January 30, 2001

Circa 1976, Part II: Brian Eno, Another Green World

I came home from therapy and the mall one day and put my new copy of Another Green World on the turntable. After I listened to it, I put it on again, and listened to it from beginning to end without hesitation or impatience. I may have even put on for a third consecutive time had not the threat of Hurricane Gloria interrupted my reverie.

I didn't intend to give the record the whole of my attention. But each odd vignette would appear, accrue detail, develop, sometimes with great drama, then fade away, guiding me to the next one. With all sorts of odd sonic juxtapositions -- drone with tinkle, say, or thump and squelch -- it left me with the feeling that all the details in these songs were all rather arbitrary but attended-to with great care. It did not hint at great meaning. It was impressionistic, probably the first pop music worthy of the appellation I had ever heard. It was quietly devastating.

Only a couple of days before July 4, 1976, I started day camp. A few months later, I would start kindergarten. The date itself I remember as being extraorinarily exciting. So, for a variety of reasons, I see the Bicenntenial as offering a conveniently clear-cut milestone in my life: it signals the end of my childhood and the beginning of my socialization into the real world.

For some reason, the idea that I could (in theory) buy a Ramones record on this date strikes me as unfathomable. They can't co-exist with the pristine banality of my childhood. I won't let them. Neither can Another Green World. But it doesn't seem to belong to any particular time. Its polite strangeness owes nothing to either what I know of 1976 (even after I've accustomed myself to all of this album's spiritual brethren -- the krautrock, the prog, Eno's other albums), or what I remember of 1976. And it owed nothing to what I knew of 1985. And it still sounds sui generis. It is, finally, "timeless," gnomic in every context you can place it in.

Thank you, Mr. Martin.
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January 29, 2001

David Gwynn, "Internalized Homophobia"

This rant irritates the hell out of me. But not because it's wrong. For the most part, it isn't. On the contrary, once you wipe away the bile, the truth of everything he's saying strikes me as fairly obvious. None of this should have to be said, much less again and again. But then I say this from a position of privilige. I live in the suburbs, far away from where the pissily doctrinaire normally live. (Eric Weisbard, at the tail end of a Consolidated review: "I mean, if you can move in with three new people in San Francisco and not find at least one bottle of Beauty Without Cruelty shampoo in the shower, you're doing better than me!") Furthermore, CAOTM attracts nothing like the audience -- and hence the idiotic trollage -- that David's site must. Hooray for me.

As I've said before, the term "internalized homophobia" drives me up the wall, because it implies the self-hater is irrationally fighting against some natural -- and hence "correct" -- way to be gay. But there is no correct way to be gay. (Which isn't to dispense with the moral obligations peculiar to those are homosexual, but...that's a subject for a less sleep-starved time. 'night.)
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January 28, 2001

La Monte Young, The Black Album

La Monte and Mirian deep-throat the universe, then retreat to the boiler-room for a nap. Godhead, of course.
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Circa 1976, Part I: Craft Fairs

When I think of the death of hippie, I invariably think of the craft fairs my mother took me to when I was a kid. If (and I'm guessing here) the sixties was a time of renaissance for American craft, a time when ne'er-do-well hispters rediscovered and resurrected all sorts of dead, dying or moribund craftwork, then the seventies were when those hipsters started selling their wares to bourgeois folk like me and my mom.

As a child, I never could understood why someone might want to buy something purely decorative like a driftwood sculpture or a lacquered box. You couldn't *do* anything with them, other than place them in some unused portion of the den and let them collect dust. (Even to this day, collecting objects d'art holds little appeal to me, partly because the really interesting stuff is well beyond my budget.) I'd like to think that these feelings were evidence of a nascent anti-consumerist ethos, a hatred of things with no use-value. In truth, the real reason I couldn't stand it when my mom's interest in bar stools made of barrels and rustic kitchen plaques was because I thought she could spend her attentions and her money on much better things. Such as the handmade toys or games that were also sold at these places. I was impossibly spolied.

