Matt Zeitlin

Marshall Mathers, in an interview with Deborah Solomon, has come out in support for gay marriage:

I think if two people love each other, then what the hell? I think that everyone should have the chance to be equally miserable, if they want.

This is pretty interesting for two reasons. Generally, hip hop is awash in casually blatant homophobia, where “faggot” is basically an insult of first resort and, more fundamentally, rather outsize manifestations of masculinity are pretty deeply entwined in the performances and personas of most rappers. And more specifically, Mathers, especially in his Slim Shady mode, has had especially homophobic and degrading lyrics towards gay.

But, and yes, my tongue is pretty firmly in cheek, Mathers in his monster hit “The Real Slim Shady,” already indicated some support for gay marriage all the way back in 2000, when they didn’t even have it in Massachusetts. Of course, it comes through an implicit comparison between gay sex, necrophilia and bestiality, but I think we should just take what we can get:

Well, some of us cannibals
who cut other people open like cantaloupes
But if we can hump dead animals and antelopes
then there’s no reason that a man and another man can’t elope

OK, so right after that lyric, there’s big “EWWW” on the track. But still, how many rappers could even joke about support gay marriage in their biggest hits today, let alone in 2000?

In some ways, the case of Roman Polanski is incredibly simple. If we were to imagine an otherwise unremarkable man who plied a 13 year old girl with alcohol and quaaludes and then raped her, we would have no sympathy for him and none of the excuses that are made for Polanski would be made for him. He is, simply, morally culpable for a horrible act and that should be held against him forever.

But our legal system is not one that fairly, accurately and satisfactorily judges moral culpability and then apportions punishments. Instead, in the case of Polanski, there is a good argument to be made that re-trying or imprisoning him now would be an offense to due process procedures and rights, which we tend to think supersede questions of guilt. One can appeal to this legal and procedural complexity — namely that Polanski was about to be screwed by a judge and prosecutor colluding with each other — without making any excuses for behavior or obscuring the rather clear fact that he raped a 13 year old girl. I think that some feminists, like Scott Lemiuex and WAM, in their noble effort to focus on Polanski’s unambiguous criminality in the face of morally odious defenses of him, have too hastily dismissed these procedural concerns as simply yet another defense for the indefensible.

Now, I hate to use myself as a counter-example, but I think it’s indeed possible to think that Polanski is indeed a rapist and that imprisoning him or retrying him (remember, he had originally arranged to be sentenced to time-served) would be problematic. The way our legal system works is to separate moral and procedural concerns, I think we are complex enough to do the same.

The mainstream, professional, American pornography industry lives in the shadow of sexually transmitted infections. This, of course, makes sense. Performers in porn have unprotected sex all the time with up to hundreds of people a year. If, for example, a few performers were to get HIV, it could go through a massive part of the industry incredibly quickly, endangering both the lives of the performers and the viability of the industry. Accordingly, there is a strict testing regiment: a PCR DNA test every month. Unlike the antigen or antibody test, which look for, well, HIV antigens and antibodies, the PCR DNA test actually takes a sample of the patent’s genetic material and look for the presence of HIV itself, not just antigens or antibodies. That the industry requires such an extensive test shows how seriously they deal with the problem. And the results have paid off.  To quote Tracy Clark-Flory’s piece at Salon, “Since 1998, the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation has reported five HIV cases among actors in straight porn. That’s a relatively low number, industry insiders point out, given the cosmic amount of condomless sex that has gone on in that time” Now, Clark-Flory, along with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation “are disturbed by the idea that five infections over 11 years is considered adequate.”

