this isn't an actual blog post

But I wish I actually had kept up with this assignment because it really is a hell of a lot more interesting than most classes' homework. It's good to have a regular stimulus for writing activity, even (especially?) if it's as casual and tossed-off as this. My stream of consciousness operates more smoothly when I'm not forced to rein it in for more rigidly structured papers, and it's almost...I don't want to say "cathartic," because that doesn't really apply. But it's definitely rewarding in some sense to be frequently writing insignificant things that don't ultimately matter. It makes me wonder why my livejournal's been so sporadically updated for the last couple years.

I might want to keep this up in some capacity.

for 3/24, anything I'd like to write about

It has been alluded to in this blog that I'm a fan of the current, revisionist take on Battlestar Galactica. Now...I know the title conjures up images of one of the campiest cash-ins on Star Wars-mania (tied with the far more entertaining Flash Gordon remake, with its classic Queen theme song). I know the Sci-Fi Channel is not known for its classy original programming. I know the word "frak" is beyond ridiculous, especially used in context like "mother-frakker" or Starbuck saying "all I want to do right now is frak." And I know that there's something inherently geeky about watching a continuity-and-mythology-drenched space opera on a weekly basis, let alone spending a lot of other time thinking and/or talking about it.

But it's the best dramatic show on television now that HBO's big trifecta of The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire are all over. Ronald Moore somehow took the core concept of the original show--a show of which I'm not even remotely a big fan--and turned it into the most compelling outer-space sci-fi show ever (the most compelling sci-fi show ever might still be The X-Files, in my opinion, but that's my 90s conspiracy enthusiasm talking. Same reason I love The Invisibles and The Illuminatus! Trilogy. I don't buy into conspiracy theories, necessarily, but I do find them entertaining as hell). Nearly everything about this show is interesting, from the unusual-for-a-space-opera emphasis on psychological realism to the still-developing Cylon mythology, but the show's most obvious distinction is the allegorical aspect. Now, anybody can write a direct parable about modern politics set in space, if it's obvious and heavy-handed enough. But BSG's plot arcs start out seeming to represent one thing, only to transform into something else entirely. It's like liquid metaphor, or something. Nobody's preconceptions about the show's politics are safe, which is a big part of why I'm going to continue watching Battlestar every Friday until this (the last season) wraps up.

It's sort of funny that Dwight from the U.S. Office likes this show so much, considering how literally he takes things. I've known nerds like that--and I use the word "nerd" with mixed affection and frustration; just keep in mind that I am the sort of person who is reasonably comfortable in comic book stores--these fantasy-militaristic guys whose politics are mostly informed by Robert Howard's Conan stories, Heinlein's Starship Troopers (but they hate Paul Verhoeven's hilarious subversion of everything the original book stands for. Guess which version I prefer?), and Ayn Rand. I remember reading Neal Stephenson's awesome Cryptonomicon, an epic tome that can only really be described as "post-modern math-fi" but is way more entertaining than that term would imply, and recognizing all the nerdy archetypes who showed up in the book. Many were these hardcore individualist/libertarian types who wouldn't understand human interaction if they studied it for a lifetime. It's just weird to me how much that stereotype rings true in a lot of cases. I don't know how to wrap this up but the blogs were due ten minutes ago. I guess my point is that people shouldn't determine their politics based on what they would have to believe in to survive as a barbarian in The Hyborian Age.

One more note:
It sounds like I watch more TV than I actually do. I have a handful of shows I really like and watch every week, but beyond that I rarely partake. I know lots of people who watch TV for the sake of watching TV, but don't really "follow" shows, but I only watch TV if there's something in particular I want to watch (incidentally, my Top 5 favorite TV shows would probably be The Wire, Freaks and Geeks, Mr. Show with Bob and David, Arrested Development, and Futurama. I can hear the cries of "Hipster douchebag!" and "What, isn't CSI good enough for you?!" from here...). Just wanted that to be clear.

3/28, regarding Tyler Perry

He has a savvy business model, I've got to hand it to him. And I guess a good message, from some people's perspectives. I'm a liberal agnostic leaning towards atheism, so I don't really get off on the core message he's going for, but he seems genuine enough about it that I'm not going to hold it against him any more than I hate Dirty Harry for being sorta right-wing. And I love Dirty Harry.

The problem is simply that his movies are bad. They're only slightly worse than most Hollywood "comedies with a heart," in that the shifts from lowbrow humor to sappy melodrama are more awkward and forced. But that's pretty bad, for one of the most prolific financially successful filmmakers working a the moment (especially for somebody who mostly works outside the Hollywood establishment). He manages to maintain a huge, devoted audience by reiterating more or less the same mediocre formula time after time, like Adam Sandler with a clumsily-handled evangelical subtext. It is strange to me that he's one of the handful of well-known black filmmakers out there, and probably the only one who's become a consistently lucrative Name Brand.