Some of the other artifacts I remember seeing at these places:

Marble tic-tac-toe boards. Furniture suitable for a Victorian-era living room, but scaled-down for children. Picturesque wood-carved dioramas of city life. Shellacked pie crusts filled with plastic berries. Little men made out of bolts, nuts and nails, playing golf or fishing, suitable for hubby's desk. Wood-slice clocks. Agate-slice clocks. Caricatures. Hand-blown glass. Batik. Tie-dye. Herbariums. Typecraft collages. Ceramic pigs with corks for noses. Quilts. Stained glass. Kites. Marionettes. Handwrought metal crustacean ashtrays. Geodes. Rubber stamps. Handblown glass. Music boxes. Potpourri and aromatic twigs. Duck decoys. Brass beds. Devil Sticks. Leather mugs. Wicker chairs. Amish everything and anything. Woodburned scrolls. Leatherbound books.
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January 23, 2001

Blog Talking Points III

90. I don't think the Bloggies can mean very much. Awards are acts of criticism, but very lazy ones. They are the most uncritical form of criticism.

91. An award does one thing that a critic does: the award says Artifact X is worthy of commemoration. But most awards, especially an award-by-poll such as the Bloggies, are incapable of accomplishing a considerably more compelling critical task: the task of explaining why.

92. In order to arrive at an result, each voter has to have all of their myriad rationales and misgivings and enthusiasms about blogging combed out and reduced to a digital checkmark. This is somewhat odd when you consider that the Bloggies are trying to honor blogs -- web entities frequently function as celebrations and dramatizations of one's rationales and misgivings and enthusiasms.

93. The Bloggies don't even have the promise of a thoroughly enjoyable empty spectacle.

94. What I would prefer is something like the Village Voice Pazz and Jop poll, whose raison d'etre as far as I'm concerned is the pithy commentary. Or how about a weblog focus group, composed of...I don't know...40 randomly chosen people from the cast of Metafilter, maybe?

95. One good thing about the Bloggies is that it will give heightened visibility to certain blogs I love, to say nothing of the ones I contribute to. Another good thing is that it will invariably point me towards other interesting blogs. I mean, I want a hat just like that. Hell, I want a BOYFRIEND who looks like that. Yum.

96. Having an blogger A-list is weird, irritating and glamorous.
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January 18, 2001

Blog Talking Points II

87. Some blogs relay thoughts and occurences so private that my sense of their author is completely vaporous. For the longest time, I didn't even know if Miromi was a man or woman. This can be a good thing!
88. The appearance of fiction in Miromi's blog also adds to this hallucinatory quality.
89. Experience has shown me that updating a blog can be a lot like having fresh food in the house; the guilt that comes from not wanting to ignore the food ends up subverting any urge to actually eat it. This is one reason I keep powdered milk in the cupboard.
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January 16, 2001

