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schwalbie92
ah! i just read a lot of your posts on mike's wall and i will totally use lastfm more often if it becomes a forum for good art-life conversations. i've been rolling around in some consumption/creation/analysis hangups that would probably benefit from a little air outside my own head. which i guess i won't start up or respond to anything right this minute because i have to head to class really soon... but how was your summer dude? did you make any bread? i left my bread starter with my mom and she killed it :'<
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mike_opal
It’s not that I want to have watched/heard/seen everything, but I want to be convinced constantly that there is infinitely more, of which I can only be convinced if I consume more quickly than it is being replaced and there is always more. (I’m starting to hear some pathology here, so I’ll just cut myself off). I do need to read more, I basically stopped, excepting class stuff, once I got into college. I’m not sure if it’s because I switched into movie-music mode, because I didn’t do much of either of those in high school, or if I got lazy, but I got a goodreads, which I’m digging. Incidentally, bernhard keeps popping up as a recommendation, so I'm gonna get my hands & eyes on what I can before classes start.
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mike_opal
Preamble: How does one make it through the part about the crimes? I was loving 2666, really loving, I then I hit that sections and saw the 400 pages I was looking down the barrel of, and it fucked with me so deeply and viscerally and thoroughly that I put it down and have carried it with me ever since, but have never opened it. I’ll read it, eventually, when I’m more ontologically secure (I picked it up at a bad time in my life for that nightmare/apocalypse anyways)… Anyway, I should give myself over to the vagaries of pleasure, but loosing my curatorial grip on art (which is only an illusion besides), thrown unmoored, having to develop my own thoughts and dare I say feelings? Like America, a great experiment. And the level of sarcasm in the preceding statement is surprisingly low, I noticed as I wrote.
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mike_opal
Mmmm, absurdity is not antithetical to perceptivity, sensitivity, beauty, or truth, and is often a direct line to them, I believe. I said “absurd” because it seems that the most appropriate way to combat that thinking of encapsulating the world in a thought, or even in one person’s head, is not the swath of information necessarily lost to the declarer-of-truth, but that they’ve missed even the cat and herring. Woolf isn’t afraid of being blunt, but the quote isn’t a forward motion, it comes in from the side. So I guess not absurd, but absurdist?
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helloimjoshua
v Faust isn't Korean Rock you silly. But yeah, hopefully it works out. But knowing my luck, I'll end up having exams the next day or something like I did last year when I wanted to see Portishead ;_;
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helloimjoshua
Oh thanks for letting me know! Concerts are a bit iffy when I'm at school because Chicago is actually pretty far from where I am (~2.5 hour drive iirc) but we shall see how everything turns out.
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helloimjoshua
Man, I'd love to see him live. Hope the show ends up being great. And I see Hol' Up is #2 for plays; that was my favorite on the album :)
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helloimjoshua
Ah ok gotcha, I know what you mean. Thanks for talking with me by the way about this stuff, I don't think anyone else would have done so ha. Unrelated but I'm happy to see that you're a Kendrick Lamar fan :D Loved his album from last year.
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helloimjoshua
I'm one to give the benefit of the doubt most of the time (as I generally like to think highly of all people when I hear about them) but yeah, there's definitely some sort of a performance going on. Nonetheless, I feel like the fact that she admitted making her name kittypryde on what.cd to get more exposure and how she struggles with wanting to people normally now that she's some sort of mini-mini-mini celeb shows something very real about who she is. Sure, that might be all for show or what not but as I said, I like to give the benefit of the doubt.
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helloimjoshua
Deleting comments is unnecessary, just explain yourself in another comment! But yeah, when I say cute I mean something a whole lot more than just looks (not sure if this is what you were getting at... I'm confused because you deleted your shout lol)
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helloimjoshua
Haha it's ok, I didn't catch it at first glance either! And you don't have a poor sense of humor :O
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mike_opal
I am honestly sort of frightened of that time when I begin revisiting art… Like I’ve run out of things. Not true, obviously, there are always more books. But right now I’m using a scorched-earth policy surely to some degree as a comfort mechanism against cultural claustrophobia, which rears its abortive head each summer. / That Bernhard sounds like exactly the kind of thing I would dig. (I do love me some formal experimentation.) Why not a book where a major action is the shifting of one’s ass on the cushion, but naturally the grind of denim only worsen the heat, but at least not the numbness? As for baker, vox is all dialogue and may be porn, my jury’s still out. The mezzanine is better anyways, a reverie on an escalator bafflingly divided into chapters.