So, naturally, they suggest that condoms be mandated, or at least adopted, in pornographic movies. This is a pretty strange demand. Best I can tell, there’s no market demand from the viewers of porn for condoms, and even more importantly, the performers themselves really, really don’t want them. Clark-Flory even quotes some of them. This one is particularly graphic:

[A single scene amounts to] over two hours of intercourse in various positions with constant stops and starts during which male performer’s erections rise and fall, condoms frequently tear or unravel and the degree of latex abrasion on the internal membranes of female performers’ vaginas lead to micro-abrasions that make them more vulnerable to all kinds of STIs. Most condom-only female performers eventually abandon condom use, not under pressure from producers, but rather because of the constant rawness and end-on-end bacterial infections produced by countless hours of latex drag.

But because 5 people over 11 years have transmitted HIV — which considering the high HIV rates among people who even approach the sexual activity of porn performers is absurdly low — the admittedly feminist and pro-liberation Clark-Flory thinks there’s justification to mandate condom usage despite the fact that almost none of the stakeholders (or at least no stakeholders she could quote) want them. She thinks that “ethical” porn consumers should demand something that no one wants!

If you allow me to reference some Eastern European Lacanians, well, just one Eastern European Lacanian, I think Flory-Clark’s advocacy for condom usage in straight porn, which she seems to think is just such an obvious idea — neigh, an “ethical” one — to support, is almost perfectly indicative of how hedonism, tolerance and freedom has created its own restrictive structures that, in classic Zizekian fashion are still incredibly limiting, not to mention insidious. To quote the Slovene himself:

Is this not the attitude of the hedonistic Last Man? Everything is permitted, you can enjoy everything, BUT deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous. (This is also Last Man’s revolution — “revolution without revolution.”) Is this not one of the two versions of Lacan’s anti-Dostoyevski motto “If God doesn’t exist, everything is prohibited”? (1) God is dead, we live in a permissive universe, you should strive for pleasures and happiness — but, in order to have a life full of happiness and pleasures, you should avoid dangerous excesses, so everything is prohibited if it is not deprived of its substance; (2) If God is dead, superego enjoins you to enjoy, but every determinate enjoyment is already a betrayal of the unconditional one, so it should be prohibited. The nutritive version of this is to enjoy directly the Thing Itself: why bother with coffee? Inject caffeine directly into your blood! Why bother with sensual perceptions and excitations by external reality? Take drugs which directly affect your brain! – And if there is God, then everything is permitted — to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of His will; clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any “merely human” constraints and considerations (as in Stalinism, where the reference to the big Other of historical Necessity justifies absolute ruthlessness).

Today’s hedonism combines pleasure with constraint — it is no longer the old notion of the “right measure” between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-Hegelian immediate coincidence of the opposites: action and reaction should coincide, the very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine. The ultimate example of it is arguably a chocolate laxative, available in the US, with the paradoxical injunction “Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!”, i.e., of the very thing which causes constipation. Do we not find here a weird version of Wagner’s famous “Only the spear which caused the wound can heal it” from Parsifal? And is not a negative proof of the hegemony of this stance the fact that true unconstrained consumption (in all its main forms: drugs, free sex, smoking…) is emerging as the main danger? The fight against these dangers is one of the main investments of today’s “biopolitics.” Solutions are here desperately sought which would reproduce the paradox of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is “safe sex” — a term which makes one appreciative of the truth of the old saying “Is having sex with a condom not like taking a shower with a raincoat on?”. The ultimate goal would be here, along the lines of decaf coffee, to invent “opium without opium”: no wonder marijuana is so popular among liberals who want to legalize it — it already IS a kind of “opium without opium.”

I’m not familiar enough with the safe-sex corpus to really comment on in authoritatively, but in my own experience (health classes and so forth), the near-obsessive focus on the “safe” part of safe sex always struck me as slightly dishonest, and almost puritan in its obsession with hygiene and control. I should not that it’s particularly interesting that Clark-Flory who wrote a piece entitled “In Defense of Casual Sex” is the one recapitulating this all-encompassing focus on health and safety in sexual activity. It’s ethical!

As I’m sure everyone’s noticed, a lot of establishments that mostly play contemporary pop/dance music have been putting a lot of Michael Jackson in the rotation. And, at least anecdotally, people have been responding.