Blog Talking Points

1. One ideal blog is Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
2. Words I never use: honest, meaningful, content [n.], publishing...
3. Charm is excellent.
4. A design is only bad if it makes me not want to read what's lodged in it.
5. Try it like a watercolor.
6. Criticizing a weblog for not being deep enough is like criticizing an address book for not being Middlemarch.
7. But some address books don't do their job well.
8. So what is the job of weblogs, then? No, no. Wrong question.
9. Sometimes even McSweeney's is serious.
10. But it's still a good idea to stop reading it anyway.
11. What are your expectations? What should they be? You never say. Because there is no answer.
12. Christopher Smart!
13. I would like to see more blogs that are strictly formal exercises
14. I would like to see more blogs pose gedanken-experiments to the reader.
15. We absolutely must keep in mind that the majority of blogs are not meant for you, whoever you may be.
16. And this will be more and more true the more blogs there are.
17. As their popularity increases, the audience for weblogs fragment exactly the same way the post-sixties audience for rock music did.
18. I want to see more pink weblogs.
19. I want to see more weblogs from Indonesia.
20. I mean "I," me, me alone.
21. Me: "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."
22. Obsolescence is obsolete.
23. This is sounding like a manifesto, doesn't it? Carry on.
24. I want to see more private weblogs -- weblogs meant for no-one save the writer.
25. I don't want to read them, though. I just want to know they exist.
26. Pere Ubu: More Is Always Better.
27. The Weblog is the Spice Girls of the 'net.
28. Idea: self-immolating blogs. Blogs that only exist for an hour and leave beautiful corpses.
29. Embrace the ephemeral, baby.
30. But pop teaches us: "ephemeral" pleasures have a tendency to last. DISCO NEVER DIED.
31. Why do I check my referrer logs? Because you don't write me.
32. Tom: "What, ultimately, is a weblog? Subject...plus commentary. And subject plus commentary sounds a lot to me like criticism."
33. *One* form of criticism.
34. A blog that attacks its subjects from all angles, through an endless variety of arguments. A distinct sense of purpose runs through each entry.
35. The blog as exquisite corpse.
36. I will not read blogs whose sole purpose is to finesse the blogger's charisma.
37. Except for Tanya's.
38. The blog reader is the gourmand of spirit: a liberal ironist.
39. No, the naturally inarticulate should not blog. But that's not to say that poor writers shouldn't blog.
40. [Deleted.]
41. Rock fans pronounced rock dead when they saw glam, singer-songwriter, punk, disco, etc. and were horrified to realize that the music they loved could actually contain those ideas. They wanted to remain naive of rock's possibilities and wanted to render the people who took those possibilities non-existent.
42. Follow me down, I am only making gestures. And I have a cold.
43. In other words, more bloggers making hay with constrictions.
44. I travel in two blogging circles: the gayfolk and the freakytriggerfolk.
45. If a link has swept the rounds of either circle, I don't bother discussing it.
46. Unless I have a unique spin.
47. Try also: Greil Marcus' Real Life Rock Top Ten.
48. Or Fredreich Nietzsche's Beyond Good And Evil
49. Or The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs
50. Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project
51. There should be blogs for commemorating dérives.
52. There should be blogs for online dérives: start at one website, follow a link to another website, and so on till reaches a dead-end, maybe.
53. Blogs that not merely link to other blogs, but remix and annotate them. Sampladelica. Derrida's Disseminations, hell, The Post Card!
54. Blogs created by fictional characters. Famous fictional characters. Amazing nobody seems to have tried this yet...
55. The less "personal," the better. Unless...
56. On updating: Lin Yutang said that if you get sleepy reading a book, go to sleep!
57. But just because it serves me no purpose does not mean it serves NO purpose.
58. Blog analogues: computer desktops, workplace environments, living rooms, car bumpers, tattooed skin, annotated bibles.
59. To say any of them are tokens of solipsism would be inaccurate; to say any of them craven attention-getting devices would be also be inaccurate, but perhaps not quite as inaccurate.
60. We are trying to connect everything that we are.
61. What we omit from our blog is what keeps us moral.
62. Now I have a *reason* to learn style-sheets, DHTML, perl, PHP, etc.
63. Why are there so few artblogs, like Miromi's?
64. Why is it seen self-indulgent or wasteful when a blogger isn't a great designer or writer? That's not always how blogs are used.
65. And who cares if that's not what the original online diarists had in mind...
66. I want to see a blog that dribbles to a close...and then wakes back up a year, five years later as if nothig happened.
67. "Use" (as a noun) is a good word here.
68. Discretion is key. Editing is a must. Blogs would not be interesting if they showed *everything*.
70. I would not want to write for one of these stuffy self-indulgent "literary" "journals." Unless I needed the money.
71. A blog detailing your activities day-by-day twenty years previous. Embellishment would be necessary and good.
72. But who could tolerate that conceit for so long? (Writer or reader.)
73. Yes I want to see better writing, but also want to see good non-writing as well.
74. I really hate thinking about blogform.
75. It should be unnecessary.
76. It should just be done.
77. Filling out every last nook and cranny of the possible.
78. A website you can only visit once.
79. When I view (insert almost any blog I like), I don't think "gee, that's good writing" and "gee, that's good design."
80. And that's because it is (obviously) a well-written and well-designed site.
81. Certain kinds of "good" writing encourages passivity in the reader.
82. What's a bad blog? Must we define it? Must there be a golden thread which links everything good?
83. There are bad entries, though. Entries which just lay there, communicating nothing but the writer's laziness, his disinterest in communicating to others and himself.
84. A blog where every blogger, everywhere, is entitled to post each, with each post consisting of exactly ten words.
85. Harry Smith's Anthology.
86. I bring up these examples not because of what they say, but how.
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January 14, 2001

Neale Talbot, "www.wrongwaygoback.com : fantastical"

Hmph. An ounce of Jerwin's linky-love is worth more than a ton of this guy's prophylactic irony.
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Drunk Enough

I am often put on the defensive as a gay man, if only in my mind. I wait, standing on line or riding the LIRR, for that moment when that dickhead's homophobic bandinage turns my way. It never does, though. I rarely strike strightfolk as being "other" in most circumstances. And there are rarely good circumstances to challenge someone's comments, anyway. Either the person in question will obviously not listen to reason, or if they will, they'll just cringe right back to a apologetic posture, in both cases robbing me of the pleasure of using a line I've wanted to use for years:

