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You're from Nightcharm, aren't you? Good man. Before you read on, please note that my current bloggery is here. Dan explains his position more accurately and fully than I did here. (Scroll down to his 6/29/00 entry.) Another reason: even my most banal attempts to flatter (much less flirt with) straight guys have been abject failures. It's been my experience that they don't seem to trust compliments when they come from gay men. It's as if they interpret an innocent remark about a tie as an invitation to anal sex. Perhaps that says something about the paranoia of the men I deal with... I can see why this angle never occured to me. I don't think about the psychological differences between men and women much. (And I'm not saying Dan does either, mind you.) Except when they're the result of injustice or humiliation, the differences don't interest me. I literally cannot see the use for them -- I can't see how understanding any such differences would benefit me or others. This doesn't mean I'm sensitivity on parade, either. It just means...I don't know what it means. I may not be doing justice to what Dan wrote in his e-mail (which as he admits is probably full of broad generalizations), but here it goes... He theorizes that the crazy flirtation of gay men isn't so much as a gay thing as a guy thing: men understand the innocence behind the male impulse to flatter better than women do, and as such, a man flirting with another man has a lot less misunderstanding to overcome than a man flirting with a woman does. So as long as it stays at a low level of seriousness (as long you stress "cute" and not "fuckable"), male-male flirting (even between straight and gay men) occurs easily and naturally. Excellent responses from folks about the whole "cute" thing. I have to admit, thought, that I phrased my question in a really vauge way. You could read it as saying "why do gay bloggers use the word 'cute' so damned often?" and not "why are gay bloggers so much more up-front about what turns their crank?" The latter is what I meant, but luckily the former is a really interesting question anyway. Dan sent a very enlightening e-mail about all this, but that's another blog entry entirely and I really need to wash some dishes. Anyway, some additional thoughts: Is it my imagination, or do gay bloggers seem far more apt to call others -- especially fellow bloggers -- "cute" than straight ones? There's Jerwin's Blogstreet Boys, and Sparky's Cute Boys of the Web, Boylog's fascination with hotties, Tim's Lascivious, and even (gasp!) Jonno's Cute Dead Guy of the Week! I can't imagine a straight male blogger getting away with this kind of shameless flirt-o-rama with women bloggers -- women bloggers who he doesn't "know" on any level, I mean. If he tried, he'd no doubt come off as a creepy stalker or at least some poor schmo with no social skills. On the other hand, when a gay man or a straight woman does this, I find it amusing. Clearly my double standard is a case of POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD. (Looking at Nanette's site reminds me that my AOL profile for epicharmus@aol.com once used the EXACT SAME Guided By Voices quote she's got on the bottom of her page. Did it help me pick up cute guys? Oh God, no.) Can gay men get away with this because there's more play in gay romance -- or more childishness? Do I want to be part of this vast daisy chain of puppy lust? Or would I be a sell-out to the misanthopy that I've cultivating lately if I put a more flattering photo on the site? Hmmm... Johnny Bond, "The Hijacker" A good trucker record with a great trick ending, but that's not what interests me here. What interests me is that it's a case of a white, southern gentlemen using the word "dis" as in "disrespect" in the year...well, I don't know what year, but probably early-seventies or so, at least before Johnny Bond died in 1978. I automatically assumed that "dis" was created, ex nihilo, in the Bronx sometime in late-seventies, early-eighties, but this leads to some interesting questions. Was "dis" a common Southern term once? Was it a trucker term? And in either case, how'd it end up in the mouths of MC Lyte and LL Cool J some ten or so years later? I can appreciate what Tom Paine did without being compelled to be Tom Paine. I was born two years after Stonewall. I owe a lot to those who fought in the riots, and to those who organized afterwards. They provided a clearing, if you will, for someone like me to exist comfortably. But I have no desire to ape them. In all their diversity and multitude, none of them had a stranglehold on the truth. Bruce LaBruce doesn't like neutering of the "complexity of gay consciousness"...and yet in the next breath talks about gravitating towards the "undiluted gay identity." Is the undiluted gay identity complex, then? I suppose I could imagine that, although it is hard. In any case, though, LaBruce's "gay consciousness" isn't complex enough to include me; I would be the chaff winnowed from an undiluted gay identity. Fine. I like reveling in contingency. Shane Tanner interviews Bruce La Bruce -- film-maker, punk provocateur