I just don't understand how somebody so inadequate as a filmmaker--his character development is cliche as hell when it exists at all, his plots are always generic and formulaic, his direction is what you expect when you think of plays being turned into films, his acting is too broad to work well on screen--can be so successful. I guess he's just an exploitation filmmaker like Russ Meyer or Herschell Gordon Lewis, but offering cheap sentiment instead of sex or gore. Either way he's artlessly delivering a commodity he knows his audience will buy over and over again. Maybe that makes him admirable as a businessman. Whatever. But as a filmmaker? Since I am unfortunately the sort of person who lives in a bubble with the music and movies I like--only acknowledging the world at large when I have to--I have trouble feeling any sort of respect for this kind of unabashed hackwork.

4/18 (anything): notes regarding my globalization paper

Just figured I'd take the time to respond to some of your notes on my paper. I may as well: the paper was, after all, basically a piece of amateur music criticism. Regardless of all the ridiculous consensus-building "canon" stuff in magazines like the getting-more-obsolete-by-the-moment Rolling Stone, music criticism should be more about creating open discourse than settling arguments (despite what Ronald Thomas Clontle might think).
OF COURSE the Pogues were better than Gogol Bordello; I didn't mean to imply otherwise, though I can see how it might read that way in the paper. I probably shouldn't even have mentioned them, just leaving the Flogging Molly comparison. Both are more overtly "punked-up" than the Pogues, and less songwriting-oriented. But yeah, just to clear that up: Pogues, one of the best bands ever. Shane MacGowan's one of the greatest songwriters of his generation--with a uniquely Irish sense of coal-black gallows humor and emotional resonance, as well as an acute awareness of the Irish literary tradition and a punk-informed political sensibility. Their musicianship is always incredibly tight, they reinvented traditional British/Celtic folk music in the coolest way since Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band in the 60s. The use of the word "gimmicky" in the paper wasn't to describe them, but rather the entire subgenre of bands who've come about in the years since Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash made them a big deal. But they were less less globally-oriented than GB, therefore not as key to that paper.
Yeah, those first four Eno vocal albums (and his work with Roxy Music!) were monumentally great. If Another Green World were to come out today it would still be mindblowing; when I first heard that album a few years back, Eno's legacy had already become about as huge and widespread as any single artist's can be, but it was still an incredible record in its own right. Unlike a lot of old "technologically innovative" albums--I like Kraftwerk a lot, but Trans-Europe Express still sounds like a very clear-cut product of its time--it's barely aged a day.
It's weird that I didn't mention the Clash's cover of "Pressure Drop," since Funky Kingston was one of the reggae albums I was listening to while writing the paper. Incidentally, reggae's another one of those genres like the blues, where the more "good stuff" I hear the more convinced I am that mainstream perception of the genre is lethally flawed. GUYS THERE'S MORE TO IT THAN LISTENING TO fucking SUBLIME WHILE STARING AT YOUR POSTER OF BOB MARLEY SMOKING A SPLIFF. Lots of that 70s stuff in particular is some of the most passionate, groovy, and surprisingly diverse music out there. But to end that digression, maybe Toots's voice is too great? It's awfully hard to remember anybody else's version of that song when you're listening to the original. Similarly, Toots and the Maytal's version of "Let Down" on that Radiodread album (I know the concept is absurd but just about everybody on there really knows what they're doing) is just about as good as the original. Toots Hibbert: there's a man what knows how to sing.
On the sixties: yeah, there were a lot of global influences in 60s rock, especially in the Eastern tonalities of just about every psychedelic band of the era. I guess they figured there was something "trippy" (or in George Harrison's case, I guess something genuinely spiritually fulfilling) about droning raga stuff, and they were kind of right about that. I'm not sure to what extent most of them were really directly influenced by Eastern music--I know John Coltrane was hugely influential on most of those bands, especially the Byrds and the Grateful Dead, and he got really into Eastern philosophy and music around the start of the decade--but the sound is still really obviously "exotic." Not to mention the really obvious Latin influences in Santana's music, duh, and the rise of the tiny handful of worthwhile jazz fusion acts.
I just figured I would never be able to get the paper finished if I didn't narrow down the scope a whole lot, specifically to punk and alternative (and even then it hurt to leave out PiL, the Ruts, the no wave scene, the Specials, Camper Van Beethoven, Boredoms, etc., etc., etc.).

