Finally clicked to see what all this is about. I'd never heard of Loren Feldman so while I may be missing some context, a video-going-viral has only itself as context, so I'm not sure that's relevant.
It's not satire. Not even close. That has nothing to do with its offensiveness, but it's not satire, because it's not about anything except Feldman's imagined (at least based on this clip) ability as a comic and what can only be called an all out stereotyping attack on, well, all African Americans. Because that's the size of the brush he uses to slap a random blop of ugly paint onto a video screen. There is nothing there but racism. Nothing. He isn't mocking himself (at least not intentionally), the preoccupations of the tech world, media stereotypes (it cluelessly advances and amplifies them rather then mocking them or revealing them).....anything.. The video is so bad it's ripe for being the SUBJECT of something satirizing racism, stereotypes, cultural preoccupations and norms. Where is there anything here beyond his stating "if a black man was a tech blogger it would be like this and isn't that funny"? It's not even "isn't it funny that a lot of people THINK it would be like this?" It's the actual, blatantly racist assumption. It's thought provoking only if you count "what a creep, does he really think this is funny?" as a thought worthy of provoking. There's just nothing else there. It was so much worse than I imagined from the comments here. Sure, it should be protected speech, of course. But I feel like I've just listened to some drunken racist telling me a bad, long joke behind a bar he's been thrown out of, except for the nauseating knowledge that this has a large audience. If a high school or college kid did this I think it would haunt them for the rest of their lives. Ugly ugly ugly. And stupid to boot. Everyone suffers lapses in judgment and misfires, so I sure hope he owns up to this and makes amends... otherwise, how can one believe he's other than he appears in the clip? Brook _______________________________________________________ Brook Hinton film/video/audio art www.brookhinton.com [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
