I haven't blogged for about a week, but today I saw something in the Guardian.co.uk online news section for Australia where I was forced to comment via my corner of the web.
First some context, the Australia section of The Guardian's online newspaper site was recently opened up to provide more credible journalism than the mainstream news sources Australia has which have gone to the dogs, but articles like this just fill me with dread as to the accuracy of the picture this well meaning newspaper section is painting about my country.
Some of the commentary is dead on, a lot of racism and sexism is still around, the Aborigines are treated even worse, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. At least it seems that way. To say Australians don't like change is somewhat misleading. They don't like bad change, is a more apt description of what we like or don't like about this country. Change is slow down here, but it's happening more rapidly than most people who don't have the internet probably realise. We live in an age where the average twenty something in Australia knows more about the internet than the government figures supposedly meant to represent them and govern how everything is to be run.
This is notable in that a recent case where customs confiscated manga that a local Australian collector imported ended with the customs agency forced to return the manga/smut/erotica/art (which warms my heart, don't get me wrong, I relish every second of embarrassment the moral guardians in this country have dished out to them) to the person who ordered this stuff online. Oh, we have culture, we might have to import it sometimes but it's there.
We also have a culture, a time honoured tradition, of bringing embarrassment to politicians and moral guardians who question our way of life, for good or ill. Sure, we get situations where hate speech is played on the radio, but we also get situations where the attempts for a national internet filter were so poorly put together by overly nanny state-ish OFLC and telecommunications boards that it was defeated with much applause from the nerds of this country, whose tireless efforts to keep the Prime Minister's mitts out of our personal lives is in need of some kind of medal, considering how many flame wars our local internet has had to go through to remain uncensored like a lot of our movies and video games have been in the past fifty years.
Because of the incompetent attempts to nanny state the people too young to care about what the old stick in the muds of censorship have to say about us, and too old to be bothered fighting these annoyances directly rather than just ordering things online from overseas when nobody's looking, that right there is the Australian character, writ large.
We do have a culture, it's not built in stone or cement as much as it's built upon years of fighting in silence until now against irrelevant cultural dinosaurs that need to go extinct. There are people who are changing things in this country, they're just not as loud as the rugby and soccer fans drunk on Victoria Bitter about it.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Men, Feminism and Boneheading
Recent internet drama has come to light, and once again we come across the problem of men "mansplaining" and women not being listened to, possibly because the men who think they don't have a solution to these problems don't generally throw their hat into the ring with these discussions like idiots such as the "Amazing Atheist" seem to. People who genuinely believe they have no real solution to problems, no matter what their gender, race or creed is, tend to shut up because they don't think they can offer anything to a heated situation that adds real value.
Mansplaining is an odd word, it condemns men rightfully for trying to justify their privilege, yet it is such a prohibitive word that shuts down any, even legitimate solutions to problems men might offer. I propose a new word replace mansplaining, or rather, an old one that has stood the test of time against generations of foolhardy men and women sticking their nose into a complicated situation they have no idea how to solve.
Enter boneheading. Now, I'm assuming not a lot of you have seen a Jean Claude Van Damme movie, but for those who have, from Bloodsport, Cyborg, Knock Off, even Universal Soldier: The Return, there's usually this annoying, poorly thought out and badly written female love interest that gets shoehorned into the plot because either the studio or the screenwriter believed they needed this element in an otherwise serviceable action movie featuring partial martial arts choreography. The female love interest keeps doubting the Jean Claude Van Damme-played protagonist, and adds nothing to the story apart from this emotional brick wall that gets in the way. It's neither a method of writing a good action movie, nor is it a particularly flattering portrayal of women in life or death situations.
And I believe that men can bonehead just as badly as these Jean Claude Van Damme action movie love interests tend to do. Donnie from The Big Lebowski comes to mind in more well meaning cases, described as "like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie" with no understanding of the crisis at hand. Donnie here represents a more naive, well meaning boneheading situation, he's not written hatefully like the Jean Claude Van Damme action movie love interests are, but he certainly is annoying to the other two main male protagonists of the plot. There's no malice there, but there's a sense that he doesn't quite understand why his two friends are stressed out over the matter of a rug.
