You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
As naught gives way to aught and oxhide gives way to chain mail and byrnie gives way to battle-ax and Cavalier gives way to Roundhead and Cromwell Road gives way to the Connaught and I Am Curious (Yellow) gives way to I Am Curious (Blue) and barrelhouse gives way to Frank’N’Stein and a pint of Shelley plain to a pint of India Pale Ale I give way to you.
As bass gives way to baritone and hammock gives way to hummock and Hoboken gives way to Hackensack and bread gives way to reed bed and bald eagle gives way to Theobald Wolfe Tone and the Undertones give way to Siouxsie Sioux and DeLorean, John, gives way to Deloria, Vine, and Pierced Nose to Big Stomach I give way to you.
As vent gives way to Ventry and the King of the World gives way to Finn MacCool and phone gives way to fax and send gives way to sned and Dagenham gives way to Coventry and Covenanter gives way to caribou and the caribou gives way to the carbine and Boulud’s cackamamie to the cock-a-leekie of Boole I give way to you.
As transhumance gives way to trance and shaman gives way to Santa and butcher’s string gives way to vacuum pack and the ineffable gives way to the unsaid and pyx gives way to monstrance and treasure aisle gives way to need-blind pew and Calvin gives way to Calvin Klein and Town and Country Mice to Hanta I give way to you.
As Hopi gives way to Navaho and rug gives way to rag and Pax Vobiscum gives way to Tampax and Tampa gives way to the water bed and The Water Babies gives way to Worstward Ho and crapper gives way to loo and spruce gives way to pine and the carpet of pine needles to the carpetbag I give way to you.
As gombeen-man gives way to not-for-profit and soft soap gives way to Lynn C. Doyle and tick gives way to tack and Balaam’s Ass gives way to Mister Ed and Songs of Innocence gives way to The Prophet and single-prop Bar-B-Q gives way to twin-screw and the Salt Lick gives way to the County Line and “Mending Wall” gives way to “Build Soil” I give way to you.
As your hummus gives way to your foul madams and your coy mistress gives way to “The Flea” and flax gives way to W. D. Flackes and the living give way to the dead and John Hume gives way to Gerry Adams and Television gives way to U2 and Lake Constance gives way to the Rhine and the Rhine to the Zuider Zee I give way to you.
As dutch treat gives way to french leave and spanish fly gives way to Viagra and slick gives way to slack and the local fuzz give way to the Feds and Machiavelli gives way to make-believe and Howards End gives way to A Room with a View and Wordsworth gives way to “Woodbine Willie” and stereo Nagra to quad Niagara I give way to you.
As cathedral gives way to cavern and cookie cutter gives way to cookie and the rookies give way to the All-Blacks and the shad give way to the smoke shed and the roughshod give way to the Black Horse avern that still rings true despite that T being missing from its sign where a little nook gives way to a little nookie when I give way to you.
That Nanook of the North should give way to Man of Aran as ling gives way to cod and cod gives way to kayak and Camp Moosilauke gives way to Club Med and catamite gives way to catamaran and catamaran to aluminum canoe is symptomatic of a more general decline whereby a cloud succumbs to a clod and I give way to you.
For as Monet gives way to Juan Gris and Juan Gris gives way to Joan Miró and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gives way to Miramax and the Volta gives way to Travolta, swinging the red-hot lead, and Saturday Night Fever gives way to Grease and the Greeks give way to you know who and the Roman IX gives way to the Arabic 9 and nine gives way, as ever, to zero I give way to you.
im seeing paul muldoon reading a poetry next week so i decided to familiarise myself with his work some more:
and ive established that paul muldoon is obsessed with being from ireland but living in America, he likes secretly hiding the alphabet in his poems, and also he likes doing that thing where all his rhymes are actually just rhyming the same word but its so subtle you only notice halfway through the poem and then you are like 'oh, haha, well played Paul Muldoon.'
he is good too in a seamus heaney sort of way. he does not write about bogs as often as seamus heaney but still sometimes you might find a bog in his poem.
People far too often take for granted the times in life when they do not have some manner of sinus problems. Like really stuffy noses are the worst. Every day you wake up without one you should smile to yourself, knowing that you can be happy with your non-stuffiness. Like today, I myself do not have a stuffy nose, nor is my nose runny or ichy. This is good. I am very thankful. I do rather wish for an mp3 player, lugging this laptop around everywhere is inconvenient and a bit silly. Jeeesus Christ I just got an email saying I have another follower on tumblr. That makes like 10 this week so far. I’m not even sure what they’re all following me for. It’s quite odd. At this rate I’ll have like 100 followers by the end of the month. Whoa. I want to go to Perkins and get a breakfast skillet. Alas, the Perkins site will not open for some reason. How unfortunate. Ohay my bestie is online, suhweet. Now limp bizkit is stuck in my head for some reason, the only vaguely effective hook they ever wrote “keep rollin rollin rollin rollin….” God fred durst is such a piece of shit, who the fuck even listens to that band. At least Nickelback are vaguely self-aware.
Regular readers of this site -- both of them -- will know that I'm no admirer of the popular beat combos of today. I don't, to my knowledge, like a single song written after 1986, and even before then the only pop and rock I can stand is either a) obvious throwaway camp or b) the product of soulless industrial hacks, who at least imbue what they do with a certain amount of slickness. Otherwise, I can't abide pop, and I especially can't abide pop when it aims to be art.
