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What a bad idea
Sunday, August 31, 2003
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK
Well, I was almost ready to post some long rambly thing about Gamble & Huff and the pleasures of buying new CDs and the sad bearing that it has on the prospects for my continued resistence to the RIAA, and then FUCK, I accidentally looked at my mouse wrong and another part of the blog-editing box gets clicked and my post gets lost despite the promise of a popup box to save it somewhere, although I'll be damned if I can find out where it is. So instead of being actual content, I will simply say that (1) no, I am not abandoning this ur-blog yet, (2) FUCK BLOGSPOT for eating my post, and (3) Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes' version of "Don't Leave Me This Way" is actually musically better than the Thelma Houston version (although nothing on God's green earth is ever going to rub the corns of the Thelma Houston version as far as emotional intensity goes. That giant vocal swell - well, like I have to tell YOU about it).
Also: Preston Sturges continues to amaze and astound me. I watched Hail the Conquering Hero last night and the climax literally had me standing up and raising my arms in triumph. I have seen six Sturges movies and the least among them is a work of staggering genius, albeit a work of staggering genius that doesn't happen to be particularly congruent with my movie-steez. If you're bored out there in ReadingMyBlogLand, you really couldn't do much better. More later.
Well, I was almost ready to post some long rambly thing about Gamble & Huff and the pleasures of buying new CDs and the sad bearing that it has on the prospects for my continued resistence to the RIAA, and then FUCK, I accidentally looked at my mouse wrong and another part of the blog-editing box gets clicked and my post gets lost despite the promise of a popup box to save it somewhere, although I'll be damned if I can find out where it is. So instead of being actual content, I will simply say that (1) no, I am not abandoning this ur-blog yet, (2) FUCK BLOGSPOT for eating my post, and (3) Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes' version of "Don't Leave Me This Way" is actually musically better than the Thelma Houston version (although nothing on God's green earth is ever going to rub the corns of the Thelma Houston version as far as emotional intensity goes. That giant vocal swell - well, like I have to tell YOU about it).
Also: Preston Sturges continues to amaze and astound me. I watched Hail the Conquering Hero last night and the climax literally had me standing up and raising my arms in triumph. I have seen six Sturges movies and the least among them is a work of staggering genius, albeit a work of staggering genius that doesn't happen to be particularly congruent with my movie-steez. If you're bored out there in ReadingMyBlogLand, you really couldn't do much better. More later.
Friday, August 29, 2003
Yes, I Am Going To Ramble Like An Lefty Emotard
I am starting to wonder if pop culture has run its course. There's a lot of shit that came with the baggage of the elevation of low culture in the mid/late 70s, but at the heart of it was something truly special: the unparalelled access it permitted to those wishing to participate. This wasn't Beatnik culture (where you allegedly had to have talent) or the Hippie culture (where you allegedly had to believe in shit); this was pure mercantile culture, where anyone could participate as long as they had the green. Crass? Of course. But that same kind of crassness was what drew people to the movies of the 30s and early 40s, widely recognized as the golden moment in American cinema: the only requirement to partake in the genius of artistic forces like Preston Sturges or Frank Capra or Cary Grant or Jean Arthur was the ability to plunk down the money for the ticket.
Before you say it: no, this isn't Yet Another Dirge Against The Percieved Lack Of Artistry In The World Today. Frankly, I tend to think that people who say that aren't paying attention; in the movie world alone, you've got the prodigious talents of people like Wong Kar-Wai and Steven Soderbergh and Michael Haneke and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and about nine hundred other directors ALONE that I could probably roll out. If anything, we've got a talent glut: too many talented artists making too many things to consume.
And therein lies the problem: we've reached the point where we can't keep moving forward without letting the old stuff die. In his introduction to Paolo Cherchi Usai's The Death of Cinema, Martin Scorsese notes two rarely-mentioned facts: one, that as recently as 1999, a half-billion hours of film were produced around the world, and two, that all of the restoration being done to classic films is inevitably for shit, since the chemical process that drives filmmaking inevitably breaks down. There simply isn't *anyone* in the world with the resources to encounter that much text - neither time nor money can permit it.
Pop culture, therefore, has lost its democratic side and is making rapid strides towards oligopoly. Unless you make a concerted effort to develop a taste in a certain aspect of pop culture, access to it is limited. My favorite movie of the year thus far is 11'09''01, and yet I only saw it because I'm such a giant dork that I bought a DVD player with region-free capabilities and imported the DVD from England. (It will, however, be opening domestically this fall in a few cities.) That's a pretty long way to have to go in order to gain access to a movie, and it's far from the only example I could cite. I would hardly expect, let alone ask, anyone else to go to the same lengths.