And not just the types that love to dance to catchy dance songs, but everyone. This shouldn’t be all that surprising, Jackson did sell 750 million albums after all. But I’m afraid that restaurants, night clubs, bars etc will stop playing so much classic MJ once the mourning/remembrance period ends. But they shouldn’t! Billie Jean is still — apart from any nostalgia or news hook — a much better song than whatever Lady Gaga, Rihanna or Justin Timberlake is putting out there. This is not just a purely aesthetic or artistic judgment on my part. They songs are amazingly danceable, and most importantly, everyone knows them. And I say this as someone who really likes Rihanna and Justin Timberlake. So please, DJs of the world, keep up the MJ!

This is obviously absurdly late, but I really think anyone who tries to underplay Michael Jackson’s death has to realize that the the argument that his death and life weren’t hugely signifigant relies on fairly contestable premises.

Namely, that pop culture doesn’t amtter at all.

Arguably, Michael Jackson was the most famous celebrity in the world. And even if he wasn’t the most recognizable face, he was certainly the most beloved musician ever, in terms of sheer numbers. I don’t need to regale you with the facts. Well, maybe I do so one can understand the scale of his fame.

Thriller is highest selling album  of all time. Bad had five number one singles. He was the first black man regularly to be on MTV. In Gabon, he was crowned a tribal king. Pop music can be split into two eras, pre Jackson and post Jackson. Oh yeah, he wrote nearly all of his big hits. He was the greatest dancer who could sing and the greatest singer who could dance. News of his death almost broke the internet.

If you care a whit about culture, if you care at all about the fact that other people care about culture, then yes, Michael Jackson’s death probably was the biggest story of the day, if not the week. Oh yeah, and that’s not mentioning all that weird stuff he did.

Some argue that Jackson’s celebrity — the changing appearence, the strangeness, the alienation, the accusations, the chimpanzees — surpassed the reasons anyone initially cared about this eccentric pop star. And in the minds of many, especially those who were only conscious during the weird years, he was just Wacko Jacko. But notice how the coverage of him, the remembrances have mostly been about the music. We’ve seen more footage of his first moonwalk than him dancing on the car at his second trial. This may be painfully anecdotal, but I’ve heard people my age talking about how they just realized how good his music actually is.

While it’s certainly true that the biggest victim of the celebrity saturated culture was Michael’s own sense of self, there is also the sad fact that, for so long, people only chose to focus on what wasn’t particularly exceptional. How many mentally and physically sick child stars who were beaten by their fathers and were worldwide celebrities since the age of 11 were at all normal? His music, his influence and his cultural legacy, on the other, were truely miraculous. Hopefully that’s what we will remember.

Ta-Nahisi, disappointed as I am at the relative mediocrity of Eminen’s latest album, has this hard question Does Em have a truly classic album? He’s a great rapper, no doubt. But does he have an It Takes A Nation, an Illmatic, an Aquemini or a Death Certificate?” In some ways, Eminen doesn’t have an album with the consistency of any of those classics. His three best albums — Slim Shady LP, Marshall Mathers LP and Eminem Show — have enough good songs for two great albums, but all three have a depressing amount of filler. Now, I don’t think this necessarily disqualifies Marhsall Mathers, after all, Stankonia has plenty of not-great songs.

But aside from this rather narrow question, I think it’s worth defending Eminem’s musical and cultural legacy. A lot of people try to denigrate Eminen’s accomplishments and acclaim by pointing out that he was able to draw so much attention due to his race. This is true, but only to a certain extent.

The popularity of Eminem among, say, white ten year olds (which is what I was when “The Real Slim Shady” dropped) has a lot to do with his race. But his race can not explain how much respect he got from other rappers. Sure, if you’re a great white MC, you’re going to get a lot of attention, but there’s still only been one white guy — Eminem — whose achieved so much. There’s a lot of reasons why so many rappers are black, but one reason is that white rappers have the same problem that ethnic minorities do in predominately white contexts. They have to be that much better than everyone else, or else they are instantly dismissed.

