Just North of Something Important

circumpolarnavigation: aaronleaf: Granta 17: While Waiting for...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:50:05 -0500

aaronleaf:

Granta 17: While Waiting for a War | Magazine | Granta Magazine

Except when he gets sued for calling Shirley Temple a whore, Graham Greene’s war journals are pretty boring. The best part of this Granta, and among the best things I’ve read anywhere, is an excerpt from Teresa Torańska’s Them, a series of interviews with Poland’s former Stalinist leaders. It’s a glimpse into the minds of the powerful and the absurdity of totalitarian propaganda. Here’s an excerpt:

Jakub Berman: Whenever we went to Moscow after the war, Stalin would invite us to supper, followed by a film. It became a custom, and our visits never ended without a meal together. Dinner would start late in the evening and last until morning. The food and drink were exquisite. I particularly remember a delicious roast of bear meat. Bierut always sat next to Stalin and I sat next to Bierut. Stalin propose toasts… Then Stalin would put on a record, mostly Georgian music, which he loved. Once, I think it was 1948, I danced with Molotov [laughter].

Teresa Toranska: You mean with Mrs Molotov?

Berman: No, she wasn’t there; she’d been sent to a labour camp. I danced with Molotov—it must have been a waltz, or at any rate something simple, because I haven’t a clue about how to dance—and I just moved my feet to the rhythm.

Toranska: As the woman?

Berman: Molotov led; I wouldn’t know how. he wasn’t a bad dancer, actually and I tried to keep in step with him, but for my part it was more like clowning than dancing.

Toranska: What about Stalin, whom did he dance with?

Berman: Oh, no, Stalin didn’t dance Stalin turned the gramophone: he treated it as his duty. He never left it. He would put on records and watch.

Toranska: He watched you?

Berman: He watched us dance.

Toranska: So you had a good time?

Berman: Yes, it was pleasant but with an inner tension.

Toranska: You didn’t really have fun?

Berman: Stalin really had fun. But for us those dancing sessions were good opportunities to say things to each other which we wouldn’t be able to say out loud. That’s when Molotov warned me about being infiltrated by various hostile organizations.

Toranska: Did he threaten you?

Berman: No, it was called a friendly warning. Molotov took the opportunity—or perhaps he’d arranged it himself since after all he was the one that asked me to dance—to mention a few things which he thought would be useful to me. I made it clear that I understood and didn’t say anything in response.

DJ Stalin!

Mangalitsa Jowl Bacon: This Little Piggy Ain't Just a Flash in the Pan

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:04:16 -0500

Mangalitsa Jowl Bacon: This Little Piggy Ain't Just a Flash in the Pan:

Coincidentally, a previous thing I’ve written about bacon just appeared on the Internet yesterday.

foreignspell: I’m sorry, but this does not look appetizing at...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:56:00 -0500

foreignspell:

I’m sorry, but this does not look appetizing at all. I’m officially sick of bacon EVERYTHING, especially when used in places where it doesn’t belong.

barthel:

Bacon. Doughnut.

Well, to be more specific, it’s a maple bacon bar, which means it’s fried starch + maple + bacon, which basically makes it french toast with maple syrup and bacon. The bacon is just integrated into the bite, and the illicit thrill of dipping your bacon slice into the pooled syrup is one of the signal pleasures of that particular breakfast. Bacon itself is cured with brown sugar, so the combination of sweetness and salty porkiness is well-established. Hey, even Anthony Bourdain liked it!

Anyway, I couldn’t be more specific at the time because I was on my web 2.no cellphone, but this is from Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland. Their doughnuts are really, really good, and they’re able to be both really good and featured on a show about high-quality food because they do a really amazing job of balancing the flavors. If you take a bite of the above doughnut with just the maple icing, it doesn’t taste so good; it’s a little too narrowly-focused. But that elision of deeper flavors leaves room for the bacon’s flavor profile to come through, and the brightness of the maple completes the spectrum. A “Mexican hot chocolate” doughnut was similarly well-balanced: sweetness was toned down and spiciness was brought up to make for a much more complex taste experience. I’m not sure if this same sort of complexity applies to, say, the Cap’n Crunch doughnut, which we did not try, but all the ones we did sample displayed careful thought and construction, with a use of ingredients that allowed the doughnuts to rise above the thin, tinny bouquets novelty pastries tend to exhibit. This was more along the lines of the Momofuku Milk Bar—like, say, the rosemary ice cream.