It's easy to argue here that the consumer base just got lazy, or that the studios grew bloated, or whatever. The problem with these characterizations, of course, is that they're inherently moral; in the context of the American consumer culture (which is the only one that I'm even remotely qualified to talk about), "laziness" runs perpendicular to the ingrained Protestant work ethic, and "bloated" implies a former ideal which simply never existed (you think they didn't have the equivalent of Renny Harlin in the 30s?). And given that if there's a lesson to be learned from the last fifty years, it's that there cannot be a consistent morality, critiquing things on that basis just seems like solipsism. Fun? Sure. Therapeutic? Of course. Productive? Not in the least.
We need to find a new common ground on which to approach pop culture. It's not like it's going to go away; pop culture exists to front people a sense of belonging, and given the increasingly aggressive self-serving mercantile nature of the world, that's not a need that people are going to ignore. I suppose that we could just recalibrate the common ground on which we approach pop culture; it's easy to make a political connection between the way we engage pop culture and the way we engage our own lives, and it seems like a fruitful exercise to use the one to change the other.
But ultimately, that's a zero-sum exercise; the search for meaning and catalysis has, thus far, led us to a point where we're creating more than we can consume and abandoning more than we know. Historically, the solution to this problem is to abandon that form of cultural expression (ask today's court jesters). But look around; look carefully. Is pop culture still adequately representing the world you live in? It does mine, and judging by the revenues generated from movies and music sales (not to mention the proliferation of file sharing, which is probably the single biggest democratic act in culture consumption in a good long while). It's not the culture itself that's breaking down, it's the model of consumption.
The question for culture activists, then, is one of how you change the model, and for that you need to study culture consumption instead of just the culture. The only constants we really have left are biological; aside from the fact that we all eat, sleep, and secrete, what goes for me doesn't go for you. How, then, do you change the model?
I would argue that one great way to start would be to drop the bedamned auteur theory (aka the methodology by which we read a text as the product of an author). I can't say that it always seemed retarded to make grand sweeping statements about an author's "intentions" or "meanings" - after all, looking for answers in cultural texts is the reason why we have texts to begin with - but the older I get, the more futile it seems to do that. The only way you can ever really discern an author's intent is to read interviews with the author - in other words, to avoid the work you're trying to characterize. And even then you've got to be very very careful, because authors have been known to be less than reliable at times when it comes to claiming authorship (viz. Welles, Orson).
But indulge me; try a specious little experiment for a second, and attempt to apply the auteur theory to science. Richard Feynman, for instance, was an enormously charismatic individual who made enormous contributions to science. Yet is he the author of that science? Would it exist if not for him - that is to say, are the impulses behind his discoveries predicated on his existence? I wouldn't say so. Science is the continued study of forces outside our control - just like the needs pop culture fills. So ask yourself the same about pop culture - can you trace all the ennui in the early 60s back to L'avventura?
The function of auteurist criticism is to recognize people especially skilled at recording the world as it is, not at continuing the evolution of the medium used to record. That function, of course, is better fuelled by abstraction, something auteurism is dangerously good at explaining away - since you're explaining the entire text in humanist terms anyway, can't you just end the discussion by saying "it's part of his schtick" or something? But that doesn't actually *say* anything at all about the medium or about how we consume it, only about how you interacted with the text. Fuck all that. Preston Sturges had a schtick, yes, and it's enormously fun. But it moved the medium of film forward because it was inexorably tied to the medium's properties; it wasn't just about presenting information, it was presenting information in a new way (the wild intuitive leaps, the faster-than-Capra dialogue, etc.). Just like Bowie's various characters did for music (setting the table nicely for the innovations of the Talking Heads and Marilyn Manson, among others), or Vermeer's colors did for painting. You can apply an auteurist model to any of their works, but it just doesn't hold up outside of the context of your own perspective.
It also seems to me like a shift has been occurring toward the medium-intensive artists in recent years anyway. I yield to nobody in my love for Michael Bay (well, at least as far as The Rock and Bad Boys 2 go), but I'll be the first to admit that he's damn near substanceless as far as content goes. Close to the only things made available as reactive agents are devices of the medium - big-ass booming explosions, gracefully choreographed fight scenes fractured by editing, things of that sort that you can't get from anywhere else. And yet he's given millions and millions of dollars to make movies, because they make money - meaning that there's a market for that kind of thing. People like form because there's meaning and pleasure to be found there.
