December 11, 2009

Irresistible Impulse

rendit:

I think what she’s implying is that Lady Gaga slept with James Chance as a zygote.

Here is my current position on Lady Gaga: Matthew made me listen to The Fame Monster, and it’s OK in parts, but when Beyonce comes in on “Telephone” I get this unmistakable feeling of “Ah, so that’s what’s been missing!”  If I have to pin it on one thing, I’d relate it to when I introduced Rachel to crabcore.  “People really need to get better at self-editing,” she said, and I think that is the nub of the problem with Ms. GaGa.  It’s no accident that the most widely-distributed depictions of her have been still images (that Kermit the frog dress, etc.), and while I very much like some of these images—the outfits and stage sets from when she was meeting the Queen are undeniably fantastic—they are almost always islolated from some actual moving production and need to be made still in order to really have their impact.  There are lots of good individual ideas in Lady Gaga’s songs and videos and stage productions, but she packs them so full of other, lesser, stuff that they get smothered.  And it’s not like I’m opposed to maximalism, obviously, but it either the parts need to not get in the way of each other, or work as a seamless whole.  Neither of these seem to be the case with Gaga as of yet, at least not on a regular basis.  For instance, her performance of “Bad Romance” on Ellen does actually work for me, because there are self- and exterior-applied limits.  The stripped-down piano version at the beginning lets the melody come through absent those annoying monotonic backings she favors, and because she’s not able to do any costume changes the dance routine that follows is focused and effective.  I love it when she equates Sylvia Plath with Marilyn Monroe on “Dance in the Dark,” but right now there’s too much unearned self-aggrandizement and too little editing for more of that sort of thing to come through.  This doesn’t mean she can’t work with that in the future, or that a cherry-picked career retrospective won’t end up making this early work look savvy.  We are getting all the chaff here, and she’s still figuring things out.  But the hit-to-miss ratio is still too small as of yet for me to get on the train.

(Why doesn’t this bother everyone?  My theory: her most unreserved straight embracers right now tend to be visual art people, who are maybe more used to looking at things in conceptual and purely visual terms so they can filter out all the noise.  But the noise is what I like, so it bothers me still.)

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December 9, 2009

Things you shouldn't say in a classroom situation

“I was wrist-deep in this study.”

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December 7, 2009

A dream someone had about me

They have to pick up their dry cleaning, but there are zombies at the mall, so they took me along, because I could protect them.  I was able to produce a protective shield, and explained that the zombies could not see normal people, only fear, so as long as we weren’t afraid, we would be safe.  I taught them how to control their emotions and we were able to pick up the dry cleaning without being attacked.

(It’s probably best not to think about what this says about me.  I don’t think I’ve even had a conversation with this person about my deal with zombies, which makes it especially weird.)

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The Major Works of Counterintuitive Thought From the Past Decade

perpetua:

Alex Pareene’s round-up of popular contrarian stances of the 00s is kinda heartbreaking, if just because it shows that the Slate-ification of modern discourse is nearly complete.

agrammar has already responded to this and hit the major points (which Alex has replied to), but let me hit some minor ones.  “Counterintuitive” is probably not the best term for a decent chunk of these (= “the ones I like,” obvs).  Take, for instance, this:

Conventional wisdom is right.
2001, Magazine.
While you may have read (hundreds of times in the very magazine this piece was being written in) that the conventional wisdom is wrong, it is actually usually right. It is “a broad agreement of elite opinion” and “a time-tested means of filtering out the bunk.” Attacks on the C.W. are vestiges of the New Left’s distrust of authority, and the consensus of wise, mainstream figures is reliable.

“Things that most people agree upon are correct” is not exactly “counterintuitive,” is it?  It’s pretty intuitive, I’d say, unless you’re a sophomore at a liberal arts school or something.  But it—along with certain other things here (Steven Johnson, some of Gladwell’s stuff, Virginia Postrel, others)—are actually trying to do something else, something that was endemic to this time period in both good and bad ways.  Call it the Decade of Counter-Skepticism.  Because skepticism has become the most rhetorically effective move, any truth claim has to be made in terms of other truth claims, and so even claims in favor of consensus ideas need to be made in opposition to previous skeptical claims.  This story is easiest for me to tell in terms of music criticism, of course, where genres tend to draw their bounderies in part through skepticism about “pop,” and so critics looking to boost pop tended initially to make their claims in terms of skepticism toward this skepticism.

But it crops up in a lot of areas, which had the effect of confusing the technique with a political allegience.  Many neoconservative claims were made in skeptical terms, making for a weird kind of utopian skepticism.  Religious conservatives in America made a lot of headway by situating themselves as a sort of misunderstood minority, and you can track sayings and slogans that frame things in these sort of skeptical terms.  Most notably, of course, mass media performance of feminist personal-is-political ideas was drastically rolled back over the course of the decade—look at the trailer for Blue Mountain State for just the most blatant evidence—and under this weird rhetoric of “we are aware that feminism exists and we are ironically mocking it!” which made it OK, because they were being skeptical.  (I have my own theory about why this happened, but this isn’t the time.)

This points out the problem with this technique.  Skepticism is a good tendency to inculcate in beginning critiquers, since it makes you more likely to question things you had previously taken for granted, and to check evidence, and to not accept things blindly, and so on.  But being skeptical does not necessarily make you right.  And every time you employ the skeptical move you do two things.  First, you legitimate skepticism as a truth-claim, and second, you encourage cynicism—rather than honest engagement—toward whatever you’re attacking.  Sometimes this is OK, but sometimes it’s not.

