Topic F, Part One: Stop rolling your eyes!

Though he was sometimes derided as too gloomy and cynical, Vonnegut's most resonant messages have always been hopeful in the face of almost-certain doom.

The quote above is taken from a nice Onion essay on Kurt Vonnegut, as featured on their A.V. Club site. I think the point they make is more than valid; it's a highly accurate observation and a good (if small) instance of counterpoint to their own, often sneering, content (especially The Hater).

Thus, it was disappointing to see the following comment, posted by "Aeryn", on the site (in an article that bravely pays tribute to Tunnel of Love, no less, wow! but anyway, here it is):

I wouldn't consider placing ANYTHING by Springsteen in something called a Hall of Fame. I thought maybe the most jaded of all internet communities, AV Club, might agree with me. Apparently not. How long until we can forget this cheeseball?

Ah! curse you, hipsters! Granted, "idiotking" gently explains the meaning (or at least the non-meaning) of the word "jaded" in a comment immediately following the one posted by "Aeryn", but still...bleh. I know "Aeryn" isn't the only person who feels this way -- that being jaded is a good thing -- and I know I'm dangling some bait for /a, given his fondness for The Boss, but from what does this fashionably dour mindset stem? I'm too lazy to look it up on the computer.

topic d, part 6: science fiction/ double feature

aside from watching the "cooler" strain of radio-friendly pop rock try on and then discard such identities as "alternative", "college rock", and now "indie" (all of which were taken to mean slightly different sounds, granted), i find it even more interesting that "indie" has now become an equally neutured and meaningless term in the movie business.

i mean, not to call out little miss sunshine just because it was successful or anything, but it would seem that the idea of small-scale, independent filmmaking has most certainly been turned into the latest marketing gimmick for big-budget, high-starpower "quirky" character sketches set against often self-aware or indulgently existential plotlines.

and i can't think of any decent band rivalries these days that could be compared to blur/oasis (or even nirvana/pearl jam, much less stones/beatles), mostly because britpop didn't register that strongly for me. also, i'm not listening to the radio much these days, so my reference points are screwed.

for a certain crowd, maybe there's yeah yeah yeahs/liars, but in that case only because both have a loyal fanbase who might've "chosen sides" after the breakup. i dunno - even that seems to be a different sort of animal entirely, now that i think it over. is it because stuff has become ever more fragmented that i can't even think of two BIG bands with similar sounds? it doesn't seem fair to pit fall out boy against the killers.

maybe i need to ask more teenagers who totally sucks and who rules these days...

topic c, part 3: the fake headlines

that "reportage" on emo is pretty funny, indeed. it reminded me a little bit of the news clips featured in the filth and the fury (a few scant seconds of which can be seen in the only available trailer to be found on youtube).

what i find interesting, though, is that emo kids seem to have subverted their punk roots by becoming a threat to no one but themselves. i mean, no one's calling them the "antithesis of humankind" or suggesting they'd be "vastly improved by sudden death" (although i'm sure at least a handful of people actually feel that way).

and yeah, imperial, that frontline episode was great. i particularly liked how the show's reporter came across at times like a total artifact of journalism itself - wearing a rumpled corduroy sport jacket, asking questions like "isn't it true, sir, that you support programs that aren't news? isn't it true, in fact, that you like gossip and can relate to the kids with their ringtones and their secret instant text language?"

way to go, generational divide - way to turn the media against itself.

(sidenote to /a - i suspect hip-hop sucks in '07 for the same reason it did 11 years ago:

"... it's the money!"

but honestly, there's still good stuff to be found out there, so i'm feeling more optimistic about things than maybe i should.)

Topic C, Part 2: Hope I die before I get old. Oh, wait -- too late.

Great timing! Firstly, because I just saw a Frontline piece on TV last night that addressed the changing face of journalism (or, The Rise of THE BLOG), and secondly, because today is indeed my birthday.

I am turning 31, no longer on the Twenties-Thirties cusp, but I've felt "old" for quite a while. More than once over the past couple of years, I have found myself muttering, "What is up with the kids these days?" I'm not sure when and in what era I got stuck, but it happened just the same.