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mike_opal
The only good critics are also amazing stylists, which for me makes it less compelling to black them out (not defending, but explaining). And fighting for emotional space on a piece of art, which support as much as one can hang on it, rather than rationally applying the emotional reaction of a critic can be difficult, but it comes down to a sensitivity to one’s own body, recognizing one’s own pleasure, no easy task. When even masturbating is difficult to parse, how the hell am I to know how I feel about richard thompson? The only art I really ever return to is music and television. I’ve seen few movies twice, reread even fewer books. As such, I have an obsessive/fanatic relationship with pretty much just infinite jest, st. Vincent, and paul thomas anderson, but then also louie, community, better off ted, friends, &c (all distressingly sitcoms).
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mike_opal
An appropriately absurd reaction from woolf! A lot of what I consume is from interviews and biographical miscellany of artists I like. St. Vincent is kind of ground-zero for my current listening trends. Of course that stuff is shunted through the allmusic/christgau filter to narrow whatever album I choose to listen to by whatever artist. Movies tend to be a little more directly from critics. Maybe it indicates a shift in my own aspirations, from aspiring-artist to aspiring-critic, which I’m seeing. I have not decided how I feel about that yet. Today was the first time I can remember buying something blind, a record, like vinyl, of classical music. But of course I recognize the name Mozart. It’s also economic, and one can’t browse torrents so easily. (Also, I want to write fiction like christgau writes criticism. My brother would say I am “up on his nuts,” for which I could only wish.)
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iacus123
"can't no-goshdamned-body stop crack, as long as young nigga's making big fat stacks, I tried to do it legal making records selling big, like tupac said it didn't pay the fucking rent" is probably more insightful about drugs in america than any hollywood movie ever made. maybe any movie ever. I would like "conscious" rappers more if they weren't all so fucking stupid. Immortal Technique, Lupe Fiasco, Talib Kweli. Just no good.
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iacus123
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4669ozY4faQ Yeah I know people like that too. People who say "New Bloc Party album, wow so awesome!" and "Call Me Maybe is awful" in the same breath. They also tend to shoot me funny looks if I play rap around them. Not that they don't like rap music, but, I think, because I'm white and they don't expect me to like rap. For them I don't think music can overcome the barrier of social acceptability because they're using music in a different way from someone who is just listening to music because they enjoy it. /// Rap is so deeply tied to what is actually being spoken, I think more so than any other genre, that if you don't understand whatever language is being spoken it really diminishes the music. But yeah there's like, Sefyu, who's a cool French rapper, and I know I've heard some good spanish rap but I can't remember names /// The tracklist on that one looks the same but mine is just tagged NYC 1979. It's probably the same.
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iacus123
I like t. swift a lot actually, even though I don't listen to her that much. She has some pretty awesome singles. 'party in the usa' is also awesome though i haven't listened/watched to anything else with cyrus in it and think she's pretty stupid. But I normally only listen to american pop music when I'm with friends and they play stuff at parties or in the car. None of it really makes too much of an impact on me.
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mike_opal
I really loved weekend, but the tape-recorder art project bothered me. It seemed atonal, like one trait of a manic-pixie-dream-guy, and the rest of the script is so tightly characterized it smacked of convention (but heterosexual convention, which at least blurs the subjection of mpdg role). But how the entire movie exists on this precipice of violence, as during the party (was it a birthday or a send-off?), keeping this romance ambiently embattled, is so crushing and moving that it makes up for the conventions it employs. / My stories also tend to have little narrative pull any direction. I fantasize about writing a book in which the protagonist sits in a chair, and which is why I adore nicholson baker. When one must pull the strings, they suddenly feel even more artificial then when one notices them in another work. / Whoop, I was not even aware of the bad brains homophobia. That is unfortunate.