There’s a reason that Eminem has such technically perfect flow and technique, it’s what he needed to overcome his whiteness. That’s probably also why he was so daring and inventive with his self-characterization. He simply couldn’t rap about the same things — money, women, how great he was — that other rappers could, or he’d just sound silly.

And I think that’s why we have to recognize his amazing three album run as one of the most culturally significant moments in recent history. Has there been anyone else who sold as many albums as he did with so much self-consciousness and such obvious vulnerability? His best songs were about his tortured relationship with his wife, his issues with his mom and an obsessed fan who was something of a doppelganger for himself. When Jay-Z raps about himself, it’s him saying he’s the greatest, when Eminem does, it’s about his incredible dysfunction.

Has Eminem sullied his legacy with his recent stuff? Yes, of course he has. But I think it’s still important to remember just how important he was — and still is.

It’s hard to think of three more vacuous, undeservedly famous people. And they’re all fighting! I’m not writing this post because you should care about this bitch-fest* of epic proportions, but because Ned’s post on it is absolutely hilarious. Here’s  a taste:

I’m not just talking about Prejean here; I’m also referring to Perez Hilton, the ethically deficient gossip monger who took time out of drawing MS paint dicks on the faces of anorexics to grandstand in the middle of a beauty pageant and elevate a theoretically sentient life form into a prominent demagogue in the culture wars, while simultaneously damaging his own cause even further simply by virtue of being a massive tool.

Check out the whole thing.

* Bitch is, in nearly all cases, a misogynistic term used to denigrate women for being assertive and for challenging traditional gender norms. But seriously, this is a totally pointless, mutually self aggrandizing and utterly vapid spat between Perez Hilton, a beauty pageant contestant, and  Alaska Barbie. I really couldn’t think of a more appropriate term.

Late 60s: College students read poetry by Sylvia Plath, The Authobiography of Malcolm X and Howl

Today: College students read Twilight books.

Today: Northwestern students raise $576,470 for Project Kindle, an advocacy and support group for kids with HIV/AIDS. Oh yeah, and they raised the money in a school year long process that culminated in 30 hours of dancing to music that Ron Charles would surely disapprove of for its vapidity (I’m looking at you, “I’m On A Boat”).

I should also note that Charles’ article commits journalistic malpractice by comparing real data on book sales to college students today with his own memories and anecdotes of what he and his friends were reading in the late 60s. I doubt that the reading habits of a future book reviewer and his social circle were representative of the reading habits of all college students.

As part of National Review‘s “25 Best Conservative Movies of the Past 25 Years” series, John Miller writes (really just appropriates) a comment on the conservatism at the heart of Master and Commander:

This naval-adventure film starring Russell Crowe is based on the books of Patrick O’Brian, and here’s what A. O. Scott of the New York Times said in his review: “The Napoleonic wars that followed the French Revolution gave birth, among other things, to British conservatism, and Master and Commander, making no concessions to modern, egalitarian sensibilities, is among the most thoroughly and proudly conservative movies ever made. It imagines the [H.M.S.] Surprise as a coherent society in which stability is underwritten by custom and every man knows his duty and his place. I would not have been surprised to see Edmund Burke’s name in the credits.”

Conservatism — at least in the sense of a respect for authority, paying attention to the good of society as opposed to the good of the individual and so forth — makes a whole lot of sense on a boat whose crew is tasked with the purpose of destroying other boats. The problem is that we don’t hear National Review arguing for “conservatism” on the decks of aircraft carriers, they instead want to import this vision onto the state or society at large.

I shouldn’t have to explain why a state — which is a set of legal and institutional arrangements designed (ideally) for the mutual advantage of its citizens — shouldn’t adopt the values of a war ship. The fact a certain set of values and assumptions makes sense in a institutional setting where the goal is to kill and destroy is a good argument for why they don’t make sense in society at large.

