Thursday, April 29, 2004
As much as I enjoyed Simon's riff on the similarities between blogs and grime--and I sincerely enjoyed it, don't get me wrong--I don't think it really described the two with any specificity. The characteristics he lists (roughly, nicheness, discourse, ego, cliques, battles, sceneism, slang, locality v. globalism, amateurism) could describe almost any masculiney subculture or "scene," from horror movie fans to metalheads to punkers to comic book fans to coders to SCAers. Take away the amateurism requirement and you bring in things like historians, school boards, chuch choirs (some fucking intense battles there, man), fashion designers, medical ethics...well, you know, most human endeavors, really. I appreciate the thought, but it's a bit broad, isn't it? Of course, Simon realizes this and is clearly having a bit of fun, so I guess I'm mainly looking to point out how his definition can be usefully broadened to all sorts of other things we want to talk about.
Speaking of which, I've been meaning to comment on the Wiley review that started all of this off, so hopefully I will. But for now, I need to go cook some chicken.
posted by Mike B. at 6:53 PM
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Hillary points us to something I'd actually been meaning to mention--the Rolling Stone immortals list, wherein artists write testimonials about other artists. She's got some good picks, but you can't miss Little Richard on himself, Iggy on Bo Diddly, Vernon Reid on Nirvana ("And Cobain was a terrific guitarist. I said that to a big Joe Satriani fan, and he got really upset with me; he didn't think Cobain had enough chops. You can't say Cobain was a great songwriter but not a great guitarist -- because he couldn't have written those songs without the guitar. You can't separate out his Big Muff guitar playing - it was essential to the music he made, and his altered tunings were incredibly influential. Just like body piercing really took off as a trend after the first Lollapalooza, I think altered, tuned-down guitars were much more prominent in the music after Nirvana."), and claps blog fav John Mellencamp on Buddy Holly, another artist dear to my heart, and said entry leads off with a Very Smart Thing:
Buddy Holly was a complete and utter hillbilly. I'm very proud of that. So much of our musical heritage is from the country. People always ask me, "Why do you stay in Indiana?" Well, I have to. Just about every song, every sound that we emulate and listen to was created by a hillbilly, born out of the frustration of a small town where there ain't much to do in the evening. That's one thing that I loved about Buddy Holly.
Pop music is the release of frustration into excitement.
posted by Mike B. at 5:36 PM
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Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Boy, talk about missing the point.
There are two really dumb things said in this article about South Park. Let's take them in turn.
Number one:
Formerly rebellious adults may be the biggest fans of "South Park," which is predicated on the hope that it continues to offend someone, somewhere. Really to savor the show, it still helps to imagine joyless souls ? repressive parents or balky advertisers, stupefied by political correctness or Christian moralism ? tsk-tsk-ing in a distant living room. (Advertisers have stood by the show, even when it pushes decency standards, and parents have never mounted a serious campaign against it.) As much as it offers new jokes, "South Park" also offers a chance to defy those fantasy scolds one more time.
In sum: South Park would not be as enjoyable if it didn't actually offend anyone, except it doesn't, so viewers' enjoyment of its humor is, in part, illegitimate.
This is one of those things you say when you dislike something and you don't really know why, so you try and ascribe it to other people's ungenuine reactions rather than your own subjective tastes. I can't know their intentions for sure, of course, but there's nothing about Trey and Matt that indicates they're honestly hoping to offend people with the show, and there's certainly nothing about the show that says that--aside, of course, from the disclaimer at the beginning, which was put there specifically at the request of the network, so if anyone's believing in those fantasy Margaret Dumonts, it's Comedy Central. (Which would not be that surprising, given the doubtful tone of their promos, etc.) If people are really taking this away from the show, well, that's their problem; I don't think it's necessarily catering to their egos, just as it's not catering to the egos of "preadolescents" by having poop jokes, because poop is (or should be) funny to pretty much everyone.