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mike_opal
It is preselected, sure. But I want to hit a certain level of comfort with whatever medium before I start with a personal determination, but I guess I don’t know what that would look like. Good taste and learning are unnecessary, and it’s almost silly to say I HAVE TO ENJOY ALL OF THE ART I CONSUME. Maybe it’s bad, I see now, not to watch something unrecommended, but so how do you go about finding what you watch or listen to or read?
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mike_opal
I’ve willingly subsumed my taste to cultural critics (music: allmusic & christgau, movies: criterion & dana stevens & bordwell/thompson & kunin, books: whatever professor I’m trying to impress), and while I do my damndest to form my own opinions about the movies I see (sorry, guys, ozu can wield a composition but I still can’t breathe when I watch tokyo story and truffaut can’t pace, and de palma has the purest uncut cinematic pleasure around, but none of this is particularly ballsy or new commentary), but my pool from which I select my movies is basically the western canon (I keep the complete list of the s&s poll, all entries, in two columns: seen/unseen) with some other stuff thrown in. I don’t know, maybe that’s the wrong the way to attack this, but at the same time without these guys (overwhelmingly) I would not have seen some of my favorite movies or heard my favorite music.
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mike_opal
And I would have to watch it again, but the scene also separates their modes of interaction because at the end louie is framed in single shots but rick (because you’re right, “the gay comic” won’t fly) is still framed with nick and Hannibal, one of whom is basically an antagonist. / It is an intellectual peeing contest, but I wouldn’t say that there’s nothing at stake. It’s condescending to call it rescue, but it’s a form of attention that (though as a pretentious pseudointellectual) I think is fair game. If you listened to the culture gabfest and thought it mastubatory, I would understand. Proving one knows about lacan AND dennis dugan is little different from waggling one’s cock against a ruler, but it’s also not hilarious. I only find it repulsive if it’s also wrong. As such I try to make my defenses of bay sincere and not a hobby (at least comedic one-upmanship is fun for everyone).
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mike_opal
Actually, yes, I do see it as a trial now because they’re asking him to *account* for himself and his (heterogeneous) subculture, like something hinges on his answers. Unpleasant as it is, I’m usually on the other side of things like this, so I’m not sensitive to aggressive, combative curiosity. It’s easy to deny somebody’s emotions if one thinks that the other is ideologically misguided, which is what makes debates like this a fucking shitshow. I hate-watched the entire savage/brown dinner table debate and was blown away by the sloppiness of brown’s rhetoric, and when he’s frothing at the lips (which you can see in a close-up, it’s creepy) it’s so easy for me to say I don’t care about him, and in my worst moments I really think I don’t have to.
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sunheadbowed
I'd love to fiddle with Harry Partch! That sounds great about the performance. Harry Partch must always be given his due. I have no recollection of the name "Orko", strangely, but I certainly remember him. Wasn't he pals with He-Man and Battlecat? I'm sure he was a good guy. I -think- my avatar art is by a woman; and also I think it's someone contemporary. It could be something obscure/not famous, though, which means we're likely never to find out who it's by! Shame, since it's such a great image.
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mike_opal
(BAD BRAINS YES) To some degree I just don’t want to admit to having sincerely liked bay’s movies once, and while I make this argument for his stuff, I still don’t watch them. I don’t mind critiques of “low” art because it seems like an unnecessary distinction, because bad art is low and good art is high, and that’s fine to me, but sometimes the unassailability of bergman is less fun to talk about than a wacky midsummer release, about which interesting things can be said. It’s another spectrum of analysis, I guess (or another spectrum of pretension, like using meticulously deployed vulgarities in one’s thesis), so long as it isn’t “Look how bad this movie is. It’s sooooo bad,” which doesn’t interest me and is why I’ll probably never watch the room. I was referring to godard’s weekend, but haigh’s is also really good and beautifully deeply felt. I do try to be rigorously sincere, and it's a wonderful thing to be full and genuine, but a world without irony frightens me a bit.
