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Weekly Revue: 5 May 2013

You Can Find Me In The Club, Doing Whatever I Said I’d Do To You In The Club
Does Danny Brown’s music match the miserable spectacle of his show? Why I’m Sad And A Little Disgusted That Danny Brown Got Head While Performing: A Simple Thought About Artlessness:

But at some point, I have to wonder whether the metaphors for sexual adventure are very entertaining, or whether the straightforward and lavish descriptions of sexual conquest are a metaphor for anything greater. “Outer Space” is a pretty cool, DOOM-ish romp, but then lines like “Love a feminist bitch, oh, it get my dick hard / So no apologies for all the misogyny” and “I’m Wes Craven with X cravings / Fuck a bitch mouth until her fucking face cave in” make me think there’s not a lot of there there.

The (probably) greatest song of ‘our’ generation, “Ignition (Remix)” is just an extended metaphor for fucking, but it’s by turns hilarious, witty, and, most importantly, makes you feel really good. It would be a lot less great if Kelly just repeated variations on “I’m gonna fuck you because I’m famous”. Perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t really create a rewarding experience when Danny says he’s going to cave in some bitch’s face with his dick.

Behind The Bleachers Or Wallflowering At The Prom
A history of smelling young, which is not anything at all as gross as that might sound now that I’ve just typed it out. What Young Smells Like: A Cultural History:

I loved the fact that it was “unisex,” because, FEMINISM! I bet Riot Grrrls smelled like this stuff! Damn the Man, but also, smell kind of like him: Such was the promise of CK One. And I loved, more than anything, the fact that my mother and my neighborhood friends and my girly-girl cousins hated it, were too turned-off by the androgyny and the “headbangers” in the ad (in suburban ’90s Ohio, we didn’t have indie, and we didn’t have punk; we had cool kids, and then we had “headbangers”) to even try smelling the thing, and reacted, when I let them sniff it, with distaste. It wasn’t even SWEET! It smelled like grass or something. Like weed. If you wore it, you would smell like you smoked weed. Like those people in the ad probably did. Who would want that?

The Rape Comic Jazz Hands Cha Cha
An essay about rape jokes, discourse, and — of course — a comments section that dislikes rape jokes but would never dare question their utility or place in culture. Not So Funny: Sam Morril’s Rape Jokes and Female Comedy Fans:

“Hey, I’m attracted to black women. Yeah, I had sex with one once.” (Once!) “It was kind of awkward, because the whole time I was fucking her, she kept using the N-word. Yeah, the whole time, she just kept yelling out, no!”

At that point, much like any of Sam Morril’s conscious ex-girlfriends, I just fastened my eyes to the ceiling and waited for him to finish amusing himself.

That Old Dance About Architecture
About the most promising rapper/soundmaker I’ve organically come across in a looong time. Who is Spark Master Tape and What Does He Do?:

The way Spark Master effortlessly generates a well realized dreadful mood puts him into rare company within the very recent mixtape world. It’s pretty easy to get great beats (or at least jack them), and the lexicon is mostly set. But the way he combines a self-defeated misery and self-medicated revel gives the semi-anonymous Spark Master Tape more personality than many rappers.

BONUS DANCE: Gratuitous Gunplay Pogo Gogo
VIPs, guns, drugs, violence, and Gunplay. Everything you’d expect. How do you like that? Gunplay Is at an All-Time High:

If Gunplay is to be the next great crazed vigilante, we want him capable of violence, but not actually violent. We want him self-aware, but not too consciously crafting image.9 He has to be real, but not too real. It’s an uncomfortable, almost slimy sentiment. But, in that context, putting a gun to your own accountant’s head, though not pulling the trigger, is exactly the sort of act that satisfies this desire.

