Kate Berlant makes it weird!
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Photo Credit: Tyler Ross
You Made It Weird #229: Kate Berlant
Episode 229:
You Made It Weird
Kate Berlant
Kate Berlant
Came to listen to Kate, unfortunately I had to listen to Pete laugh at his own jokes while Kate sat quietly. If only the Todd Barry podcast of her was working for me…
So’s this juice.
Fuck you Pete. Made me spit my coffee out on my desk.
I’ve been on this campaign to get Pete exposed to Richard Linklater’s work as he captures existentialism in art so perfectly. Pete watches Linklater’s latest masterpiece and then what happens – “Doesn’t like it”. Oh well.
The ‘Before…’ movies maybe Pete?
to transcend thought and language is to connect with nature. to be the conciousness of a flower, all flowers.
The ritualization of Pete Holme’s masturbatory practices? You made it weird. Mission accomplised.
You must be new here.
I just adore Pete, but this episode was the first one where I felt genuinely frustrated with the position of white and classist privilege. Pete’s argument about people working at resorts made me so uncomfortable. That he thinks any one of us can speak to their experience, and assuage our own guilt by coming up with this narrative about how happy they may be with this ‘simple’ existence made me cringe. Similarly, I really disagree with the point that we don’t feel bad for people working at Staples, and that’s the same, so why should we feel bad for resort workers. One, I DO feel bad for people working at Staples for minimum wage, and two, working at Staples in America is not the same as living and working in Cabo, Mexico. We just can’t comprehend any of their experience, and the chances of someone working at a resort being a Mila Kunis type from Forgetting Sarah Marshall is just such a slim possibility, and more likely it’s a person deeply entrenched in systemic poverty.
If you see this Pete, I don’t want to hurt any feelings, I just had this reaction that feels like when your friend says something offensive and doesn’t know any better and you feel a responsibility to tell them why it upset you.
Connie, thanks so much for expressing this so well. I couldn’t find the words, they were stuck in my craw…
Completely agree, it was a tough spot to listen to in this one
Not to necessarily disagree with any of the specific points you made there, but I think you misinterpreted what or maybe why he said that, I thought he was referencing his conversation with tj, which wasn’t to say that we can come up with narratives to assuage our guilt, but that the narrative and the guilt are both ridiculous. In this case using the less commonly expected perception of someone in that position possibly being happy with a simple life to illustrate the ridiculousness of assuming anything positive or negative about another person’s situation, essentially making his point more along the lines of you can’t speak to anyone’s experience but your own. Further that the yard stick for being better off or happy or whether or not we should feel bad for someone is also ridiculous. In the grand scheme of things couldn’t it just as easily be that the yard stick we use be one that favors poverty, like some religious practices, and isn’t it weird that we would presume responsibility or guilt for anyone else’s position on either yard stick when we here they are in life and where you are has almost nothing to do your decisions. Who is anyone to assume happiness or unhappiness on a staples employee or someone in systemic poverty and to make the presumption to either pity them or not? Who even decided being happy or comfortable was the ultimate preference? To conclude, I don’t necessarily think any of that, or that that is exactly what tj thinks or even actually said, I just think what Pete said was to express to Kate that tj once asked him why we don’t question why we think the way we do about other people, not that the workers at a resort don’t really have it that bad.