"Why do you care? It's not like I'm ever gonna get drunk enough to want to fuck you."
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January 13, 2001

The Medea Connection, "Grey in the Grey Morning"

Mission of Burma running through "I Melt With You." There's someone I know who might like that quite a lot.
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Carl Thomas, "Emotional"

Utilizes exactly the same slow-jam cliches that have been bourgeois R&B's bread-n-butter at least since the Gap Band's "Yearning For Your Love" -- and that's what, fifteen-twenty years old? (Why must a big-ol' echoey woodblock sound signify good sex?) But there's this strangely floating, static quality to it, as if the quasi-piano sound in the background's been infected by the "holy minimalism" meme (cf. Robert Ashley's "Factory Preset").
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The Associates, "Party Fears Two"

I think I'd really like this if I was ga...whoa. Wait a minute.
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Eve feat. Missy Elliot, "Ain't Got No Dough"

Listening to this loud is like having someone LICK ME ALL OVER.
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Moby feat. Gwen Stefani, "South Side"

I know why Moby is featured the cover of Play jumping up -- it obscures the fact that he's short. I know why Gwen Stefani is featured on this song -- it obscures the fact that Moby is a twerp. But Gwen's a twerp, too. Ergo: failure, failure, failure.
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January 12, 2001

Happy Anniversary

January 12, 1996 was not the first time I was ever on the 'net -- lucky me, dad had a modem for his Apple IIe way back in 1983 -- but for all reasonable purposes, that date marks the beginning of my internet life. Between 1996 and 2001 there is...quite a lot. Alas, I don't think I could provide a detailed summary for you, and frankly, I don't want to. I was trying to do just that this week, and I came up with a whole long list of internet-related events in my life, some of them fun and wizbang and weird, and some of them so utterly personal I could not possibly relate them with complete candor. If you're reading this slightly obscure blog, you're probably not an internet slouch yourself, and you've got stories which exactly parallel mine, stories which exactly parallel mine, stories which involve friends and family and coworkers and loves and perhaps your conscience, too. As in "real life," so too the 'net. So I'm not sure I need to tell you all.

I still get that crazy urge to get all elegaic over what's happened, to speak of the enormity of what's gone on and how it's changed my life (your life, too, my sweet), because it's all so godamned staggering. So to commemorate this, I've bought myself to the Temple of Dendur in the Met (which seems appropriately crepuscular and imposing for the occasion), where, if all goes well, I will blog wirelessly for the first time. The Palm Pilot I'm using to do the deed is a technology which represents a quantum leap in flash and sexiness from the 28.8 kps modem-equipped Aptiva I first used to the access the MSN Network that cold, snow-tormented afternoon this very day five years ago. That's only one difference between the then and the now we could come up with; we could also reflect more generally on the shift from the minimal to the saturated, from the open secret to the overhyped, from the novel to the everyday -- or, to get more personal for a brief moment, from the atomized to the engaged. No matter what narrative framework you choose, I kinda like the way the story's unfolded.

God bless the good ship internet and all who sail it. Let the chattering continue without end. A-fucking-men.

Catch you later.




The above is very good thing, but it's all wrong. Check the date it was first published -- after 9 o'clock. The Met closes at 9. So, no, I wasn't able to blog wirelessly at the Met after all. Every time I did, I got a page saying I didn't have any blogs, which you know and I know is a damned dirty lie.

Instead, I've just finished typing in the above directly from my Palm at this place called easyEverything.com, a fucking internet cafe of all things! On 42nd Street no less! I thought those things were mere relics from the mid-nineties (oh, the irony...), but no, in my hour of need I caught their subway ad on the S line, and...here I am. In this ridiculous place, all decked out in orange and exposed HVAC, that will most certainly not last for more than six months. Behind me, some guys are wigging out over some ladies they're chatting with; to the left and right, people are checking mail or operating their webcams.

It feels like the center of the world.

January 11, 2001

Keith Caulfield, keithers.com

Awww yeahh!

Link courtesy of Mike Moore, who's had more-or-less the same reaction.
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Pere Ubu, "Final Solution"

There are songs like "In the Navy" or the Pet Shop Boys' "Rent" where the male-male desire is invisible to everyone but those "in the community"; but there are also songs where the spectre of gay life is so hidden that its presence would come as a surprise to nearly everyone, the song's authors included.