Look, if you're familiar with my point of view, you know that I'd be the first to make this argument if I thought it was valid. It would be a prime example of the whole art-under-repression mentality. But I think the argument here just totally misunderstands the nature of transgressive art. Something can be offensive without actually offending many people (and I think "many" is the crux of the argument being used--I can testify that my college-age friends were offended by Mr. Hanky, so there is indeed offense being taken), just as something can offend a lot of people without trying to be offensive. You can say offensive things in such a way that they actually mitigate the offense being taken. The fact is, "offensive" is in large part not a teleological thing. Sure, it has to be offensive to someone, but it doesn't have to actually offend you, and given the wide group of people this reaches, you have to acknowledge the contextuality of offensiveness (for instance, saying "gyp" would not raise an eyebrow for 99% of the population, but a gypsy would probably be incredibly offended by it) and grant that its frisson is not based on the idea of someone actually being offended so much as it is on transgressing the social mores. Offensiveness is contextual, but I think that fact should require us to give it a wider definition, not a smaller one.
Number two:
What's more, a chord of uplift sounds at the end of many episodes. The creators, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone, are regularly identified as libertarians and consider themselves singularly in touch with the wickedness of boyhood. But let's face it: there's learning, even hugs, on "South Park."
It's surprising, in fact, that in almost seven years viewers haven't bridled at the show's pedantry. In an episode this season crusaders in South Park lost sight of real danger when they focused on a trivial Janet Jackson-like flashing crisis. The show spelled it out: people get hung up on phony sex scandals and ignore the real problem of violence.
Two weeks ago a pedophile pop star named Michael Jefferson, who has a son named Blanket, came around to taking fatherhood seriously.
"I've been so obsessed with my childhood that I've forgotten about his," he says. "I thought having lots of rides and toys was enough, but Blanket doesn't need a playmate. He needs a father, and a normal life."
This sounds almost ingratiatingly sane. If "South Park" is one of television's great comedies, it's not great for being reckless; it's great for being a series of funny, topical parables.
In sum: the "I've learned something today" (or "ILST") bits at the end of every episode honestly state the point the show is trying to make.
Wow. This is the point where I pass my palm slowly over my head and make a whistling sound. How can you watch more than two episodes of South Park and not get that the ILST stuff is just a parody of those kind of things on regular sitcoms? It seems glaringly obvious to me, and, I think, almost everyone else. Sure, there's some seriousness there--I'm not saying they don't actually think that the Janet Jackson scandal was stupid--but they're not parables, because they're a long way from profound, and Matt and Trey know this. The humor is in the fact that they spell out the lame-ass message the show in question is conveying, and this is precisely why people haven't gotten tired of the "pedantry"--it's a friggin' parody of pedantry. I'm honestly unsure how you can miss this. There's even a few ILST segments in which they conclude they didn't learn anything, or what they thought they learned they didn't learn at all.
Moreover, the argument doesn't even make any sense. Who needs to hear that you shouldn't buy your kid a carousel besides, I dunno, Michael Jackson? Maybe a few ultra-rich parents, but are they going to be getting moral guidance from South Park anyway? I'm insisting that we judge it by its effects here (as opposed to the offensiveness thing above) because the show does hew to a pretty unified standard of what's offensive, whereas saying something is a series of parables only works if it's trying to convey a reasonably coherent worldview, otherwise it's just a bunch of moral-sounding things that make no sense. The article makes a half-hearted attempt at ascribing it to an ideology (pro-free thinking, kinda touchy-feely liberal), but it's about as convincing as that article that tried to say that South Park is conservative[1]. It's anti-religion, except when it thinks religion is nice.[2] It's anti-violence, except when it's incredibly violent. I'm sure if I wasn't in a haze right now I could pick out a bunch of totally contradictory ILST morals, and I'm sure Trey and Matt are fully aware of this. The fact is, you can say South Park fits into a range of moderate ideologies, because you can't read South Park as anything other than reactive, and the whole point of being reactive is that you just criticize what you see as wrong, but because you believe in "common sense," you don't have a coherent worldview. Aesop and the Talmud did. South Park doesn't.