I've tried to isolate a single reason for this, and here is my tentative result: it's the lyrics. I find pop lyrics at best painfully hokey, and at worst indistinguishable from bad adolescent poetry -- indeed, they often are bad adolescent poetry. The verses of Coldplay, Belle and Sebastian, Morrissey and the like could well have been lifted from poetry.com, or someone's livejournal. Artistically, they belong with the buckets of versified zit-squeeze secreted nightly by sensitive teens across the globe. I'd run a mile from any of this stuff written down, and none of it becomes more bearable when set to sixteen bars of drum and bass. Quite the opposite, in fact. And thanks to an entertainment industry which keeps pop stars, like pet dogs, trapped in a permanent state of adolescence, bad adolescent poetry is all most of them ever produce.
I've repeatedly tried to get into pop and rock, but hokey lyrics have always defeated me. My last such attempt was two years ago, when daily car trips with a Scandinavian coworker made me appreciate at least the theoretical appeal of 70s metal, and even made me curious enough to check it out personally. A friend of a friend, whose musical taste I respect transitively, once claimed that all rock since 1975 was basically just footnotes to Led Zeppelin; so I went and bought Led Zeppelin's classic 1971 album IV, aka "the one with Stairway to Heaven". I went home, pressed play, and prepared to rock! But after a few minutes of listening to a bunch of grown men singing "yeah! yeah! rock'n'roll!" or some such, I began to feel a bit silly. It sounded just like Spinal Tap, only without the irony. I barely made it through the self-serious bombast of Stairway to Heaven (which was doing nothing for me) before I became overcome with embarrassment and had to turn off the CD. I can't say the lyrics were intrinsically sillier than "Hoyotoho-ho" or "Walla-lalla-la", but I guess the riffs weren't grabbing me like those leitmotifs did. I remain content to respect Led Zeppelin from a distance, preferably outside audible range.
When it comes to silly lyrics, it occurs to me that most of the music I like has the benefit of being purely instrumental. Of the vocal music I like, I either don't understand a word of it (as in Vivaldi motets) or find the lyrics actually quite well-written (as in Handel's Messiah, even if they place style over content). The exception is the music of Purcell, who could take dreadful hackwork like Nahum Tate's Birthday Ode for Queen Mary and turn it into something miraculous and joyous and transcendent. But I've yet to find a Purcell of the pop world.
Stone Cold Shower: Crimson Grass (Troubador, £23.99)
Where now for the uncrowned elder statesmen of big-budget rock? After the decidedly hot-and-cold reaction to Mondomovie, their last album, Shower have apparently taken a lesson from Clifton Woods and now present a more laid-back, chilled-out tone, going back to their roots in the post-industrial Rhode Island rock scene. Some of the songs even display an ironic self-awareness: in Any More for Leather and Break Horizon Bells Michael Dell satirises his iconic status as rock's premier frontman, his mock-mordant lyrics cycling airborne over Keith Reed's ever-jangling guitar. Crimson Grass forms a heartfelt dialogue with the band's previous albums: with the extensive quotations from past successes like Gunflower and Lumbago Tree, the band seem to be reaching out and asking a few tough questions of themselves. What direction will their music take from here? Has their time passed, or can they still rock the system? On the basis of this album, the answer to both questions is a resounding 'Yes!'
Truth Smugglers: Pears for the Children of Castille (Epigram, £20.99)
Fresh from their lucrative new deal with Epigram, the Lancastrian balladeers are back with their rawest, most politicised album yet. The title track, which refers to detention of Afro-Castroist guerrillas by the corrupt Pinatubo regime, sets the tone. Smugglers frontman Mark Davey bawls out these working-class anthems with hammer-and-nails sincerity, his hollow northern vowels resonating ever more anger from the steelmills and coalpits of his youth. "We left our pain/The human brain/In a bargain bin", he sings, as Simon Macclesfield's angry guitar and Brian Golding's percussive drum-work nail down the Smugglers' sound: post-punk, pre-retro, all rough edges. A must-have.
Linen Jeans: Onyx Butterfly (Reflex, £18.99)
Linen Jeans are the quiet, sullen guys who used to sit at the back of class and go home and write toilet-paper-rolls of poetry after school: the kind of guys who subscribed to teenage-angst aged fourteen and never looked back. In Butterfly, their first album to hit the mainstream shelves, they serve up their angst-poetry as music. Sounding like a homespun blend of semi-grunge, sub-rock and My First Keyboard Lesson, Jeans aren't helped by the crane-like vocals of lead singer Guy Blessington, who makes each track sound like the strangled death-cry of a bleating hen. Not good.
Button Crash: Mindfunk (Gehenna, £24.99)
For those not yet convinced of the greatness of this latter-day punk-rock outfit from North Carolina, look no further than A Night with Cheese, the second track on their outstanding new album. Straight away, lead guitarist Dale Sobchek launches into a thunderous, thrilling four-chord riff, augmented by layer upon layer of incredibly textured guitar and bullet-popping drums, creating an instant and undeniable aural sound-space. And for most of the album it never lets up: the aggressive, untamed lattice-work of Sobchek backed up by Carl Foster's throbbing bass, reminiscent of Blunt Cascade's Hal Cardaway at his best. And then there are the vocals - oh, yes, the vocals. Caroline Pewter's voice is an all-in-one madonna-whore-complex, sometimes down-and-dirty, sometimes divine, like the offspring of an archangel and a two-bit hooker. Her lyrics are one part Foucault to three parts T.S. Eliot: listen to the sustained, but self-aware, patter of Miscast as Orfeo, or the sublime verbal autonomy of Howl at the Moon. "Can I behave/The tidal wave/Navigation takes me out to sea/You gotta swallow your pride and believe in me." Classic stuff.