BONUS DANCE: The Culture Twist And Revolutionary Shout
Those scrappy Marxist editors over at n + 1 try to imagine a western cultural revolution that won’t suck. Cultural Revolution:

A more optimistic third possibility glimpses, in the dark cloud already raining on us, a silver lining of cultural revolution — of rapprochement, that is, between intellectuals and nonintellectuals, the intellectuals becoming more like workers and the workers more like intellectuals without the broadening of cultural life diminishing its liveliness or highest achievements. On the contrary, per Trotsky: “The powerful force of competition which, in bourgeois society, has the character of market competition, will not disappear in Socialist society, but, to use the language of psychoanalysis, will be sublimated, that is, will assume a higher and more fertile form. There will be the struggle for one’s opinion, for one’s project, for one’s taste… . Art will then become more general … the most perfect method of the progressive building of life in every field. It will not be merely ‘pretty’ without relation to anything else.”

In the famous concluding vision of Literature and Revolution, cultural revolution is not a leveling, but a tectonic upthrust. As culture one day becomes the common property of all, “The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”

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Pretty sure that’s not why “bloggers are dumb”, though if the cure for cancer could be found in pageview generation then yes it would be (maybe) a bad allocation of resources to cover stories that are only interesting to yourself. Given the reins to the godhead blog CMS, I know I could only muster the stuff to write (ahem) report about Gay Obama. And we all know how music journalists are heavily invested in optimal allocation of resources. Definitely only write about “Ricky Gervais 2012 Golden Globes Opening Monologue”, “Pe Lanza leva pedrada na cabeça em show! (Rio das”, and “Champion Spotlight - Sejuani, the Winter’s Wrath” or else you may become instantly irrelevant and/or a plague on humanity. Which is it? Bloggers are doing themselves a disservice because the thing they’re writing about isn’t popular enough -or- they’re bloviating pageview grabbers because they jump on the meme train? Allow me to destroy your mind: some people were writing about her video before she even had video. That’s a heavily zen form of blogging. My advice: write about what you want, do a good job, and try to make yourself happy.

Pretty sure that’s not why “bloggers are dumb”, though if the cure for cancer could be found in pageview generation then yes it would be (maybe) a bad allocation of resources to cover stories that are only interesting to yourself.

Given the reins to the godhead blog CMS, I know I could only muster the stuff to write (ahem) report about Gay Obama.

And we all know how music journalists are heavily invested in optimal allocation of resources. Definitely only write about “Ricky Gervais 2012 Golden Globes Opening Monologue”, “Pe Lanza leva pedrada na cabeça em show! (Rio das”, and “Champion Spotlight - Sejuani, the Winter’s Wrath” or else you may become instantly irrelevant and/or a plague on humanity.

Which is it? Bloggers are doing themselves a disservice because the thing they’re writing about isn’t popular enough -or- they’re bloviating pageview grabbers because they jump on the meme train? Allow me to destroy your mind: some people were writing about her video before she even had video. That’s a heavily zen form of blogging.

My advice: write about what you want, do a good job, and try to make yourself happy.

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Yesterday Was Dramatic. Today is OK.

Yesterday I wrote a post that I thought was a pretty clear satire. 1 I guess I’m mostly untroubled by it and the reaction I seem to have received. And since that reaction is part of my whole reason for writing it, I’ll share some of those.

One person said, “This is the best takedown of the show I’ve read.” but that was almost immediately after I posted it, before I made some more changes to the essay because I was worried it would not exactly land how I wanted it to, and maybe before the reader got through all of it or thought about it.

Another person quoted a bit back to me and made an upset comment, and then followed up by saying, “wait you are joking! aren’t you? you are”, which correlates to my thinking that people (myself mostly, but others I’m sure) make Tumblr comments on things (or “like” them) before they’re done reading or thinking about the things.

Another person said, “If HRO had this tone I would read it.” That more or less got to the crux of what I was trying to say.

Another person said, ” i think this is meant somewhat sarcastically? i only think so because i agree too much.” which also got to the crux of what I wanted to say. I’ll return to this comment.

