Oh dear, I don't know who Edie Sedgwick was! Shame on me!

Ah. Well. I never considered that. And, judging from the ensuing teapot tempest, I’m not alone. Obviously, as my followup posts show, I agree that Edie Sedgwick never earned her fame; she’s a scrap of cultural detritus. Nonetheless, if the upcoming movie is about ES as Warhol’s test case for his “fifteen minutes of fame” thing, then it’s a movie worth making. I still don’t think Prairie Dawn, or whatever this chick’s name is, is the one to play her. But the era of manufactured celebrity is a worthy subject matter, if you ask me, and Edie Sedgwick is probably just about the best subject for such subject matter.

Like, I mean, the title of this thread? Not feeling so ashamed of the whoosh.

So is this whole thing one of them thar Socratic ironies I’ve been reading so much about.

Wait, you did know who Edie Sedgwick was but you asked “Who the hell is Edie Sedgwick?” in the CS thread to point out cultural parallels with Sienna Miller, and titled this Pit thread “Oh dear, I don’t know who Edie Sedgwick was! Shame on me!” because your trap for lissener worked even though his answer was meant as an innocent “Jeez I’m old”?

I’m so confused.

I’m nobody, dork. (NOTE: CULTURAL REFERENCE ALERT!)

I don’t get it. Am I supposed to be an old guy in the back of a limo? Or the butler with white gloves and a spoonette?

Bud Abbott: Who the hell’s on first?
Lou Costello: How the hell should I know?

Does kind of change the tone.

Dude…it’s lissener. In starting this thread, you’ve already expended way more effort than it’s worth.

And now, so have I.

Incidentally, why is he listed as “guest” now?

This continues to crack me up. If any other user name had responded to “who the hell is ___?” with that “kids these days” post, would they have been pitted? Absolutely not. The post might not even have been remarked opon. In any case, the bulk of approbation would almost certainly have come down on RickJay for his aggressive tone, and not the poster who responded as I did. This is, again, absolute proof of the bias I carry here (which, god knows, I’ve done enough to earn a certain portion of). A number of you are so convinced that anything I say is going to be condescending, that if you can find any remote way to interpret what I type as possibly, vaguely, condescending, you’re going to call it proof. You know so much better than I do myself what it was I *really *mean. And each such “proof” is racked up against me as cumulatively overwhelming “evidence” that I’m a condescending prick.

God knows, as I said, that I’ve done my share to earn a certain portion of that burden, but that’s all the more reason I’m usually pretty careful to consider my words and my tone. Nine times out of ten, anymore, when I’m accused of being condescending (or whatever), my intention was nothing of the kind.

This incident, when the innocuousness of my remark is compared against the uproar RickJay manufactured out of his imagination, is absolute proof of this ridiculous bias. No single other poster would have engendered anything like this response for the exact same words, which for me proves that it’s about the “lissener” label on the post, and not the words themselves.

The laughable transparency of the bias in this instance has actually lifted quite a load off my mind. Thanks, guys, for making your objection to what I said so ridiculous as to be absolutely meaningless.

. . . Cue the shamelessly obvious chortles of “paranoid” or “conspiracy!” or “victim.” Whatever; I wrote the above knowing full well what would follow, so check off your boxes if such obvious cliche doesn’t embarrass you. For the record, I posit no conspiracy; snowballing mischaracterization, built on previous mischaracterizations and occasional justifications supplied by me when I type less thoughtfully than I should, is not in any way a conspiracy. And this instance is so ludicrous and laughable that I carry no feeling of victimhood. Accusations of paranoia might be valid to a certain extent, but also certainly, inarguably, justifiable to a degree. But whatever. I’ve played this scene so many times now that my back grows more ducklike with each boring repetition.

If we’re voting, chalk me up as another for “Who the hell is…” as always negative, and itcertainly came across as such in that thread.

call it as a post hoc “whoosh-up”, not a real whoosh. Unless there’s evidence that** RJ** knew who she was, I’d say it smells of after-the-fact justification.