But the dumb thing about trying to ascribe it one is that this completely misses the point of what the show is trying to do. South Park is not trying to make points, it is trying to be comedic, and if it makes a point, it is purely in the service of the comedy, not the other way around, and this is precisely why it can espouse contradictory morals from one show to another. But just as the author here cannot see how something can be offensive without offending, neither can she see how something being rigorously comedic is as valid as something being consistently moral, and for precisely the same reason: these are both ambiguous, and we are loathe to accept ambiguity unless it is explicitly spelled out for us (think the endings of the last two Lynch movies). South Park actually points out its ambiguity by pretending to be unambiguous, but apparently this went over the author's head. See the motion at the beginning of this section.
It's drastically short-changing the show to reduce it to the kind of bland, obvious morals the article offers up. The comedic project is disruption, and that's something that South Park is very good at. Its particular technique of addressing social questions with a reductio ad absurdum doesn't actually result in valid conclusions necessarily (the rainforest episode, for example, concluded that the rainforest sucked ass and should be torn down, which is sorta true but not really), but it does provide very interesting paths to those conclusions.
If I had a beef with the show, it wouldn't be with the straw men it sets up (which are inevitably caricatures that improve the comedy at the expense of the logic, and that's dandy) so much as with the fact that it bothers to tear down the straw men at all. Kyle is a less interesting character than Cartman because Kyle's role is merely to say "Dude, what the fuck?" and then do nothing, remaining a passive complainant, whereas Cartman always goes with the joke. He's just as capable as Kyle, in the world of South Park, of realizing when people are acting (intentionally?) ridiculous, but Cartman chooses, far more often than the other main kids, of going with the joke, not just participating, but in taking it even farther. A great example of this is the Civil War episode, where Cartman takes command of the Confederates in a Civil War reenactment, gets them drunk, and convinces them to win the battle, and then go on and try to win the war. It's hilarious and not exactly unrealistic, but the best part is when, at the end, Stan and Kyle realize that the only way to end the joke is to play into it, to provide a punchline by dressing up like Jefferson Davis and Abe Lincoln and declaring that the South loses. Usually Matt and Trey let the manias run their course, but when there's an end like this that plays into the joke rather than simply cutting it off with an ironic moral, I think those are the episodes that really work.
It's unsurprising to hear that they consider themselves libertarians.[3] Aside from the fact that comedians seem to feel required to at least act libertarian (as I noted in my Chris Rock post), the superficial South Park ideology is very much based in criticizing but not proposing anything new. And that's OK, because while it may lack a coherent moral code, it does firmly take a position for at least one episode and truly explores it. They're not parables, they're thought experiments, and ultimately there's nothing lurking behind them except a very particular logical argument that they're attempting to fully explore in as honest a way as possible, via the rules of comedy that form the other source. And I like that. There's an interesting opposition to be set up between this and the Simpsons, but that's enough meaningless cultural criticism for one day, yes?
[1] I just wanted to footnote this to repeat just how fucking retarded that article is. It's really, really, really amazingly retarded. Really.
[2] Actually, on this measure, it does conform nicely to Matt's likely worldview, that of a non-religious Jew, but the fact that there are two creators here can't be ignored. The push and pull between arguments in the best episodes is a welcome outcome of this setup, as opposed to the oddly unitary (or wholly diffuse) points of view you get in committee-written shows. Er, Matt is Jewish, right?
[3] Somewhat unrelated point: everyone seemed to like the 9/11 episode, but I found it annoyingly un-funny and wishy-washy. Still, it represented the tenor of the times, where the enemy wasn't the left or the right, but extremism on either side--leftist conspiracy theorists, righty god-wranglers, etc. It's fair to say that we're no longer at that point, but I don't think that was the way it had to be. It was certainly in the interests of the administration to make extremism a valid position again, and I think we've all suffered for it.
posted by Mike B. at 4:58 PM
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Sometimes an article comes along that almost perfectly encapsulates my attitude toward something. In this case, it's a New York Times article about the young editor of Seventeen, and the attitude it nails concerns eating in New York. Jason, you'll like this one.
