…is not dead, or even relegated to bands hailing from the early 90s.
I went to a concert the other day – The Two Funerals – and the lead singer introduced the most of the songs in this fashion:
“This song’s about how fucked up racism and sexism is.” *feedback* *feedback* *powerchord* *scream*
I feel… elated.
Minor rant alert: I just started a summer internship, hence the minor lack of posting. It’s with a non-profit organization working with intellectually disabled persons, so on the first day we of course had a long discussion on proper terminology and respect for ID persons. Reasonable enough. A particular emphasis was placed on not using the word ‘retard’ – it’s one of this organization’s big things, it seems.
But that’s where it became… odd. According to this organization’s ideas, ‘retard’ is the most offensive thing anyone could ever say, and in a larger sense they believe that discrimination against ID people is worse by far than discrimination against any other group. At some point it was even said that insulting a Black person wasn’t so bad – after all, a Black person can more easily punch you in the face! Yeah….
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You’ve seen what I’m talking about: the kitten blog. Like here, or here – or even vote on the cutest kitten here.
Now, I’m the sort of person who tends to be very harsh on the kitten-blogging crowd.. Or I used to, anyway.
The way I see it, here you are. You have the most powerful communication system ever created. Do you use it to do something unique and worthwhile? No! You post pictures of kittens. Kittens! And not just the occasional kitten – kittens every day. What a waste.
I’m just a big hypocrite, of course. I’ve spent plenty of time writing about TV shows and movies, etc. While some of it is honest cultural analysis, plenty is just pointlessness. Kittens are no different.
But I think I understand more now. Kitten pictures, you see, are perhaps the purest form of escapism imaginable. A real kitten isn’t – you have to take care of a real kitten. But when you look at a picture of a kitten, you see a kind of distilled combination of cuteness, wonder, and innocence all rolled up in one ball of fur. People don’t like kitten blogs because of the kittens per se, they like them for the distraction from reality, for the wonder of the animal world without the animal. Other escapist media shrinks before the power of the tiny kitten.
Or something.
…while listening to Pat Benatar. ‘Hell Is For Children’ make me cry every time, dammit…
So I disappeared again, real life exploded on me, blah, blah, blah. I could go on and on about why, or why not, but not only does nobody care, it wouldn’t even really be true. The truth is, I got a bit fed up with the Internet, blogging, everything computer-related (rather ironic for someone whose future career relies almost entirely on computers…). I burnt out without the excuse of having burning sufficiently beforehand.
About three months ago, I even made a blogging schedule – one day I was going to write about technology, one day politics, one day crosspost from Fourth Wave. It lasted for one day. Lovely. General weirdness/fights across teh interwebs only made things worse, first with a bunch of feminist blogs shutting down or going on hiatus (I know, I know…), and secondly the weirdness surrounding the lesbianish web-sphere (someday I’ll put all my feelings on Afterellen vs. Shewired vs. Autostraddle vs. the world down, but not now…)
I still haven’t completely gotten over it all, either, but I also miss writing rather badly. So here I am.
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This has been around for a while, but it’s really quite fascinating. Apparently some extremely bored people decided to write a song based on a survey. A pair of songs, actually: the ‘Most Wanted Song’ and the ‘Most Unwanted Song’. The most wanted song has mushy love lyrics, electric guitars, and rock/r&b-style singing. The most unwanted is a huge mess of bagpipes, harps, children, and other random elements.
Needless to say, the ‘most wanted’ one is boring and derived. But the ‘least wanted’ song is actually quite fun. It’s a sort of random hodgepodge – sopranos, tubas, and children advertising the holidays at Wal-Mart. In other words, it’s completely postmodern. In all honesty, if they had layered it a bit, made it a bit more dissonant, and fixed the structure (at the moment it’s more like three or four songs placed end to end than one complete work) it might pass as a serious modern classical work. As it is, it’s a fascinating commentary on musical opinion.
Which just goes to show – true art is weird. This was, of course, the artist’s intent (Wired Magazine completely missed the point here).
But I can’t help but think the composer was being unfair – they obviously made the ‘most wanted’ song annoying, and the ‘most unwanted’ interesting, if non-standard. What if they had honestly tried (within the given guidelines) to write a really good song for the most wanted one? It seems to me that would have been far more enlightening…
The health care reform bill just passed, and there’s a bunch of unhappy people all over the country.
I won’t pretend to understand the issue completely (I got bored and stopped following it closely a long time ago). But if the summaries are correct, (and the CBO is accurate, which seems reasonable), we’ll get a moderate reduction in the deficit, some new taxes for the rich and people who use tanning salons, some decent subsidy expansions for low-income people, and some mild tweaks to medicaid and medicare. All quite undramatic, really.
All of which makes the protests quite bewildering.
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When I first heard about fan fiction, I thought it was the Worst. Idea. Ever. By a long shot. Why not be original?, I thought. It seemed so… dishonest, almost like stealing. And slash (actually, shipping generally) seemed to be downright obnoxious. The characters are author’s, right?
Then, of course, I learned about textual analysis, and the whole concept that each reader constructs their own reading of each work, only truly applying to them. Fine. But still – fan-fiction’s different, right?
Not so much. On the off chance that you still can’t stand it (or want to convince someone else), here are some thoughts:
The disaster in Haiti (as seen by those in the rest of the world, of course) is winding down. The government is giving up on searching and moving toward rebuilding. The media frenzy is nearly over – no headlines, few articles on the front pages of websites and papers. Even more – people aren’t talking much about Haiti any more, and although I don’t know, I imagine donations are on their way down, too.
I could say that in reality, the disaster is far from over, that we still need to support Haitians, etc. And it would be true – at least to a point.
But in all honesty, Haiti will be okay – as much as it can be. The damage is already done. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and the country destroyed. The humanitarian groups are finally in place, and all the rich foreign governments are involved. The disaster relief machinery is in place, it’s all downhill (or is that uphill?) from here.
And it’s too late to really do anything, because this disaster wasn’t really caused by the earthquake.
Happy Pride to teh Internets, all three of you.
And no, I’m not dead, just busy. I’ll hopefully start posting semi-regularly again soon!
But hey… how else are you going to sell spam-based products?