More negative examples of male boneheading in cinema come from the duology masterwork that is both Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. These movies are an interesting case because not only is the protagonist a woman who is constantly hassled by the boneheading, and the sheer not knowing of the old white men whom her background comes from, who dismiss the worth of the street dancers and the urban positive expression they bring to the black community in their artform not tied to the white establishment of Broadway and studio dancing. But in her own boneheading, she doesn't quite understand why Shabadoo is very hesitant to even bother trying out for a white dance competition when he is quite happy expressing himself on the streets where black males like himself are granted some level of dignity and respect. These two movies are very good at both dance sequences and introducing young students of sociology to how subculture and race intermingle, and also issues of belonging in ethnically diverse communities and culture clash with more ethnically white establishments like Broadway which is mainstream, along with other parts of the entertainment industry.
I'm telling the world, right now, that we need to move beyond mansplaining, for boneheading is a condition of ignorance that knows no gender, race or creed, and that everybody on Earth for just a moment can look like a damn fool when they walk into a heated discussion not knowing what they're talking about.
Mansplaining is an odd word, it condemns men rightfully for trying to justify their privilege, yet it is such a prohibitive word that shuts down any, even legitimate solutions to problems men might offer. I propose a new word replace mansplaining, or rather, an old one that has stood the test of time against generations of foolhardy men and women sticking their nose into a complicated situation they have no idea how to solve.
Enter boneheading. Now, I'm assuming not a lot of you have seen a Jean Claude Van Damme movie, but for those who have, from Bloodsport, Cyborg, Knock Off, even Universal Soldier: The Return, there's usually this annoying, poorly thought out and badly written female love interest that gets shoehorned into the plot because either the studio or the screenwriter believed they needed this element in an otherwise serviceable action movie featuring partial martial arts choreography. The female love interest keeps doubting the Jean Claude Van Damme-played protagonist, and adds nothing to the story apart from this emotional brick wall that gets in the way. It's neither a method of writing a good action movie, nor is it a particularly flattering portrayal of women in life or death situations.
And I believe that men can bonehead just as badly as these Jean Claude Van Damme action movie love interests tend to do. Donnie from The Big Lebowski comes to mind in more well meaning cases, described as "like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie" with no understanding of the crisis at hand. Donnie here represents a more naive, well meaning boneheading situation, he's not written hatefully like the Jean Claude Van Damme action movie love interests are, but he certainly is annoying to the other two main male protagonists of the plot. There's no malice there, but there's a sense that he doesn't quite understand why his two friends are stressed out over the matter of a rug.
More negative examples of male boneheading in cinema come from the duology masterwork that is both Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. These movies are an interesting case because not only is the protagonist a woman who is constantly hassled by the boneheading, and the sheer not knowing of the old white men whom her background comes from, who dismiss the worth of the street dancers and the urban positive expression they bring to the black community in their artform not tied to the white establishment of Broadway and studio dancing. But in her own boneheading, she doesn't quite understand why Shabadoo is very hesitant to even bother trying out for a white dance competition when he is quite happy expressing himself on the streets where black males like himself are granted some level of dignity and respect. These two movies are very good at both dance sequences and introducing young students of sociology to how subculture and race intermingle, and also issues of belonging in ethnically diverse communities and culture clash with more ethnically white establishments like Broadway which is mainstream, along with other parts of the entertainment industry.
I'm telling the world, right now, that we need to move beyond mansplaining, for boneheading is a condition of ignorance that knows no gender, race or creed, and that everybody on Earth for just a moment can look like a damn fool when they walk into a heated discussion not knowing what they're talking about.
Friday, February 22, 2013
Pulling a Dr Dre in the arts
EDIT: Was originally posted on Tumblr here, reproduced here by the author himself. I can't do anything about the white background text paste, sorry.
What could I mean by this outrageous, truly truly outrageous statement? I’m talking about certain features of the arts using a legendary rapper’s tendency to be a perfectionist and not release any albums he feels are phoned in. Dr Dre has released two classic albums, The Chronic and 2001, which are regarded as classics of his genre of music. He’s also released other albums which are obscure (perhaps for a reason) and is threatening to release another album called Detox though these days he seems content marketing his Beats headphones.
Dr Dre’s oeuvre isn’t for everyone, his gin and Hennessy laced rhymes aren’t loved by the Mos Def or De La Soul crowd but since Dr Dre’s quality over quantity approach to his creative work was the most apt comparison I could come up with - without tarnishing the good name of a Harper Lee or JD Salinger style career, he’s the face I’m putting onto this problem.
Dr Dre’s “release two great albums then fade into the background to sell expensive headphones” strategy is a notable one since it’s one better than the “one hit wonder” category. He’s known for two respected albums instead of hundreds of bad mixtapes like Lil B for example. Because he only puts out what he believes to be not phoning it in, he can focus on quality production of music.
