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Re: Fluxtumblr

offnotesnotes — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:51:56 -0000

At the same time, Wayne expresses strong opinions here about not wanting to put leaked tracks on albums, so it's not as if he's totally detached from the marketing/packaging/money. I feel like there's an element of shtick to his unchained-id persona-- he knows people prefer to think of their artists, especially rock and hip-hop stars, as Dionysian, drugged-out geniuses who are not quite like you and me, who care only about their art and its sexy-fun accoutrements. (Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse.) But I've even seen some intriguing skepticism out there regarding Wayne's supposed syrup addiction-- apparently syrup addiction gives you a gut, due to its effect on digestion, and Wayne is always walking around with his skinny torso topless. He's a smart guy, and surely it's possible that he's playing up the parts of his persona he knows people like (that doesn't keep him from being likable!).

Re: Fluxtumblr

offnotesnotes — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 12:50:38 -0000

RAIN!!!!

Re: Fluxtumblr - The Pitchfork corporate offices are about to get firebombed

offnotesnotes — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:16:37 -0000

here's a vote for Exile. don't firebomb my apartment, please!

Re: offnotesnotes - [C]ommercial pop artists, especially those with a...

offnotesnotes — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:33:22 -0000

I like this point, and it sent me off doing some Googling and thinking about Joseph Campbell and the importance of "narratives" in journalism. Somehow I eventually stumbled across this fantastic quote from Rebecca West, a writer have not read but now am interested to check out:

As we grow older and see the ends of stories as well as their beginnings, we realize that to the people who take part in them it is almost of greater importance that they should be stories, that they should form a recognizable pattern, than that they should be happy or tragic. The men and women who are withered by their fates, who go down to death reluctantly but without noticeable regrets for life, are not those who have lost their mates prematurely or by perfidy, or who have lost battles or fallen from early promise in circumstances of public shame, but those who have been jilted or were the victims of impotent lovers, who have never been summoned to command or been given any opportunity for success or failure. Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. If one's own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book.

Re: Thou Shalt Think for Yourselves

offnotesnotes — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:08:45 -0000

Thanks for the support! Yeah, I realized the things I would do to make my other blog distinct from tumblr would be more work and less fun than I'm willing to commit. This platform is one I can use without taking up time I wouldn't have wasted anyway, it's more natural for me, and it feels a lot less formal without my name in the url. Which I at least managed to steal from those Cold War Kids fans who pranked me on Sgum back in aught six (man, we're old).

Re: Thou Shalt Think for Yourselves

offnotesnotes — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:38:41 -0000

Oh, for sure! And thanks for the URL tip-- I kind of like the redundancy for now, just to acknowledge that offnotes existed. Next site: offnotesnotesmedia.tv.

Re: Thou Shalt Think for Yourselves

offnotesnotes — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:21:53 -0000

Shortly before offnotesnotesnotesnotes, I should expect. Offnotesnotesnotesnotesoffnotes?

Re: offnotesnotes - Love Is All: “Busy Doing Nothing” (Live at Cake...

offnotesnotes — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:34:27 -0000

cool, thanks for the tip! and thanks for being ok with my re-posting your recording. (and thanks, above all, for the recording!)

Re: offnotesnotes - Lil Wayne [ft. T-Pain]: “Got Money”/”Lollipop”/”A...

offnotesnotes — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:21:48 -0000

fixed! for now.

Re: Fluxtumblr

offnotesnotes — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 06:27:41 -0000

you're not wrong, walter, you're just... totally right!

Re: Fluxtumblr

offnotesnotes — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 06:46:12 -0000

also: "Jamie"-ish

Re: Get a Drink, Have a Good Time Now. Welcome to Paradise.

offnotesnotes — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:04:48 -0000

Oh but of course, dude.

Basically, this is the Tumblr equivalent of TGI Friday's.

Re: offnotesnotes - Roskilde [Marc Hogan] | Pitchfork

offnotesnotes — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:10:21 -0000

Thanks, dude!

Hey, when's that Philip Glass thing? We still going to that?

Re: offnotesnotes - In the past, our debates were sort of like...

offnotesnotes — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:55:46 -0000

Oh, I'm sorry, my post wasn't very well worded-- I definitely wasn't trying to dismiss your comment. I actually think this is something we should be talking about more! (I guess I just wasn't sure I had anything else I could glean from Powers' piece when it comes to the topic of women in pop criticism, but that's beside the point.)

What interests me most here is the likelihood that editors of music publications are getting way more pitches from men than from women. And why stop at music publications? Although there are plenty of women in journalism (they outnumbered men at my j-school!), opinion journalism still appears to be male-dominated (Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd duly noted). In the blogging realm, in particular, the political bloggers who managed to parlay their weird little hobbies into respectable, paying gigs are more often men (with Arianna Huffington and Wonkette the most glaring exceptions). When it comes to music or sports, there are ways you can try to explain away this seeming lack of female opinion journalists (perhaps these are just the areas of useless trivia that men tend to obsess over). But those arguments don't hold water when it comes to non-trivial issues, such as politics. And they don't hold water if, as I am, you like to argue that pop culture can be important in a way that transcends trivia. Women should be participating in this conversation. If there are obstacles preventing them from doing so, they should be removed; if there are ways to encourage more women to get involved, these things should be tried.