I'm not saying that we should only evaluate things literally; I recognize that I enjoy it because I'm a giant weirdo, and that most people would be just as happy watching whatever's at the megaplex as I would be to pay a kajillion dollars to see the new Wong Kar-Wai movie a day early. Old methods aren't irrelevant. But if we don't start pushing media, soon they'll be outstripped. I want to be a movie critic more than anything in the world, and it's not so that I can impress friends or dazzle crowds of chicks at parties. I want to be a critic because I think movies have meaning, just like I'm sure that Nate considers music to have meaning or Brendan does with literature. Many people, of course, will think quite the opposite. But the point isn't to benefit everyone; most people these days can't speak for themselves, let alone everyone. The point is to push the medium and sustain its vitality. Just because culture is bigger than yourself doesn't mean that you can lapse in your duty to kick it in the ass if you think it's necessary.
I am starting to wonder if pop culture has run its course. There's a lot of shit that came with the baggage of the elevation of low culture in the mid/late 70s, but at the heart of it was something truly special: the unparalelled access it permitted to those wishing to participate. This wasn't Beatnik culture (where you allegedly had to have talent) or the Hippie culture (where you allegedly had to believe in shit); this was pure mercantile culture, where anyone could participate as long as they had the green. Crass? Of course. But that same kind of crassness was what drew people to the movies of the 30s and early 40s, widely recognized as the golden moment in American cinema: the only requirement to partake in the genius of artistic forces like Preston Sturges or Frank Capra or Cary Grant or Jean Arthur was the ability to plunk down the money for the ticket.
Before you say it: no, this isn't Yet Another Dirge Against The Percieved Lack Of Artistry In The World Today. Frankly, I tend to think that people who say that aren't paying attention; in the movie world alone, you've got the prodigious talents of people like Wong Kar-Wai and Steven Soderbergh and Michael Haneke and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and about nine hundred other directors ALONE that I could probably roll out. If anything, we've got a talent glut: too many talented artists making too many things to consume.
And therein lies the problem: we've reached the point where we can't keep moving forward without letting the old stuff die. In his introduction to Paolo Cherchi Usai's The Death of Cinema, Martin Scorsese notes two rarely-mentioned facts: one, that as recently as 1999, a half-billion hours of film were produced around the world, and two, that all of the restoration being done to classic films is inevitably for shit, since the chemical process that drives filmmaking inevitably breaks down. There simply isn't *anyone* in the world with the resources to encounter that much text - neither time nor money can permit it.
Pop culture, therefore, has lost its democratic side and is making rapid strides towards oligopoly. Unless you make a concerted effort to develop a taste in a certain aspect of pop culture, access to it is limited. My favorite movie of the year thus far is 11'09''01, and yet I only saw it because I'm such a giant dork that I bought a DVD player with region-free capabilities and imported the DVD from England. (It will, however, be opening domestically this fall in a few cities.) That's a pretty long way to have to go in order to gain access to a movie, and it's far from the only example I could cite. I would hardly expect, let alone ask, anyone else to go to the same lengths.
It's easy to argue here that the consumer base just got lazy, or that the studios grew bloated, or whatever. The problem with these characterizations, of course, is that they're inherently moral; in the context of the American consumer culture (which is the only one that I'm even remotely qualified to talk about), "laziness" runs perpendicular to the ingrained Protestant work ethic, and "bloated" implies a former ideal which simply never existed (you think they didn't have the equivalent of Renny Harlin in the 30s?). And given that if there's a lesson to be learned from the last fifty years, it's that there cannot be a consistent morality, critiquing things on that basis just seems like solipsism. Fun? Sure. Therapeutic? Of course. Productive? Not in the least.
We need to find a new common ground on which to approach pop culture. It's not like it's going to go away; pop culture exists to front people a sense of belonging, and given the increasingly aggressive self-serving mercantile nature of the world, that's not a need that people are going to ignore. I suppose that we could just recalibrate the common ground on which we approach pop culture; it's easy to make a political connection between the way we engage pop culture and the way we engage our own lives, and it seems like a fruitful exercise to use the one to change the other.
But ultimately, that's a zero-sum exercise; the search for meaning and catalysis has, thus far, led us to a point where we're creating more than we can consume and abandoning more than we know. Historically, the solution to this problem is to abandon that form of cultural expression (ask today's court jesters). But look around; look carefully. Is pop culture still adequately representing the world you live in? It does mine, and judging by the revenues generated from movies and music sales (not to mention the proliferation of file sharing, which is probably the single biggest democratic act in culture consumption in a good long while). It's not the culture itself that's breaking down, it's the model of consumption.
The question for culture activists, then, is one of how you change the model, and for that you need to study culture consumption instead of just the culture. The only constants we really have left are biological; aside from the fact that we all eat, sleep, and secrete, what goes for me doesn't go for you. How, then, do you change the model?
