Gawker - Case of the Twotwotwotwotwosdays

Everything you need to know about Twosday.

The date on your calendar is not deceiving you: it is indeed two. It’s several twos, in fact: 2-22-22. While recounting a completely unrelated joke, Mitch Hedberg once said “just press two for a while,” and it has never been truer, or two-er, than it is today, or two-day. But what does 2-22-22 mean, and how do you celebrate it? Several outlets are wondering, and now so are you. Is today’s date connected to “these higher esoteric metaphysical frequencies that align us,” as celebrity astrologer Aliza Kelly told the Washington Post? Should you drop everything and get married in Vegas before the sun sets, as CNN seems to suggest? Not to worry; we have all the answers you need right here.

WHAT IS 2-22-22?

2-22-22, also known as Twosday, has traditionally been feared as the date the integer two would be granted corporeal form. While there is no evidence two would be a malicious figure if given flesh, many worry its diminutive position in the numerical order has resulted in built-up resentment within two that could become cataclysmic under the right circumstances. Not all believe this, however. Some think the assumption that two resents its so-called “diminutive position” is projection on the part of the afeared, and that there is no reason to believe two is not proud of its work, even though it may be “less” than the work of five or seven. “There are no small numbers,” these people say, “just small amounts of things.”

These people have their place

When I was a child complaining things not going my way, my parents would sing the Rolling Stones’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” at me until I gave in. Crucially, they did not sing the part where Mick Jagger says, “If you try sometimes, you just might find… you get what you need,” and as such I was raised to believe that sometimes life just isn’t fair and we must all make peace with that.

Some of you could stand to learn that lesson when it comes to nepotism in Hollywood. Should entertainment be a meritocracy where only the most talented people rise to the top? Sure. Has that literally ever been the case? No. Do you really think all four of the Warner brothers were pulling their weight?

There are cases of nepotism that stink to high heaven. Ivanka Trump’s modeling career, Stephen Baldwin’s filmography, and the fact that we know who Chet Hanks is all prove that. But sometimes it just works, and that is something we should all just chill out about. This is how the business works, and if you want to see talented, normal people act, I recommend regional theater.

But not all nepotism is created equal. In my mind there are three different occasions (maybe two-and-a-half) whereby it is fine for a famous person to have a famous parent. Please note that I said famous parent, not just a rich parent. Nick Kroll’s billionaire corporate investigations father or Taylor Swift’s financial advisor papa do not make them the beneficiaries of nepotism — they simply had class privilege, which is different and frankly more annoying. I will always appreciate someone who went into the family business over someone whose parents paid their rent while they did open mics.

What are those three (two and a half) occasions I was talking about? Thank you for asking. Let’s break them down.

'Meet Me in the Bathroom' and the feeling of indie New York

I’ve been thinking about early aughts New York lately, more than I usually am anyway, and mostly because of a documentary I watched this past Sundance called Meet Me in the Bathroom. The film is an adaptation of Lizzie Goodman’s account of the New York music scene from 2001 to 2011 as told by the people who made it. In refreshing, mesmerizing fashion, the whole documentary is built from archival footage of the time and audio from interviews — no talking heads and sometimes no title markers telling you who’s talking. It’s a little like watching a collective memory: a memory of the time before Napster and file sharing, before Brooklyn got fully gentrified, when people moved to the city because it was still cheap.

Before seeing the movie, I’d been thinking of early aughts New York because I’d been reading Meet Me in the Bathroom — a staple of my downtime as a bookseller, one of the handful of titles I’ve never bought but flip through consistently whenever I get the chance. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Strokes, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, Franz Ferdinand, Moldy Peaches, the Walkmen, Jonathan Fire*Eater are all avatars of a certain mood, a time and place in history, sure, but also a big part of my life.

Which means that, before watching or reading Meet Me in the Bathroom, I’d been thinking about early aughts New York because both projects are really about indie rock, the genre I built my personality around for the better part of high school. I’ve been wanting to write about why so much of that music still matters to me, why it’s funny to see some of those bands come back around into the cultural consciousness as relevant or “actually still good,” when they never really left any of the conversations I tend to have. Then, last week, everyone started talking about “vibe shifts” and the comeback of “indie sleaze.”