Koan: Koan (Headingley, £22.99)
The outspoken rapper returns with his own distinctive brand of in-your-face profanity and militant Buddhism that isn't afraid to kick ass. Any fears that the man Koan was going to tone down his act are quickly dispelled in the powerful first track, Strap Her Down and F**k Her, a tour-de-force of verbal virtuosity and sustained sprung-rhythm attack. He rails against the gross materialism of western society using the shocking image of a man forcing his wife to have sexual congress with a horse: this is powerful, visceral stuff, Koan using double and sometimes even triple assonance to underline the force of his point: "Come here b*tch/And twitch/Your ass for my switch/-Blade, whore." Under his carefully-contrived public image as a boorish, wife-beating thug (which he lampoons in Wife-Beaters 101), Koan's savage lyrics reveal a passionate reforming poet, a William Blake for the 21st century. Witness the biting irony of A Whore's a Whore and Meat-Hookers (which quotes Lymphomania's Towel Feeder), and see the injustices and inequalities of society being skewered before you on a plate. A true artist.
Breakfast Sump: Blood Pumpkin (Plunge, £21.99)
Breakfast Sump, aka Leila Hapgood, first hit the headlines last summer with her smash club anthem Into the Halo, which featured her disembodied vocals hovering over a rippling pseudo-ambient electronic sound-space. Halo is the centrepiece of this her first album, in which Hapgood takes the tenets of house/trance and weaves in her own distinctive retro-psychadelia, pulsing in sine-waves of moody blue, green, purple and orange. Excellent downtime listening.
Rennet: The Gorge (Simeon House, £19.99)
All Danish bands must of course live under the shadow of the mighty Freya, but Rennet is one band willing to stake their own claim to music excellence. Nils Mortensen's outfit have raised a few eyebrows over the years, and their latest album should win them more than a few admirers. From the alt-folk excesses of Journeyman's Bottle, to the intricate 3/4/3 structure of Show me (the Faith), to the steady rock dirge Porterhouse Blues, this is an all-round solid album. Despite his tender years, Mortensen's vocals combine a time-worn grace with a steady vulnerability: overall the band's sound is Trailor Wedge meets Outscape meets Kurt Cannabich. Worth checking out.
Regular readers of this site -- both of them -- will know that I'm no admirer of the popular beat combos of today. I don't, to my knowledge, like a single song written after 1986, and even before then the only pop and rock I can stand is either a) obvious throwaway camp or b) the product of soulless industrial hacks, who at least imbue what they do with a certain amount of slickness. Otherwise, I can't abide pop, and I especially can't abide pop when it aims to be art.
I've tried to isolate a single reason for this, and here is my tentative result: it's the lyrics. I find pop lyrics at best painfully hokey, and at worst indistinguishable from bad adolescent poetry -- indeed, they often are bad adolescent poetry. The verses of Coldplay, Belle and Sebastian, Morrissey and the like could well have been lifted from poetry.com, or someone's livejournal. Artistically, they belong with the buckets of versified zit-squeeze secreted nightly by sensitive teens across the globe. I'd run a mile from any of this stuff written down, and none of it becomes more bearable when set to sixteen bars of drum and bass. Quite the opposite, in fact. And thanks to an entertainment industry which keeps pop stars, like pet dogs, trapped in a permanent state of adolescence, bad adolescent poetry is all most of them ever produce.
I've repeatedly tried to get into pop and rock, but hokey lyrics have always defeated me. My last such attempt was two years ago, when daily car trips with a Scandinavian coworker made me appreciate at least the theoretical appeal of 70s metal, and even made me curious enough to check it out personally. A friend of a friend, whose musical taste I respect transitively, once claimed that all rock since 1975 was basically just footnotes to Led Zeppelin; so I went and bought Led Zeppelin's classic 1971 album IV, aka "the one with Stairway to Heaven". I went home, pressed play, and prepared to rock! But after a few minutes of listening to a bunch of grown men singing "yeah! yeah! rock'n'roll!" or some such, I began to feel a bit silly. It sounded just like Spinal Tap, only without the irony. I barely made it through the self-serious bombast of Stairway to Heaven (which was doing nothing for me) before I became overcome with embarrassment and had to turn off the CD. I can't say the lyrics were intrinsically sillier than "Hoyotoho-ho" or "Walla-lalla-la", but I guess the riffs weren't grabbing me like those leitmotifs did. I remain content to respect Led Zeppelin from a distance, preferably outside audible range.
When it comes to silly lyrics, it occurs to me that most of the music I like has the benefit of being purely instrumental. Of the vocal music I like, I either don't understand a word of it (as in Vivaldi motets) or find the lyrics actually quite well-written (as in Handel's Messiah, even if they place style over content). The exception is the music of Purcell, who could take dreadful hackwork like Nahum Tate's Birthday Ode for Queen Mary and turn it into something miraculous and joyous and transcendent. But I've yet to find a Purcell of the pop world.
