together?
You will be Ramona and I, Alessandro, till I go mad and get shot, then miraculously become Felipe, and we will go live in Mexico.
Your Kafka quote got me aroused, damn.

Un Chien Andalou

"It's really lunatic: how much people want stories to be true."

I suppose this is a not-so-sly dig at my sincere, if misplaced, hope that Madd Ronald is real.

May I please state in my defense that I believe in the power of metaphor?

Even if Madd Ronald doesn't exist in the empirical sense, he remains a powerful symbol that continues to comfort and inspire us all.

Please see my paper on this subject, "Bling and Nothingness: The Phenomenology of Madd Ronald."

Hamud Ibn Hamud

I believe in you, and will be the first in line to buy a book signed by trojan horse.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

+ Watch video

Un Chien Andalou

trojanhorse

And it isn't new to say that America is well suited to the genre of autobiography because of the ethos of self-reinvention. Coming out of Augustine and Pilgrim's Progress and Rousseau, the autobiography is also shaped by Christianity and Enlightenment ideals about the rebirth of the self. As is America.

Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona is one of the great 19th century American novels. It is a romance so the prose is a bit purplish for modern tastes but the descriptive passages about early California are quite good. It deals with the transition from Spanish to Anglo California, the situation of Native Americans (news flash: not good) and the problem of miscegenation. Jackson never said the story was true but it was so popular that every town in California had a Ramona pageant, there were at least three movies made, and most California towns have a street named after the character. You can still visit the tourist sites for places like Ramona's "wedding chapel" etc.

It's really lunatic: how much people want stories to be true.

SheWalkedWithAZombie

Dickdogfood

trojanhorse

Also, tldr.

Hez

This is a non-credit lecture, and will not be on the test.

Laura Browder. Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000. 312 pp. $49.95 cloth/$18.95 paper.

When the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot slyly warned, "If there is, among all words, one that is inauthentic, then surely it is the word 'authentic,'" he might have been cautioning against the authenticity touted on advertisements, flap or back copy, and reviews of many of the best-selling "ethnic impersonator autobiographies" that Laura Browder studies. Her cast of "slippery characters" includes Mattie Griffith, the abolitionist creator of The Autobiography of a Female Slave (1857); Lillian Smith, a "voluntary Indian" renamed "Wenona," who starred in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in the 1880s; the "imaginary Jew" Elizabeth Stern, whose I Am a Woman--And a Jew (1926) was penned by the illegitimate child of a Welsh Baptist mother and a German Lutheran father; Sylvester Lance, the son of former slaves who "transformed himself into the internationally famous Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance" and composed the memoir Lance Long (1928); Ben Reitman, a Jewish lecturer and Chicago fund-raiser whose Sister of the R oad: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha (1937) became a 1972 film about hobos directed by Martin Scorsese; John Howard Griffin and Grace Halsell, the passers who recorded their cross-racial impersonations in, respectively, Black Like Me (1960) and Soul Sister (1969); Asa Carter, the KKK racist whose The Education of Little Tree (1976) "sold much better than any other Native American autobiography published at the time"; and Danny Santiago, whose Famous All Over Town (1983) was praised for its rich portrayal of Chicano street life until, the secret behind the pseudonym revealed, he was replaced by the social worker Daniel James, a graduate of Andover and Yale.

The figures Werner Sollors calls "ethnic transvestites" demonstrate to Laura Browder that "the tradition of American self-invention," inaugurated by Ben Franklin, enabled a number of self-fashioners to apply the hegemonic logic of the "fluidity of class identity" in the United States to "the porousness of ethnic identity." With scrupulous detail, she examines not only each of these literary and social events, but also their reception so as to demonstrate that "ethnic passage from one identity to another is not an anomaly" in America. Following in the steps of such scholars as Eric Lott and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who work on whites masquerading as people of color, Marianne Torgovnick, who studies Anglos imitating Native Americans, and Michael Rogin, who analyzes Jews blacking up, Browder proves that what historically has passed for authenticity may simply be a re-inscription of stereotypical and biologistic attitudes toward racial and ethnic identity. At the heart of this study stands the paradox that success ful racial and ethnic imposters have to master the racial registers they deploy, and so they may restrict rather than expand, re-inscribe rather than subvert their readers' assumptions about identity. For this reason, according to Browder, not so much the act of passing but the exposure of the impersonator offers the possibility of liberating readers from fixed ideas about race and ethnicity.