Let me just throw this out there. I’ve recently become obsessed with Miley Cyrus’ “See You Again.” And here’s the result of me trying to intellectually justify that.

At first listen, the lyrics are weird and allusive. I mean, most songs that talk about longing for a certain person and how that persons makes the narrator feel strange are really about sex. So, when she talks about “freaking out” and how “she couldn’t breathe” and the “next time we hang out,” we would generally assume that she wasn’t really talking about getting short of breath when she saw some guy she had a huge crush on. But this isn’t just any pop-tart singing, it’s America’s most virginal daughter-of-a-lame-country singer, Miley Cyrus.

So, here’s the interpretive question. We know that Miley Cyrus, at least in the iteration featured on Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus, is not intending to talk about sex. But maybe we’re not committing the intentional fallacy. We can derive that Cyrus isn’t talking about sex not from our knowledge of biographical facts of Cyrus’ life (the much dreaded external evidence in Wimsatt and Beardsley original essay), but from the fact that reading “See You Again” as really being about sex is a pretty big stretch within the context of the larger ‘poem’ within which See You Again is presented (that would be the album as a whole). Basically, if HM2 featured songs that were any more suggestive than See You Again, it would be a fair assumption to read some extra meaning into the childish lyrics, but it doesn’t.

But maybe trying to graft a framework for reading poetry onto music is a big mistake. That’s because there’s a lot more to a song than the words (and lest I sound obvious, there’s more than than the music too). Affectation and presentation matter a lot. And here’s where the real tension is. Closely related to the intentional fallacy is the affective fallacy. Whereas the intentional fallacy is “a confusion between the poem and its origins” (like, for example, the fact we know that Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana wouldn’t actually be talking about sex) the affective fallacy is “a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does).” But what’s affect and what’s not affect when it comes to music? Isn’t affect the difference between a Radiohead cover band playing Paranoid Android and Radiohead doing it?

Or, to get back to our original example, when, say, an all-male a capella group sings the song to a specific, female member of the audience, how are we supposed to deal with this litany of new and different facts about the song. Surely, when Freshmen 15 performs the song, it’s probably appropriate to read more purient intentions into the lyrics.  And I don’t think we’re committing any interpretative fallacy by doing so.

PS – To commit the interpretative fallacy, I must admit that a big motivation for writing the post is the fact that I’ve been listening to “See You Again” over and over while I’m supposed to be writing a paper about Sailing to Byzantium. I didn’t want to put my mind to waste.

PPS – I really need to salvage some cred here, so allow me to be really annoying for a second. I’ve seen Radiohead live, I’ve seen Beck, Manu Chao, Stars, Arcade Fire (twice) and the last album I listened to in its entirety was Liquid Swords.

Yesterday, I went to talk given by two English professors, one Mark Goble at UC Berkeley and Peter Coviello of Bowdoin. Sure, what they actually talked about was interesting enough, but that wasn’t the most fascinating part. I could make all sorts of observations about stereotypes of English grad students, or grad students in general (tight jeans, the women who were more assertive than the men, long, ponderous non-questions posing as questions, making a big show outing of nodding in agreement when one of the speakers mentioned some obscure theorists or writer and so on and so forth), and, even though I just made all those observations anyway, that’s not really the point.

The really intriguing thing was how this group of people, who have made a career and will make a lifetime out of reading and interpreting and analyzing some of the most difficult texts out there (or, inversely, will make the most difficult analyses of relatively anodyne texts) were still so enamored with normal jokes! For example, Professor Goble discussed the section entitled “Colon” in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Seeing how Goble’s talk dealt with the supposed immateriality of information and how that contrasted with the large amount of digital, conceptual and physical waste and refuse produced, it made sense that Goble would focus on a part of the book in which Agee deals with linguistic refuse and….make a bunch of shit jokes*. PhD bathroom humor, but bathroom humor nonetheless.