Doesn't this person know that instrumental rock exists, let alone that there are whole genres of beat-driven and melodic music outside of the classical repertoire that are instrumental by nature?
First of all, let's quickly dispense with the claim that bronyism is not ironic. This doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny. The brony phenomenon originated on 4chan (that noted bastion of tolerance and honesty), when a bunch of trolls pretended to like this pony cartoon in order to piss off a reviewer who complained that it was a commercial sell-out. Then a different bunch of trolls claimed toactually like it in order to piss off those who only pretended to; and then a still different group decided to seize the high moral ground from everyone else by actually actually liking it. From there it spiralled out of control.
What we have here is not the absence of irony, but instead the limit of irony repeatedly applied on itself to infinity. Bronyism is not unironic: it's post-ironic, trans-ironic, hyper-ironic. It is irony that has entered a maniacally oscillating state, resembling a hangover or perhaps a caffeine overdose, in which the perpetrators are no longer even sure if they're in on their own joke. It's irony folded back on itself so often that it has arrived at sincerity, or something like it, and has thus supposedly won redemption.
This kind of irony is also known as "The New Sincerity", and in the wider world is exemplified by the works of Wes Anderson, Zach Braff, Miranda July, and Dave Eggers and the McSweeney's crowd, and works like Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, The Sound of Young America and other cultural lowlights of the last two decades. Under their surface of mildy self-critical whimsy, all these works are in the business of providing feelgood sermons for deserving liberals, empowerment for the already empowered. They all exploit the New Sincerity's built-in redemption narrative: irony redeemed by sincerity, phony liberal guilt and self-loathing overcome by the revelation that you're a genuinely good and superior and blameless person after all.
The New Sincerity combines the worst of two worlds: all the tedium of hipster irony with all the sanctimony of evangelical Protestantism. This is precisely the attraction for its admirers, who think it combines the best of these worlds: hipper-than-thou posturing without the sneer, Protestantism without the theology. As the synthesis of two different but equally nauseating kinds of smugness, the New Sincerity is a natural gathering point for today's beacons of bourgeois morality. "God" never features in their moral admonitions, but otherwise they're as bad as any Victorian moralist: reaping the rewards of privilege and empire, while chiding the less fortunate with their insufferable rectitude.
This might be a relic of my papist schooling, but I don't believe sincerity, new or old, should be counted among the cardinal virtues, and I think it's sad to see anyone older than a teenager hanging it out for admiration. What good does your sincerity do anyone in this day and age? At least for 17th century Calvinists, saved by faith alone, the quest for sincerity had a spiritual urgency about it: if their faith was insincere, their souls would burn for literal eternity in the literal fires of Hell*. Today's liberal WASPs face no such threat. Nothing is riding on their sincerity, and their struggle to find it is nothing but vanity. Their sincerity is simply a display of fidelity to a constructed self, which is largely built out of consumer choices and hypocrisy. It's the ultimate assertion of bourgeois individualism and bourgeois values.
In political terms, this sincerity is reactionary, and in moral terms, it's irrelevant. If the self you've constructed is good, then being sincere to it can motivate you to good deeds; but all too often, the self you've constructed is a pampered, narcissistic manchild, and being sincere to it is a moral zero. Sincerity exists in the moral realm of intentions, and unless you're a sociopath like Orson Scott Card, what matters more in any moral system are actions and their consequences. Good acts are always better than sincere ones.
Lest anyone declare I'm trying to out-moralise the moralisers and out-prig the prigs: you can stop projecting now, bronies. I'm not trying to knock you off my perch, I'm trying to drag you back down to my level. I'm no model for anyone. I'm lost, like you once were. I'm still searching for meaning and belonging, I'm still struggling with how to be conscious and human in the 21st century and not go insane, and I'm not making any progress. I don't know the answer, but I do know this: the New Sincerity ain't it
all that did was make me imagine what it would be like if dave eggers was a brony which provided me with a good 2 seconds of amusement, good job weird internet guy
Here I offer a personal view on the disctinction between camp, kitsch and trash. Now, I'm no student of kitsch, which lately has become an area of some academic interest, and doubtless many of the great minds in humanities departments have investigated the matter in much greater depth and length than I. So I ask the reader to forgive me for the lack of citations in this article, and my general ignorance of the current state of research, as I tread into this rarefied intellectual ground. It is not my intention to barge into the realm of kitsch theorists, or to cut across the various schools of camp theory, or to offer anything which rivals the latest sound and complete theory of trash. This is merely the offering of a humble layman.
Kitsch, the German word for 'trash', was originally applied in the late 19th century to the then-new commercial art for a mass audience, as opposed to 'high art' and 'folk art'. Since then, many of us have reluctantly had to admit that not all mass commercial art is necessarily trash. And besides, the meaning of kitsch has moved on; it now clearly refers to a particular kind of worthless art, and not worthless art in general. So we need a finer-grained definition. I borrow and simplify mine from someone called Dahlhaus [add citation later]. Kitsch, by this definition, is art which aims to evoke some particular emotion, or communicate some message, but doesn't have the resources to do it. It aims high, but its means are too crude and transparent and vulgar. Perhaps the most obvious examples of kitsch are the movies of Ed Wood, which aimed to be thoughtful sci-fi pieces, but were made carelessly on the cheap by a man with no talent. Other examples of kitsch include Forrest Gump, The Matrix, Britpop, certain performances of Liszt, and numerous bad film scores (recent shocking examples includeA History of Violence, Crash and Capote). Needless to say, kitsch is always bad.