But, yeah, sometimes it is.  Some of the things in this list are good things, as Alex says in his response, and the skeptical move is sometimes necessary.  The idea that the conventional wisdom is always wrong had kinda become the conventional wisdom, and that needed to be argued against.  Still, I think the best writers are largely (not entirely!) moving away from skepticism and toward a more open-ended, exploratory style that admits ambiguity while ultimately siding somewhere definite (though, of course, certain people remain stuck in the skepticism ghetto).  I’d like to think that we’re moving out of these pendulum swings a little bit, toward some sort of stasis.  We shall see.

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December 6, 2009

I imagine this was only funny to, like, 1% of the audience, but oh man was it on-the-nose.  “Drag-racing PT Cruisers,” “your dad owns two Suzuki dealerships,” “who fed garlic knots to my pit bull,” etc.

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December 3, 2009

Rachel has a saying

It is a way of explaining why she doesn’t like something, and it goes like this: “It’s pandering to me badly.”  Which is to say that something is clearly targeted at my demographic and tastes—which is good, who doesn’t like that—but does so in an unpleasing way.  And this is more annoying than if something had merely been bad, for all sorts of reasons: you are now expected to like it but you don’t, there are only so many opportunities to be pandered to and this one has been squandered, it’s always around but it sucks, etc.  I agree with all this.

There’s an interesting distinction when lots of other people like it, though.  If something is clearly presenting itself as being part of our taste-group but I don’t like it, that would normally just mean that it’s not really part of our taste-group, since we have good taste and all.  But if lots of other people like it, especially people more or less similar to me in terms of taste, then this suggest something more odious: that this thing does reflect my taste, but my taste is actually (secretly, without me knowing it) sucky, or at least what I would consider “sucky.”  And so I then want to convince everyone else that it is in fact sucky so we can go back to agreeing that my taste is like how I think it is.

So, to apply this to the present case, Animal Collective is being presented (by who? ah, just in general) as an inventive and poppy indie band, and I like inventive and poppy indie bands.  But they seem hippie and etc. to me, which conflicts with how I understand my taste in inventive and poppy indie bands to be, so I reject them.  But then when everyone else (“everyone else,” right) accepts them, I don’t like that!  It means that maybe secretly all along I liked hippie shit, and so I will either need to start liking hippie shit or stop liking all these other things, or like them less, etc. etc.  We all want to perform our taste in the way that is most pleasing to us but are confined by what everyone else thinks, but still need to pay attention to that since taste performed solo isn’t very rewarding.

You can chalk a lot of this up to cross-cutting cleavages (hee hee hee) of course: a band (or TV show, or whatever) can fall sqaurely into multiple taste-groups, and so maybe the problem is that my taste-group is accepting them but I read them in  terms of how another taste-group is understanding them and erroneously think that this is how my taste group is accepting them.  This might make for the biggest explosions: when something crosses over from one group to another, wholly constituted in terms of one set of taste so that the other set of taste either has to adopt some new standards or successfully argue for a different way of understanding the original object.  And if lots of people like this thing, that makes it really threatening.

Or maybe we just like yelling at each other on the Internet.  Who knows!

(The “I” here is not rhetorical, by the way—I really don’t like Animal Collective, so this was really just me trying to figure my own behavior out.)

ETA: I had made this post a draft because in rereading it it seemed snotty, but then it became part of a conversation, so I figured I should put it back up just for context’s sake.  But I no longer, like, endorse it or anything.

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I KNEW IT

Me: Isn’t there some other explanation for this besides oppression?  Do they have to be doing this to resist the dominant culture?
Cultural Studies Professor*: Like what?  What do you mean?
Me: Well, like…fun.
CSP: Oh, Marxists don’t believe in fun.

* Cultural studies professors are Marxists, generally.

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December 2, 2009
Sean Michaels' 75 best songs of 2009
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Hey, so I know we don’t like ambiguity in our politics or engaging with the substance of ideas or anything, but did you guys actually watch Obama’s speech?  Because it is a really good speech.  Thoughtful, nuanced, sober, convincing, making the connections you’d want him to make, and even ending with some soaring rhetoric!  It seems like people are more responding to the news of the troop level increase than the speech itself, but that can’t be true, right? (No more politics stuff after this, I promise, which is why a baby is in the picture above.)

Hey, so I know we don’t like ambiguity in our politics or engaging with the substance of ideas or anything, but did you guys actually watch Obama’s speech?  Because it is a really good speech.  Thoughtful, nuanced, sober, convincing, making the connections you’d want him to make, and even ending with some soaring rhetoric!  It seems like people are more responding to the news of the troop level increase than the speech itself, but that can’t be true, right?

(No more politics stuff after this, I promise, which is why a baby is in the picture above.)

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December 1, 2009

Rachel Again

And that’s the point I think Rachel was making: any budget number is politically motivated, no matter where it comes from.  Just because budget things are hard numbers, we tend to think they reflect some sort of objective truth.  But they’re ultimately just guesswork, and while people who have the training can make valid assessments of the validity of that guesswork, those people are generally not us.  Which, again, is fine!  But let’s not pretend like we have any basis for arguing about truth.  Let’s admit this is always a political argument and move on with our lives.

I would just like to point out that I am one of those people who can make a valid assessment. Budget numbers are not theoretical mathamatic equations, they are all within some policy/political framework. I am not saying that $1.2 trillion was pulled out of a hat or chosen because it sounds nice rolling off the tongue.  I know this sound insane, but $40 billion is not that much money.  I have had a $1 billion difference between my very legitimate low and high projections for one small piece of one program in the local New York City government that involved about 20,0000 four year olds. So I cant even imagine what the margin of error is for the amount of money needed to save the US economy.

Also, the $800 billion effectively kept the economy from derailing. So my original point remains, why is this a failure? I love me some Paul Krugman, but he has consistently faulted Obama’s proposals for not going far enough.

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