Bacon. Doughnut.

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:41:19 -0500

Bacon. Doughnut.

Prince - “Pope” Rachel is not a musician, but she...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 04:20:00 -0500

Prince - “Pope”

Rachel is not a musician, but she likes musicians. If she were a musician, she says, she would be Nancy Whang, although I suspect maybe more the yelling function of Nancy Whang than the playing keyboards function of Nancy Whang. Anyway, this is I think a good vision of how Rachel would like to be a musician. Although who wouldn’t want to be a backup singer for Prince, right?

Anyway, this is all to say that maybe Merill Garbus’ live performances are a good vision of how Rachel would like to be as a performer: basically banging on things and yelling, or just singing perceptively about TV. “He always disliked doughnuts / but he always loved my hole.” Yes yes yes. Let’s leave the emotions unsaid. “You can be the president / I’d rather be the pope.” Sounds good to me.

I know how you feel, kiddo.

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:02:16 -0500

I know how you feel, kiddo.

tUnE-yArDs - “Lions” BiRd-BrAiNs is a great album...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:04:00 -0500

tUnE-yArDs - “Lions”

BiRd-BrAiNs is a great album because it’s intentionally trying to sound like the demo version of “Mushaboom.” That recording is a great recording accidentally because a lo-fi sound fits the emotional heft of the song a lot better than the clean studio version. “Mushaboom” is meant to reassure you about the disappointing present by presenting a pleasant vision of a pleasant future, and as such, it’s the kind of song you sing to yourself, the kind of song that runs through your head in the morning as you walk through the rain on the way to work (“planting lilacs and buttercups / but in the meantime we’ve got it hard / second floor living without a yard”). The demo’s traffic sounds fit that perfectly, and the physicality of the sound combined with the understated singing make you feel like Feist is breathing the words into your ear, soothing and reassuring—but also credible, because there’s too much grime there for her to be lying. You get the sense she knows too much about disappointing realities to give you false hope.

The emotional tenor of the tUnE-yArDs album is very different, but the similarity is that lo-fi actually fits the songs. It’s the difference between style and sound: most bands use lo-fi as a style, a way of signaling to listeners their particular taste allegiences. And there’s nothing wrong with that as such. Style is important! But Merrill Garbus, the woman behind the oddly-punctuated name, has a style already just in the way she writes and plays her songs. No further style is necessary. Instead, she needed to present them in such a way that they would be emotionally legible, so that the meaning would come through. And that’s why lo-fi works here. For one thing, the same need for physical presence and closeness is present, as the songs sound not just personal but private. The intense melodicism and the tone of her voice sounds like Dawn Weiner at the end of Welcome to the Dollhouse, singing to herself in an impossibly sweet voice on the school bus, the beauty smothered by the extroverted exuberance of the other kids. This does not sound powerful. It does not sound like Garbus should be standing in front of a band of amplified instruments, directing and controlling and outdoing them. It’s too contained for that. But it doesn’t feel like a singer-songwriter sitting along on a stool, either; it doesn’t feel confessional. It feels, again, absolutely private, like Garbus is singing entirely—entirely—for herself, with no intention or awareness of an outside audience.

But even though it doesn’t feel powerful, it still feels incredibly intense, and that’s the other reason why lo-fi feels appropriate. Just like, as Matthew has pointed out, the contained vocals on St. Vincent songs are the controlled public face while the wild guitar is the losing-her-grip interior life, the guitar and ukelele on Garbus’ songs are the contained bits, the feelings that can safely find exterior expression. But the feelings are so contained that they’ve built up enormous pressure:

we can pretend it’s christmas while we’re locked here in this box
while my brother and all his friends whip out their tiny teenage cocks
if I scream they’ll hear us so let’s count along with clocks
tock, tock, tock, tock