Camp -- deliberate bad taste -- is in fact the opposite of kitsch. Camp uses more resources than its aims require. Camp puts a certain amount of ingenuity, subtlety and creative talent into a work which is obviously silly, stupid, or tasteless. Camp can be sublime; sometimes artistic truth is found in expressing more than what is needed or strictly tasteful. Even bad camp is usually better than kitsch. Many objects of fandom are camp. Examples of camp include Handel, Vivaldi, Queen, disco, Raiders of the Lost Ark and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Opera, a ridiculously contrived medium, is more or less camp by default. The same goes for any good stage drama.
Trash aims low and is low. Thus, bad camp can also be trash. Sometimes trash is worse than kitsch, sometimes better. Examples of trash include Russ Meyer movies, Troma movies, death metal, most porn, most pop music, reality TV, in fact most television, most advertising, in fact most of the art people get exposed to in their lives.
To clarify the distinction, here is a quick reference guide.
Taken as only half-serious in and of itself, that last one about camp and kitsch is very funny; taken dead seriously, it is simply self-indulgent and pretentious.
Many critics of the Singularity Institute focus on its cult-like nature: the way it presents itself as the only protection against an absurdly unlikely doomsday scenario; the way its members internalise a peculiar voculabulary that betrays itself when they step outside the cult confines; the way they keep pushing the work of their idolised cult guru on unwilling readers. (In particular, they keep cheerleading for Yudkowsky's endlessly dire Harry Potter fanfic, Mary Sue and the Methods of Rationality.) While all these criticisms are legitimate, and the cultish aspects of the Singularity Institute are an essential part of its power structure, I'm more concerned about the political views it disseminates under the guise of being stridently non-political.
One of Yudkowsky's constant refrains, appropriating language from Frank Herbert's Dune, is "Politics is the Mind-killer". Under this rallying cry, Lesswrong insiders attempt to purge discussions of any political opinions they disagree with. They strive to convince themselves and their followers that they are dealing in questions of pure, refined "rationality" with no political content. However, the version of "rationality" they preach isexpressly politicised.
The Bayesian interpretation of statistics is in fact an expression of some heavily loaded political views. Bayesianism projects a neoliberal/libertarian view of reality: a world of competitive, goal-driven individuals all trying to optimise their subjective beliefs. Given the demographics of lesswrong.com, it's no surprise that its members have absorbed such a political outlook, or that they consistently push political views which are elitist, bigoted and reactionary.
Yudkowsky believes that "the world is stratified by genuine competence" and that today's elites have found their deserved place in the hierarchy. This is a comforting message for a cult that draws its membership from a social base of Web entrepreneurs, startup CEOs, STEM PhDs, Ivy leaguers, and assorted computer-savvy rich kids. Yudkowsky so thoroughly identifies himself with this milieu of one-percenters that even when discussing Bayesianism, he slips into the language of a heartless rentier. A belief should "pay the rent", he says, or be made to suffer: "If it turns deadbeat, evict it."
Members of Lesswrong are adept at rationalising away any threats to their privilege with a few quick"Bayesian Judo" chops. The sufferings caused by today's elites — the billions of people who are forced to endure lives of slavery, misery, poverty, famine, fear, abuse and disease for their benefit — are treated at best as an abstract problem, of slightly lesser importance than nailing down the priors of a Bayesian formula. While the theories of right-wing economists are accepted without argument, the theories of socialists, feminists, anti-racists, environmentalists, conservationists or anyone who might upset the Bayesian worldview are subjected to extendedempty"rationalist"bloviating. On the subject of feminism, Muehlhauser adopts the tactics of an MRA concern troll, claiming to be a feminist but demanding a "rational" account of why objectification is a problem. Frankly, the Lesswrong brand of "rationality" is bigotry in disguise.
Lesswrong cultists are so careful at disguising their bigotry that it may not be obvious to casual readers of the site. For a bunch of straight-talking rationalists, Yudkowsky and friends are remarkably shifty and dishonest when it comes to expressing a forthright political opinion. Political issues surface all the time on their website, but the cult insiders hide their true political colours under a heavy oil slick of obfuscation. It's as if "Politics is the mind-killer" is a policy enforced to prevent casual readers — or prospective cult members — from realising what a bunch of far-out libertarian fanatics they are.
Take as an example Yudkowsky's comments on the James Watson controversy of 2007. Watson, one of the so-called fathers of DNA research, had told reporters he was "gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really". Yudkowsky used this racist outburst as the occasion for some characteristically slippery Bayesian propagandising. In his essay, you'll note that he never objects to or even mentions the content of Watson's remarks — for some reason, he approaches the subject by sneering at the commentary of a Nigerian journalist — and neither does he question the purpose or validity of intelligence testing, or raise the possibility of inherent racism in such tests. Instead, he insinuates that anti-racists are appropriating the issue for their own nefarious ends:
"Race adds extra controversy to everything; in that sense, it's obvious what difference skin colour makespolitically".
