Blue Lines Revisited

Aug
21st

Thu

Build-A-Bear Factory

“If there is one point on which history repeats itself, it is this: that at certain fixed intervals the Russian Empire feels a need of expansion; that that neccessity is usually gratified at the expense of the Turk; that the other Powers, or some of them, take alarm, and attempt measures for curtailing the operation, with much the same result that the process of pruning produces on a healthy young tree.”

- Lord Rosebery, quoted in Robert Harvey’s The War Of Wars, which I am reading. It is a huge battlebuster volume of military hist. about the Napoleonic wars. So far it is conforming precisely to my stereotype of military history, viz. you can feel the writer’s horrible discomfort when forced to talk about politics or society and his sweet sweet relief when the proper business of BATTLES gets underway.

Aug
20th

Wed

Criticism Spat

Blog post detailing a recent comics blogosphere spat about the role of critics (the links within give you the background) - what amazes me in this, and it’s probably arising because the comics and particularly the webcomics world is a pretty small one, is the notion - held by this Kurtz guy and his allies, apparently - that the critic is somehow addressing the creator or trying to get the creator to change their work.

Speaking as an occasional critic this seems to me entirely wrong-headed: I am in general absolutely mortified by the idea of the artist reading my review of their record (or whatever), and would hugely prefer it if they didn’t. Criticism, from my perspective, is simply me talking about something I’ve experienced in the hope it’ll provide an angle or spark a conversation among other people who have an interest in it. The artist doesn’t come into it: they’ve left the building, their role in the whole process is over. I review things in good faith, so I make the assumption that they’ve released this thing into the world in a condition they’re happy with - that’s all I expect of them.

Aug
12th

Tue

i was so all over this microstar shizz back in the day.

pgwp:

maura:

and yes my first online alias was in honor of a smashing pumpkins b-side. i was 18 when i picked it, so cut me some slack.1

(the first online alias I ever came up with—also when I was about 18, in 1994 or 95—was “feesh”. I was into a hardcore/metal-ish band called Craw and they had a song called “The Feesh Crick Kid”.)

My first online alias - also c.95, maybe later? - was “Tawky Tawny”, after a talking tiger who is a pal of Captain Marvel. I had been posting happily on USENET under my name but decided to get an alias because, well, just because: I dropped it after about a month.

Moore’s scripting, for example, seemed wildly sophisticated compared to the house-style comics of the ’90s with which I could then compare it, but comes across shopworn, even hokey to me now. All those panel transitions where what someone is saying in one place is placed in a dramatically/ironically appropriate caption box over something unrelated yet thematically linked in some other place! There’s one groanworthy bit in the Owlcave where Nite Owl says something about a reflection while we’re shown his reflection, and I liked the failed sex scene juxtaposed against the commentary for Ozymandias’s gymnastics routine better when it was Phil Rizzuto doing play-by-play for Meat Loaf in “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.

—

Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat

Sean T. Collins revisits Watchmen. (via perpetua)

Weirdly I was just discussing this very thing (Moore’s scene transitions) with Alan, Mark S. etc on email. It’s a quirk that’s all over his earlier work and Watchmen has it in overdrive - like Sean says, it all seemed incredibly impressive at the time and has aged less well than other elements of the comic.

Aug
4th

Mon

An exercise.

maura:

Please reblog with the reasons why you would, in your recreational-music-appreciation-moments, decide to listen to Grizzly Bear and/or Fleet Foxes and not other bands. This is a serious question.

Look, I have a beard, OK? It is my beard. It took time to grow. It connects me to nature, because nature is full of similarly HAIRY THINGS. If I want to listen to music made BY bearded men FOR bearded men then that is MY RIGHT.

(I have never heard any Grizzly Bear. I hope they make gay muscle-disco versions of Band songs.)

I am happy to admit having MILKED THE POPTIMISM CASH COW until its UDDERS SQUEAKED IN AUTOTUNED PAIN.

—

Blue Lines Revisited

Yo, Tom, obviously I wasn’t saying anything as (obviously) idiotic as that! I wasn’t even suggesting anything conscious. And I definitely wasn’t saying that everybody who writes about “American Idol” does so in order to make money, or even makes money at all. What I was saying: If you write for a publication that makes money from advertising revenue, your employer makes more money if more people click on what you’ve written. More people will click on what you’ve written if you’re writing about something that’s already popular (e.g., “American Idol” and not the Tough Alliance). So overall, it’s in the short-term financial interests of professional music journalism to cover stuff that’s already popular rather than highlight deserving unknowns. There isn’t necessarily a value judgment attached to this (though personally I’m more interested in hearing what a critic would like even if it weren’t popular than whatever Rupert Murdoch happens to have successfully spent millions marketing), but it’s a reality. I mean, even I don’t want to read a Stars Like Fleas review.