From Bravo to the New York Times, this propaganda machine can't be stopped

A few months ago, eagle-eyed Bravo viewers like me suggested that someone up top at NBC Universal was profiting from the proliferation of pickleball scenes across the network’s reality programming, particularly on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Vanderpump Rules. Over the long weekend, a slew of pro-pickleball propaganda from the New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, and more outlets positioned pickleball, essentially a tennis game at a 1:4 scale, as the fastest growing sport in America.

And you know pickleball is red hot when the Times interviews TV’s most relevant star Matthew Perry, once a junior competitive tennis player in Canada, about his gameplay. “I don’t move around as well as I used to, but I saw my friend Amanda Peet talking about pickleball on a talk show and I was like, ‘I have to try this,’” he said.

I knew that Vanderpump Rules’ Lala Kent and Randall Emmett had granted interviews to a pickleball magazine called The Dink, but the Times also alerted its readers to a new magazine called InPickleball with a circulation of 45,000 whose name “comes from an aspiration to emulate InStyle magazine.” InPickleball published a “feature with sun-drenched photos of Teddi Mellencamp Arroyave, the former Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member and a pickleball enthusiast.”

A disclaimer on the Times piece states, “Stuart Emmrich, a former New York Times editor, consulted on the magazine last year but is no longer affiliated with it.”

The 'Righteous Gemstones' actor has perfected playing a certain type of guy

You wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to say that Danny McBride always plays the same character. My ex-boyfriend used to do a solid impression of a typical Danny McBride role because, well, he actually couldn’t stand them. It’s true that McBride – who became known for his memorable supporting turns in films like Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, and Hot Rod – tends to embody men who are cut from the same cloth. These men swear prodigiously, puff their chests, and swing their dicks around. They believe that women owe them sex, strangers owe them respect, and the world owes them everything else. Not because they are remotely impressive or even competent, but because they all share the same vision of how a man acts when he’s a big deal. McBride’s first on-screen role was in his frequent collaborator David Gordon Green’s 2003 indie drama All the Real Girls, and while it was a far demurrer debut of what would come to be the recognizable McBride persona, his character was literally named “Bust-Ass.”

McBride is rarely a leading man, but he’s always a scene-stealer. Since his debut in All the Real Girls, he’s been a pyromaniac explosives expert, an egomaniac Taekwondo instructor, a hotheaded drug supplier, an oafish royal heir, and a guy who drinks green tea all goddamn day. And he’s also portrayed himself — or rather, a version of himself which amplifies the worst qualities McBride is so good at bringing to life. One that, subsequently, all of his friends secretly hate (in This is the End). This is because McBride characters are pig-headed, aggro, misogynistic, arrogant, narcissistic, and prejudiced. Sometimes they are all of these features at once, sometimes only a couple, among other things. These men don’t just demand your attention, they need it to survive. They step into a room and deprive it of oxygen. McBride’s characters always have something to prove because, crucially, they always have something to hide. More often than not, the men that McBride portrays are not only the comic relief, but the butt of the joke. Their personas are a costume — self-loathing beta males masquerading as alphas. Snake oil salesmen trying to sell the world themselves. They are men born and bred in the United States of America.

McBride has made a career out of satirizing American male chauvinism. He highlights the absolute worst features and consequences of Western masculinity, pervasive in McBride’s native South (consistently the locale of his TV series) but not unique to it. The same kind of patriarchal toxicity that can be found anywhere in America, and is distinct to America. This is nowhere better apparent than in McBride’s three TV collaborations with directors Green and Jody Hill (the latter of whom has taken the actor in as something of a muse, since McBride starred as incompetent Taekwondo instructor Fred Simmons in Hill’s feature debut, The Foot Fist Way): Eastbound and Down, Vice Principals, and, most recently, The Righteous Gemstones. It’s a triptych of work that McBride himself has referred to as “the evolution of the misunderstood, angry man”: stories centered on white, entitled, vitriolic losers who think they should be winners. Denied the easy success and acclaim they believe is rightfully theirs, they lash out in increasingly violent, distressing ways. Because with each series, though all three are decidedly bleak, the tone of the show itself and what this particular character is capable of has turned darker, with Gemstones landing comfortably in the genre of black comedy.