I would argue that one great way to start would be to drop the bedamned auteur theory (aka the methodology by which we read a text as the product of an author). I can't say that it always seemed retarded to make grand sweeping statements about an author's "intentions" or "meanings" - after all, looking for answers in cultural texts is the reason why we have texts to begin with - but the older I get, the more futile it seems to do that. The only way you can ever really discern an author's intent is to read interviews with the author - in other words, to avoid the work you're trying to characterize. And even then you've got to be very very careful, because authors have been known to be less than reliable at times when it comes to claiming authorship (viz. Welles, Orson).
But indulge me; try a specious little experiment for a second, and attempt to apply the auteur theory to science. Richard Feynman, for instance, was an enormously charismatic individual who made enormous contributions to science. Yet is he the author of that science? Would it exist if not for him - that is to say, are the impulses behind his discoveries predicated on his existence? I wouldn't say so. Science is the continued study of forces outside our control - just like the needs pop culture fills. So ask yourself the same about pop culture - can you trace all the ennui in the early 60s back to L'avventura?
The function of auteurist criticism is to recognize people especially skilled at recording the world as it is, not at continuing the evolution of the medium used to record. That function, of course, is better fuelled by abstraction, something auteurism is dangerously good at explaining away - since you're explaining the entire text in humanist terms anyway, can't you just end the discussion by saying "it's part of his schtick" or something? But that doesn't actually *say* anything at all about the medium or about how we consume it, only about how you interacted with the text. Fuck all that. Preston Sturges had a schtick, yes, and it's enormously fun. But it moved the medium of film forward because it was inexorably tied to the medium's properties; it wasn't just about presenting information, it was presenting information in a new way (the wild intuitive leaps, the faster-than-Capra dialogue, etc.). Just like Bowie's various characters did for music (setting the table nicely for the innovations of the Talking Heads and Marilyn Manson, among others), or Vermeer's colors did for painting. You can apply an auteurist model to any of their works, but it just doesn't hold up outside of the context of your own perspective.
It also seems to me like a shift has been occurring toward the medium-intensive artists in recent years anyway. I yield to nobody in my love for Michael Bay (well, at least as far as The Rock and Bad Boys 2 go), but I'll be the first to admit that he's damn near substanceless as far as content goes. Close to the only things made available as reactive agents are devices of the medium - big-ass booming explosions, gracefully choreographed fight scenes fractured by editing, things of that sort that you can't get from anywhere else. And yet he's given millions and millions of dollars to make movies, because they make money - meaning that there's a market for that kind of thing. People like form because there's meaning and pleasure to be found there.
I'm not saying that we should only evaluate things literally; I recognize that I enjoy it because I'm a giant weirdo, and that most people would be just as happy watching whatever's at the megaplex as I would be to pay a kajillion dollars to see the new Wong Kar-Wai movie a day early. Old methods aren't irrelevant. But if we don't start pushing media, soon they'll be outstripped. I want to be a movie critic more than anything in the world, and it's not so that I can impress friends or dazzle crowds of chicks at parties. I want to be a critic because I think movies have meaning, just like I'm sure that Nate considers music to have meaning or Brendan does with literature. Many people, of course, will think quite the opposite. But the point isn't to benefit everyone; most people these days can't speak for themselves, let alone everyone. The point is to push the medium and sustain its vitality. Just because culture is bigger than yourself doesn't mean that you can lapse in your duty to kick it in the ass if you think it's necessary.
The following was, in its entirity, the snarky-ass entry I had planned on writing about the VMAs last night:
"The VMAs happened last night."
As you may be able to discern, I am somewhat hostile to the continued existence of the VMAs. But then I got into work and heard about the Madonna/Britney/Christina thing and...[sheepish grin] yeah. Dammit, I'm a man. On some level I'm sure it's just cultural conditioning ("hey, lookit them thar fay-muss girlies kissin' each other all sexy-like and whut-fer! YEE-HAW etc."), but oh well. Likewise, I'm sure that their motivation behind the stunt was less than pure, to use the least applicable term to unfortunately spring to the front of my mind; there's a giant wad of comments on Fark about how they're just doing it because sex sells or whatever. That may well be the case; I can't say that I understand the intuitive leap between "girls making out" and "buy buy buy", but then again, it's aimed primarily at a demographic where Chingy is (however momentarily) a commodity.
But whatever. None of that diminishes the awesomeness of the event, and by "awesomeness", I don't mean that in a Womyn's Movement/Fuck The Advertisers/Ideology-Of-The-Week kind of way. In this age when marketing and testing has gotten so specified that they can essentially make a movie literally about my life(called American Splendor - and no, I'm not harboring delusions that I'm Harvey Pekar, but he's a frustrated cynical rabidly-self-pitying guy who files medical records. Conenct the fucking dots, people.), it's good to see that deep down, I'm just as much of a pervert as the rest of the world. Sometimes a cigar, to borrow another unfortunately contextual phrase, is just a cigar :)
"The VMAs happened last night."