I’m terrified, as many writers are, that I have this trilogy of books that contains my best ideas I’ll ever have, and nothing I’ll write will ever be as great as these three novels again. Difference is, like Dr Dre I have at least one good idea left in me, rather than having only one story to tell.
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and not much else, but she’s a genius. Bram Stoker wrote a lot of things, yet he’s only remembered as The Dracula Guy. Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick and other things but that white whale’s hard to ignore. My point is, even if you do come up with great works of art beyond what you’re famous for, if you quit while you’re ahead it might be a better idea than you think.
Besides, if you’re a writer with only two great novel ideas, short stories and non-fiction of a comedic bent always sells well. Oscar Wilde wrote one novel, he mostly wrote plays, but The Picture Of Dorian Gray is some damn good laurels to rest on for a part time novelist.
I’m not quite sure what to do once I write my best ideas. Maybe write for Cracked.
We Want Some Too, Counter Culture and Modern Bohemia
I like reading a lot of books on my Kindle, I take it everywhere I go if I can because you just never know if you're gonna need to read something while stuck on the train or a bus. And I read some pretty interesting stuff if I don't say so myself. One of these books was We Want Some Too by Hal Niedzviecki. It was written in the early 2000s, but it was pre-viral internet, there was not nearly as big a self publishing, indie DIY presence through the internet that there is now. No social media either. Also MTV was still relevant at the time of writing.
But to discount the message this book has because of how it's aged is to ignore certain basic truths about the nature of media, and "lifestyle culture" as the book puts it. Lifestyle culture as defined by this book is essentially the mutation of the real lives of young people yearning to be part of something bigger than themselves, to contribute to the culture, to be like the people on TV. Consumerism and a desire to buy into celebrity and mass culture was there even pre-internet, but I think that the ways mass culture works now has been so splintered by the internet that any attempt to heal the wounds of the mutilated mass culture, and young people now are far apart from each other in the different groups of what people are fans of. There's fandoms now, not subcultures, that people belong to.
There's Homestuck fans, The Most Popular Girls In School fans, Disney fans, Sherlock fans, Girls fans, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com fans, Webcomic and Webseries fans, there's now a mixture of both corporate and web based counter cultural fandoms that meld together on Tumblr, posting GIF images featuring their favourite quotes from TV shows and movies they love, and share with others who also love these media bites of a larger whole. On Tumblr you can often find yourself alone if you're not part of the same fandoms that the cool kids are part of, which is not unlike the tale of the Tarzan obsessive collector from We Want Some Too who is isolated by his distinct fandom because so few others share that fandom because other fandoms are more popular.
This book was written at a time where young people's popular culture barely made reference to the internet, whereas now you can't escape it, the very people this book is telling who yearned for a way to get their voice out there, and possibly become viral, got what they wanted, at least I think so. Maybe not. I certainly don't know what it takes for something to become a viral hit, and most of the stuff that does become viral doesn't appeal to me all that much. Psy's Gangnam Style is a notable exception because the success of that song awakened the awesome market forces of the K-Pop industry, with this breakout hit that struck a chord with people around the world without anybody even understanding the lyrics, it was the shock of the new, the sound of now, Asia seems to be having a renaissance of cultural content breaking out in the West even as Japan's output like anime is sagging in popularity due to a tendency for the animation industry there to pander to local otaku instead of casual and foreign fans who might find the cultural tendencies towards otaku fetishism of little girls to be uncomfortable and not what they're looking for in their entertainment. Rather than one Asian country dominating the visual and musical culture of the now, the stranglehold Japan had in the minds of the young seems to be fading and spreading out to the rest of Asia where their own voices, once feared to be trampled by monolithic Japanese culture elements, may get a chance to be heard once again.
Meanwhile in the West, long after this book was published, I heard on Twitter a little drabble where a notable webcomic artist was saying that the electric guitar is an extinct instrument, and heavy metal is the only genre of music where the instrument is still relevant. It's not an instrument of the young, whose music is now made by DJs and computers. Occasionally you get a middle class white college educated band whining about how their city needs a guitar based band to represent them, but the ship has sailed, the damage is done. Clinging to the guitar as a cultural mode of expression is about as useful to stemming the tide of new culture as only watching MTV Classic, which in Australia where I live is a channel that's still around and plays old music videos aiming for the nostalgia and hipster markets I imagine. The overwhelming whiteness of guitar based music in both indie pop and rock, rock and roll and heavy metal has been struggling under the burden of rap and hip hop, as well as K-Pop recently becoming far more relevant to young people raised in a much more ethnically and culturally diverse world. White people are in no danger of going away, that's just stupid, only the most hardened of Stormfront members would be bold enough to suggest that white people are going extinct.