…and that’s what the percussion sounds like: blown out and suffocated with room noise because they can’t physically sound loud enough to convey the emotion that’s underlying all these songs. We need to scream, but we can’t, because we have to be quiet, so the drum sounds will scream for us. Meanwhile, sweet synth lines come in like the superego’s attempts to soothe, though it doesn’t always work. And riding that emotional crest are the vocals. The vocals are, obviously, the key here: aside from how they convey the private nature of these songs, they are almost always the only things that change in Garbus’ songs; everything else might as well be loops. But they change immensely, ranging from low muttering to full-throated shouting to head-voice keening, and when that’s not enough, they get pitch-shifted. The album is immaculately constructed, but it’s also an incredible performance, Garbus taking this base she’s built for herself and wringing every possible ounce of emotion out of it.

That no one knows how to talk about this exactly is a great example of the tyrrany of style. It’s a lo-fi album that just doesn’t sound like what we think “lo-fi” sounds like, so what is it? Sounds aren’t just sounds; they’re associated with particular groups and particular places and times and values, which is key. Most of the time this is great: style’s ability to group disparate elements together into something meaningful makes expressions of taste richer and more rewarding; it lets us argue about something more than just the merits. But it can also make us unable to hear justified deviations from stylistic discourse: they become the guy in the gorilla suit. tUnE-yArDs is one of those, and I’m very glad it’s breaking through.

I am revisiting Love v. Money

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:26:00 -0500

Man, how can you not like an album that begins with the sound of cash registers fucking?

(Related: want to read a review of Love v. Money that is somehow simultaneously right and totally missing the point?)

A retraction, and an apology to Mark Shields.

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:23:50 -0500

A retraction, and an apology to Mark Shields.:

I feel I am under some sort of journalistic obligation to post this? Follow-up here would be: well, the initial impression remains. Except that if my loyal-audience theory is right, all the people who saw the original post saw the retraction. So…I don’t know. Yay?

50 Cent launches essay contest for single mothers

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:57:40 -0500

50 Cent launches essay contest for single mothers

I will never understand Twitter

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:45:11 -0500

You can get live updates of who’s getting arrested at the Clackamas County Jail in Oregon! Along with links to each person’s jail profile, complete with picture (sometimes)! 98 people are following them, hopefully all local journalists! I feel 50% creeped out and 50% fascinated!

“pinie99” seems a little confused, honestly.

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:41:49 -0500

“pinie99” seems a little confused, honestly.

Shields: I’m ‘Nostalgic’ For A ‘Manly Man’ President Who Will ‘Kick Some Tail And Ask Questions Afterwards’

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:31:00 -0500

Shields: I’m ‘Nostalgic’ For A ‘Manly Man’ President Who Will ‘Kick Some Tail And Ask Questions Afterwards’ :

Here, Think Progress posts a one-minute clip of Mark Shields very obviously making a joke and interprets it literally, then somehow manages to rope in the number of people that have died in Iraq as a way of heaping moral censure on him. Commenters respond by assuming he’s a conservative and applying the usual insults. Except, of course, that Shields isn’t a conservative, as anyone who’s at least watched the Newshour (if not, you know, actually read his work) knows—he’s the moderate-liberal foil to David Brooks’ moderate-conservative on the program’s only opinion segment. Shields is actually agreeing with the commenters here: he is making fun of George Bush. And for so doing, his name gets dragged through the mud.

There are two possibilities here. One is that the piece’s author genuinely didn’t know that Shields was being sarcastic, which means that a) he has no idea who Mark Shields is, since the partisan cue would have led him to think twice about interpreting the clip literally, and b) he is unable to read human emotion.

The other, though, is that this was done intentionally, and given the (hopeful) unlikelihood of the two conditions above, it’s hard not to think that the poster intentionally misrepresented Shields’ intent either in order to rile up his audience or in order to fill a posting requirement. Neither are good reasons, and to me, this illustrates the real problem with political blogs today: freed largely from the regular information-gathering function of the traditional media, their only means of getting attention is to discover—or create—scandals. And there is a certain tendency to strip the nuance or ambiguity out of political statements in order to make them sound more extreme than they really are, a tendency that’s been going on in American political discourse for some time now.