"It's almost impossible to get a table here at night," she said brightly, surveying a dining room starting to fill with a weave of tourists and office workers. She often hits the Red Lobster in Hicksville on the way back from Hamptons weekends, she said, or drives out to a Secaucus, N.J., location. ("They have the best fries!" she declares.)...
Putting a big dent in 24 fried shrimp would probably put your typical women's magazine editor in the hospital, either for treatment of shame or stomach rupture, but Ms. Rubenstein revels in her pedestrian palate, which she says is a legacy of her life as the daughter of Iranian immigrants on Long Island. "We went out to eat very rarely, and we thought that a place that had a big lobster on the front had to be pretty fancy," she explained.
When it is required, Ms. Rubenstein is happy to show her face at Michael's, the Midtown nexus of media power, but left to her own devices, she is still mesmerized by the sight of a big red plastic lobster...
[At Bubba Gump's] Ms. Rubenstein ordered something called a Blue Lemon Up, because, she said: "Blue is good. Blue cotton candy, blue soda, it's all good."
The waitress smiled. "You get to keep the glass," she said.
"Oh, goodie," Ms. Rubenstein said, managing to resist the urge to clap her hands. And her mood brightened further, if that is possible, when she spotted hush puppies and cheese fries on the menu.
Dude, I got excited just reading about it.
I'm also happy to hear that someone else thinks about how which outlet of a fast-food chain has the best fries. And I'm all about the blue comment.
Also, memo to David Carr: liking hush puppies and disliking corn dogs, or more specifically disliking shrimp breading that tastes like corn dogs, is no more weird than liking polenta but disliking a sauce for being too mango-y. Know what I'm saying?
It's a great bit when her mentor talks about how he likes Red Lobster now. Yeah, you know, you really only need to take a food snob to, say, Popeye's, three times, and they'll like it. Because that's food that basically trying to taste as good as it can. Plus: mmm, fried.
posted by Mike B. at 11:40 AM
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Tuesday, April 27, 2004
To people who keep up on these things more than I do: where is William Bowers writing for these days? I miss that guy, and he's not on the PF masthead anymore.
posted by Mike B. at 1:05 PM
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I've updated the links, adding a new line for the pile o'sites I wanted to add in. I've also added definitions on mouseover. Let me know if anything's messed up or if you want anything changed, should you be the site propriator.
posted by Mike B. at 12:56 PM
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Monday, April 26, 2004
Joe is right--the stuff that's been going up on the Plan B website is pretty awesome. The thing that really got me is this kickass piece on the Muppets, or more specifically I suppose on the Muppets' albums. The only thing I'd say about it is "more!" Really, Gonzo's whole body of work is begging for an extended inspection, and I mean that in full seriousness. The bits about musichall and irony are especially good. I actually meant to do a bit on the Muppet Show a while back when I watched a DVD or two, but never got around to it. Still, it's really interesting to revisit now--the vaudeville stuff is much more obvious, and now that I'm more used to laugh tracks I can get over them better. The musical interludes used to annoy the hell out of me, but I really appreciate them now, and I can't help but wonder how seeing that weird, wide-ranging selection of genres effected my later taste. Probably not much, but they still do a great "Devil Went Down to Georgia."
posted by Mike B. at 6:53 PM
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To the internet community:
Hi-ho. So me and my two friends Lori and Nat are starting a band. We now need a name. Can you help us? Some useful facts:
- We are currently in the vein of McClusky and will be in the vein of the New Pornographers or something like that once we get a keyboardist who doesn't go to Ireland for three months at a time.
- We all like boobies. (No, I'm serious. We all agreed on this.) But you don't have to incorporate this into the name. It would probably be better if you didn't, actually. But it's good background info.
- Lori really likes corny jokes but you might not want to cater to this.