Another person quoted a bit back at me that I said about Jay-Z and told me to “come on”. That was actually really disappointing to me and mostly by itself made me think the post had failed. I actually re-wrote that point quite a bit. I wrote the thing I posted a few days ago, on Monday night after watching the show and having quite an intense conversation about it with my girlfriend. Watching the show confused me because it made me uncomfortable and not like it, but I couldn’t really articulate why except in terms that were clearly ‘not right’, and that made me upset with myself for the most part. So I wanted to write something about it that was able to express my confusion and consternation with myself while also making light fun of people who didn’t ‘get’ the show while also vindicating people who did ‘get’ the show. I don’t have the first draft of the thing I wrote, but I recall that point was originally only about the bathroom scene with Jamina Kirke and Shoshana Mamet, but then I wanted to make a note about the music in the show (Feist, Vampire Weekend, Jay-Z), but I thought taking the piss from Vampire Weekend was both trite and not smart, so I thought it would be funny to take the piss from Jay-Z and pretend to only know him form that song “Ni//as in Paris” because that would be really funny. And I had thought that since I write pretty extensively about hip-hop and even wrote a 6,000 word piece on Watch The Throne and why ostentation and richness is not a good basis for criticism of the album, I thought that joke would at least land. And apparently it did not.

Another person reblogged the post with the title “just your average misogyny in the lena dunham tag”, but that person has since deleted the reblog. That reblog got another reblog, though, with the commentary, “if parts of this post aren’t sarcastic and you aren’t joking: i herby declare any and every female in the world who is willing to sit on your dick would be doing a disservice to their country, their gender, themselves and the world. please, please, please don’t reproduce. or speak”, which seems a little harsh and ill-conceived as a form of rebuke, but it’s also one I don’t necessarily disagree with. [Applies an average critique of young, cis, hetero, white feminism to inaugurate a very involuted and parallel discussion.]

It seems likely that those reblogs spurred another person to create a physical comment (so rare in Tumblr) that said, “#11 negates #9”, which is exactly correct. The whole point of the thing I wrote was that people who make rather thoughtless critiques, or critiques sedimented in what you might call “received wisdom”, they’re often logically incoherent and self-contradictory. This adage runs double-true when it comes to women, who are often held to absurdly contradictory standards and expectations: be fuckable yet chaste, not-dumb but not too smart, don’t obsess about your looks but be very pretty, don’t be self-absorbed but don’t be thoughtless, have your shows and books and cultural detritus but don’t have it actually be about you or things you care about, etc.

Getting back to that one comment I said I wanted to return to: the person who made it is someone I don’t really know but I talk to him on twitter and enjoy talking to him about things like music, and we usually disagree about everything from smartphone cameras to Cam’ron. He’s the sort of person I wrote the piece for. Like, do you think anyone in New York ever reads an Onion article about paying $5,002 for rents in a closet or artisanal kickball-sewing and thinks to himself, “My life has some problems in it. I need to make a change.” I don’t know — probably not? But maybe that happens, and so I wanted to write something that explored my dark feelings for the show and also tried to point out how stupid those feelings are. Because I think there are really very few rhetorical or even practical ways of making a point, and to do it you have to (and I’m really sorry here) deconstruct those problems. That’s really what the word means, don’t you know? You have to inhabit the situation and take it to the nth degree and see where the system cracks, strains, and breaks down. You have to really believe it will get you there, and then when it fails, you have to be honest about why and how it’s failed — what are misogyny’s design flaws? It’s difficult to point them out, I think, with a mere schematic like a fire escape plan. Because misogyny isn’t escaped but rather rushed toward. So it has to be illustrated with an oven that chars you.

I also think it’s pretty rancorous and corrosive for culture warriors and commenters to hold “relatability” as one of the most important criterions for a show’s success in the case of shows about young people or women, but not ever for shows about dragons, incest-rape, meth dealers, Mexican League baseball pitchers, ad executives, zombie apocalypses, high school football coaches, or any police procedural ever.

I don’t know. I’m glad that for the most part “the choir” seemed to get what I was saying, and I’m also sort of glad it upset other people because that’s also the point I suppose. You should be writing nasty emails to me or something, and then we could bon over how terrible I am at writing satire.