Maybe I'm wrong in my main assumption here. But if I'm not: What's discouraging more women from developing strong voices as opinion journalists, in pop music or more generally? How can we remove these obstacles and get a class of talking heads that better represents our society, male and female?

Re: offnotesnotes - The other reason I don’t believe in AIDS is...

offnotesnotes — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:18:29 -0000

Yeah, I guess in the sense that "this crazy shit can't be true."

But I actually didn't know about the history of the author, so it's quite a relief to know he's definitely a proven kook. Harper's is one of those publications I always mean to read, because other people whose interests are similar to mine seem to follow it, but I didn't realize it was so vastly different from The New Yorker or The Atlantic as to publish the quasi-highbrow equivalent of this heinous XXL post.

Re: offnotesnotes - The other reason I don’t believe in AIDS is...

offnotesnotes — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:13:42 -0000

Yeah, this guy and the actual Byron Crawford both seem like basically clever guys, which is why it's always so disappointing when they stop just short of having a point and settle for controversy clicks instead.

Re: offnotesnotes - The other reason I don’t believe in AIDS is...

offnotesnotes — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:51:20 -0000

Brendan, I hope you're right. The Harper's article is from 2006, so it would be sort of random. I mean, obviously there's a whole bunch of satire involved here-- as with the New Yorker cover, once you play the satire card, the big debate comes down to whether dude is doing something really funny or adding to the misinformation. If it's a joke, the comments section suggests either his readers are also extremely sophisticated satirists, or they don't have a clue.

Re: offnotesnotes - On the last page of “The Wrecking Crew,” Frank...

offnotesnotes — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 10:15:44 -0000

I guess I'm thinking of Tocqueville's assertion that none of this stuff works if we don't have an informed electorate. This would imply that an informed electorate is in the public interest. Does Bentley say anything about this?

It seems like there are at least two substantial interest groups (the extraordinarily well-to-do and the extraordinarily ill-informed) who have at least a short-term interest in an uninformed electorate.

Re: offnotesnotes - Older men should be dragged out and whipped when...

offnotesnotes — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 10:20:22 -0000

Wait, so which part of this particular Dowd column is being sarcastic? Have you ever seen her on TV or in person? I think you are giving her a wee too much credit. This is a woman with little regard for the truth-- she included a fabricated Kerry quote in one of her columns last election cycle ("Who among us doesn't like NASCAR?"), and this time she credulously used that very questionable "beanpole" quote from Amy Chozik's WSJ story, and she consistently obsesses over how all Dem men are feminine and all Dem women are men. She has even used Pride and Prejudice in each of the last two elections, both times casting the Dem as Pride.

She is, in short, a nut.

Re: offnotesnotes - Older men should be dragged out and whipped when...

offnotesnotes — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 10:30:36 -0000

I left out Dowd's most egregious journalistic sin, in my book: Dating back to her time as a Times reporter, she is almost single-handedly responsible for leading the media's increasing focus on the trivial as opposed to the substantial. The notion that you can tell more from Gore's "earth tones" than his policy platform, etc.

Re: offnotesnotes - Until liberal journals challenge the culture of...

offnotesnotes — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:12:31 -0000

1. Ann Coulter sees herself as a humorist, too. (Or at least, she says she does when people don't get her "jokes.")
2. Maureen Dowd has been making shit up about absolute trivia since she was a front-page reporter for the Times, not a columnist. Examples:
http://www.dailyhowler.com/...
http://www.dailyhowler.com/...
3. She was loved by her editors for her mind-reading abilities:
http://www.dailyhowler.com/...
4. Maureen Dowd is a powerful columnist for The New York Times. John Edwards once sent her a Ken doll to kiss up to her. Obama reportedly treats her very carefully. She is taken seriously. Other journalists copy her scripts. The trivia that she focuses on is what reporters seem to focus on now, too. Why not have a columnist who focuses on stuff that isn't trivial? It's The New York Times. They could get plenty of people smarter and funnier and less trivial and more honest than Maureen Dowd.
5. "Humor" doesn't excuse getting your facts wrong.
6. She is often described as a "left-wing" columnist. This is inaccurate. Pretty much only Somerby bothers to say so.
7. She's less a humor columnist than an old-fashioned holdover from the days of the 1950s "women's pages."
8. What kind of person publishes a column in which a presidential candidate sings "I Feel Pretty" to his bald spot? A presidential candidate whom this person presumably supports over the other guy? A presidential candidate who, right after this latest column in a series of fatuous negative columns by the same person, then LOSES to the other guy, who then leads us into eight years of failed policy? And do we want such a person to continue being the leading "liberal" columnist at The New York Times?

Obviously she's not single-handedly responsible for the past eight years. But she's a disgrace to journalism.