- I'm not quite sure what Nat likes, as her main role in the naming process so far has been to say "um, no" to the really dumb suggestions, but she does like lots of things.
- To more concrete about the genre thing: we are indie rock, poppy, kind of early 90's-ish. Lots of riffs, vocal harmonies, dancy in that rock way (for now; we will probably be dancy in that dance way once we get a full-time keyboardist, as my previous band with Lori was).
Also, as much as I appreciate "funny" band names, we are not a jamband, so for every suggestion you make for the benefit of my laughin' parts like "Long Dong Silver and the Butt Pirates," please also try and make one that we wouldn't be embarassed to be playing Radio City as in ten years' time.
I'm serious about this, and it would be a really big help. I may or may not take the top contenders and subject them to a vote later, but the people it's more important to convince are probably Nat and Lori.
posted by Mike B. at 5:05 PM
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Incidentally, I paged through that Blender article at lunch. It was pretty interesting, although not as good as the Strauss. At any rate, part of it is online. More notably, maybe, there are some pictures of her with Frances Bean. She looks reassuringly good, doesn't she? Really just like an 11-year-old should look. A little gawky, as we all are at 11, and very normal looking. The pictures with her and Courtney are pretty cute, and it strikes me that it's a kind of Rory/Lorelai "we're mother and daughter and we're friends!" kind of relationship. They should do a Gilmore Girls where they meet Courtney and Frances and they bond, until Courtney and Lorelai freak each other out, and then Laney comes along and convinces Frances to join her band, and then Kurt Cobain's daughter will be in a fictional band with Sebastian Bach, and...
Wshew, OK, I think that just crossed the enthusiastic/nerdy line in my Gilmore Girls fandom, so I'll stop.
posted by Mike B. at 4:49 PM
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From the aforementioned Neil Strauss article on Courtney:
Theoretically, this should be a time to celebrate. After a six-year hiatus that included disbanding her longtime group Hole, Love has released a new CD, America's Sweetheart, an assault of overblown guitars and screaming lyrics that is as raw and open as her personality. But on this front, too, Love is upset. "People say, 'You made a great record,' " she says. "No, I made a good five songs. I had twelve songs, but they're not on the album. I had no creative control."
She says that the label released the CD before she was finished, selected the cover art without her and didn't get her approval on some of the final mixes or sequencing..."We're going to put out a press release saying that if Virgin doesn't give me enough money [to promote the CD], I'm going to quit."
Right now, Virgin is all she really has. She recently parted with her manager and business lawyer. If she pisses Virgin off, I tell her, she'll have nothing.
"Fuck it!" she leaps to her feet and yells.
This is one of the reasons I'm really loving Courtney these days. These are the kind of complaints artists make all the time: I lost creative control, the label isn't doing enough to promote it, etc. But you'd usually either make it in private, to friends, or make it in public, but quietly. Courtney does it in a Rolling Stone story while she's promoting the CD, and says she's going to follow it up with a press release. Now, don't get me wrong: this does happen. I've certainly been on the semi-receiving end of a few of these sorts of missives, but it was never quite in this context. There's something different about it, and what's different about it is everything else.
The charge has been made against punk rock that the choice it has is either to be unsuccessful or to sell out. What do you do when you're getting money and living the high life? How can you rage against the system when you depend on it for your continued success? Well, you can act like Courtney, getting right to the pinnacle and then fucking everything up, continually, then getting people to trust you again, and then fucking it up. This is not what you might call a spontaneous combustion model of self-destruction along the lines of the Sex Pistols; this is a slow smolder marked by flare-ups, a parasite that lets the host keep living to preserve its own life. Courtney Love has made immeasurably harder the lives of any number of worker bees in the eternally hated music business, and even as much as you can accuse her of hypocracy by continuing to profit from its mechanations, you can't deny that she brought more attention to the issue of artists' rights (for better or for worse) than anyone else. I'm not saying that her being mean to her manager or fellow touring acts or A&R people or photographers or anyone else is necessarily a good thing; it's just true to the spirit of punk rock. Her escapades are undeniably juvenile, but that doesn't make it un-punk, since punk's just a wee bit juvenile itself. I'm not necessarily approving of a certain subset of C-Lo's behaviors by associating them with the historically determined meaning of "punk," which is something I have a few issues with. Nevertheless, it's undeniable that she either doesn't give a fuck or doesn't give a fuck about certain things you're supposed to give a fuck about--unlike the current situation of a certain white rapper we might get to later.