"Satire," 4/9

The linked article says something that's been the case for as long as I've been paying attention: most attempts at satire in pop culture are pathetically limp. Saturday Night Live has its moments--maybe one per episode--but nothing making it particularly culturally relevant except that it's such an institution that we just assume it's automatically culturally relevant. Look, there are and always have been and always will be funny individuals involved with SNL, but something about that environment makes them less funny than they should be. I didn't believe Tina Fey was funny at all until 30 Rock came along to console us jilted Arrested Development fans. Same with Tracy Morgan, who consistently provides the funniest line delivery on 30 Rock. Amy Poehler was hilarious on Upright Citizen's Brigade, and is probably still hilarious in the UCB live show which I will see if I ever get the chance. I like hearing Christopher Walken say "googly eyes" as much as the next guy, but SNL simply isn't as funny these days as almost any sketch show I can think of. Kids in the Hall, Mr. Show, UCB, The State, Human Giant, SCTV...the giant institution of "satirical" television has been lapped by its offspring too many times by now to count. (Still beats the shit out of MadTV, though).

Anyway, satire's still plenty alive. It's weird that the article picks out Conan O'Brien as an example, when satire's never been his forte (he's always been about absurd humor, and when he mentions a famous politician in a joke, it's usually simply as a springboard to make a silly joke, not to lend any political insight). The writers of the article are right to mention Stephen Colbert, though: for somebody who claims to have been sort of apolitical before he started work on The Daily Show, Colbert's probably the definitive political comedian of our time. Unlike, say, Bill Maher, he never includes politics at the expense of being funny--he's a killer improv comedian who's just as funny on Strangers With Candy, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, or The Venture Bros. as he is on his own show. And his own show typically has the most dead-on political comedy of anything else on TV, especially with The Simpsons on life support (South Park is usually great but can get awfully heavy-handed and unlikable when it deals with politics).
The point here is that satire's really not dead or dying. We remember Mark Twain from his time, and Mort Sahl from his, and Kurt Vonnegut, and so on, but surely the majority of media was dominated by hacky crap at the time, as well? There's plenty of good satirical work being done, and it seems awfully simplistic to assume that satire's dead because most "political" humor is empty and unfunny. I'd be willing to bet it's always been that way, and always will.

I'm not sure how possible it is to catch up at all if the posts have to correlate with the dates of the assignments, but here's a word on "Terrorists"

The difference between freedom fighters and terrorists is, theoretically, that terrorists fight by wreaking havoc among the civilian population as much as they partake in straightforward military conflict. Now, the term "terrorist" is often applied to honest revolutionaries these days, so the word's definition has been a little obscured. I don't think the American Revolutionaries favored taking and murdering civilian hostages, just as I think there are certain terrorist groups out there whose ultimate goal is the downfall of non-Islamic western civilization. (That doesn't make the term "Islamofascist" any less completely retarded). The line's getting awfully blurry between the two, though. I guess that's how it works when you're a global superpower: everybody opposed to you ends up being perceived as a threat to your supremacy one way or another, and you end up fighting back with semantic b.s. like this, with full-blown military invasions, with "Freedom Fries," etc. To tie this into the Pogues discussion in my next post: if the Birmingham Pub bombings were in fact perpetrated by Irish nationalists (or any sort of political activists), that is terrorism. It's an attack on the civilian population to make a political point, which might irritate the British government enough to have arrested and imprisoned six innocent men "for being Irish at the wrong place and at the wrong time," to quote Shane MacGowan. But it won't lead to the establishment of a unified Irish nation. Haphazard tactics like that give the Cause--whatever cause you're fighting for--a bad name. Remember the Weathermen, back in the 60s and 70s? Okay, technically I don't remember them, but I've become aware over the last several years that they existed. The whole thing just seems embarrassing in retrospect: a handful of kids with guns, weed, and a pipe dream of violently overthrowing the government. They went further than your average dreadlocked college student with a Che Guevara t-shirt (I'm surprised those still exist considering how stereotypical it is), but their most significant accomplishment was freeing Tim Leary from prison. The revolution may not be televised, but it also almost certainly will not revolve around Timothy fucking Leary, okay? The point being this: if you can't achieve change by working within the system--and I can accept that, with the system proving as resistant to positive change as anything really can be--then at least think things through better. Don't kill civilians; it just damages your public image and makes it so that the government can't possibly acquiesce to your goals for P.R.'s sake.

Non-related:
I haven't had many chances at all to use the computer at home during the last week or so; my extended family's been in town for a funeral, some of them staying in the room with my family's computers. Not that that changes the fact that I screwed up to begin with by constantly forgetting about this whole blog all semester, of course.

Addendum to "The Blues," last post

I should say that white rock musicians are not entirely incapable of doing interesting things with the blues. It's just that the overly reverent, overly long, overly "soulful" (emphasis on the quotation marks) approach seems pointless and redundant. A bizarro deconstruction of blues is often pretty interesting, I think. I already mentioned Captain Beefheart--who more or less patented the whole concept of Dada blues in the late 60s--and Tom Waits, but it could also apply to some PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, the Jesus Lizard, Royal Trux, and the Laughing Hyenas (I didn't mention the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion because I've never liked 'em much myself). Even a more straightforward blues-rock style works for me (I have nothing bad at all to say about peak-era Rolling Stones except that Altamont happened, and I like punkier blues-rock bands like the Gun Club and, yeah, the White Stripes) but too many guitar solos just kill it. And I LIKE guitar solos. Ask Neil Young's electric work how I feel about guitar solos, and I guarantee you that they'll confirm my positive stance on the matter.