Yudkowsky appears to think that racism is an illusion or at best a distraction. He stresses the Bayesian dogma that only individuals matter:
"Group injustice has no existence apart from injustice to individuals. It's individuals who have brains to experience suffering. It's individuals who deserve, and often don't get, a fair chance at life. [...] Skin colour has nothing to do with it, nothing at all."
Here, he tells the victims of racial discrimination to forget the fact that their people have been systematically oppressed by a ruling elite for centuries, and face up to the radical idea that their suffering is their own individual problem. He then helpfully reassures them that none of it is their fault; they were screwed over at birth by being simply less intelligent that then creamy white guys at the top:
Never mind the airtight case that intelligence has a hereditary genetic component among individuals; if you think that being born with Down's Syndrome doesn't impact life outcomes, then you are on crack."
Yudkowsky would reject the idea that these disadvantaged individuals could improve their lot by grouping together and engaging in political action: politics is the mind-killer, after all. The only thing that can save them is Yudkowsky's improbable fantasy tech. In the future, "intelligence deficits will be fixable given sufficiently advanced technology, biotech or nanotech." And until that comes about, the stupid oppressed masses should sit and bear their suffering, not rock the boat, and let the genuinely competent white guys get on with saving the world.
Also, I totally believe everyone has the right to their own opinions, and for that matter they have a right to join a cult if they feel like it. In fact people who want to live forever, you could argue, are more likely to take care of the environment and their own children, because those are major investments for them.
On the other hand, what is their plan for the rest of us? Is it to, like Vinge says, give us the appearance of being masters of godlike slaves? Are those slaves our smart phones? Are we being intentionally shepherded into an artificial existence of play-power? Because I’ve suspected that very thing ever since I read the Filter Bubble.
The ‘90s were not kind to Testament. After 1992’s The Ritual failed to live up to Black Album-sized expectations, half the band quit, including virtuoso guitarist Alex Skolnick. Worse still, the band’s record company demanded a more “alternative” approach on the next record.
What happened next is something that warms my goddamn heart, and I will always love Testament for it. They replaced Skolnick with death-metal prodigy James Murphy (Death, Obituary, Disincarnate), and put drummer Mike Tempesta (Exodus, White Zombie) behind the kit. Then they proceeded to write the heaviest album of their career.
What Does It Sound Like: A 50-foot-tall middle finger to the music business, carved out of stone, and lit on fire so that even at night, you can see it. Musically, this thing is utterly crushing from the second you hit ‘play,’ full of choppy, claustrophobic riffs that are somewhere between thrash and death metal. The songs are more straightforward than, say, Souls Of Black, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s also the first Testament album where the production wasn’t complete shit. I remember being truly shocked at how crushing this was when it came out.
Low is a direct attack on everything in the ‘90s metal playbook. There’s about a thousand guitar solos on this record, along with a motherfucking bass solo on the instrumental “Urotsukidoji” (still doing instrumentals in 1994? Awesome.) “Trail of Tears” is the album’s sole ballad, a tribute to singer Chuck Billy’s American Indian heritage. “Dog Faced Gods” is brutal even by Testament standards, and features the debut of Billy’s now-standard death metal vocal.
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^ :(
As (by paul muldoon)
As naught gives way to aught
and oxhide gives way to chain mail
and byrnie gives way to battle-ax
and Cavalier gives way to Roundhead
and Cromwell Road gives way to the Connaught
and I Am Curious (Yellow) gives way to I Am Curious (Blue)
and barrelhouse gives way to Frank’N’Stein
and a pint of Shelley plain to a pint of India Pale Ale
I give way to you.
As bass gives way to baritone
and hammock gives way to hummock
and Hoboken gives way to Hackensack
and bread gives way to reed bed
and bald eagle gives way to Theobald Wolfe Tone
and the Undertones give way to Siouxsie Sioux
and DeLorean, John, gives way to Deloria, Vine,
and Pierced Nose to Big Stomach
I give way to you.
As vent gives way to Ventry
and the King of the World gives way to Finn MacCool
and phone gives way to fax
and send gives way to sned
and Dagenham gives way to Coventry
and Covenanter gives way to caribou
and the caribou gives way to the carbine
and Boulud’s cackamamie to the cock-a-leekie of Boole
I give way to you.
As transhumance gives way to trance
and shaman gives way to Santa
and butcher’s string gives way to vacuum pack
and the ineffable gives way to the unsaid
and pyx gives way to monstrance
and treasure aisle gives way to need-blind pew
and Calvin gives way to Calvin Klein
and Town and Country Mice to Hanta
I give way to you.
As Hopi gives way to Navaho
and rug gives way to rag
and Pax Vobiscum gives way to Tampax
and Tampa gives way to the water bed
and The Water Babies gives way to Worstward Ho
and crapper gives way to loo
and spruce gives way to pine
and the carpet of pine needles to the carpetbag
I give way to you.
As gombeen-man gives way to not-for-profit
and soft soap gives way to Lynn C. Doyle
and tick gives way to tack
and Balaam’s Ass gives way to Mister Ed
and Songs of Innocence gives way to The Prophet
and single-prop Bar-B-Q gives way to twin-screw
and the Salt Lick gives way to the County Line
and “Mending Wall” gives way to “Build Soil”
I give way to you.
As your hummus gives way to your foul madams
and your coy mistress gives way to “The Flea”
and flax gives way to W. D. Flackes
and the living give way to the dead
and John Hume gives way to Gerry Adams
and Television gives way to U2
and Lake Constance gives way to the Rhine
and the Rhine to the Zuider Zee
I give way to you.
