December 2009
28 posts
haters and hecklers
Hands down, end of discussion, no contest, the single shittiest phrase of the ’00s—even over “webinar.” “Hater” emerged in the ’90s, but it seeped its way into pop music’s bloodstream during this decade and shows no signs of going away. It’s the ultimate cop-out, equally applicable, and specious, whether you’re a megastar or a wannabe. Don’t want to own up to your own bullshit? Call everyone a...
10 tags
fiction and the decade, 5 & 6
See here: lacking enough of a deadpan face to say anything about the “best” books of the decade, I’m just noting a handful of items, new or not, that seemed relevant to me over the past years. Two more below: Donald Antrim and Nathan Englander.
5. Donald Antrim - The Verificationist
Leave out his debut (on grounds of being “different”) and his memoir (on grounds of being...
The Decade in Music Genre Hype (link) →
tomewing:
I just want to be positive for a minute and say: sub-genres are SO GREAT. They’re one of the best things about music. These little sceney bubbles of everyone batting round an idea, running with it, trying to cash in, trying to imitate, not caring about being original, not caring about being ridiculous, just this mad goldrush sprint to work through something - it’s brilliant. Especially...
7 tags
fiction and the decade, 3 & 4
See here: lacking enough of a deadpan face to say anything about the “best” books of the decade, I’m just noting a handful of items, new or not, that seemed relevant to me over the past years. Two more below: George Saunders and Alejo Carpentier.
3. George Saunders — Pastoralia
Stories, from the first year of the decade, which maybe accounts for why I’m not...
fiction and the decade, 1 & 2
I’ve been sort of charmed, lately, to notice a few people on Tumblr putting together “best books of the decade” lists — there’s a kind of hubris and devotion to this that strikes me as a good thing. After all, even print publications with staffs of full-time year-round book critics tend to get a little neurotic about their own authority when putting together...
further to the previous posts, just a thought
I have traditionally been a supporter of the idea that musical taste is not just about music, and that this is a good thing. This has always struck me as one of the things that’s interesting about pop music, especially when you think about it in a sort of teenaged sense — the way our tastes and affiliations are informed by, or even trying to express, things about us. Where we fit in....
correlation versus causation
barthel picks up on Creed
^^ While I was composing the previous post, Barthel has picked up on this and sort of touched on something I was attempting to touch on: how finding criticism important is itself somewhat of a middle-class / bourgeois habit — how criticism is a “privileged” perch mostly among a specific class — how considering it an elite with responsibilities...
the complications of examining other people's...
sadydoyle:
We can agree that Creed is terrible, I think. We can also agree that this is not the point. The point is deciding, as a critic, that you don’t have any obligation to the terrible/popular/terrible-because-it-is-popular stuff, and setting up your own obnoxious young-white-man’s discourse in which you for some reason are qualified to expound upon the culture, and you get (in many cases)...
re: The Princess Bride
Westley’s undying love for Buttercup seems incredibly romantic right up until you consider that she’s the basically the only woman in the nation of Florin who’s both pre-menopausal and not covered in filth.
One grows older and suspects an altogether richer and weightier story hovering behind Miracle Max and his wife — passion! politics! court intrigue! magic! corpses! a...
5 tags
a book that is popular on the internet
Before I say what I’m about to say, let me just note that I have not read Shoplifting from American Apparel, apart from maybe a four-page excerpt somewhere, which actually did not irritate me as much as I expected it to, and was interesting and readable and made me chuckle a few times, and generally made me feel better about the fact that a lot of people I see/know are interested in the...
"A servant must not be chosen by the author as the... →
thinlinednotepaper:
S.S. Van Dine’s “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,” from 1928.
These rules do, of course, turn out to be the conventions of murder mysteries and detective stories, and with pretty good reason; they’re all more or less sensible. You might wish to bend or break one or two of them in a given story, as a novelty or angle, but much more than that and you start...
“What gives with my two favorite 2000s sitcoms - 30 Rock, Arrested Development -...”
–
Overheard on Twtr.
Seriously, what is it about contemporary comedy that apparently screams for slap bass, ukulele, bad jazz vocal ensembles, etc?
It seems like this music is meant to signify “fun,” but what I love about the comedies mentioned above is how bravely sour and unfun they are beneath...
???
cureforbedbugs:
But if that’s the case, then I think this 21-year-old is seriously deluded (and I’m pretty sure dude’s like 30, so WTF are you still doing on the precipice [of adulthood], dude?).