The other weird impossibly highbrow/lowbrow bit of humor was in a discussion of that unlovable figure only loved by grad students, none other than Theodor Adorno. When Goble described Adorno’s Minima Moralia as the work of a annoyed, fidgety neaurasthenic aesethe, he get some knowing nods and some giggles, but when he just flat-out described one of the classic works of critical theory as “bitching,” (which is basically accurate) most everyone was in stitches.  

I don’t know if there are any real conclusions to reach here, except the most banal ones…everyone likes shit jokes and making fun of complainers! Even grad students in English!

*The aforementioned part of the book is entitled “Colon” and, not surprisingly,  Agee makes plenty of feces-references on his own.

**For more on Adorno’s Minima Moralia, here’s the translated text at marxists.org and here’s an article in Lingua Franca about Adorno and more specifically about his defense of difficult language

Although it is impossible to specify exactly what Man’s greatest technical achievement is, I think that Planet Earth, in Blu Ray, viewd on a 52 inch plasma, is certainly up there.

I just feel sorry for conservatives who think that prudishness is the equivalent of art criticism. Seriously guys, you can do better than this.

I have to agree with Andrew Seal that Jennie Yarboff’s pick of the Corrections as the novel that best exemplifies the Bush Era is just so far off base.

The most obvious objection is that The Corrections was published in early September, 2001, meaning that the central cultural-political issue of the subsequent seven and a half years is totally absent from the novel. In fact, in so much as the Corrections is a repersentation of the zeitgeist, it’s pretty clearly a snapshot of a mome that has past -the late 90s and the pre-9/11 2000s. The primary political issue it deals with – the hilarious privatization of Lithuania’s everything (which, of course, is a stand in for all the shenanigans in Russia during the 1990s) – is hopelessly passe. The story in Eastern Europe and Russia now is one of the government asserting every more control and of Western economic officials being chastened by their failure.

As far as “HMOs, psychopharmaceuticals, viral marketing, …the organic-food movement” all those issues have been plenty salient since at least the 80s. Everyone knew about global warming in the 90s, the organic food movement has been around since the 70s, DeLillo dealt with psychopharmaceuticals in White Noise and so on and so forth

All the fun cultural, social and political stuff Franzen deals with is somewhat marginal to the main thrust of the book. Yanoff is right to call it a “a warm social novel on an epic scale.” In the way it captures the social zeitgiest effectively, it’s because the social zeigeist hasn’t really changed because of 9/11 or due to the machinations of theBush administration. What constitutes “the social” – at least in the sense novelists deal with it – is a bit removed from the day-to-day changes in presidential administration or in the vagaries of foreign policy.

And Franzen’s social insights (as opposed to his political preoccupations) hold up remarkably well. This, of course, is the mark of a great social novel. Great social novels, like the Corrections, are so remarkable because they describe the mores, preoccupations and manners of specific people in a specific cultural-temporal space (say, New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis at the end of the 20th century or, more canonically, Victorian London), but at the same time they must give the reader a shock of recognition that what’s going on with the characters in the novel  is not all that different than what’s going on in the world of the reader. At least, that’s what the good ones do.

And so while it’s fun to say which era Franzen most speaks to, his book is much more than a snap shot of what it’s like to live in the early oughts. If it were just a high piece of literary journalism, then I doubt people who had just lived through the period Franzen describes (and were still living in it) would have liked it so much. I, for one, don’t read it as a grand work of social anthropology, but instead as an incredibly well written novel that deals with the things that novels tend to deal with.

Ned and Dylan both have thoughtful, totally reasonable lists of music that best captures what it was like to live in America in the time of Bush. And while their picks range from ones I totally agree with (“Intervention” by Arcade Fire) to ones I like, yet don’t quite see how they relate to Bush (Tha Carter III, “The Modern Age”), I have to say that I can’t really evaluate the popular culture of 2000-2008 in terms of the socio-political environment.