The result of this way of thinking and talking about politics are people who think they know far more than they actually do, simply because they are able to perceive what is on the surface and are told that this represents wisdom. One commenter claims that, even if he was being sarcastic, it was Shields’ fault that the commenters didn’t get that. Except Sheilds made the comment in the context of a whole program, with an introduction and follow-up and other opinions given and responded to. The misreading is, rather, due to Think Progress clipping it out and posting it with an almost entirely unconnected tsk-fest about Iraq. This is the blog’s fault.

But it’s also not Shields’ fault that people who presumably think of themselves as politically knowledgable don’t know who Mark Shields is, which knowledge is both reasonable to expect if you’re talking about politics and important to have if you’re trying to understand something Mark Shields says. The utopian idea is that erroneous information on the Internet will always get called out by the Internet, but what if the only people reading something are people whose scope of experience is so limited that they lack the means to question it—and, moreover, don’t think their experience is limited? The Internet is supposed to make us more media literate, but sometimes it more provides the illusion of media literacy. The pose of skepticism becomes a kind of authority in a context that values it, but that doesn’t mean anything skeptical must be true.

"I often hear people defending their “guilty pleasure” habit of subscribing to awful blogs or reading..."

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:01:49 -0500

“

I often hear people defending their “guilty pleasure” habit of subscribing to awful blogs or reading tabloids or watching bad TV with phrases like “It’s good sometimes” or “It’s not that bad” or “I have to follow what’s happening.”

There’s only so much time in the day, and only so many days in our lives. There’s enough great work out there that you don’t need to waste any time with anything that isn’t great.

”

- Marco.org:

Agreed! (Mostly! Obviously Marco isn’t against reading what you have to read for your day job. Or your good job, even. I read, say, TechCrunch and other not-Shakespeare-but-zeitgeisty blogs because I’m writing a story about tech culture and have a legit reason to want to accurately represent that culture. But:) The worst habit, often accidentally encouraged by awesome tools like Tumblr and Twitter, is to add and add and add, and never delete. Even bad TV is more defensible than bad RSS feeds, because you must actually like the show enough to make some effort to watch it. It doesn’t just pile up for you automatically, unless you watch all your TV on Hulu.

So do yourself a favor and unsubscribe from something today. (Even if it’s me. I won’t notice!)

Then go read “Infinite Jest” or watch “The Seventh Seal” or one of those other things that seems awful until you go do it and then it’s very satisfying, moment-to-moment.

(via nickdouglas)

I hate this attitude. It’s this attitude that leads to signifiers of importance grafted onto art in order to make it palatable to people who think that culture should be medicinal; this attitude that leads people to think that importance lies always somewhere outside and not in what you do and what you like; this attitude that lets us dismiss difficult or weird or bad or stupid or cheesy or campy art because it’s not making it easy for you, not throwing its seriousness in your face so you can feel good about spending you precious goddamn time with it. Art or culture or entertainment or whatever you want to call it is about pleasure and connection as much as it is about transcendence, and the mere fact that something you think is “bad” is able to hold your attention is at least as interesting as anything “great.”

Instead of dropping your guilty pleasures, think more about why you like them. Don’t settle for easy answers, and don’t assume it’s because there’s something wrong with you, as this quote does. I would much rather have someone say something intelligent about why they like gossip blogs or Bridezillas (say!), something that admits the validity of pleasure as a prerequisite to analysis, than to hear someone talk about how they read this really important book and how profound it is. It’s the guilty, not the pleasure, that’s the problem here.

Rereading Vols. 4 + 5 currently. Totally on Team Kim...

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:32:38 -0500

Rereading Vols. 4 + 5 currently. Totally on Team Kim now.

(Sorry about the high pic content lately—I sprained my wrist and need to save my typing strength for papers and such.)