However, despite feeling somewhat distanced from an age group I was once in (and not so long ago, thank you very much), I don't think I'm quite as out of touch as whomever is responsible for these "lock up your children" news stories. I mean, seriously? Who's scared of emo? Was it ever actually threatening? Teenagers still connect with it, to be sure -- and maybe that's what's frightening parents, as always -- that there's a form of music to which their children deeply relate, which they themselves cannot understand, and thus even greater separation from their offspring is created -- but, Moms! Dads! Emo isn't even goth! Emo is kinda like the hair metal of my youth, except with a lot more crying.

It's funny that Frontline noted that even though most people still get their news from television broadcasts, younger audiences consistently turn to the Internet for their information (with nightly viewings of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, of course); for an "old people" news outlet, Frontline is certainly not oblivious to the shifting tastes of target demographics. In terms of these generations, I don't know onto which side of the divide I land. I suppose I've fallen somewhere in the divide itself, into some chasm in which I know that most of today's music isn't exactly made for me, but I still (somewhat secretly) enjoy "Dance, Dance" (I know, /a: for shame). It's a hole in which I'm so old that I listen to Big Tracks by choice, in a non-ironic way (with frequent, sincere, detours into Top Tracks), and willingly load such songs onto my MP3 player; but it's a hole in which I'm young enough to actually know how to operate an MP3 player, and it's a hole in which I'll never be too old for cake.

Topic B, Part 6: Shout-out! or, Another sidebar.

Awesome! We get namechecked. Thank you, Mat the W!

Topic B, Part 5: I Am What I Am Not

The internet combines two worlds in a way that no medium has ever done before – it provides the mob mentality of the congregated masses as well as the safety and anonymity of solitude. The result is the freedom to (re)construct identity and to perfect the art of (self-) promotion. It is both a communal and a personal forum; it operates much like a real marketplace or town square, given equally to exhibition and commerce. But imagine a marketplace that allows its participants as much or as little secrecy and obscurity as they wish. Accordingly, what we’re selling in this marketplace, as often as not, is a heavily modified version of ourselves.

The real coup represented by someone like Jeffree Star is the willingness to step into the actual world while maintaining that myspace-crafted persona. We have come to expect a degree of falsification and misrepresentation online, but still hold higher standards for authenticity in the flesh & blood, bricks & mortar world. The fabricated world of online creation should be negated by the actual world of lived experience – you are not your facebook profile; you do not look like your carefully chosen and posted photos - but when a Jeffree Star comes along and denies this rift, it raises alarm. And I think that, as PF suggested, is the point of the whole exercise. New modes of self-invention; newly available methods of self-definition.

Star is but one example of the new breed who, by cunningly utilizing the tools granted them by history’s greatest shared source of information, have become “famous for being famous,” or more accurately, famous simply because they claim to be famous.

***UPDATE*** Emily Nussbaum suggests that maybe it's a generational gap, that nobody over 30 can possibly understand what it means to be young and alive and online today. Most chilling passage? That would have to be this one:

Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

Topic B, Part 4: Amplify the lie.

This whole fake it 'til you make it attitude must occur on such a grand scale in the entertainment industry (or at least the industry of entertainment wannabes). It's like padding your resume -- times a thousand! The practice must be much more common and accepted in showbiz than it is in the workaday world, though it's probably done just as surreptitiously.

One could argue that Jeffree Star has every right to manufacture his persona, and that he even has the right to create a biography out of whole cloth, since the business he's in is fuelled by illusion. Why should the development of an alter ego stop at stage names?

An artist's authenticity always amazes (ah! alliteration), but sometimes we need a little fantasy, no? As PF pointed out, the reality might actually disappoint.

Hmm. Maybe I shouldn't be so hard on Laura Albert.

topic b, part 3: the prettiest (proto)star

wow - i just came across this article and thought it fit in perfectly with our recent thoughts.

i'm curious about how real any of it is, though. clearly, mr. star is connected enough to make myspace demos with peaches' drummer (although, i can't honestly say how connected that really makes a person), and he's great at doing the self-promotion qualified by noncommittal disclaimers thing (ie, a makeup line that's "secretly in the works, but you can publish that" and a reality tv show that "is getting finalized today").

i'm impressed by the fake it 'til you make it chutzpah on display here. so impressed, in fact, that i can't tell if i'd really just rather it all remain a cloud of hyperbole awaiting media "condensation" (like a molecular cloud coalescing in the interstellar medium! if i may belabor the metaphor just a tad more - pardon that, but it has the word "medium" built right into it!).

that's the real art happening here, and i'm sure any "realization" of the alleged works in progress henceforth would be a bit of a letdown.

