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Sarah the Hussy (![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} braisinhussy) wrote in ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/community.gif){kind=small} fandom_wank,@ 2006-10-29 23:23:00 |
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| Entry tags: | actors, crazy people, feminism: you're doing it wrong, sockpuppets |
James Urbaniak vs. teh crazy
This starts in June 2006 and is ongoing.
Actor James Urbaniak has a livejournal. I know him only as Dr. Venture from the Venture Brothers, but he's done a bunch of other stuff.
His resume has caught the attention of one karen_strang. In her inaugural LJ post, she compiles a list of "the most egregious woman-haters of America's culture". This list includes urbaniak. In her "review" of American Splendor, she writes:
I also did a little research on an actor named James Urbaniak, who plays the appropriately named "Crumb." He has one of the most appalling filmographies I've ever seen, an endless list of creeps, psychos, perverts and killers. Urbaniak must be rated as one of the most misogynist performers on the planet.
There's more of the same here in her thoughts on his role in Henry Fool.
In this entry, urbaniak posts a picture of one of his babies with a copy of the Venture Brothers DVD. D'awww and all that. In response, karen_strang posts this rant. My favorite exchange:
k_s: James Urbaniak has suborned the will of his spouse and forced her to produce not one child but two.
anonymous commenter: It's not like you can internally chose whether one, two, or more children develop inside of you. Kind of funny to appear to suggest it.
k_s: Well of course you cannot choose. That's how men like it.
Um, what?
Someone brings her to the attention of urbaniak. He makes a post about the situation, and karen_strang comes and responds to practically every comment.
And then... there is a whole lot of crazy from karen_strang, and a lot of just-can't-leave-it-alone from urbaniak. (At this point, I kind of want to smack both of them around a bit.)
After June, they go to their respective corners. karen_strang starts talking about comics, and urbaniak continues talking about Venture Brothers, Kidnapped, his twins, etc. She sort of drops out of the LJ scene in mid-July, posting infrequently.
Until recently.karen_strang is writing a book called The Urbaniak Effect. No, really.
As you can see, I've been busy. The deal for my book, The Urbaniak Effect: The Spectacle of Celebrity, The Subjugation of Women and a Holographic View of Culture is finally nearing completion and the work on the book itself will soon be under way.
How has this occurred? Funny story.
Faithful respondents will recall that I was working on my dissertation some months back when I got sidetracked by an online war with actor/blogger James Urbaniak. All the time I was cursing myself for getting drawn into such a petty battle with a cultural nonentity, it turns out someone was paying attention. Namely, my aunt Cecie, who, as it happens, is a rather influential literary agent in New York. She felt that I was really onto something with my holographic view of culture, where the smallest cultural grain of sand (and Urbaniak and his projects certainly qualify as that: an off-Broadway play, low-budget, independent films, two failed TV shows) can be seen to reveal everything one needs to know about a culture. The study of cultural minutiae is, apparently, a "hot topic" in publishing circles, with books about cod and salt and numbers and colors being abnormally popular at the moment; reaction to the proposal in the publishing world was immediate and substantial and I had several publishers competing for my favors, as it were.
The book is not "about" Urbaniak per se, but rather what he shows about American culture, distilled down to its most basic premises: ie, the primacy of male power, the relentless attack on the rights of women, the bread-and-circuses song-and-dance that keeps a nation distracted from the destruction of a planet at the whim of a male-dominated corporate oligarchy.
Okay! urbaniak must make this known to his readers, so he links to it, and once again karen_strang must come and respond a lot.
Then the whole thing kind of just tapers off. Maybe they'll continue picking at each other. Maybe it'll turn out that karen_strang is a sockpuppet of urbaniak's. Who knows?