Some of the chapters in Slippery Characters veer away from ersatz autobiographies to discuss, for instance, theatrically staged performances at P. T. Barnum's racial exhibits; Helen Hunt Jackson's best-selling novel about Native Americans, Ramona (1894); Israel Zangwill's influential play The Melting-Pot (1908); and the "revolutionary blackface" performed by the Symbionese Liberation Army in the nineteen-seventies. Although Browder recognizes "the transgressive quality of an outrageous joke" in the racial impersonations she records, humorous and playful episodes are often eclipsed by the acts of racial violence and dispossession that she records. In large measure, too, Slippery Characters tends to focus on the ethnic impersonator autobiography, which is now "a genre on the verge of extinction." According to Browder's last chapter, where she glances at recent works like Shirlee Taylor Haizlip's The Sweeter the Juice and Gregory Howard Williams's Life on the Color Line, "a deconstruction of racial categories" h as begun and contemporary memoirs tend to dramatize not temporary racial passing so much as sustained processes of racial re-definition. On her last page, Browder summarizes her findings about what the tradition of the autobiography--which, she believes, is "uniquely suited" to America's mythologies--tells us about racial history: "While race may be a construction, it wields tremendous power in the lives of most people, for whom racial and ethnic categories are far from abstractions." Such a conclusion does not substantially enliven current thinking about race; however, Slippery Characters contains an ample archive of cross-racial masquerades in American cultural history.

COPYRIGHT 2002 African American Review
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group

Un Chien Andalou

SheWalkedWithAZombie

SheWalkedWithAZombie

TheBigDoggy

SarahHeartburn

But the authors are obviously not brilliant. And brilliance doesn't sell books. The publishing industry wants memiors from people of color that write sentimental narratives about overcoming oppression and finding your true self (I am strong. I am beautiful. etc.): books that can be described as "moving" and "touching." And they have to be memoirs not fiction. Because fiction is hard. And brilliant writers might do things that are unfamiliar and/or complicated.

I don't feel bad for the publishers or readers that are fooled by this. Their appetite for this crap is what makes it possible for the imposters to succeed. They get what they deserve.

SheWalkedWithAZombie

there's a bit from me that sure as hell nobody has to fact check to see it for the bull-droppings it is.

saltwatertaffy

You're welcome, Karion.

But to the extent I've toiled, I've toiled for Gawker, for America, and because I, too, am hostage to the hope that Madd Ronald is real.

I believe with a sincere heart that someday Madd Ronald will be made manifest unto us, either bodily, or in transfigured, exalted form that will know neither death nor dawn.

Hamud Ibn Hamud

Un Chien Andalou

I have really appreciated your efforts in all of this.

Do you think Madd Ronald is real? I so want to believe. This story is just outrageous and beyond the pale. No pun intended, of course.

karion

-Franz Kafka, "The Wish to Be a Red Indian" (1913). Muirs' translation.

SheWalkedWithAZombie

Un Chien Andalou

trojanhorse

SarahHeartburn

Also, I'm sure the white kid in a black neighborhood has that great man bites dog appeal that makes a story particularly desirable, but it also makes it very easy to check. She would have stood out so dramatically, it seems like it would have been pretty easy for someone to verify that she actually lived there for 12(?) years. How about a copy of her high school annual?

coastrange

GeorgeBabbitt

In Other News...

belltolls

In Other News...

MisterHippity

In Other News...

SarahHeartburn

Of course we said as much in this forum *days* ago.

After Sigerson quikly tracked down Peggy's websites, I believe I called the International Brother/SisterHood Foundation nothing more than an expression of Peggy's "inchoate longings."

I'm hoping the L.A. Times will go the extra mile and interview Madd Ronald, because I love him unconditionally.

Also, it would be nice if we could find someone who can tell us whether Peggy's pit-bull tattoo is real.

Hamud Ibn Hamud

This Book Is A Fake Autobiography: I Am Not A 16 Year Old Runaway Hooker Taken In By Wolves On the Outskirts Of Glendale California.

belltolls

In Other News...

Dickdogfood

uncle_wiggly

She keeps it handy so she can honestly tell people, "I've got a little Indian in me."

MisterHippity

In Other News...

SarahHeartburn

LolCait

Moff