As you may be able to discern, I am somewhat hostile to the continued existence of the VMAs. But then I got into work and heard about the Madonna/Britney/Christina thing and...[sheepish grin] yeah. Dammit, I'm a man. On some level I'm sure it's just cultural conditioning ("hey, lookit them thar fay-muss girlies kissin' each other all sexy-like and whut-fer! YEE-HAW etc."), but oh well. Likewise, I'm sure that their motivation behind the stunt was less than pure, to use the least applicable term to unfortunately spring to the front of my mind; there's a giant wad of comments on Fark about how they're just doing it because sex sells or whatever. That may well be the case; I can't say that I understand the intuitive leap between "girls making out" and "buy buy buy", but then again, it's aimed primarily at a demographic where Chingy is (however momentarily) a commodity.
But whatever. None of that diminishes the awesomeness of the event, and by "awesomeness", I don't mean that in a Womyn's Movement/Fuck The Advertisers/Ideology-Of-The-Week kind of way. In this age when marketing and testing has gotten so specified that they can essentially make a movie literally about my life(called American Splendor - and no, I'm not harboring delusions that I'm Harvey Pekar, but he's a frustrated cynical rabidly-self-pitying guy who files medical records. Conenct the fucking dots, people.), it's good to see that deep down, I'm just as much of a pervert as the rest of the world. Sometimes a cigar, to borrow another unfortunately contextual phrase, is just a cigar :)
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
WATCH. THIS. SPACE.
Yes, I know ordinarily new blogs are packed full of shit as people explore the blog-space of their lives and shit, but not me, nosir; my plaintative wheadlings about wine, women, and inadequate mail delivery are thankfully still a glint in my eye. Instead I have plans. Big fucking plans. Big hour-long plans which will benefit YOOOOOOO. My reccomendation: Go download Soulseek yesterday, if you didn't already have it. (ANDYOU CAN'T TAKE ALL THAT SCRILLA WITH YOU, SO DONATE SOME TO NIR WHYDONCHA. I'm poor and I do it.)
This will either work or I will look very very stupid in a matter of days.
Yes, I know ordinarily new blogs are packed full of shit as people explore the blog-space of their lives and shit, but not me, nosir; my plaintative wheadlings about wine, women, and inadequate mail delivery are thankfully still a glint in my eye. Instead I have plans. Big fucking plans. Big hour-long plans which will benefit YOOOOOOO. My reccomendation: Go download Soulseek yesterday, if you didn't already have it. (ANDYOU CAN'T TAKE ALL THAT SCRILLA WITH YOU, SO DONATE SOME TO NIR WHYDONCHA. I'm poor and I do it.)
This will either work or I will look very very stupid in a matter of days.
My idjit friends
One of my friends has taken leave of his senses and has decided to hitchhike across the country, to See What Is To Be Seen. He has also created a blog to record his various doin's and a-goin's, so feel free to check in on it every so often (it'll be permalinked too).
I wonder why I never even thought of going on one of these Le Grande Adveteures. I would like to think that it's because I am a Sane Person, butif that's the case, "not going hitchhiking" is just the exception that proves the rule.
One of my friends has taken leave of his senses and has decided to hitchhike across the country, to See What Is To Be Seen. He has also created a blog to record his various doin's and a-goin's, so feel free to check in on it every so often (it'll be permalinked too).
I wonder why I never even thought of going on one of these Le Grande Adveteures. I would like to think that it's because I am a Sane Person, butif that's the case, "not going hitchhiking" is just the exception that proves the rule.
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
Announcing a Con-Test
I need a title graphic - something not unlike Nate's. If ye wifhe to submitte one, just email it on over to EDIT CUZ I'M DUMB. The winner will recieve...the satisfaction of seeing their work head up my page every time they visit. GIT TO IT, yawl.
Edit: In these days of Sobig and shit, am I actually dumb enough to ask people to email me files? I would have hoped not, but here we are. Der.
I need a title graphic - something not unlike Nate's. If ye wifhe to submitte one, just email it on over to EDIT CUZ I'M DUMB. The winner will recieve...the satisfaction of seeing their work head up my page every time they visit. GIT TO IT, yawl.
Edit: In these days of Sobig and shit, am I actually dumb enough to ask people to email me files? I would have hoped not, but here we are. Der.
It needed to be said
I work in the medical-records department of a hospital (think Harvey Pekar) for an outside agency. There is one particular room in the department where doctors come to look over dictation or whatever the hell doctors do when they aren't curing cancer. In this room, there is a radio. The radio is always on, and in the year and three months (depress-a-mundo) that I've been working here, it's always been tuned to conservative talk radio shows.