As dutch treat gives way to french leave
and spanish fly gives way to Viagra
and slick gives way to slack
and the local fuzz give way to the Feds
and Machiavelli gives way to make-believe
and Howards End gives way to A Room with a View
and Wordsworth gives way to “Woodbine
Willie” and stereo Nagra to quad Niagara
I give way to you.
As cathedral gives way to cavern
and cookie cutter gives way to cookie
and the rookies give way to the All-Blacks
and the shad give way to the smoke shed
and the roughshod give way to the Black Horse avern
that still rings true
despite that T being missing from its sign
where a little nook gives way to a little nookie
when I give way to you.
That Nanook of the North should give way to Man of Aran
as ling gives way to cod
and cod gives way to kayak
and Camp Moosilauke gives way to Club Med
and catamite gives way to catamaran
and catamaran to aluminum canoe
is symptomatic of a more general decline
whereby a cloud succumbs to a clod
and I give way to you.
For as Monet gives way to Juan Gris
and Juan Gris gives way to Joan Miró
and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gives way to Miramax
and the Volta gives way to Travolta, swinging the red-hot lead,
and Saturday Night Fever gives way to Grease
and the Greeks give way to you know who
and the Roman IX gives way to the Arabic 9
and nine gives way, as ever, to zero
I give way to you.
I went to the Lindt factory in Cologne, Germany about 6/7 years ago.
Best school trip ever *_*
im seeing paul muldoon reading a poetry next week so i decided to familiarise myself with his work some more:
and ive established that paul muldoon is obsessed with being from ireland but living in America, he likes secretly hiding the alphabet in his poems, and also he likes doing that thing where all his rhymes are actually just rhyming the same word but its so subtle you only notice halfway through the poem and then you are like 'oh, haha, well played Paul Muldoon.'
he is good too in a seamus heaney sort of way. he does not write about bogs as often as seamus heaney but still sometimes you might find a bog in his poem.
that is my summary of paul muldoon.
this is also a good poem by paul muldoon
An Old Pit Pony
An old pit pony walks
its chalks
across a blasted heath.
Its coat is a cloud hung on a line.
It sighs
for the pit-propped skies
of that world beneath.
Its coat is a cloud hung on a line.
but is he as good a poet as Lil B?
I'll think you'll find the answer to be a resounding "no".
excerpt from the 52 hour stream that happened over the weekend.
contains strong language, which may be offensive to some viewers. Also contains PewDiePie, which is offensive to possibly far more viewers.
cant access youtube ortumblr at the moment
counting the days until this contract ends so we can get an internet provider that isnt thoroughly awful
Regular readers of this site -- both of them -- will know that I'm no admirer of the popular beat combos of today. I don't, to my knowledge, like a single song written after 1986, and even before then the only pop and rock I can stand is either a) obvious throwaway camp or b) the product of soulless industrial hacks, who at least imbue what they do with a certain amount of slickness. Otherwise, I can't abide pop, and I especially can't abide pop when it aims to be art.
I've tried to isolate a single reason for this, and here is my tentative result: it's the lyrics. I find pop lyrics at best painfully hokey, and at worst indistinguishable from bad adolescent poetry -- indeed, they often are bad adolescent poetry. The verses of Coldplay, Belle and Sebastian, Morrissey and the like could well have been lifted from poetry.com, or someone's livejournal. Artistically, they belong with the buckets of versified zit-squeeze secreted nightly by sensitive teens across the globe. I'd run a mile from any of this stuff written down, and none of it becomes more bearable when set to sixteen bars of drum and bass. Quite the opposite, in fact. And thanks to an entertainment industry which keeps pop stars, like pet dogs, trapped in a permanent state of adolescence, bad adolescent poetry is all most of them ever produce.
I've repeatedly tried to get into pop and rock, but hokey lyrics have always defeated me. My last such attempt was two years ago, when daily car trips with a Scandinavian coworker made me appreciate at least the theoretical appeal of 70s metal, and even made me curious enough to check it out personally. A friend of a friend, whose musical taste I respect transitively, once claimed that all rock since 1975 was basically just footnotes to Led Zeppelin; so I went and bought Led Zeppelin's classic 1971 album IV, aka "the one with Stairway to Heaven". I went home, pressed play, and prepared to rock! But after a few minutes of listening to a bunch of grown men singing "yeah! yeah! rock'n'roll!" or some such, I began to feel a bit silly. It sounded just like Spinal Tap, only without the irony. I barely made it through the self-serious bombast of Stairway to Heaven (which was doing nothing for me) before I became overcome with embarrassment and had to turn off the CD. I can't say the lyrics were intrinsically sillier than "Hoyotoho-ho" or "Walla-lalla-la", but I guess the riffs weren't grabbing me like those leitmotifs did. I remain content to respect Led Zeppelin from a distance, preferably outside audible range.
When it comes to silly lyrics, it occurs to me that most of the music I like has the benefit of being purely instrumental. Of the vocal music I like, I either don't understand a word of it (as in Vivaldi motets) or find the lyrics actually quite well-written (as in Handel's Messiah, even if they place style over content). The exception is the music of Purcell, who could take dreadful hackwork like Nahum Tate's Birthday Ode for Queen Mary and turn it into something miraculous and joyous and transcendent. But I've yet to find a Purcell of the pop world.