I’m guessing “approbation” is not the word you wanted here.

Haw. Sixteen hours of work and man do my feet hurt and OPPROBRIUM. That’s what I meant. Plus I have a headache.

I wouldn’t take it negatively at all- I read it as someone expressing the fact they have not heard of the individual in question, and wanting to know why they should have heard of said individual in the first place.

YRMW, of course.

lissener! You’re botching it. Badly. Kalhoun framed a perfectly innocuous, perfectly believeable interpretation of your post as a rueful acknowlegement that our knowledge (or lack thereof) of such cultural curios as Edie dates us like carbon-14. At that point all you had to do was nod vigorously, point at Kalhoun, and say “Yup.” And that would have been that.

Instead, you tack on a gratuitous lament about “sweeping cultural illiteracy” which with luck and sympathy you might have passed off as self-directed sarcasm if you weren’t also busily characterizing the subject as significant. Which you were.

Another problem: you keep referring to the post that offended RickJay as your “‘kids these days’ aside.” But it wasn’t. The post was a single seven word declarative sentence. It contained no asides, and it did not contain the words “kids,” “these,” or “days.” The post consisted of a boxed quote of another poster’s question with the appended comment “Sometimes this board is just too depressing.” It is not hard to discern the insult: that you find another poster’s level of knowledge tiring, if not tragic. As I said, Kalhoun opened a door for you to admit another interpretation, and you promptly slammed it shut.

If you know you’ve earned the reputation and these events are still happening frequently enough for you to keep this kind of statistic, you may want to stop burnishing your intention and attend to your execution.

Oh, and lissener, there’s a point at which pre-empting accusations of paranoia that haven’t even been made looks less like a rhetorical device than a symptom.

RickJay was a little bit rude, you were a little bit rude, neither of you was particularly harsh, and somehow both of you are losing the Pitting. The really depressing thing is not that you were both rude but the paltry, trifling cause for which you’re both willing to shed the burdens of civil discourse.

Edie Sedgwick is massively important because Bob Dylan needed someone to allegedly write “Like A Rolling Stone” about…

Yeah, asking a question, that’s willful ignorance.

Sometimes this place is so depressing.

Edie Sedgwick? We don’t need no steenkin’ Edie Sedgwick as long as there’s Mary Woronov. <long tortured sigh>

My god, man. This post, and your last big one above it, and the one that started this whole thing off, so reek of condescension that it makes me wonder if you’re aware of the tenor of your posts at all.

When someone is upset with you, and you talk about how amusing their anger is, that’s condescending. You may want to be condescending, sure, or you may not; but it’s condescending.

Daniel

Okay…I give. Who is she? I’m not familiar with her name at all.

Well, I heard “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” was Bobbie’s tribute to the late Ms Sedgewick.

Surely, I’m not the only oldster here who remembers that the Warhol gang invented the word “superstar.” Edie was one & various speedfreaks/transvestites/etc. also won the title. Nowadays, Entertainment Tonite! bubble-heads use the word without a trace of irony.

I agree that “Who the Hell is…” is just begging for a smart answer.

WTF, asshole? Of course I’m gonna be condescending to a bunch of assholes accusing me of some bullshit transgression. I never said that I was never, under any circumstances, condescending. There are times–bullshit accusations of a personal nature–when it’s perfectly justified. The question at hand, you disingenuous fuck, is whether I was being condescending in the linked thread. Nice bait and switch; I wondered when we’d see some more of your dishonest schtick. (It’s got to bother you, Dorkness, that you can’t ever honestly engage on a subject–at least with me–but that you must feint and sleight in order to appear to score points when you’re not capable of doing anything of the kind. I would drop dead of amazement if you ever directly addressed the actual subject at hand, rather than oh so cleverly redirecting your approach by a degree or two to keep the surface just slippery enough to make actual engagement impossible. Dishonest fuck.)