Mangela Lansbury

By extension of your logic, we shouldn't be talking about anyone who's signed to a label. All labels have producers and PR people that work with their artists, so what's the point when their artistic output is tainted by third parties? I'm not going to come out and say that Britney Spears was anything more than a marketing masterpiece, but I think Taylor Swift is a fairly unique case. She works on a large enough scale that she has a lot of people helping her behind the scenes, but she also just produces good things because she's a talented individual. Something about the rejection of the idea that she has no input on what she creates is just... wrong. It's still a collaborative effort, of course. Taylor Swift probably doesn't know much about equalizing or producing electronic music, I'm sure. If you asked her to DJ, she'd probably fuck up the beat matching. That doesn't mean she doesn't come up with a lot of what goes into her songs or act authentically in interviews. Kant wrote about beauty, saying that a taste judgment should be made only under certain criteria -- something about being purposive without purpose (continental philosophy is full of dumb and impenetrable phrases), being necessary, a thing being pleasurable because it's beautiful and not the other way around, and some other things I can't remember. Adorno and Horkheimer drew on this critique of judgment (and a lot of other things) when they came up with their theory of the culture industry -- that there is a capitalist industry now that dictates what should be considered beautiful, and only acts made independent of that industry should actually be judged for their beauty. Judgment of that system is perfectly valid. Taylor Swift is a talented woman, but everything she makes is very strongly influenced by the thought, "How will this sell? How will this affect me as a brand/product?" She commodifies herself and her artistic output to an insane degree, which is a fair criticism when it's contextualized as being about Taylor Swift as a product of the industry that she works in, but it doesn't feel right when it's framed as being a criticism of Taylor Swift as an individual. Now that I type that out, it's super nitpicky and dumb, so nevermind.

Side note: The correct response to any criticism of Miley Cyrus is just to shrug and say, "Oh, she's just bein' Miley."

This is really gross and removes agency from a strong female pop star who, by everyone's account, very strongly controls her output and image. There are going to be producers and all that fine tuning it and doing the mixing and everything else that a piano and guitar based singer/songwriter just won't be able to do in pop music, but Taylor is very open about her songwriting process -- the copy of 1989 that I have has 3 tracks at the tail end that are exclusively about where 3 of the songs on the album started, and it's all just very obviously the same song without the polish. Taking that agency away from her -- along with trying to intellectualize what's essentially a statement of "I don't like this" by trying to interpret Kant by way of Adorno and Horkheimer -- just rubs me the wrong way. I mean, there's a valid statement to be made about culture industry and the way that it robs groups of agency by creating an environment that encourages them to produce art objects within a certain paradigm of what beauty is, but applying that same theory to an individual just doesn't feel right.

In a time where people earnestly worry about their personal brand and how they, as a person, appear as a branding effort, I think it's overly cynical to be completely unforgiving of someone for presenting a version of themselves to the public. It's not inauthentic if you're simplifying your self for consumption. It's just capitalism. Also, it's a question that is, at this moment, impossible to answer. Either you follow the narrative that Taylor Swift has had control over her image and song writing or you don't. It just happens that she's a more interesting figure if you assume she has agency, so why not let her have that?

I went to do Black Friday stuff a few years in a row with my dad. It's a terrible, harrowing experience and I don't recommend it. We stopped going because a lot of places have absurd limits in place ("Limit 5 per store" on a cheap TV and people start lining up at noon on Thanksgiving? Not wasting my time) and it got a little too violent. Not like punchy punchy grrrr fuck you violent, but like I will jab you with my elbows while I grab something because then I can get to the next thing faster and you won't be in my way violent. Important note: The last time I did the early stuff, stores didn't even open at midnight so it's been a while and maybe things have gotten worse/better. I'd say that you're better off just getting something online or during a normal sale, but I've never shopped for a TV so I wouldn't know! That's just my experience with Black Friday how it's gotten terrible ever since it became a thing.

