looking for a thread (yes, i'm going to post here occasionally)
my company moved its boston office over the long weekend. as i've unpacked my shit, i came across an old piece of paper covered by 3 little sticky notes with the names of different movies scrawled in my wretched printing:
sticky one: 'the longest yard,' 'charley varrick,' 'night of the living dead (90),' 'logan's run,' 'the gauntlet'
sticky two: 'gator,' 'death wish 4,' 'hercules in ny'
sticky three: 'cabin boy,' 'color of money,' 'disorganized crime,' 'serpico,' 'rosemary's baby'
that's it. no other context.
it has a name
the new music blog:
house lights soundtrack
fire
complacence: just good enough; whimsy; the deliberate promulgation of symbols (ribbons a-plenty) and -isms as substitute for exercised human decency; rationalization of "me" and "my needs" (the reason that self-awareness is so important culturally now is that it's a slick way to break with the baby-boomers; somehow, the implicit logic is that self-knowledge makes naked self-interest more ok); marginalizing anything that threatens dandyism by deeming it too serious or angry (fear), or dismissing it with a roll of the eyes or a twirled finger at the side of the head; obscurantism as a substitute for substance.
funny that "purging" and "purgatory" are knotted together at the latin root.
meditation is its own kind of purging.
exercising is a whole lot of fat burning.
fire is a symbol of revolution. purification written on the grand social scale.
that's all preface to a change that's relevant to the blog, and while i'm shooting myself in the foot a bit by being vague, it's unintentional, and i can assure you that when i have a name for this new thing i've got, i'll let you know what it is.
thanks, jim
pursuant to
this post,
here's someone saying a lot of things that are true (bolding is mine):
"By no means are those disparate cultures [moneyed white preppydom; afropop] natural bedmates.
The best African and Caribbean pop is a joyful celebration of life issued in defiance of oppressive political forces, poverty and disease, or pretty much the exact opposite of the inspiration for the soul-searching of most preppy artistes. This is not to say that preppies can’t make great art. But Koenig is hardly following in the footsteps of J.D. Salinger, John Updike or John Irving by illuminating the profound emptiness hiding behind the cheerfully privileged facade;
he is celebrating the superficialities.
“As a young girl/Louis Vuitton/With your mother/On a sandy lawn,” Koenig sings of an object of his affections in “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.” “As a sophomore/With reggaeton/And the linens/You’re sitting on… Can you stay up/To see the dawn/In the colors/Of Bennetton?”
And let’s not even talk about the obsessions with Cape Cod and geeky academic trivia (“Oxford Comma” is a song inspired by the correct use of punctuation, while “Mansard Roof” pays homage to an architectural style famously seen on the Louvre), or
the attempts to “keep it real” by contrasting such nerdy references with calculated name drops ranging from worldbeat pioneer Peter Gabriel to foul-mouthed rapper Lil’ Jon.
“Calculated” -- ultimate, that word is at the heart of what bugs me most about Vampire Weekend, and my gripes crystallized at SXSW, where the band members were ubiquitous, walking the streets wearing their Dockers and polo shirts, with white cardigans casually but carefully tied around their necks — in Texas, in the day time, with a temperature of 92 degrees."
hahahahaha
look at this first.
10 things white people likeif i was to add a number 11 to this list, it would be: "self-awareness and playing with one's hair to look cute and thoughtful when mugging for the camera"
some pretty heavy IRONY there, given that this is the site creator we're talking about, eh folks?
if i was to add a number 12 to this list, it would be: "the veneration and sexualization of the slacker nerd."
see, my problem with
this site (more specifically, the popularity this site has garnered) is that it's content to merely present these things. as is de rigeur, it spoon feeds its patrons with the most surface level observations WITHOUT implying any kind of stance, any kind of urgency, any kind of argument, any kind of significance or conclusion to be drawn from its content.
it's more empty navel-gazing junk along the lines of those vh1 "i love the __'s" shows. it's the stereotypical bad stand-up comic who has to tweak his voice when delivering a joke because the observation it contains is so baldly apparent (white people like impersonating this guy). it's subversion with training wheels permanently fastened on.
there's no palatable sense of, good lord, we're in TOTAL FUCKING CULTURAL INERTIA AND HAVE BEEN FOR WAY TOO LONG AND WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?!?
it's lazy. it's cowardly. it doesn't present anything new. it encourages complacence of thought. and ultimately, it galvanizes the acceptance of the essential herd mentality it purports to lampoon.
but hey, white people just love being in on the joke, so it's harmless, right?
i am trying very hard to not let this bother me
and yet, i can't help it.
something about this --
"opening dawn: fans up early for baseball" -- reminds me that in spite of loving baseball and knowing that the red sox are going to be my team for the rest of my life, there's this weird provincial constriction to being a fan of the sox that has nothing to do with (or at least, should have nothing to do with) how the players play the game, or really with the game of baseball in general.
it's like, i read this article about people packing into the bars in the early hours of a weekday morning to watch their team, and then, quite unbidden, those stomping chords that open "i'm shipping up to boston" go rattling through my mental jukebox (remember when the music people called 'punk' actually went for the jugular?), and oops, here comes boozy, brawling sully, red-faced and full of piss and vinegar, and somehow this more than any physical danger he could possibly represent makes him a man to be given wide berth, a man to be accorded a tacit respect, i guess, and yes sir, here comes some anonymous, crowing, drunken floozy wearing a pink red sox cap and hanging on sully's arm, and her volume will have to be tolerated by one and all because she'll put out some sloppy sex, things revert as they always do to form, bobblehead dolls, remdawg, wally, dunkin donuts, "-ah" everything, f-ing shaughnessy, real salt of the earth people, boston traffic, everything's a-ok, we're all marching belligerently without a care in the world, aside from the satiation of the loudest of our screaming hungers, onward and forward towards death.
this is what it calls to mind. it's hard now to imagine starry-eyed kids with big league dreams getting psyched for little league, and memorizing more numbers than a nasa engineer could hope to cram into his brain, and i don't think of elder figures passing along first-hand accounts of moments that have fallen through history's cracks to eager, reverential listeners, and i don't feel these sweeping, overwhelming senses of tenacity, of triumphing over adversity, of blurred racial and national lines, hands joined in the brotherhood of the common goal, because so many meaningless and certainly less vital elements of the game and of a team are amplified so greatly.
yahooism's been written about a million times over, and i certainly have nothing new to add to the discussion, but man, it just sucks when, just as has happened with music, politics, comedy, etc., yet another means by which the individual can make a healthy connection to the collective is co-opted, and the experience's innards get yanked right out so that all we're left with is a mold, a rigid, systematic way of creating expectations and reacting to outcomes. any fandom surely hedges on doing this and occasionally does indulge, but hardly ever to such a pervasive and overarching extent, and perhaps that's the price we pay for success.
maybe this speaks to my own generally foul mood, and that's really alright with me, and just like everything else reverts to form, i might as well welcome comments that speculate on my own unrelated creative, professional, social and romantic frustrations in life, because of course those must inform any observation i make that leaves a bitter taste in readers' mouths (i guess if i was in better frame of mind i'd merely think these things rather than write them?), and it's much easier to deal with an argument or observation on tangential grounds than it is to meet it head-on.
the kills' new album is really, really awesome
good review
here ... i'd write one myself, but i've got a full plate with a certain video game blog challenge.