I'll close for now with this irrelevant tangent: if there ain't no cure for the summertime blues (AND I KNOW THAT'S A ROCK'N'ROLL SONG RATHER THAN SOME DEEP DELTA RARE TRACK, 'KAY?), why does seasonal affective disorder almost always hit during winter? Is the summertime blues actually a separate condition altogether, or just something to do with being young and angsty with nothing to do? Eh, the young man ain't got nothin' in the world these days...

various things sort of related to recent classes

A) John Hodgman is a funny, funny writer. It's no hyperbole to say that The Areas of My Expertise is one of the greatest almanacs to ever consist entirely of false information. That's underselling it, really: anybody who likes dry, absurd humor needs to read it and maybe memorize the entire list of hobo names contained within.

B) The Blues:
That documentary we're watching about all those Mississippi guys who got rediscovered/uncovered by Fat Possum in the early 90s is reminding me how much I like that stuff. This really sounds like sort of a cliche affectation for a white middle-class semihipster college student to have, but that whole Stevie Ray Vaughan/Robert Cray/Eric Clapton 12-bar overpolished overlong guitar solo stuff bores me to tears. I don't pretend to know the first thing about "authenticity" in any sort of music. Chuck Klosterman has an essay about pop-country being more authentic in its working-class populism than the more traditionalist alt-country stuff, and as much as I prefer Steve Earle and the Drive-By Truckers to anything Toby Keith will ever, ever, ever, ever do, I have to admit he's probably right. But the point is that I feel like blues at its rawest is some of the most effectively cool, groovy music ever, and too many people's perceptions of it have been shaped by Blueshammer-style bullshit (again, "bullshit" being a totally subjective factor in this post!) that they'll never be able to dig on this music I really like. Go listen to any of those old Fat Possum guys--R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, CeDell Davis--or John Lee Hooker, or Lightnin' Hopkins, or Lead Belly, or Fred McDowell, or Robert Johnson, or Son House, etc. Howlin' Wolf in particular was cool as hell. If you're the sort of person who's ever wondered where Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart got their singing styles...you've probably already heard Howlin' Wolf. But that's beside the point, I guess.
Something that I find interesting is how I find those Mississippi guys waaaaaay more exciting than the wanky electric stuff because their music is more repetitive. Somebody like Eric Clapton--or John Mayer, God help us all--follows fairly predictable 12-bar AAB patterns, but these guys often eschew that altogether in favor of something even more basic. I don't know how that makes it more interesting. Maybe it has something to do with Steve Reich or Brian Eno? Gods damn it, I feel like a phony for even trying to talk about music that I know next to nothing about, but it always feels like a revelation when I find myself totally thrilled by music that I always used to basically think of as an irrelevant museum piece.

C) Hey, did you catch that "Gods damn it" in the last paragraph and think, "Maybe that was a Battlestar Galactica reference?" It was. I'll talk about that later because I'm stoked about the new season (apologies to everybody else in the class because I doubt any of you watch that show).

the whole "internet fragmentation of modern culture" thing

It's funny that even though I didn't start really listening to hip-hop until I was in high school, the sound of early 90s gangsta rap really gives me a sense of nostalgia for my childhood. I guess The Chronic (and that sound in general) was so pervasive in pop culture when I was 5 that--even though I was only vaguely familiar with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Ice Cube's names at the time, not even their music--that whole sound reminds me of elementary school. Just like Nirvana and Soundgarden and Mortal Kombat and old episodes of The State and Beavis and Butthead. I didn't really directly experience most of these things at the time, apart from one babysitter who was really into Nirvana and would occasionally watch MTV when he was over, so I find it funny how much I unconsciously absorbed early 90s pop culture. I can't play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas without feeling like a kid again, despite having never been to L.A. and (obviously) never having been in a gang.

So here's the question: are there any trends in pop culture as dominant these days as that whole "Alternative Revolution" and hardcore hip-hop were from 91 to 95 or so? Will the kids growing up today be able to feel nostalgic about things they only indirectly experienced, or is there no pop culture as monolithic as things tended to be before the internet blew our culture into tiny little fragments? That's not necessarily a bad thing, I guess. I like not having to deal with music I don't like on a regular basis--I've heard that Soulja Boy bullshit (apparently a massive hit?) a few times but hardly enough to remember what it sounds like--but the whole thing is weird to me. It's strange growing up in a world where the idea of the Rock Star is taken for granted, only to find that it no longer really exists by the time you're an adult.