What I'm saying is that European influences, such as France, Norway, Sweden, Britain, Ireland, Scotland, to a lesser extent Australia, are fading into the background for a while because right now is the time when hip hop, rap, R&B and electronic music have gained legitimacy, they've got cultural capital that's long overdue, and the idea of what counts as legitimate music is changing. The Grammy Awards have always had a hard snub of rap as a genre, but the people, white, black or anyone else have been exposed to it long enough that it's part of life, it's just there and to ignore it would be as foolhardy as ignoring the reality that a lot of people of multiple races play video games, or that Hollywood cinema isn't speaking to the common people due to a combination of remaking classic films rather than funding new, more racially diverse content as well as more roles for women in mainstream Hollywood pictures.
Which brings me to Lena Dunham's project with HBO, Girls, a show that I can't agree with on an ideological level, I used to have my problems with Brian Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim and the movie adapted from it due to a number of reasons including that I couldn't relate to characters who so easily throw away romantic relationships where I've struggled all my life to begin my first romance that wasn't one sided, but Girls makes Scott Pilgrim look like Menace II Society. None of the houses depicted in Girls look remotely like homes that regular blokes like me or regular women I know could afford, nor do they look particularly lived in, they look like aspirational show homes rather than abodes that people live, work, play and sweat in every day of their lives. For a supposedly Bohemian show, it's very slick, polished and manufactured to appeal to the fantasy of what its fanbase wants to live as their lives rather than what I could on any level deem reality. Lena Dunham clearly wants to be the voice of a generation but when she spends a lot of episodes as do other characters romancing wealthy and culturally powerful older men with much more clout and influence than they do, I'm forced to wonder whether Dunham is being honest that she's portraying the reality of what twenty something women are these days versus what they wish they could be. Say what you will about Twilight, it's garbage, but it's very honest in what it's trying to achieve.
Mass culture, although splintered, is still around, and the internet has not completely replaced it. It does however, provide some form of escape from what society showers with mainstream and financial success, for sometimes it is undeserving.
But to discount the message this book has because of how it's aged is to ignore certain basic truths about the nature of media, and "lifestyle culture" as the book puts it. Lifestyle culture as defined by this book is essentially the mutation of the real lives of young people yearning to be part of something bigger than themselves, to contribute to the culture, to be like the people on TV. Consumerism and a desire to buy into celebrity and mass culture was there even pre-internet, but I think that the ways mass culture works now has been so splintered by the internet that any attempt to heal the wounds of the mutilated mass culture, and young people now are far apart from each other in the different groups of what people are fans of. There's fandoms now, not subcultures, that people belong to.
There's Homestuck fans, The Most Popular Girls In School fans, Disney fans, Sherlock fans, Girls fans, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com fans, Webcomic and Webseries fans, there's now a mixture of both corporate and web based counter cultural fandoms that meld together on Tumblr, posting GIF images featuring their favourite quotes from TV shows and movies they love, and share with others who also love these media bites of a larger whole. On Tumblr you can often find yourself alone if you're not part of the same fandoms that the cool kids are part of, which is not unlike the tale of the Tarzan obsessive collector from We Want Some Too who is isolated by his distinct fandom because so few others share that fandom because other fandoms are more popular.
This book was written at a time where young people's popular culture barely made reference to the internet, whereas now you can't escape it, the very people this book is telling who yearned for a way to get their voice out there, and possibly become viral, got what they wanted, at least I think so. Maybe not. I certainly don't know what it takes for something to become a viral hit, and most of the stuff that does become viral doesn't appeal to me all that much. Psy's Gangnam Style is a notable exception because the success of that song awakened the awesome market forces of the K-Pop industry, with this breakout hit that struck a chord with people around the world without anybody even understanding the lyrics, it was the shock of the new, the sound of now, Asia seems to be having a renaissance of cultural content breaking out in the West even as Japan's output like anime is sagging in popularity due to a tendency for the animation industry there to pander to local otaku instead of casual and foreign fans who might find the cultural tendencies towards otaku fetishism of little girls to be uncomfortable and not what they're looking for in their entertainment. Rather than one Asian country dominating the visual and musical culture of the now, the stranglehold Japan had in the minds of the young seems to be fading and spreading out to the rest of Asia where their own voices, once feared to be trampled by monolithic Japanese culture elements, may get a chance to be heard once again.