You know what I was wondering

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:40:11 -0500

screwrocknroll:

It’s necessary for each and every one of you to read this. John Cabrera a.k.a. Brian from Hep Alien on “Gilmore Girls” muses on whether Skid Row exists in the world of Gilmore:

ahahannah:

In the episodes of Gilmore Girls, where Hep Alien is auditioning for new guitarists and out of the blue Sebastian Bach comes in and they’re weirded out because he’s old, but they let him in the band because Laine feels bad for him, in that world…did Skid Row exist? I mean, every other band existed? And, I mean, he isn’t just some guy from some unknown band. I mean, someone line David Bazan (first name that popped in my head, dunno why) came on and was like a really good folk singer (should’ve picked a better name, but bear with me) no one would know any better. But Sebastian Bach isn’t unknown. People recognize him, my mom did.
I don’t know. That’s always funny to me, in TV shows, how pop culture exists even though they are inside of it.
I don’t know why I’m talking about this. It’s stupid.
Also though, on another episode, where the guys & Laine are talking about ”guilty pleasures” music, Laine says Simon and Garfunkel, most musically conscious people I know really LIKE Simon & Garfunkel in a totally unironic, guilty way.

I may just hang out with folkies though.

I’m stopping now, thinking too far into television. I’ll just go back to watching TV now.

I always thought of it like this (and I did ponder this a lot while working on the show)… yes, Skid Row did exist in the world of Gilmore Girls. And so Sebastian Bach also existed. Which means the character of Gil looks exactly like Sebastian Bach.

So why has no one in the band made that connection?

Well why has no one in the band made the connection that Sophie looks a hell of a lot like Carole King? Or the Troubador like Grant-Lee Phillips (well actually we weren’t in any scenes with him, but you know what I mean). Maybe it’s that sometimes we overlook the obvious. That we’re so focused on our Rock and Roll or the drama in our relationships that we just can’t see these special things staring us right in the face.

But I think the big question is… why does Gil look exactly like Sebastian Bach? Why does he talk about having had a band once that didn’t work out… how does he just happen to have an “in” at CBGBs for a little teenage garage band? And why is it that his name just happen to be the first three letters of the show itself?

I think the character of Gil is more of a mystery than it seems on the surface. In fact, I think all of these musical characters have a magic to them that lives outside of reality.

Which is kind of cool. I don’t know.

So we're all going to refer to any male News Corp. employee as "Cha Cha #1" from now on, right?

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:56:51 -0500

So we're all going to refer to any male News Corp. employee as "Cha Cha #1" from now on, right?

allcreatures: isay: fuckyeahoctopi: The Octopus Who Loves His...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:24:46 -0500

allcreatures:

isay:

fuckyeahoctopi:

The Octopus Who Loves His Mr Potato Head

“Louis, a giant Pacific octopus at the Blue Reef Aquarium in Cornwall, England, is so attached to his Mr Potato Head toy that he turns aggressive when aquarium staff try to remove it from his tank.

“The giant Pacific octopus was given the toy for Christmas and has even learned to dig out food hidden in the secret box at the back of it.”

via Metro.co.uk

So many things about this are awesome.

"The private homes that New London, Conn., took away from Suzette Kelo and her neighbors have been..."

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:40:57 -0500

“The private homes that New London, Conn., took away from Suzette Kelo and her neighbors have been torn down. Their former site is a wasteland of fields of weeds, a monument to the power of eminent domain.
But now Pfizer, the drug company whose neighboring research facility had been the original cause of the homes’ seizure, has just announced that it is closing up shop in New London.
To lure those jobs to New London a decade ago, the local government promised to demolish the older residential neighborhood adjacent to the land Pfizer was buying for next-to-nothing. Suzette Kelo fought the taking to the Supreme Court, and lost. Five justices found this redevelopment met the constitutional hurdle of “public use.””

- Pfizer abandons site of infamous Kelo eminent domain taking | Washington Examiner (via lastbutnotleast)

Lady Gaga has been a popular topic for gender studies papers this semester

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:21:06 -0500

igather:

lams:

I believe the majority of people in my classes have written about her or her videos at least once.

I would love to take credit for prophetic vision here, but I think we all saw this coming. Everybody is the problem with cultural studies!

Haha, my officemate is teaching an undergrad gender/queer/etc. studies this semester, and someone slipped a Lady Gaga/hermaphrodite article under the door for her today.