The charge has been made against Courtney Love that she is a "fame whore," that she does things merely to get in the tabloids. Given what we know about Courtney at this point, I'm a little unclear how you can believe this to be true--that, in other words, Courtney would not be taking her shirt off at fast-food restaurants and hitting fans with mic stands if it were not getting printed in the Post. How can you believe this? Crazy is crazy--attention is sometimes a factor, but I don't think Courtney needs Page 6-level attention to justify her antics. At this point, Courtney's going to get covered no matter what; someone from X random hardcore band doing what she's doing would not make it into a major paper, but Courtney knows that she will.[1] And so what I think people who accuse her of being a fame whore mean is that, given that she knows her public indiscretions will get wide play, she should be responsible and not do these things, because...well, I'm a little sure why not. I think Frances Bean usually gets invoked. But I think what they miss is the implicit bargain Courtney has struck: realizing that she's going to be able to get people to print stories about her in the media, she basically uses this as a means of leveling the playing field between her and the people with more money and more connections and more power. She has become a master at media manipulation--so much so, I think, that the media doesn't even seem to realize, or care, that it's being manipulated.[2]
And so the above quote has to be regarded (indeed, it's probably only regarded) in the context of the rest of Courtney's public life. Saying this seems simultaneously a) crazy, given that there was some doubt that she'd be able to find another label big but cooperative/stupid enough to fund a new album, and given that it was somewhat of a miracle that it came out at all, and b) about as far from unexpected as you can possibly get, given that this is exactly what she's always done. You know both of these things because you know everything else, because Courtney has let you know it. But what's significant about all this is that Courtney is 100% aware that most people will think this, and she says it anyway. Sure, the fans'll get up in arms (recall my point about how Courtney's hardcore fans actually seem more insane than she herself is[3]) and maybe make some stink for the label--and sure, I'm a little intrigued too at the idea that there's more "authentically Courtney" versions of the songs somewhere, being a fan myself--but Courtney knows damn well that most people who care will think some combination of a&b, and even fans will at least have to acknowledge it if we're honest about the object of our regard at all. And this is something I love about Courtney: that she lives a significant portion of her life wholly in public, and she is completely honest in the way she portrays it.
Let's pause for a brief clarification here. I'm not saying Courtney always tells the truth. I'm just saying she tells the truth to the New York Post with the same frequency that she tells the truth to, say, Wendy Cobain, or Dave Grohl. I think that's true because I think she says exactly the same thing to those parties in public and in private. For everything Courtney's been accused of, she's not often portrayed of saying one thing in public and another in private. Even during the darkest hour of her shudderingly self-interested legal strategy in the Nirvana, LLC lawsuit, she would explain it on bulletin boards, and none of the principals ever contradicted her. The stances were wrong, but fairly portrayed. And that's what I'm saying she does: she honestly portrays her perspective. That's something you can't say of a lot of public figures.[4] That it is almost certainly a symptom of a mental disorder doesn't necessarily make it any less admirable.
The reason that Courtney seems so unstable, in part, is that she refuses to make a lot of the compromises you're expected to make to acheive a settled kind of fame, which I think we agree she could get if she tried. Her particular balancing act involves building up enough power to get the attention to get her message across, and then uncompromisingly delivering that message, which in turn strips her of much of that power, and then building it up again. It's a remarkably political process for someone who's mentally unbalanced. She doesn't just wreck things; she wrecks thing and then survives to wreck 'em again. At first it was the cultural capital of punk cred that she was building up and wrecking, and now it's marketability. And she knows this, but she really works with it well.