Meanwhile in the West, long after this book was published, I heard on Twitter a little drabble where a notable webcomic artist was saying that the electric guitar is an extinct instrument, and heavy metal is the only genre of music where the instrument is still relevant. It's not an instrument of the young, whose music is now made by DJs and computers. Occasionally you get a middle class white college educated band whining about how their city needs a guitar based band to represent them, but the ship has sailed, the damage is done. Clinging to the guitar as a cultural mode of expression is about as useful to stemming the tide of new culture as only watching MTV Classic, which in Australia where I live is a channel that's still around and plays old music videos aiming for the nostalgia and hipster markets I imagine. The overwhelming whiteness of guitar based music in both indie pop and rock, rock and roll and heavy metal has been struggling under the burden of rap and hip hop, as well as K-Pop recently becoming far more relevant to young people raised in a much more ethnically and culturally diverse world. White people are in no danger of going away, that's just stupid, only the most hardened of Stormfront members would be bold enough to suggest that white people are going extinct.
What I'm saying is that European influences, such as France, Norway, Sweden, Britain, Ireland, Scotland, to a lesser extent Australia, are fading into the background for a while because right now is the time when hip hop, rap, R&B and electronic music have gained legitimacy, they've got cultural capital that's long overdue, and the idea of what counts as legitimate music is changing. The Grammy Awards have always had a hard snub of rap as a genre, but the people, white, black or anyone else have been exposed to it long enough that it's part of life, it's just there and to ignore it would be as foolhardy as ignoring the reality that a lot of people of multiple races play video games, or that Hollywood cinema isn't speaking to the common people due to a combination of remaking classic films rather than funding new, more racially diverse content as well as more roles for women in mainstream Hollywood pictures.
Which brings me to Lena Dunham's project with HBO, Girls, a show that I can't agree with on an ideological level, I used to have my problems with Brian Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim and the movie adapted from it due to a number of reasons including that I couldn't relate to characters who so easily throw away romantic relationships where I've struggled all my life to begin my first romance that wasn't one sided, but Girls makes Scott Pilgrim look like Menace II Society. None of the houses depicted in Girls look remotely like homes that regular blokes like me or regular women I know could afford, nor do they look particularly lived in, they look like aspirational show homes rather than abodes that people live, work, play and sweat in every day of their lives. For a supposedly Bohemian show, it's very slick, polished and manufactured to appeal to the fantasy of what its fanbase wants to live as their lives rather than what I could on any level deem reality. Lena Dunham clearly wants to be the voice of a generation but when she spends a lot of episodes as do other characters romancing wealthy and culturally powerful older men with much more clout and influence than they do, I'm forced to wonder whether Dunham is being honest that she's portraying the reality of what twenty something women are these days versus what they wish they could be. Say what you will about Twilight, it's garbage, but it's very honest in what it's trying to achieve.
Mass culture, although splintered, is still around, and the internet has not completely replaced it. It does however, provide some form of escape from what society showers with mainstream and financial success, for sometimes it is undeserving.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Back to my roots
A long time ago, I created an anime blog in my teens where I gained a taste for the glory of Internet based opinion slinging for the first time. I had my first baptism of fire in the flame wars that came and went, I prevented a suicide from across an ocean using only my keyboard and my Internet connection, I went through a turbulent period where I got out of the anime blogger game in an attempt to become the proverbial Beastie Boys of the Japanese Superflat art movement and light novel craze respectively. My future looked bright in my tireless efforts to bring avant garde Superflat literature to the masses and I'm still trying to get published.
To celebrate my end to the long wandering through the desert that was the past five years of my life, I resolved to begin a serious, regular blog that would turn up in Google searches far easier than my Tumblr mutterings did. Don't get me wrong, Tumblr's great, but the kind of ideas and concepts I work with just aren't gonna appeal to the same demographic as Homestuck's fanbase and The Most Popular Girls In School.
Anyway, I'm back and I'll post something up here real soon.
To celebrate my end to the long wandering through the desert that was the past five years of my life, I resolved to begin a serious, regular blog that would turn up in Google searches far easier than my Tumblr mutterings did. Don't get me wrong, Tumblr's great, but the kind of ideas and concepts I work with just aren't gonna appeal to the same demographic as Homestuck's fanbase and The Most Popular Girls In School.
Anyway, I'm back and I'll post something up here real soon.
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