Now let's get something straight right up front: I love conservative talk radio. (Same goes for the Fox News channel.) My reason? Because it's really fucking funny. I don't mean that conservative doctrine is ridiculous (it's not a baseball team, it's just another way to look at the world), but rather that the hosts somehow have been given license to say the craziest fucking things in the world. The king, of course, is Michael "Go choke on a sausage" Savage, yet there's plenty of stupidity to be found in just about all of them.
Well, yesterday I heard one of them say very possibly the Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard Ever, and it went a little something like this. (This IS paraphrased, but what follows is the gist of it. I swear before God almighty that the following sentiment was expressed, and I heard it.)
"All the time, you get these liberals attacking conservatives on moral issues - Bush didn't serve in Vietnam, this guy's soft on family values, conservatives are - stuff like that. When's the last time you heard a conservative attacking all liberals on issues of character?"
Seriously, folks, my head was swimming.
I cannot underemphasize how very much everything I described in this entry did, in fact, happen.
I work in the medical-records department of a hospital (think Harvey Pekar) for an outside agency. There is one particular room in the department where doctors come to look over dictation or whatever the hell doctors do when they aren't curing cancer. In this room, there is a radio. The radio is always on, and in the year and three months (depress-a-mundo) that I've been working here, it's always been tuned to conservative talk radio shows.
Now let's get something straight right up front: I love conservative talk radio. (Same goes for the Fox News channel.) My reason? Because it's really fucking funny. I don't mean that conservative doctrine is ridiculous (it's not a baseball team, it's just another way to look at the world), but rather that the hosts somehow have been given license to say the craziest fucking things in the world. The king, of course, is Michael "Go choke on a sausage" Savage, yet there's plenty of stupidity to be found in just about all of them.
Well, yesterday I heard one of them say very possibly the Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard Ever, and it went a little something like this. (This IS paraphrased, but what follows is the gist of it. I swear before God almighty that the following sentiment was expressed, and I heard it.)
"All the time, you get these liberals attacking conservatives on moral issues - Bush didn't serve in Vietnam, this guy's soft on family values, conservatives are - stuff like that. When's the last time you heard a conservative attacking all liberals on issues of character?"
Seriously, folks, my head was swimming.
I cannot underemphasize how very much everything I described in this entry did, in fact, happen.
And for those of y'all that are wondering (all three of you), yes this is going to be more about music than movies. Inevitably I'm going to start yammering about movies, of course, but I want to try to save the dynamite stuff for the Bedamned Secret Project, so music probably comes first mostly. Probably better this than clogging the ITVR music forum, anyway.
ATTENTION BRAD FUCKING COPELAND
Can you fucking hurry up and officially put out the blingin' blangin' remix of "Tom's Diner" already? Jesus CAH-RYST, I wanna go ahead and call it the best Thee Danse Myoosick song of the year.
Can you fucking hurry up and officially put out the blingin' blangin' remix of "Tom's Diner" already? Jesus CAH-RYST, I wanna go ahead and call it the best Thee Danse Myoosick song of the year.
The deaf and the dumb
Man, Putzfuck really does suck sometimes (that time most typically taking place over the entire course of a day), but they do serve a purpose by existing. It's always fun to go through their archived reviews and read them hamfistedly trashing albums that you love (example: Few things are more incriminating than Daft Punk's own lyrics, which, while generally deeper than "don't stop the dancing," rarely go beyond sensitive junior high poetry and "could this be love" Whitesnake-isms. FUQ U BUDDY); I think probably everyone does it with every critic (seeing as how a pop-culture critic is only as useful as his congruence to your own personal taste), but since PF hates everything good it's especially fun.
And yet sometimes things go horribly, horribly right. Last night, after a long day of working like the Only Mule in Georgia without having slept the night before, I decided to spend my last few lucid hours watching I Love the 70s and browsing around, and...fuck. I'd forgotten all about "Drinking In LA", which got played like three times on M2 during my sophmore year, only one of which I managed to hear (viz. the Wiseguys). But the PF guy really did nail it: you only have to hear that shape-shifting hook once and you are fucking THERE and you know it.
I guess you can really trace the origins of this blog directly to that moment. Partially, of course, that's because pop culture exists to form communities between consumers, which is probably why the source of the memory-flood is so staggeringly surprising, as generally I would like to run very very far away from anything associated with PF. I have no doubt that if this blog finds an audience, it will be due to any skill I have in translating my reactions to a text object into the English language.