Now's not the time to crow about the fearsome greatness of "Final Solution." If you haven't heard it yet, well, that's what God put Napster on this earth for. (I've said it before and I'll say it again: Pere Ubu's first two singles mean more to me than the entirety of the Rolling Stones' recorded output.) If you have heard it already, you might find it curious that I cannot help but hear the misfit protagonist in Pere Ubu's "Final Solution" as anything but some misfit kid just on the verge of realizing he's gay. He's "a victim of natural selection," possibly because he's unable to breed, and the girls won't touch him cause he got a "missed erection," maybe 'cause the ladies do nothing for him and he don't know it yet. And all that stuff about cures and social infections hearken back to the days when being gay was considered an illness. Of course, I'm sure if asked, Dave Thomas would deny that "Final Solution"'s protagonist is gay just as firmly (and just as unconvincingly) as he denies the song's title has anything to do with the Holocaust. Yeah, but who says he's the boss of his songs' meaning?

That's only my favorite example; I also have "interesting" interpretations of Pavement album titles and maybe 65% of Robert Pollard's career. How about you?
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January 10, 2001

Rocket From The Crypt, "Ditchdigger"

Why I hate anthemic angsty white-boy music: these guys are way too fucking sentimental about their own conflictedness.

Why I like anthemic angsty white-boy music: I have been known to be both sentimental and conflicted.

Why I hate straight-boy homoeroticism: it's chickenshit. When not flagrantly the work of closeted minds, it's a buncha jackasses admitting that male-male desire exists without having to assume the burden that said desire means a damned thing. Fuck 'em.

Why I like straight-boy homoeroticism: because it's hot...no, because it's sweet.

So yeah, this song is anthemic angsty white-boy music, and is shamelessly homoerotic. The narrator addresses this ditchdigger guy, slaps him some skin, asks him to "lend me your ear" which sounds an awful lot like "lend me your rear." And says, no, screams YOU'RE! THE! SAME! over the chiming guitars thrashing in waltz time (in waltz time! how sissy is that?), a phrase which could mean anything but I like to think recalls that beautiful moment of total identification that occurs when you're in love. But since this is love between two straight guys, all gayness in it has to denied, the love between the two made all conflicted, so Mr. Narrator jokes about the ditchdigger's haircut and leprosy and screams a lot and acts real macho with his posse, all of whom are wearing matching outfits. This sucks and this does not suck.
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January 9, 2001

Barry Walters, "A Better Best Top 100"

I am such the rock critic nerd.

For the last twelve years, I have lovingly kept a clipped copy of this article in my very very favorite coffee table book, *Mission To Earth: Landsat Views The World,* keeping it nice and fresh and flat. It has long been a talisman. I even pasted it to my dorm-room door during my freshman year.

When I first saw it a Roosevelt Field Mall magazine kiosk, it made me sweat and my heart race. I was befuddled and impressed by its anti-canonical and anti-corporate world-view and later, Walter's stress on the use value of pop music. Also neat was his emphasis on disco and post-disco musics. (Bet you could probably divine exactly what discos Walters frequented in the 70's-80's simply from this list alone.) I already loved dance music, at least the stuff I heard on MTV and WBLS, but it took me a while to realize these musics did not operate the same way rock did, and that any real understanding of these genres would come from making a detour away from the Christgau-Marcus-Marsh worldview(s). Walters also introduced me to #29, yum.

The rock world saw many more lists after that, most them humorless and impersonal thingies. Including this. Check the contributors list for maximum intended irony. Another irony: yes, indeed, "Heartbeat" was used in some commercial (Bud, not Bayer).

I'm posting it at Jonno's request, who mysteriously bought up this ancient article last Friday without any prompting from me whatsoever. (Jonno, incidentally, is a swell chap with a swell s.o. who throws a swell party.) Better catch it fast. I might get paranoid about copyrights and pull the damn thing. You never know who might be reading this, after all.
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January 7, 2001

Various Artists, The Best of Ken Burns JAZZ
Unknown, "JAZZ: A Film By Ken Burns -- A Viewer's Guide"

The CD largely consists of stuff that might sound good in the background at Starbucks or a GM car commercial. Not surprisingly, both are sponsors.