Moreover, I admire what she's been able to get across with this process. In addition to the great, positive feminist stuff, I think she's willingly given up something that's of immeasurable use to public figures: the aura of mystery. A lot of people need to do this trick where they can't tell you what they're really thinking, partially because people respond to things a lot better if they can pretend like it means exactly what they want it to mean[5], and partially because what they're really thinking is kind of boring, banal, and uncreative. Celebrities don't seem like celebrities if we know that they're doing their taxes and cleaning the toilet and having a hard time finding something to eat. Courtney is the rare celebrity that does everything she can to ensure that you don't see her that way, that you do see her as a flawed, graspable, real human being. She will tell you who her lawyer is and how their meetings go; she will tell you about her relationship problems; she will tell you about her custody battles and everything else. There are certainly parts of her life that remain hidden--but these are small and well-chosen. Just as what some people see as fame whoredom is actually a form of honesty, since Coutney's refusing to conform to what someone in the public eye is supposed to act like[6] is just her being her, so is her incessant (and, honestly, kind of annoying) name-dropping a similar aspect of this openness. She really does hang out with these people, and because she's a real person instead of a celebrity for whom hanging around with famous people is just run of the mill and nothing special, she's excited about it and wants to tell people about it. Ultimately, I think it's less her trying to make herself look better by associating herself with Nicole Kidman or whoever, and more just her being genuinely excited about doing this stuff. I don't think people want to acknowledge that genuine strain of excitement and wonder in Courtney, but there's no doubt in my mind that it's very much there.
So I really admire Courtney for all of this, for managing to be a celebrity without being a celebrity, for taking this negative of universal media attention and turning it into a half-positive, for being, above all, absurdly honest, self-destructively honest. I think--and I could certainly be wrong--that it actually does some good in the wider world.
[1] Witness the dressing-up episode in the Strauss piece that resulted in "the boobs conversation," as I will henceforth refer to it.
[2] In part, no doubt, because so much of the manipulation and even the surrounding justification seems antithetical to Courtney's interests.
[3] Which would be an interesting graph to plot--craziness of artist v. craziness of fans.
[4] Nor would you necessarily want to--Lord only knows what a whole media landscape of Courtneys would be like.
[5] And because they haven't internalized the death of the author, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
[6] What's that line from one of the Stooges? "What do you expect to happen when you pay a bunch of monkeys to act like monkeys?" Something to that effect.
posted by Mike B. at 4:43 PM
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ROCK 'N' ROLL BON MOTS #009
(disclaimer: yes, I know talking about your dreams is like one small step away, blog-wise, from talking about your cats, but bear with me here, I need to get warmed up)
I had a weird dream last night. We were in this big dining room of a faceless hotel and there were four of us seated around a table with a white tablecloth: me, my songwriting partner, someone who looked to be of South Asian heritage that I assume was my subconsciousness' version of Panjabi MC but who actually looked more middle-aged and doughy and Bangladeshi, and Jay-Z's sample clearance guy. Apparently me and my songwriting partner had produced a track for Jay that had done fairly well and now they wanted us to do another one. Me and my songwriting partner talked for a while but he/she (couldn't tell or can't remember) seemed kind of frantic; I said I had lots of little bits and we should get together and throw beats behind them and see what happened, but S.P. was quietly freaking out. I also suggested something with a lot of clapping. The meeting broke up and I looked through the binder (!) about our track. It reached #22! That's nice. Then I tried to ride the elevator and Jay was there, slogging his way up the down elevator. I blame the Time-Warner mall for this bit, and a sign on the subway for the other bits. (It was a really weird sign. I wish I could've taken it.)
And then there was something about a train tunnel dripping blood and a naked firefighter spraying gallons of water on a tower, and then I woke up and played with my cute little cat Muffin Pookums.
posted by Mike B. at 10:54 AM
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