But that's all bullshit; I'll join a support group if I want to meet people like me. I'm more interested in the qualities that made the hook itself so paradoxically instantaneously memorable. Part of me wants to say that it was just the time - remember that I first ran into the song in 2000, right smack in the middle of the renaissance of Limp Bizkitry and Ja Rulisms - and that nothing else out there really had that undulating tapped-snifter sound. But that's got to be nothing but bullshit; someone out there HAD to be doing it better. If there's nothing else that we can take away from postmodernism, we can always run back to that.
So what, then? Is memory just cultural? Do I remember BV3k so fondly because of some shit that happened to me when I was five or whatever? I certainly hope not; if that's true, then Taste exists as a sort of shorthand for art. We have art because individuals want at least SOME part of themselves to live longer than them, of course; it's just the survival instinct elevated to the level of culture. If said culture has progressed to the point where we're interacting directly with the medium of tones and notes itself, then yeah, on the one hand that means that we have a more informed base to work from, but on the other one...can't everyone hear sounds (except deaf people, of course)?
I am not one to polemicize things offhandedly; I am a big believer in self-determination and the day I speak for someone else is the day I jump off a bridge holding a very large rock. But to me, it seems implicitly dangerous to start interacting with culture on THAT basic a level, especially if (like me) you're doing it from a taste-centric, uneducated background (six months of piano lessons, three guitar lessons, and some elementary school recorder booklets are the width and breadth of my musical education). It's a different thing if you really kick your own ask to learn about the medium, of course - generally "more education" seems to be my answer to every problem with society - but nobody seems to want to do that anymore, including myself (at least when it comes to music).
Please understand that I'm also not saying that society is fucked up because everyone is stupid and doesn't do the research in order to Fully Realize their Implicit Burning Love of Bran Van 3000 - far from it. Today's pop culture is more globally informed than at any other point in history, and it's adding new cultural links every day (ALFONSO CUARON is doing the next Harry Potter movie, ferchrissakes). Yet the way we consume it really hasn't changed since the advent of MTV: those who want to encounter it have to go straght to a fixed source of legitimacy, be it MTV, VH1, or one of the ClearChannel stations. (I generally don't count internet radio, if only because the cost of accessing it is so prohibitive and the conditions of access are so much more restrictive. However, when they come out with a portable internet radio tuner not known as a laptop or a Palm Pilot, I will be all up in its shit.)
I think that's probably the root of the problem. The fundamental crisis on the horizon for tomorrow's significant cultural thinkers is going to revolve around consumption more than ever, because we're (hopefully) transforming from a self-serving culture into one forced to think globally AND locally. (I guess that's all we can really hope to learn from the current Bush administration. FOUR BUCKS FOR GAS IN PHOENIX, people.) Yet in the meantime, we still have to go to the one source, and the hydra-head we talk to doesn't really matter all that much. I wonder what would have happened if Nate or David or Brendan or Eric or Rick had told me to download the BV3K album instead, and I'd come across that song by accident rather than by programming. Would I still remember it three years later?
What I want most in the world is to prove that it could.
Man, Putzfuck really does suck sometimes (that time most typically taking place over the entire course of a day), but they do serve a purpose by existing. It's always fun to go through their archived reviews and read them hamfistedly trashing albums that you love (example: Few things are more incriminating than Daft Punk's own lyrics, which, while generally deeper than "don't stop the dancing," rarely go beyond sensitive junior high poetry and "could this be love" Whitesnake-isms. FUQ U BUDDY); I think probably everyone does it with every critic (seeing as how a pop-culture critic is only as useful as his congruence to your own personal taste), but since PF hates everything good it's especially fun.
And yet sometimes things go horribly, horribly right. Last night, after a long day of working like the Only Mule in Georgia without having slept the night before, I decided to spend my last few lucid hours watching I Love the 70s and browsing around, and...fuck. I'd forgotten all about "Drinking In LA", which got played like three times on M2 during my sophmore year, only one of which I managed to hear (viz. the Wiseguys). But the PF guy really did nail it: you only have to hear that shape-shifting hook once and you are fucking THERE and you know it.
I guess you can really trace the origins of this blog directly to that moment. Partially, of course, that's because pop culture exists to form communities between consumers, which is probably why the source of the memory-flood is so staggeringly surprising, as generally I would like to run very very far away from anything associated with PF. I have no doubt that if this blog finds an audience, it will be due to any skill I have in translating my reactions to a text object into the English language.
But that's all bullshit; I'll join a support group if I want to meet people like me. I'm more interested in the qualities that made the hook itself so paradoxically instantaneously memorable. Part of me wants to say that it was just the time - remember that I first ran into the song in 2000, right smack in the middle of the renaissance of Limp Bizkitry and Ja Rulisms - and that nothing else out there really had that undulating tapped-snifter sound. But that's got to be nothing but bullshit; someone out there HAD to be doing it better. If there's nothing else that we can take away from postmodernism, we can always run back to that.