Re: offnotesnotes - Until liberal journals challenge the culture of...

offnotesnotes — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:29:51 -0000

Like, if you take the role of the media seriously, which I know you do, then I think it's important to take Maureen Dowd seriously-- and demand better.

Just imagine what conservatives would do to somebody who was supposedly a leading conservative columnist but always made up stuff that cut against their candidates! Why do they want to win and liberals want to lose?

Re: offnotesnotes - Until liberal journals challenge the culture of...

offnotesnotes — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:53:57 -0000

"If you look at Air America, it's pretty clear that liberals don't generally score political points by adopting the more loathesome techniques of the right."

Hmm, I'm not sure if that's the reason Air America is such a failure. Keith Olbermann has done pretty well by adopting the loathsome tactic of fudging his facts. But either way, I'm not arguing that anyone should do anything loathsome.

I'm arguing that liberal journalists should call out an ostensibly liberal New York Times columnist when she misstates facts in a way that favors conservatives. Lord knows the other side would (rightly) call out a conservative pundit who misstated facts in a way that favored liberals.

I'm also arguing that liberal journalists should call out ostensibly objective hard-news reporters when they misstate facts that favor conservatives (for instance, the ongoing confusion about Social Security supposedly going "bankrupt"). Again, conservatives routinely do this, and I don't think they're doing anything loathsome.

At the very, very least, why criticize other liberal journalists for demanding that journalists not misstate facts in a way that cuts against liberals? I don't get it.

You're totally right that Maureen Dowd doesn't directly influence public opinion-- that she only shapes elite opinion. But that stuff trickles down eventually. Let me give an example.

When you talk to almost anyone in this country about "liberal bias," they will know what you mean. That's because conservatives cared enough to put that framework out there.

If you tell someone that Al Gore didn't really invent the Internet, by now, some of them might know what you mean. If you tell them that Al Gore wasn't actually a serial exaggerator (one of Maureen Dowd's favorite themes, and one that her approval presumably helped spread among the rest of the elites), then you will have to do some more convincing. If you tell them that Obama actually has an energy policy, that he's not too this or too that, same deal. That's because nobody has bothered to set up a framework to call out those lies the way that the Republicans did.

Somerby has the right framework: The media uses "scripts," many of which are driven by the likes of Dowd and Chris Matthews. One of those scripts: McCain is a Saint. Another: Single-payer health care is bad ("Harry and Louise"). If you could say to people, "There goes the script-driven media again, writing the novels like the famous authors they all wish they were," the way that Republicans can say, "There goes that liberal media again, feeding you liberal bullshit," then you might have a winning argument. Assuming you care about whether people have health care, it's an important argument to win.

Of course, many journalist at big news orgs might not really care THAT much about whether people have health care. After all, THEY have health care. And many of them will benefit more from McCain's tax policies than from Obama's tax policies. But again, nobody bothers to tell people that. Liberals always leave it to the conservatives to complain.

Regardless, I just don't understand how it's helpful to have a person like Dowd influencing the national discourse. You agree that she is influential in shaping elite opinion. But you also say that we should just treat her like a humorist. That's fine-- but isn't there a paradox in that statement?

If she's influential at an elite level, are the elites getting the joke? Or are they taking her seriously? If we could be bothered to start convincing people she's just a humorist, that would be great. But we could start by caring enough to convince people she's wrong.

I hardly think Somerby is doing a bad thing by pointing out false statements and an obsession with trivia in the work of Dowd and her elite ilk.

All arguing aside, though, thanks for engaging in this discussion with me! This is what is great about Tumblr.

P.S. As for whether people think Dowd is liberal, a recent Los Angeles Times column by the fine and decent Neal Gabler called her a liberal:
http://www.latimes.com/news...

Finally, I should point out that in 1999 Maureen Dowd won the Pulitzer Prize. So there's that.

Re: offnotesnotes - bradford cox said… Can I just add please that I...

offnotesnotes — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:05:50 -0000

I dunno, I totally would've downloaded the files, too, but as a fan I probably would've commented on there saying, "Hey man, I downloaded this, but did you mean to leave this open?" And shared with my friends, sure. But posted on a message board? Probably not.

EDIT: Also part of what bums me out about this is that, yes, of course people were going to take something that's left out for them. So basically, as soon as the potential for music to be freely available on the internet happened, human nature made it inevitable that recording artists would no longer be able to expect compensation for their work, unless people were generous and wanted to donate or buy t-shirts or whatever. The economic value of being a musician went way down, and it's everybody's fault and yet no one's-- you could either sue everybody, and infuriate your customers, or take the Radiohead pay-what-you-like stance, which didn't even work out THAT great for Radiohead. Either way, the money's gone, the show's over; no individual is doing anything wrong, but collectively we're disincentivizing the creation of great music.That sucks.

Re: offnotesnotes - bradford cox said… Can I just add please that I...

offnotesnotes — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 07:34:34 -0000

the music industry has disincentivized the creation of great music since "Thriller"

what does this even mean?