On the beauty of snobbery – Daniel Mendelsohn in NYRB:

‘I happened to be staying with Bob at his home in Miami Beach when he was working on the near-death experiences piece. This was in 2014; I’d known him for twenty years by that point. (We had met in November 1994, when he was part of a group of people who gathered at a pizza parlor before seeing a preposterous sci-fi movie called Stargate. When the movie was over, we were shell-shocked, but Bob was elated. “That was so fabulous!” he chortled, with a gleam in his eye that, over the next thirty years, I learned to recognize. “We have to do this again next week!” That was the beginning of the Schlock Movie Club, which met pretty much every Saturday or Sunday morning over the next dozen years or so to see the worst movie of the week.)’

Read the obituary here.

Some people would call this camp, a word that I haven’t seen in print for a while by the way, but I would say it’s upgraded snobbery that belonged to the time that Mr. Gottlieb was shining more than ever, the nineties.

In the movie ‘Metropolitan’ (Whit Stillman) there is this fantastic quote, ‘so you’re one of this public transportation snobs.’ Keep in mind, this is about somebody who actually uses public transportation, because he is a snob apparently.

(My father might have been one of then, but he was a snob from Eastern Europe.)

The worst-movie-club is a kind of snobbery that’s not my cup of tea. And needless to say, we all need some snobbery. But this attitude of being above it and indulging in it at the same time, is one of the reasons why irony got a bad name.

If you go to a brothel don’t act as if you’re above it. Indulge in it, as if it isyour last chance of happiness.

This attitude makes Fassbinder such a great director. But that’s another story. And postwar Germany is another story as well, needless to say.