Taylor obviously knows what the media is saying about her and maintains very strong authorship over her work, so there's something to either interpretation. I think there's a strong argument to be made that Shake It Off is her naming the stakes (or lack thereof) in her switch to pure pop, but much more than that would just be cynical, I think. Taylor is very conscious of the fact that a lot of her fans are tween and young teen girls and part of what she wants to do with her music is empower them to be themselves without alienating them, so she's just telling her story in a way that people from 12 on can relate to. So much of her interview message these days has been, "People are always going to find something terrible to say about you, so just be who you are and love yourself," that I have a hard time accepting cynical reads of this album since, well, I see that exact message repeated throughout the album. And as far as the madonna/whore thing goes, I do think there's a bit of that going on, but I think it's something that's done not for men but to make her music accessible. She's trying to speak honestly about her sexual experiences and anyone past a certain age will undoubtedly pull that out ("Cause you know I love the players and you love the game" is incredibly unambiguous, but before you reach a certain age it's just a bunch of words that you'll put your own meaning into because you don't have the requisite knowledge to contextualize what she's saying), but it's done subtly so that it doesn't distance the general "just do you and you'll be fine" message she's trying to convey to women of all ages. I don't know if that intentionality makes it functionally any different, but I think it's important that it's being done for female fans and not to attract men to the innocent girl who's totally dtf.

I wonder how that guy would react if someone told him that Irish wasn't considered white until pretty recently. TB or the one that I don't think I've ever heard of, either one would work. Just tell them that Irish or Italian weren't white designations until really recently, kind of like how Iranian Caucasians aren't considered white today. Would they stand by their positions?

I kickstarted City of Darkness Revisited a while back and got my copy of the book this weekend. I was flipping through it earlier in the week just looking at the photos, and they were just phenomenal snapshots of Kowloon Walled City, an architectural/sociological curiosity that's really captured my interest off and on for the last few years. It was just a few city blocks that grew together and became a self-contained society/slum, controlled by the Triads for part of its life. The book has some truly breathtaking photos in it, but tonight was the first chance I got to really dive into some of the writing. I only managed to read 2 of the essays, but they were surprisingly good for what you find in what I imagined to be a mostly design-driven book -- the kind of quality I only really expect out of a publisher like Phaidon. If you're interested in this kind of thing and can afford it, I highly recommend the book. From what I've seen so far, it's a really impressive accomplishment.

I think the podcast has done well so far. There are maybe a few things that are questionable (like giving some kind of identifying information for people who declined to consent to their identity being given on the show), but it's not like this is the Plume affair or anything. This kind of story is important to tell because of the good it can bring into the world, and while there are some gross things that have come out of the telling, that doesn't mean that this kind of story shouldn't be told. Also, things like 48 Hours exist and nobody goes hog wild with harassment because of them, what the fuck is wrong with you, internet

A piece on Anita Sarkeesian popped up on Berfrois today and I'm not sure how I feel about it. Its rhetoric gets dangerously close to the "she's not a REAL gamer!" stuff of gators (among other things), but I think there's something to a few of his points. It might be the first critique of Anita Sarkeesian that I walked away from thinking, "Hey, maybe that guy wasn't just a raving lunatic. There might actually be something to a few of the things he said." His problem seems to be more with gender analysis in general than with Anita herself, which is a bit problematic and a bit right, and it's easy to poke holes in a lot of his arguments (isn't the presumption that games are art objects present in examining them AS art objects? why consume feminist critique and then complain that the critique you just consumed was feminist? is selling out even a thing anymore?), but there's something more insidious/unsettling in it that I can't quite put my finger on. Still, it was weird to go to go to a place I go to read about books and art and shit and see Sarkeesian staring back at me.

My mind is trying to make this fit to Drunk in Love.

The deconstruction of the gamer identity shouldn't prevent people from identifying as a gamer. It's still the most useful word we have for saying "I am a person who cares a lot about video games," and I don't see another word coming around to occupy that space. It's a healthy thing to label yourself with and, while there is a vocal part of the gamer-identifying pulsation that is just a bile-spewing abyss where human decency goes to die, they aren't everyone who qualifies as "gamer" -- and that's kind of the point of the thing, and mostly what they feel so threatened by. To me, the idea of the death of the gamer is more about the stigma (perceived or real) attached to the mental image it calls forth and how that needs to go away because it's outdated than wholesale abolition of the use of the word. It means that people who spend their commutes playing mobile games should start identifying as a gamer more than it means that people should stop identifying as gamers.

If you want to see positive nerd portrayal, just find any piece of media featuring an Indian who isn't a doctor or a gas station clerk, or about half of the roles allotted to Asians. Maybe those aren't taken into account because they're just stereotypical portrayals of model minorities, but they're still there. Or just look at popular perceptions of the people who play certain roles (Marvel movies, Doctor Who, Star Trek/Wars) after they say in interviews how much they liked this nerdy thing growing up -- particularly how they either become more beloved or how the perception of them doesn't change at all.