So what, then? Is memory just cultural? Do I remember BV3k so fondly because of some shit that happened to me when I was five or whatever? I certainly hope not; if that's true, then Taste exists as a sort of shorthand for art. We have art because individuals want at least SOME part of themselves to live longer than them, of course; it's just the survival instinct elevated to the level of culture. If said culture has progressed to the point where we're interacting directly with the medium of tones and notes itself, then yeah, on the one hand that means that we have a more informed base to work from, but on the other one...can't everyone hear sounds (except deaf people, of course)?
I am not one to polemicize things offhandedly; I am a big believer in self-determination and the day I speak for someone else is the day I jump off a bridge holding a very large rock. But to me, it seems implicitly dangerous to start interacting with culture on THAT basic a level, especially if (like me) you're doing it from a taste-centric, uneducated background (six months of piano lessons, three guitar lessons, and some elementary school recorder booklets are the width and breadth of my musical education). It's a different thing if you really kick your own ask to learn about the medium, of course - generally "more education" seems to be my answer to every problem with society - but nobody seems to want to do that anymore, including myself (at least when it comes to music).
Please understand that I'm also not saying that society is fucked up because everyone is stupid and doesn't do the research in order to Fully Realize their Implicit Burning Love of Bran Van 3000 - far from it. Today's pop culture is more globally informed than at any other point in history, and it's adding new cultural links every day (ALFONSO CUARON is doing the next Harry Potter movie, ferchrissakes). Yet the way we consume it really hasn't changed since the advent of MTV: those who want to encounter it have to go straght to a fixed source of legitimacy, be it MTV, VH1, or one of the ClearChannel stations. (I generally don't count internet radio, if only because the cost of accessing it is so prohibitive and the conditions of access are so much more restrictive. However, when they come out with a portable internet radio tuner not known as a laptop or a Palm Pilot, I will be all up in its shit.)
I think that's probably the root of the problem. The fundamental crisis on the horizon for tomorrow's significant cultural thinkers is going to revolve around consumption more than ever, because we're (hopefully) transforming from a self-serving culture into one forced to think globally AND locally. (I guess that's all we can really hope to learn from the current Bush administration. FOUR BUCKS FOR GAS IN PHOENIX, people.) Yet in the meantime, we still have to go to the one source, and the hydra-head we talk to doesn't really matter all that much. I wonder what would have happened if Nate or David or Brendan or Eric or Rick had told me to download the BV3K album instead, and I'd come across that song by accident rather than by programming. Would I still remember it three years later?
What I want most in the world is to prove that it could.
I do not like blogs.
I really do not like blogs.
Blogs to me are something to be distrusted. I think Anne Frank really ruined it all - before her, diaries were something that were supposed to be, y'know, personal, not something that could Change the World or Influence Lost Souls or whatever. And yet that's what the lion's share of blogs are - people trying to rationalize away their lives by transforming them into objects of consumption. (The most terrifying thing I may have ever read on the internet: a response to a post on another blog reading "I just like reading your life".)
Well, I say fuck all that. My life is a constant struggle to keep it one hundred and eighty-six percent separate from the culture; there's a reason why I want to be a film critic instead of a filmmaker. Thus, those are the terms that I'm going to engage Blogdom in - the terms of Me Liking Or Disliking Things About Culture. Hence the name.
I am not promising, however, that this will not slowly devolve into "OMG eye NeEd A GF yo" or whatever; when I was thirteen I wanted to be an environmental lawyer and then when I was sixteen I wanted to be a vulcanologist. Things change. But be thou forewarned: at least at first, if you think I'm going to be talking about how my life is hard because I don't have a toaster, you may want something else.
I really do not like blogs.
Blogs to me are something to be distrusted. I think Anne Frank really ruined it all - before her, diaries were something that were supposed to be, y'know, personal, not something that could Change the World or Influence Lost Souls or whatever. And yet that's what the lion's share of blogs are - people trying to rationalize away their lives by transforming them into objects of consumption. (The most terrifying thing I may have ever read on the internet: a response to a post on another blog reading "I just like reading your life".)
Well, I say fuck all that. My life is a constant struggle to keep it one hundred and eighty-six percent separate from the culture; there's a reason why I want to be a film critic instead of a filmmaker. Thus, those are the terms that I'm going to engage Blogdom in - the terms of Me Liking Or Disliking Things About Culture. Hence the name.
I am not promising, however, that this will not slowly devolve into "OMG eye NeEd A GF yo" or whatever; when I was thirteen I wanted to be an environmental lawyer and then when I was sixteen I wanted to be a vulcanologist. Things change. But be thou forewarned: at least at first, if you think I'm going to be talking about how my life is hard because I don't have a toaster, you may want something else.