Semi-confidential to cureforbedbugs: I don’t know exactly how old you are, or exactly how old Amanda Petrusich is, and sometimes I even forget exactly how old I am, though I think it’s safe...
(confidential to Tom)
re: Billboard — keep in mind that we Americans are, well, Americans: people here who are “against” the value of popular music are often actively invested in popular music’s being seen as popular, since that lets them believe they’re more clever and revolutionary than everyone else (or at least boldly unconcerned with what other people do).
So I don’t think...
Billboard's Top 100 songs of the 00s →
desnoise:
I had half-expected agrammar to touch on Tom’s passing remark about 2000s r&b/hip-hop, critics, and race, and he didn’t. Now, it’s true there’s very little in U.S. culture that doesn’t touch on issues of race (also, oft-ignored by conservatives and liberals alike, class). And it’s hard to be certain what exactly Tom might be thinking here (quickest way to find out: Tom, what are...
Billboard's Top 100 songs of the 00s →
tomewing:
I find this list - especially the top 40 or so - really fascinating, and not simply because I like about 2/3 of the records in it and adore a good half-dozen.
It’s interesting to me because of the idea - repeated so often I’ve come to lazily accept it without really thinking - that this decade has been particularly fragmented in terms of pop, the music people listen to, and so on.
...
new jersey ain't the whole world
In a reality TV world, no place is deemed more real than New Jersey. Whether it’s “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” or “Jersey Shore,” the fictional mob reality of “The Sopranos” or the real-folks rock of Bruce Springsteen, if you want real reality, not silly poseurs sneaking into the White House, there’s no better place to find it than New Jersey.
From the New York Times. This makes very...
9 tags
either Julie Powell is analyzing critics or I'm...
I said earlier that I wanted to talk here about rhetoric that amazes or confounds me — which evidently means that I need to talk about Julie Powell, of Julie & Julia fame. Doublex.com is currently giving her space to talk about her new book, Cleaving, and her experience promoting it. (The book is about butchery and how Powell had an affair.) And yesterday, following an introductory...
6 tags
on why you probably wouldn't want to actually be...
Life forces most people to grow out of their teenage-bedroom habits. The world of teenage bedrooms, after all, can be awfully cloistered. It tends to involve passionate attachment to a really small sphere of things — specific images, books, records, ideas, beliefs — coupled with a pretty profound lack of understanding or interest in anything else. It’s a world where the things...
The Major Works of Counterintuitive Thought From... →
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.
Reblogging this partly because it’s a very well-assembled list, but also to point out that I’m not sure the “Slate-ification” runs that deep — in most of the cases presented...
11 tags
which part of songs do you like? (this is not...
Off to the side of last week’s spat about Animal Collective, I kept talking about the “proportions” of songs. Something about this stuck with me over the weekend. I was using the word “proportions” in an extremely general way, of course, to refer to nearly anything — the proportions of verse to chorus, bass to treble, instrument to instrument, signal to noise;...
8 tags
Lynda Barry, Cruddy, and the "weird 1970s...
Lynda Barry likes the cruddy to the point where she made that the name of her novel, but her cruddy is different, unironic, full of heart.
I said this earlier, while trying to feel out some kind of generational aesthetic, one presented in the 80s and 90s by people who’d mostly grown up in the 70s — this fascination with the Cruddy/Ordinary/Grotesque. The heart and lack of irony I...
AnCo be galvanizin'
cureforbedbugs:
The gist, though, was that if “My Girls” is some new standard for, or at least important entry in, the category “aural difficulty that you need to spend some time with,” then we’re not living in very “difficult” times. The-Fucking-Dream is more “difficult” than “My Girls”! Seriously, though, “Fancy” is technically very tough to parse, and somewhat similar in structure. Maybe I’ll...
Once more on Animal Collective
screwrocknroll:
Animal Collective is indie, sure, you can tell that by the subculture of people who listens to them and likes them and argues about them. But “poppy”? … I can understand people liking this for the texture, or the mood it builds (as I proposed here), but for the “pop”?
Well yes yes of course, a billion times yes! Just with a caveat. This is something I was gesturing toward...
Imagine if the internet as we know it now was... →
screwrocknroll:
Lex’s predictable disgust with anything that falls outside his tightly-regulated world view of acceptable music…
Link is to a Singles Jukebox roundup on Animal Collective’s “My Girls.”
I’m a bit loathe to pick up on anything Lex says, because of the vast distance between when he’s speaking in good faith and when he’s just posturing....
Dave Eggers on being a critic
peterwknox:
veiledyellow:portraitoftheartistasayoungman:
Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you...