When are we getting those 20 minutes on 1989, the best pop album of the year?

You should counterbalance the negative impact of the show with the positive impact of it. Just this weekend, Serial was a leaping point for a conversation about the American carceral state, and it's inspired one of my friends who's a public prosecutor to look into the feasibility of helping an innocence/freedom project. The bad side is really obvious, but the good that stories like this put into the world I'd subtler in nature. It's a thorny little quandary, though. I haven't worked out whether or not it's ethical to consume something like Serial and I doubt I ever will.

It's a generic name, but it serves the purpose of setting up an expansion of the jedi/force users for the start of this new trilogy. It's practical and uncreative, but it's a subtitle that does have some meaning in it. It's just framed in a really boring way.

I went to a boxing gym for the first time today! They were handing out flyers by where I'm temping to advertise that you could come in and get a personal training/show you how all this works session for free, so I went ahead and did it. It was so much fun and really exhilarating (and I felt super cool???) but I'm afraid I might not be able to move tomorrow. Running did not prepare my arms for this.

I loved the way that Dennou Coil blended the spiritual or paranormal with the digital, too. I haven't watched it since it aired, but I remember it setting up this mythos around weird shit going down that really deftly entangled the pasts of individuals and the histories of places, and drew both of those into this constant march of progress. I should watch it again, I was in a weird place last time I saw it so that might all just be bullshit.

I read Gabriel by Edward Hirsch tonight. It's a 100-ish page poem by a father who lost his son. It was phenomenal but utterly and completely soul crushing at times. It's easy to read as poems go since it's split into 3 line stanzas and has an easy to follow narrative so don't let the fact that it's a long poem turn you off if you're not the kind of person who's usually into poetry. I'm still digesting it so I don't have a whole lot to say yet, but I highly recommend it. Just don't try reading it while you're on lunch at work unless you really, really, really like embarrassing yourself by crying in front of people.

There's another sortapology in a comment on soundcloud that a friend of mine sent me Something about that "regardless of their credibility" at the end infuriates me in a way I'm too tired to articulate. It's just so condescending, like how I imagine a Victorian doctor would go about telling a woman she's hysterical. Also, I'm a little sensitive about cancer stuff after a recent loss, so I get that cancer jokes are just playing with rhetoric to point out how absurd his statement was, but maybe that's a bridge too far y'all.

The text of the stories was fairly immaterial in the case, as I understand it. The estate was mostly arguing that because some of the Sherlock Holmes stories were still under copyright, the character was owned by their estate and representations of him needed to be licensed/they were owed compensation for those representations. Now any characteristics represented outside the last bit of the canon are free game. For some reason, Holmes' cocaine use was an issue? I don't know, I only read the coverage briefly. Copyright: It's fucking weird!

Blogs of War, a great resource for national security stuff, recently launched Covert Contact. So far, it's been a really even-handed look at different national security issues. I don't know how many people here are into things like how to approach lone wolf terrorism or if Twitter is a fundamentally broken platform, but it's new-ish and the episodes are short so give it a try if you're into that kind of thing I guess???

TotalBiscuit said some pretty similar things about the interview on 8chan -- how he just wanted to lay out his perspective, let Totilo say his thing, and then move on, letting the ridiculousness in Totilo's argument speak for itself. I'm not going to watch the video because I don't really like giving TotalBiscuit views (I don't like the content he produces, his political views, or his general media persona so I don't support him by viewing what he produces) so I can't really comment beyond "hey I saw this thing that TB said." But knowing TB, he was probably an ass and just doesn't realize it. Also, I just realized that the core of GamerGate's problems with "journalistic ethics" could be immediately solved if they just took the same stance I do on people who produce content that I don't particularly care for: don't consume it. There are plenty of natsec writers who I don't read because I think what they produce is basically beltway propaganda. I'm sure they don't care about that, and I've never really raised the issue with them (except with Joshua Foust that one time when I was really bored at a desk job where I didn't have any work to do ever last summer). It's basically just a personal choice that I've quietly made.

Ever since I moved away from where I grew up, I feel lonely leading up to Christmas, then really stressed out after trying to fit in too many people/events during my 5 day trip home.