and an anti-assimilationist -- on Nightcharm (a gay erotica site -- you have been warned, my heterosexual brethren). He says this: In gay politics, it's a question of the assimilationists versus the anti-assimilationists. I'm with the former. I grew up with fairly solid liberal bourgeois values. And so I remain. I'm still bourgeois insofar as I think having a career, a long-term monogamous relationship, and a house of one's own full of "nice things" are not ignoble goals -- hardly above criticism or analysis, but not necessarily signs of the unexamined life. So I can't "sell out": there's no place for me to sell out from. I have my own Phelps story. It was the Stonewall 25 Parade, June, 1994. There was a drum corp, and people around me and my friends were dancing a little in the warm sun. Then we heard a big commotion up front. You could hear a lot of screaming and yelling. The mass of people were walking around, reacting to some unseen point on the sidewalk. I got terrified for a second -- it sounded like a riot, and here I was unprepared for violence. We got closer. It was only Phelps and his posse. Nobody was being attacked, not physically anyway. A small group were carrying crude signs on street corner, dishing out typical Phelpsian crap, and it seemed like everyone around us were only too willing to dish it right back and then some. After they got their full share of abuse, the crowd re-grouped and re-marched. Then they went back to dancing, only this time, they boogied just a little bit harder. As if they were celebrating a victory over their oppressors. Me and my friends looked at our fellow marchers, and then each other. We have nothing to do with these people. After he expressed horror over Rev. Phelps infamous godhatesfags.com site, I e-mailed Luke some info about how Phelps was even worse than he thought. He promptly thanked me...but said I blogged for Blue Lines. Not CAOTM. I was thinking that I guess I could tell him about this site, but...it just seemed, well...forward of me, you know? I suppose I don't have the requisite will-to-self-promote needed to make CAOTM the blogging choice of the new generation. Luckily, Tom set him straight. :) If my anti-essentialist views concerning identity sound an awful like my anti-authenticity views concerning music, you're absolutely right. There's no coincidence. More about "self-loathing." Bruce Bawer: "Malliaris's description of Wolf as 'self-hating' is typical of many subculture-oriented gays, in whose view a refusal to accept the subculture's idea of homosexuality constitutes a refusal to accept one's won homosexuality." The subcultural idea of homosexuality Bawer's talking about could defined as one where a homosexual is supposed to be, by nature, sexual adventurous and politically radical. By this view, a homosexual who voted Republican, shopped at Ikea, or wanted to get married would be someone who still hadn't come to terms with who they "really were." Surprise, surprise: I find this view demeaning and limiting. I don't want to be held to some pre-approved template of behavior just because of this one (admittedly non-trivial) aspect of my life. (Of course, it works both ways: Bawer himself refers to "subcultural" gays and lesbians as self-loathing. I don't see that promiscuity or narcissistic exhibitionism is necessarily a sign of self-hatred; even if disgusting it's not always a problem of self-esteem. Well, not always.) What is rock? What is jazz? What is pop? These are questions for the butterfly collectors. This Jeff Pike essay makes Carducci sound 35% as full of shit as Harry Knowles. "Self-loathing," when not describing the specifics of actual depression, is the word of the extremist essentialist. It's called R&B and not "R&B" because the music in question has something to do with the music that was called R&B some years hence, and that music had something to do with the R&B of a time prior to that. Follow the chain down, you'll get the music of Carducci's juke joints and whorehouses (among other musics). It's family resemblances, not essences. If this disconnection from the source makes Timbaland not really R&B, fine, whatever, I'll call it something else if I have to, fercrissakes. But of course I won't. I have as much to do with the anal-retentivity of the one who insists on the primacy of musical labels as I do with the anal-retentivity of the audiophiliac dweeb. It would be self-loathing if "the American earth of roadhouse, etc." (what a charmingly picturesque, almost Marcusian line) described the milieu (either social or aesthetic or both) of RZA or Mannie Fresh or Timbaland. Of course it doesn't. It probably doesn't describe their parents' milieu, either. Maybe not even their grandparents. Momus: "As Theodor Adorno has pointed out, peoples who have been dehumanised are often, paradoxically, made into symbols of all that is most human." Joe Carducci says: "Indeed, this is an 'R&B' that's increasingly sci-fi in its hysterical self-loathing flight from the American earth of roadhouse, kitchen, church, juke joint, whorehouse, etc." He somehow neglected to mention the plantation. Happy birthday to me. David Gelernter, "The Second Coming - A Manifesto" We need another manifesto like we need... Gelernter calls browsers and operating systems "obsolete" even when millions upon millions of people use them, and when nothing exists to replace them -- this is the sociocultural equivalent of light pulses arriving at their destination before they've left. However good Gelerneter's intentions may be, he sounds like a motivational speaker, and he sounds like those horrible, oppressive "You Will" AT+T ads from the mid-nineties (oh, wasn't that a time?). Change is coming. Change is inevitable. It will sweep away the old and bring the new, just like planned obsolesence back in the fifties. But we're not supposed to think of dishwashers and cars here. Think the future. By a near-Darwinian necessity, change always brings us something better than what we have. Change is always a good thing. We know what you want. Just you wait. Please do not hang up. We know who you are. We've got your number. And so on. Originally I put a cool-as-anything java Spirograph applet thing for this entry, but I just got really tired of waiting for my webpage to load. Various Artists (Mix by Master Stepz), UK Garage: The Next Step UK Garage? I still have no fucking clue what that means. But the CD's free with Mixmag, which at eight dollars as an import, a bargain for a CD. While I can't imagine ever dancing to this, the dink quotient on this post-house music -- we're talking really skinny beats here -- subtly renders any backsliding towards mere bourgeois R&B a moot point. Adorable and suave. Greil Marcus writes about Sleater-Kinney. Again. What Stanley Booth is really bemoaning is that rock music is no longer the great disrupter of culture. But nobody in all honesty would say that music is mere entertainment. Even entertainment isn't just entertainment nowadays. People play rock music at weddings and funerals. That's not a trivial fact, folks. People also play it when they'e trying to fall asleep or go to work. People have created vast and terrifying corporate empires thanks to its ubiquity. It keeps people from being terrified of elevators and empty spaces. It soundtracks lives and delimits experience as much as anything does. And yes, it changes lives. This is not an ignoble state: it is the culmination of rock's manifest destiny, perhaps. But then, I'm against the idea that rock music is, au fond, any one thing at all. There is no essence, only family resemblences. And I'm not in it for the unwholesomeness, either. That ugly, wretched myth of rock 'n' roll being the devil's music and how it still informs the ways serious people think about rock music -- the idea that rock music, au fond, always was and should remain some overwrought brew of paganism and dementia praecox -- it's one idea that I wouldn't be sad to see disappear from the rockcrit landscape. "Any kind of popular trend is infinitely more wholesome than listening to old records and trying to institute changes. It's more important that people know that some kind of pleasure can be derived from things that are around -- rather than catalog more stuff -- you can do that forever: and if people aren't going to have a reason to change, they're never going to change...I don't think people should spend too much time fiddling with old records -- it's better to switch on the radio." -- Harry Smith, 1968 But I'm not in it for the wholesomeness. Knowing that the Ramones released their first album before I had my fifth birthday, before the Bicentennial, before I went to camp and then school, feels *weird* to me, like an unwanted invasion into the pristineness of my childhood. Knowing that there's actually a musician on volume four of the Anthology that's still alive and musically performing, at that, (Wade Mainer, the feller who sings a grinning version of "John Henry"), isn't too weird; finding out there's a living musician on one of the eariler volumes is utterly unthinkable. That's how distant they sound from us. What's your all-time most impulsive record purchase? Mine's Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume Four. The space of time between noticing it in the new release racks at J&R Music World to carrying it back to work took a minute-half, maybe even just a minute. After picking up the first Anthology set, folk became grist for my intellectual mill, more pop stuff to think pop thoughts about. The Anthology made folk music comprehensible. Once, when I put any thought to it at all, the idea of listening to The Old Music struck me as a purely academic exercise: the Anthology had all the familiar pop themes of corn, abstraction, sublimity and death, all completely familiar themes to the pop lover in me. Plus, there were the unearthly harmonics these musicians summoned up out of their well-worn fiddles and throats; after my brain had been hard-wired through years of growing up with country music and then drony stuff like shoegazer and gamelan, how could I not love that? Thanks to the Anthology, I set about folk and blues music with the same random knowledge and fearlessness that informs my purchases of alt. or disco or pop stuff. So I've gained enough familiarity with The Old Music to think that this