  1. Is “satire” even the right word? Probably not. Satire seems to imply to me probably a higher level of art. But I don’t want to use the word “trolling” (gerund), either, because that’s not really what I was trying to do. Ie, I wasn’t trying to say something obviously not true to upset people. I tried to inhabit a rhetorical space that would upset the equilibrium of a like-minded reader. But either way — something like, but not as good as, satire. ↩

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This Talking Is Only Bravado: In a Lifehacker poll from March 2011, nearly a third of respondents...

In a Lifehacker poll from March 2011, nearly a third of respondents said they owned at least five computers, an especially astounding figure if you consider that smartphones didn’t count in the poll. Only 8 percent of respondents owned just one computer. To be fair, Lifehacker readers aren’t your average American—it’s a site dedicated to improving your life through technology, and its fans are probably more internet-savvy and inclined toward gadgets than most. Nevertheless, the typical American consumer isn’t wholly different. In 2009, more than a quarter of all American households had three televisions, and nearly 10 percent had five or more.

This is of course a good piece, but the subtext of the selection above is that the tech press and tech-y sites are always going to have a selection bias for minimizing the social, political, and human costs of technology. This phenomenon drives me nuts because — while influential tech evangelists like Gruber may be at the forefront of tech-murder-colonialism apology — there is a halo effect for the entire media industry that proscribes the breathless acceptance of more and more gadgets in our lives.

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Bethlehem Says: The Classical and You

bethlehemshoals:

The Classical is $8,140 away from its goal. If you’ve donated, we thank you with all our hearts. If you’ve made a principled stance not to—maybe you would prefer to “support” writers with a different model, or believe freelancers can write two things at the same time—then we appreciate your honesty.

If you’re either waiting, or on the fence, this Tumbl is for you. We want The Classical to happen, and we hope you do, too. We’re not asking you to prop up our hobby, or rejecting those time-honored internet precepts of hard work and tireless sacrifice. We just need a hand getting started. If in a year, The Classical can’t support itself, it dies as dead as if it never existed in the first place.

The Classical isn’t just for us, it’s for all of you—the writers interested in contributing, the readers who feel there’s something missing from sports journalism that has yet to be fulfilled. This money allows us, and you, to build the kind of site we know can work without looking over our shoulder from Day 1. It’s a luxury, sure, and may run counter to all libertarian ideals. But we prefer to see it as trust. Trust in what we’ve done, and will do. Or, if you want, good old-fashioned fear. If we don’t raise this money, The Classical doesn’t happen.

It’s an old NPR refrain, but it’s that simple. The Classical won’t exist without you. And if The Classical doesn’t exist, it tells us that it all we need to know. If that’s the case, we’ll take our answer off the air.

Count me in.

I’ve supported Grantland in principle because I like a lot of its writers. Nothing against them! I also wholly, entirely, 100% support paying writers, seeing as how writing money is a good portion of the money that comes into this household, and I really don’t think ‘good stuff’ happens for free, nor should it, for writers just as much as anyone else. But Grantland is mostly not for me. I don’t like the editorial direction and its atavistic insistence to riff on the status quo instead of challenging it. I know this isn’t a Grantland-versus-The Classical situation, but I can’t help frame it like that. When I visit Grantland, I’m presented with a full page ad for Subway. I see all the worst parts of the culture — sexism, racism, reality TV — reflected back on me. Above all, I see a guiding force that’s both not interested in changing, but entirely ignorant of the need for change. I can’t really blame him, since it’s made him rich and powerful. Which, if you think about it, is the entire point — problem as Ouroboros.

Shoals was a founding member of Free Dark, the official second-best sports blog of all-time. Free Darko was one of those sites that opened up my eyes to the possibilities of sportswriting being real writing. It also showed me that you can apply to your contemporary interests the present total of your smarts, education, and overflown/blown feelings. If I’m not mistaken, I’ve never read a thing on Free Darko that made me question why I was reading it, let alone for moral reasons. I’ve never read anything there that made me feel icky or bad for enjoying sports. I get that on a once or twice weekly basis at Grantland. It’s not for me. I know Shoals isn’t the only Classicist on deck, but his work is continually thoughtful, smart, and above all kind. I support that message.

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