As I order my venti Mango-Citrus Tiazzi at the Rockville Centre Starbucks, I notice they sell copies of the CD right by the cash register. They also offer this viewer's guide thing where each episode is given a brief description, with pointers to relevant albums purchasable at hearmusic.com. The opening sentence for Ellington At Newport 1956 is a pop culture reference Wynton Marsalis may not understand, much less appreciate: "Don't call it a comeback."
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January 6, 2001

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

I think one reason I find Benjamin's descriptions of Parisian arcades so resonant is because I dream of malls all the time. Shopping at malls, meeting people at malls, walking, walking, walking through cavernous monstrosities that would make the Sunrise Mall look modest.

Why I dream about malls, of all things, might be explained by applying some shamelessly theoretical psychology. If according to the Freudian worldview, dreams are disguised wish-fulfullments, then the mall serves dream-logic doubly well. In the waking world malls are obviously a site of desire -- you know, consumer fetishism and all that. In the dreamworld, malls additionally serve as a site of desire because, like all buildings, they can act as a symbolic stand-in for the genitalia.

And what do I buy when I'm in my dream-malls? You'd think that with me being a music obsessive, I'd be being buying lots of records in my dreams. But that almost never happens. With exceptional regularity -- at least once a month -- I dream about buying Lego sets. Really. Not any of the contemporary ones, mind. I mean the older sets, the ones that they've stopped making for decades. (Not specific sets, though. I'm not that much of a collector geek.) Why I dream of Lego more than anything else must have something to with the way I absolutely pined after Lego sets as a kid. But also: Lego bricks are building bricks, and probably can also serve as a substitution for genitals in the dreamwork.

I also dream of buying clothes a lot. Again, upon consideration, this doesn't surprise. I suffer from a mild case of clothes fetishism: in real life and the dreamworld, certain kinds of clothes are attractive to me because they serve as a safe stand-in for the men I'd like to be in love with.

It should go without saying that my dream purchases go unconsummated -- I ALWAYS wake up before I can take items to the cash register.

Goodness knows why I bring this up -- not only am I veering on the tawdrily personal, but in the part I'm reading now, Benjamin isn't even talking about the arcades; he's writing about shawls.
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January 3, 2001

2001 GRAMMY Nominations

The big news here is that Eminem, of all people, got nominated for album of the year, as did Beck and Radiohead. I used to watch the GRAMMYS to put me in touch with my hate. Now I'll watch for the perverse pleasure of watching some bloated crit-faves take a few grabs at the brass ring. (Will Em be there? Will he go absolutely fucking nuts if he wins? Will other people go fucking nuts if he wins?) The grand canyon between the rock-critic establishment and the biz establishment continues to get filled in, shovelful by shovelful.

As I wait to see my dermatologist, I catch GRAMMY Foundation President/CEO Michael Greene on the waiting room TV, blathering on and on about how Em's nomination was a token of the awards' commitment to freedom of expression:

"'We're going to catch a lot of flak for this, there's no question, but you've really got to view this in the context of art being a pretty extreme medium sometimes,' he said."

I do like Eminem. I do! But rarely has a rock star administered so much pain with so much pleasure. Not since the Angry Samoans, maybe. I recall they were funny, too.
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Jonno, jonno.com

"But as for their use as a term of self-reference being "pretentious" - well, I have no answer to that. (Except to say that maybe you need to get out more, Mary ... )"

I'm not saying it's pretentious in general to use "fag" or "homo" as a term of self-reference. I'm saying it would be pretentious for me to do it. It's much like the way I can't possibly use "mothafucka" or "pogue mahone" or all sorts of Italo-American slang unless I'm trying to make a joke. If I tried using them as part of everyday conversation, or (god forbid) with any degree of seriousness, I'd sound completely ridiculous. Lots of guys can deploy those words without self-consciousness, but I'm not one of them. There's just too much of the spoiled suburban mama's boy in me to use them without irony or affectation.

Imagine Rich Tafel calling himself a "fag." See? That's exactly what I mean.

Well...not really. I'm still a good lefty who couldn't possibly knot his tie if his life depended on it...but you get the idea.
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January 1, 2001

David Filo and Jerry Yang, "Yahoo - A Guide to WWW"

This mirror site replicates what Yahoo! looked like circa 1994. January 12, 2001 will mark the fifth year I've been an active participant on the internet, and surely now is the time for nostalgia.

The irony is that the super-minimalist approach of Yahoo! '94 has come back, in a limited way, for the wireless versions of popular websites: compare blogger.com vs. wireless.blogger.com or Yahoo! mobile vs. the scary behemoth of associated services that is the current Yahoo! site.

Link courtesy of Anil Dash.
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