(via offnotesnotes)

I know! I thought your point was very good. I think for reviews especially the interweb-era balance has shifted from “is this worth hearing” to “let me read [x]’s take on this”, where there’s an implicit assumption that you already pretty much know what [x]’s take will be and are waiting to agree or disagree or nick the snarkiest lines. I find it darkly amusing, reading (for instance) P4K response on somewhere like Metacritic, that the tone isn’t so much one of fans getting angry at the zine for dismissing something they love, more of annoyance at the wilful perversity they detect in giving an ‘unpredictable’ or off-kilter score.

(mind you, that is Metacritic’s “thing”)

Jul
28th

Mon

22. Daddy where do hits come from?

The Top 10 Things I’ve Written On My Website (in terms of hits received since 2006 when we switched to wordpress)

1. Why We Hate Indie Kids (51,000 views) - this was co-written w/Maura long long ago and is, though mostly not untrue, horrendously out of date. As approx. 250 commenters have let us know.

2. Every Word Is True (18,700 views) - essay on various versions of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”, has respectable google trade despite not pimping soundfiles.

3. Why We Hate Emo Kids (Apparently) (17,500 views) - shameless follow-up to #1, attempting to find a smidgen of sociological meaning in the frothings of the random comments massive.

4. The Ninth FT Pop Music Focus Group (17,300) - the last one of these we did ‘properly’ - mostly googlers looking for Busted or Ultrabeat.

5. Porn Porn Yes Porn I Said Porn (13,600) - the point of this throwaway article neatly proven.

6. King Of The Boots (13,000) - seminal (it’s linked on Wikipedia and all) article on bootlegs, or mash-ups as we’re supposed to call them now.

7. Peter Sarstedt - “Where Do You Go To My Lovely” (11,500) - the most viewed, by some long way, of my Popular blog pieces, the average views for which is now around 2000 I think, which I’m pretty pleased with even if they are mostly googlers. I gave Peter S a low mark, and many commenters take issue with it.

8. Download This! 2002 (10,400) - there are no actual downloads, to the undoubted annoyance of most visitors. List of my favourite 100 tracks of 2002, the high watermark of my “poptimism” I guess.

9. A Million Hearts (8,600) - my sentimental favourite FT essay so I’m glad people go look at it.

10. Carter USM Reconsidered (8,400) - I am now a little ashamed of the mealy-mouthed tone of this and feel I should have come out more firmly in favour of Jim Bob and Fruitbat.

AS ANYONE who’s read my voluminous writings on “American Idol” knows, I’m happy the tide has turned toward poptimism. Not only does it widen the field for us music-obsessed chin-scratchers, it has allowed for important new discussions about race, class and gender, those old staple subjects of music writing.

—

Pop music critics embrace the mainstream - Los Angeles Times - calendarlive.com

As anyone who knows anyone who has blogged about “American Idol” knows, you get more clicks blogging about “American Idol” than blogging about Steinski, Harvey Milk, or Fleet Foxes. So it’s not as if the turning tide toward “poptimism” among critics who want to be paid for our work is entirely un-self-interested.

Try finding a piece on poptimism that acknowledges this simple commercial fact.

(via offnotesnotes)

I am happy to admit having MILKED THE POPTIMISM CASH COW until its UDDERS SQUEAKED IN AUTOTUNED PAIN.

Reading Powers’ piece was a little bit unnerving because it seemed to assume the existence of rock criticism as a community and as a thing which can spark wide conversations and debates, as opposed to small conversational islets among groups of mostly-like-minded friends, strung at ever-increasing distance across a howling entropic void. In one or two of those islets, people are still making a tiny bit of money.

Jul
27th

Sun

20. Girl Talk

I think the reason I find GT’s stuff so enjoyable (after avoiding it for AGES AND AGES cos I assumed I wouldn’t) is nostalgia not for the hits he’s playing (I play all that stuff all the time anyway) but for its unification, the idea that there’s one single pop culture that all relates to itself. (Specifically - and this is mostly a technical thing I’m guessing, cos it’s so easy to find hip-hop a capellas - his thing seems to be reintroducing the rest of pop and rock to hip-hop).

All the negative stuff people say about this hyperspeed mash-up stuff is true too - low attention span, atrophied context, self-indulgent ipod addict shuffle generation blah blah blah. Yes it’s decadent, it’s also the only record this year I’ve found myself putting on and listening to the whole way through.

Jul
16th

Wed

19. Believing Simon

from an Poptimists comment thread, to use later.

“Cowell’s created a gameworld in which coarse melisma is at least a bronze-standard, but it maps onto the actual popworld only very imperfectly, which is great for me as a listener (since I don’t like Cowellism enough to want it more than a minor flavour note). But it is really annoying* when critics buy Cowell’s line that this is good pop (only inverting the ‘good’) and assume that Idol/X-Factor winners can act as shorthand for “commercial pop music” and can-carriers for its ills.”