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mike_opal
And scenes that deal with race/sex/gender in terms of otherness (I think that’s what grad papers call it these days), as in, confronting the idea of otherness, are crazy tightropes of dodging the observer effect, and often sympathy isn’t enough to dodge othering further. I didn’t read the scene as a trial or attack (except by nick di paolo, much as he might try to couch his disdain.) To some degree, I agree with the straight guys that this is just information. It gets icky when they hound their friend about it, rather than just read Advocate or whatever. Like it’s a spectacle or some totally unique fetish. I like the use of a historical argument because it points to a decision that no one new is going to be won over to the cause of lgbt rights by pathos, and so one just has to decide on the logical appeal. It’s kind of a sad comment on heterosexual culture, really.
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mike_opal
By using a dubious etymology to make the argument that Louie should think about the word he’s using, the comic shoots himself in the foot because his analysis of the word is as historically misguidedly as louie’s. So it makes me think about how much the history of a word can rattle around inside of current usage of it, e.g. how much does it matter if the word faggot derives from a medieval torture if it still makes gay people feel like shit, and should louie stop using it because it may reference historical cruelty, or because it causes current pain, and to what degree are these wrapped up in each other, as in, if that wasn’t the etymology, wouldn’t it still be not the sort of word you want in a-level rotation? But scenes like this tend to interest me more cinematically and less by what is talked about.
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sunheadbowed
Harry Partch is GOD !! What is the name of that strange asshole from He-Man who is in your avatar? I remember him from the days before I was a sexual being.
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two19train
from here: http://drawnassociation.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/SnowflakesWilsonBentley.jpg
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FredBanana
haha, i was wondering if anyone would ever notice that bit of complete bullshit I put in Vivien Richman's bio. She is not Jonathon Richman's mother, but it makes me laugh to think there might be people out there who think she is. Regardless she's p cool and I added you just for listening to her
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mike_opal
I don’t think malick is intellectually bankrupt, and I give him props for inventing an almost sui generis style. BUT guuuuuuuh the narration. It’s like he just sets up a mic next to a crazy-stoned philosophy/religious studies major. The thin red line blew my mind when I was twelve, but tree of life dragged in the second hour, and why put sean penn in a movie? Also, I’m liking late-career brad pitt a whole bunch. Holy shit was he great in TOL and inglorious basterds. DAVID GORDON GREEN WE LOVE YOU COME BACK. if you pretend that bay’s action scenes are a lost brakhage, they can be quite enjoyable in a totally peculiar way. His scenes are nuts and work like no other movie. One must abandon all intentionalism, but there are pleasures to be had in how little bay cares for anything except color. Obviously, armond white is a troll and a tool, but his comparison of godard’s and bay’s cinematic anarchy made sense to me. Godard is just way better at it.
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mike_opal
(I love that bit with his daughter. Those girls are my fave characters) The episode ends with them playing guitar and petting/passing the duckling around, so your vision of the scene is not so far off. But if a gun is ever pointed at me, I try to take a Keatony fall, because that’s all I’ve got. Yeah, I mean, I’m really burned out on irony like that, I would rather have the syrup. Or better yet, the community/parks & rec/louie (because I think the end of duckling is played straight because ck is serious, because if he was playing to our ironic distaste for humane endings, I would feel cheated, somehow) tactic of using cynicism/irony to help the syrup go down, which makes the sweetness feel earned.
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mike_opal
I think that his bit about “the n-word” as in the actual phrase “the n-word” is really funny and interesting and true, but though I used to find that whole beginning of Chewed Up with the discussion of faggot/cunt/etc. funny, now I just think it’s dangerously unenlightened. The poker game with the etymology of faggot is great because the etymology the comic gives is dubious, and less because it makes a completely new point about the word “faggot” in modern usage. It’s a great scene, and magnanimous about both language and comedy, but not mind-blowingly perceptive. I think he’s careful and sensitive enough that his usage isn’t offensive, but I don’t think he’s right in justifying them for normal conversation. They’re good jokes, but I don’t laugh at them anymore. But country drive is a fantastic episode, through and through.
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