With the exception of some TV shows, movies and songs – which, besides 24, were generally rather mediocre -that very explicitly dealt with the politics of the day, it’s damn near impossible for me to make these types of judgments. That’s because not only have the last eight years been the years of Bush, they were also the eight years of the greatest personal, physical, emotional and social development of my entire life. While hoping to avoid knotty philosophical quandries, it’s safe to say that I’m a totally different person at age 18 then I was at age 10. And since the consumption of cultural bits, especially pop cultural bits, can not be disentangled from the person consuming them (in my case, me), it’s hard to seperate my own personal development over the past eight years from how the culture has developed. So, I will always reflect on pop culture in the age of Bush as first “pop culture while I was a teenager” and then second in its larger social and political context.

I know the South Park Conservative meme has been around for a long time, but on National Review’s Phi Beta Cons blog, there’s been a recent uptick of interest in trying to recast the most transgressive, crude and immature show on television as something conservatives can sorta call their own. Robert VerBruggen – who, as a former Northwestern Wildcat is necessarily the best contributor – makes the case:

 But I think it’s unfair to call it liberal: One of my favorite quotes from the creators is, “I hate conservatives, but I really f***ing hate liberals.”

The show’s creators take at least as much joy in slaughtering lefties’ sacred cows as they do conservatives’. A cloud of “smug” emanates from hybrid-car drivers. Jesse Jackson has a character “apologize” by kissing his rear end. A big coffee chain puts a small java shop out of business, the message being that that’s the way the economy works. Hippies find themselves the targets of countless gags. Al Gore gets skewered. Etc.

Also, South Park is a show that covers political topics fairly frequently and as of 2006 had 3.1 million viewers an episode. I’m already on the record saying there shouldn’t be a South Park college course, but why on earth should conservatives opt out of the conversation entirely and pretend they don’t watch it?

I think VerBruggen is making both a hard and soft case here, and only one of them seems to make sense. The hard case is that South Park, in some essential way, a conservative show. The evidence is that they constantly satirize liberals and do-gooders who take themselves too seriously. So, their targeting of Barbara Streisand, Tim Robbins, Al Gore and Jesse Jackson isn’t just equal opportunity insulting of puffed up celebrities, but instead a focused criticism of a certain type of PC, holier-than-thou liberalism. The soft case is that South Park is a purely negative show, aimed only at tearing down people who have an elevated opinion of their own importance, and that in the course of taking pot shots at Mormons, Scientologists, educators, the Catholic Church, parents, law enforcement officers and moralists of all stripes, they get a few shots in at liberals. 

To me, a devoted South Park watcher, it seems obvious that Parker and Stone are almost nihilistic in their desire to tear down anything and everything. So, liberals get caught in this all inclusive dragnet of satirization and mockery. VerBruggen and other South Park watching conservatives have had a better case to make recently, as South Park has taken a turn towards episodes centered around politics and current events as opposed to the simple, yet hilarious, crudeness that has always been their mainstay.

As long as we’re talking about South Park and politics, it should be noted that season’s 12 “The China Problem” presents a very good case against China threat mongering.

I’ve skied for nearly my entire life. For me, snowboarders were always an expected, natural part of the skiing experience. For others, especially those who think of themselves as true, old school skiers, they are the worst possible modern menance. Austin Bramwell has one of the more articulate – yet also completly unhinged – rants against the supposed scrouage of snowboarding. The weird thing is that all of his complaints against snowboarders – that they take up the entire trail, they take wide turns, slide down the hill and destroy powder, lie down on the mountain, make blind turns etc – can be side about the true menance to the skiing experience: beginning skiers.

What’s Bramwell is actually complaining about is the democrization of the skiing experience. Because of wide spread grooming and high speed lift, plenty of people can access snow that once only accessible to the expert and dedicated. Of course, that elite few is mad, but the real outcome is that more people get to enjoy something that those elitists enjoy a lot. How can that be bad? If you enjoy the sweet pow pow, how can you deny it to anyone else?