Topic B, Part 1: You got served.

Betagal and PF bring up an interesting point: the idea of manipulation. This isn't just restricted to wigged-out brides on YouTube (please excuse the hair-related pun); remember lonelygirl15? JT LeRoy? Most exposed pranks are justified as performance art or even social experiments, but those who were fooled tend to get really, really angry about the grift. They write books about it! They make widely ignored movies about those books!

So should staged clips be labelled as such? I'd like to think that I'm savvy enough to distinguish real footage from the scripted variety, or at least take it all with a grain of salt (if that expression applies), but what if the clip involved a crime? (Imagine, /a, if we had posted a clip of one of the fake kidnappings we pulled off in high school? Would the act be dismissed as low-brow entertainment, or would we have police knocking on our doors?)

If I saw footage of a crime on YouTube, my first instinct would be to assume that it was a prank. Who'd post that sort of thing on YouTube, of all places, right? Yet the site has been used to nab murder suspects and is being used to find missing persons. Will the proliferance of Internet hoaxes (and punking in general) diminish the effectiveness of measures like these, because the fakes create a "crying wolf" atmosphere in which the real victims are lost?

Topic A, Part 4: Teach Your Children Well

A slight (but oh so slight as to stay on track) shift on this topic. Thanks to PF all of my friends are now addicted to RapCat, and there is indeed an indescribable beauty to being able to watch the commercial for "The Clapper" anytime you like. I mention this commercial in particular because:
a. I love the cranky old woman at the end.
b. A friend of mine tried to find this very commercial in the pre-YouTube era whilst on the job and ended up downloading a ton of spyware onto her company computer. Whoops!

But one thing that has stunned me about YouTube is the proliferation of online blogging. I'm certain there is a fancier name for these things, but you get the ideer. Now whether they are honest-to-God 16 year olds or a bunch of actors who merely look like fragile 16 year olds is really beside the point. I saw the video below and was horrified on several levels. Give it a look, I'll wait.

In my day, we wrote all of this sort of thing down in spiral bound notebooks or little journals with butterflies on the cover which were kept under lock and key. Then 2 or 3 or even 10 years later we found it again and shuddered at our innocence or stupidity or even just wept as we remembered how painful and awkward those years were. But we most certainly didn't put it on the internet to be found by our parents and classmates.

It also brings up a good point brought up earlier by Miss Imperial. Anonymity sometimes brings out the worst in people, and for evidence you need to look no farther than message boards and the comments on YouTube. This poor kid is just about as awkward as they come, and the comments under this video telling him to kill himself because he's pathetic and hated made me unbelievably sad. Is this where we are, people? Is this the magic of technology that was promised us? Laughing at Britney's bad skin on HDTV and telling the underdog to kill himself?

That's it, my kids are using a Commodore 64 for their homework and playing Pong.

Topic A, Part 3: Mostly sidebar.

Just the mention of House of Guitars -- "The store that ate my brain!" -- sends me into a tailspin of nostalgia. (I, too, grew up in suburban Ottawa; like /a, I cannot say "J&E Grocery" without adding the store's street address IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS, as if it were part of the name. In a way, it is.) I really did feel like I had some claim to Rochester, NY, and even though that city is right across the water from Toronto, all the American network feeds come from Buffalo affiliates. People, that is NOT the same.

Sigh.

It's true, though, that the world feels a lot smaller than it used to, thanks to the Internet...but, like /a pointed out, the world also feels a lot more congested. How do teenagers stay in the loop? It's not even a loop! It's like a bunch of loops all intertwined, then wrapped tightly around a really huge backpack. No wonder they all need three cellphones each.

(At some point we're going to have to talk about people wearing Bluetooth earpieces ALL THE TIME. I know it's been parodied on many an occasion and is therefore old news, but seriously, it's like those things are grafted to people's temples.)

And /a, you're right, there's a lot of footage on the Internet that some would call, er, "pointless". I feel as if I should applaud the DIY mentality of posting your own work on YouTube -- I suppose it beats waiting in that giant American/Canadian Idol line -- but how does one ensure that the work gets noticed?

(Oh, and I should note that the TBS feed in Toronto comes from somewhere in Georgia, which is the reason why I saw Rap Cat in the first place. Step up, Buffalo!)