never-released fourth volume of the Anthology is pretty good, but that Yazoo puts out compilations which are almost as good all the time. Some good tunes, particularly the train songs. Some of it's fucking tedious, like Bradly Kincaid's seemingly endless English ballad, and maybe most of the second disc. Volume Four covers later ground -- the latest song is from October of 1940, whereas volumes one through three are all pretty much pre-Depression -- and is a jot more recognizable, less mysterious. And less interesting. Why, I'm not sure. My off-the-cuff answer is that the Depression turned the folk artists of the twenties into either the professionals and has-beens of the thirties. So the folkier artists retreated back into the hills from which they came, and the modernists, the ones dedicated to taking the music out for a ride to see how fast'll go, were forced to mutate the music into non-folk, technically advanced forms (bluegrass, delta blues) or die. There's some good stuff, though, particuarly the train songs. But it's close to thirty dollars thanks to Revenant's obscenely well-wrought packaging. I have no regrets, but may I suggest this instead? Just want to say this now because I know I'll forget -- today is Bloomsday, people! Bloomsday! Get with it! This is what I've been doing on my summer vacation. Not bad, I think, though some things need to be worked out, still: everything needs to be reformatted, for starters. I have to reinstate the site meters. The bottom is a bit boring. But I like the dotties, which takes off on a Coach Leather in-store ad campaign. Talk Talk, Laughing Stock -- Impossibly fragile, barely there. "Sweet Dreams, My Gypsy Blue" Some hypothetical questions for Metallica:
I don't think it's a good sign that it took a whole minute for me to remember suck.com's name. No link - never liked 'em in the first place. They're so mid-nineties, ugh. Let me clarify one thing here - if you've ever e-mailed me about anything, your blog does not suck. No, there is no cause-and-effect relationship here. It's simply an amazing coincidence. The angstiness of the short-distanced blogger. It dawned on me about a year into my web citizenship (1996 or so) that I should learn HTML and create a website or something. It seemed like all the smart people were doing it, I'm a smart person, er-fucking-go. Up went something on Geocities, a homepage with a nice hand-drawn graphic, one or two pages of random "CAOTM"-style jottings, and then…nothing. I never bothered to add anything else. I didn't know where to take it. I had coder's block. I really wanted to make truly fantastic website, something that would beguile and amaze with its marriage of form and content, a site that was Hello Kittyand Ludwig Wittgenstein and Chank Diesel and Greil Marcus all rolled into one nummy pancake. But I had no idea what I wanted the site to be about. I kept searching and searching for an idea that would allow my creative juices some recess time, and none came. (How Guido Anselmi of me.) I knew one thing -- if I was going to The closest "idea" I came up with was providing online annotations of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, an appallingly geeky activity which nonetheless satisfied both the obsessive-compulsive fact-and-figure side of me, and also the side of me which just plain adored the show. But just before I was going to gather my druthers and do something, I found some little band of fellows stole my thunder and independently came up with the exact same idea! What's worse is that their haunting niceness There's no point in me telling the story of what happened next and what's happening now, so let's just concentrate on the now, the now being the Cultural Artifacts of the Moment weblog. Sad to say, I'm still tormented by the fact that I don't know where this is gonna go -- I still don't know what I want to do with it, aside from re-design it. Like Simon Reynolds' rock & roll tree (har-har), it lacks an anima. The comfort is that I find that the act of blogging contains a certain modicum of F-U-N, and that I know that no matter what happens, at the very least, friends will read and respond to it. (A tempered but unsarcastic hooray.) Most weblogs touch my vomit spot. May God in heaven above save CAOTM from such a horrid fate. I'm going to have re-install all the software on my computer again this weekend, because it keeps fucking up in a way I will keep non-specific. So while I doubt very highly that anything will go wrong, don't be surprised if you don't hear from me for a week or so. These things happen. A documentary about Pink Floyd's The Wall has just finished on VH1. The main art-direction guy for the whole multimedia tour-de-force, Gerald Scarfe, said something about how, with The Wall, he was finally able to get move beyond the kind of sugary animations that you'd see in Walt Disney movies. As if the body-loathing of his copulating flowers and ass-mouthed judge isn't as much self-protective fantasy as the sickliest Disney monstrosity... The second-most repellent thing about The Wall is Scarfe's illustrations, whose phenomenal ugliness ripped a bit of innocence out of my childhood. The