But most importantly, this complaining about the lack of powder is really a bunch of pointless griping. I’m in Breckenrdige right now, and I’ve had two straight days where the majority of my runs were either on totally fresh or slightly tracked powder. Yes, Breckenridge built a high speed chair that accesses a lot of their best powder, and still, in the afternoon on a day with no snow (it had snowed heavily the day before) I was able to find as much powder as any reasonable skier could possibly want. All the high speed chairs do is make the good stuff easier to get to. And everyone should be happy about that. 

Via Wilkinson 

Yglesias makes two very good points regarding survey data that “46% of the surveyed men lie about what they have read — to impress partners — and 33% of the surveyed women admit to lying about their reading habits.” That number seems much, much to low. Doesn’t everyone lie about what they read? Well, depends what you mean by lie.

For example, when somone makes a declarative statement about a book, like “The psuedo-Ukranian-English prose in Everything is Illuminated is amazing” they clearly intend for the listener to infer that they, in fact, read Everything is Illuminated. But the speaker isn’t technically lying – after all, plenty of well-respected critics said the exact same thing. Could this account for the 54% who supposedely don’t lie about their reading habits? The more banal explanation is that they just lied about their lying…that or they don’t read and thus have nothing to lie about.

I have to also echo Yglesias’ point that people who go to elite colleges – or those who take humanities classes – almost have to become proficient liars about their reading. The reading load in many English and History courses is just absurd. That, and students have been not-reading books since high school, if not middle school.

I’m sure all of you have friends who take it as their mission to call you out on your bullshit. Well, Ton, who’s made himself known in the comments before, is one of those friends. Whenever I run my mouth about hip hop and basketball, subjects for which he has much more knowledge and passion than I, he’s sure to call me out. And, to put it mildly, he disagreed with my 808s review. He hasn’t changed my mind, but he’s put into sharp relief the more questionable aspects of the album from both a musical and cultural standpoint. Here’s his take:

You’re better than this, you’re just buying into the vision of Kanye as a musical genius. Just because it sounds different doesnt mean it sounds good. It’s gimmicky, annoying sounding and worse of all he is biting T-fuckin Pain, the scourge of hip hop. Don’t get sucked into Kanye’s hype, I’ma go start a petition to send him back to producing. Heartless and streelights might be decent songs, but on the whole the album is disgraceful.

I think the difference here is that Ton, unlike me, is a true hip hop head who has a real love and appreciation of the genre. I, on the other hand, am a big pop/pop culture junkie, so I’m a bit more forgiving of rappers who stray off the reservation. I’m also much more likely to see artists as cultural figures, as opposed to just people who perform songs.

The cultural and political magazine is a weird beast. At first (and really second,third, fourth and fifth) blush it’s really unclear exactly what the cultural pages at the back of, say, The New Republic, has to do with the political and news stuff at the front. The same goes with the Nation.  In conservative political magazines, the connection between the back and front of the book has always been a bit tighter, as hilariously explicated Frank Foer’s classic Slate article on “The Stalinist Aesethics of the Weekly Standard.”

This is not to say that there aren’t linkages between politics and art,that, when handled deftly, can produce very good writing. But it’s just that having cultural pages in magazines whose primary purpose is the advancement of a particular ideology creates a weird tension. I guess the point of this diversion is to link yall to three really good pieces of literary criticism from the Nation and the Weekly Standard. 

First is William Deresiewicz’s (who may be the best literary/cultural essayist around) dissection of James Wood.

Second is Stefan Collini’s reappraisal of Calvin Trillin Lionel Trilling.

And the suprirse pick is Michael Weiss essay on David Foster Wallace’s critical work concerning the intersection of irony, postmodernism and literature. It’s not all surprising that Weiss wrote such a fine piece, what’s surprising was that it found its way into the Standard. Most pieces concering irony and postmodernism published in conservative journals are usually just full of ill-informed scorn that just dismisses, as opposed to grapple with, the claims made by ironists or postmodernists.