most repellent thing about The Wall is how Roger Waters attempted to elevate his own private rock-star neuroses into a universal condition. This is what Eminem will look like when he's older. Domino's Pizza has a new ad campaign. Flat Eric should sue. Forget being a measly stock-broker. If John Rocker retires, I predict he will have a richly promising career of irritation in direct-to-video action movies. Or porn. Good God. The League of Gentlemen is coming to Comedy Central. Whatever should I think of this? Some great Tom T. Hall song titles. "It Sure Can Get Cold In Des Moines." "I Flew Over Our House Last Night." "The Monkey That Became President." "I Hope It Rains At My Funeral." "St. Louis Named A Shoe After Me." "She Gave Her Heart To Jethro." "That's How I Got To Memphis." "I Miss A Lot Of Trains." "Old Enough To Want To (Fool Enough To Try)." "Pinto The Wonder House Is Dead." "As for pop.... It was a great year for teenage girls, and for substantially older male rockcrits who imagine they can somehow inhabit the consciousness of teenage girls (the motivation? something to do with the idea that teenage girls are more 'authentic', precisely through being innocent of a notion of 'authenticity')." No. No, no, no. I'm no longer a teenager, you could say I am rock critic of a sort, and you could also I like (though not love, not yet) the stuff teenaged girls are supposed to like. Yet I have no interest in inhabiting the consciousness of teenage girls. Nor, I assume, do the folks listening to the Backstreet Boys and 'Nsync on the adult contemporary stations alongside Gloria Estefan and Billy Joel. I would much prefer to inhabit the consciousness of Cute Punk Rock Guys. And what is this "overarching marco-myth" crap anyway? We live in an age where "language," "narrative," "myth," "system," and so on all mean exactly the same thing -- nothing. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. Almost anyone. I actually like Simon Reynolds. He won me over with Generation Ecstasy, which I found refreshingly free of the revolution-mongering and academic babble of his post-rock article and Blissed Out, both of which nauseated me when I first read them. (Well, truth be told, I've only skimmed Blissed Out, and that was ten years ago.) He's still capabale of this, though: "Rock is like a fallen tree-- dead and rotting, it will surely sustain whole micro-ecosystems of bugs, toads, fungi, mosses, for years to come--teeming populations of miniscule critters living off its moribund tissues (rock's archive of gesture and feeling and expression). Sure, you can focus on specific micro-scenes of rock (e.g. thrash/death/black metal, emo-core, whatever), and perceive bustling vitality -- but that doesn't mean that the tree, the overarching macro-myth, isn't dead." "Rock is dead." Nobody ever establishes criteria for a future state of rock's deadness. Nobody ever says "I'll know rock is dead when such-and-such state of affairs holds"; the meaning of the death of rock & roll is always explicated after the fact, never before. What do we mean when we say that rock music - or any music - is "dead," anyway? That the music no longer is interesting? That it no longer innovates? That nobody makes it anymore? That the current stuff people call rock music is actually a betrayal of the principles of the folks who created the stuff in the first place? Is any of this true? And more importantly, even if it is true, why should I give a shit? Who could the mystery woman in this piece be? Janis Ian? Phoebe Snow? BUFFY?!?! Uh-oh. E is hitting the 'hood. Simon Reynolds seems very optimistic about this development, saying that it just might help dissolve the tough-guy paradigm that's ruled hip-hop in one form or another since God knows when. Unfortunately, I also remember from Reynolds' Generation Ecstasy that chronic use and abuse turned the effects of E from deterritorialized empathy to speedfreak frenzy. Eventually the music followed suit: witness 'ardkore, gabba and the mutatious forms of drum & bass. While the idea of hip-hop love thugs is, well, intriguing I'm not sure hip-hop could stand to be more terrified and paranoid than the stuff coming out the Ruff Ryders camp is now. Reynolds says that it's unlikely that E won't have an effect on hip-hop, and while I agree, I find the particular form of his enthusiasm suspicious. Throughout his recent writings Reynolds expresses his total dismay that we aren't living in the total musical revolution that was rave/techno in its glory years: now he seems reduced to looking under every nook and cranny for the seeds of the next one. Me, I can stand not living in a musical revolution, especially if you call the situation we're in now non-revolutionary times. (If you do need a revolution, go straight to Napster, dammit.) I haven't updated because I was voting for Tom's next focus group. And also because I was trying to think of kind things to say about Tom T. Hall, whose box set happens to be my most recent music purchase. It's nice to know that Mired is paying homage to Al Ewing's fine work. Flap your arms, child, you look like a pheasant. |
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