THE NEW SINCERITY: JUST AS BAD AS THE OLD
First of all, let's quickly dispense with the claim that bronyism is not ironic. This doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny. The brony phenomenon originated on 4chan (that noted bastion of tolerance and honesty), when a bunch of trolls pretended to like this pony cartoon in order to piss off a reviewer who complained that it was a commercial sell-out. Then a different bunch of trolls claimed toactually like it in order to piss off those who only pretended to; and then a still different group decided to seize the high moral ground from everyone else by actually actually liking it. From there it spiralled out of control.
What we have here is not the absence of irony, but instead the limit of irony repeatedly applied on itself to infinity. Bronyism is not unironic: it's post-ironic, trans-ironic, hyper-ironic. It is irony that has entered a maniacally oscillating state, resembling a hangover or perhaps a caffeine overdose, in which the perpetrators are no longer even sure if they're in on their own joke. It's irony folded back on itself so often that it has arrived at sincerity, or something like it, and has thus supposedly won redemption.
This kind of irony is also known as "The New Sincerity", and in the wider world is exemplified by the works of Wes Anderson, Zach Braff, Miranda July, and Dave Eggers and the McSweeney's crowd, and works like Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, The Sound of Young America and other cultural lowlights of the last two decades. Under their surface of mildy self-critical whimsy, all these works are in the business of providing feelgood sermons for deserving liberals, empowerment for the already empowered. They all exploit the New Sincerity's built-in redemption narrative: irony redeemed by sincerity, phony liberal guilt and self-loathing overcome by the revelation that you're a genuinely good and superior and blameless person after all.
The New Sincerity combines the worst of two worlds: all the tedium of hipster irony with all the sanctimony of evangelical Protestantism. This is precisely the attraction for its admirers, who think it combines the best of these worlds: hipper-than-thou posturing without the sneer, Protestantism without the theology. As the synthesis of two different but equally nauseating kinds of smugness, the New Sincerity is a natural gathering point for today's beacons of bourgeois morality. "God" never features in their moral admonitions, but otherwise they're as bad as any Victorian moralist: reaping the rewards of privilege and empire, while chiding the less fortunate with their insufferable rectitude.
This might be a relic of my papist schooling, but I don't believe sincerity, new or old, should be counted among the cardinal virtues, and I think it's sad to see anyone older than a teenager hanging it out for admiration. What good does your sincerity do anyone in this day and age? At least for 17th century Calvinists, saved by faith alone, the quest for sincerity had a spiritual urgency about it: if their faith was insincere, their souls would burn for literal eternity in the literal fires of Hell*. Today's liberal WASPs face no such threat. Nothing is riding on their sincerity, and their struggle to find it is nothing but vanity. Their sincerity is simply a display of fidelity to a constructed self, which is largely built out of consumer choices and hypocrisy. It's the ultimate assertion of bourgeois individualism and bourgeois values.
In political terms, this sincerity is reactionary, and in moral terms, it's irrelevant. If the self you've constructed is good, then being sincere to it can motivate you to good deeds; but all too often, the self you've constructed is a pampered, narcissistic manchild, and being sincere to it is a moral zero. Sincerity exists in the moral realm of intentions, and unless you're a sociopath like Orson Scott Card, what matters more in any moral system are actions and their consequences. Good acts are always better than sincere ones.
Lest anyone declare I'm trying to out-moralise the moralisers and out-prig the prigs: you can stop projecting now, bronies. I'm not trying to knock you off my perch, I'm trying to drag you back down to my level. I'm no model for anyone. I'm lost, like you once were. I'm still searching for meaning and belonging, I'm still struggling with how to be conscious and human in the 21st century and not go insane, and I'm not making any progress. I don't know the answer, but I do know this: the New Sincerity ain't it
camp, kitsch and trash
Here I offer a personal view on the disctinction between camp, kitsch and trash. Now, I'm no student of kitsch, which lately has become an area of some academic interest, and doubtless many of the great minds in humanities departments have investigated the matter in much greater depth and length than I. So I ask the reader to forgive me for the lack of citations in this article, and my general ignorance of the current state of research, as I tread into this rarefied intellectual ground. It is not my intention to barge into the realm of kitsch theorists, or to cut across the various schools of camp theory, or to offer anything which rivals the latest sound and complete theory of trash. This is merely the offering of a humble layman.
Kitsch, the German word for 'trash', was originally applied in the late 19th century to the then-new commercial art for a mass audience, as opposed to 'high art' and 'folk art'. Since then, many of us have reluctantly had to admit that not all mass commercial art is necessarily trash. And besides, the meaning of kitsch has moved on; it now clearly refers to a particular kind of worthless art, and not worthless art in general. So we need a finer-grained definition. I borrow and simplify mine from someone called Dahlhaus [add citation later]. Kitsch, by this definition, is art which aims to evoke some particular emotion, or communicate some message, but doesn't have the resources to do it. It aims high, but its means are too crude and transparent and vulgar. Perhaps the most obvious examples of kitsch are the movies of Ed Wood, which aimed to be thoughtful sci-fi pieces, but were made carelessly on the cheap by a man with no talent. Other examples of kitsch include Forrest Gump, The Matrix, Britpop, certain performances of Liszt, and numerous bad film scores (recent shocking examples includeA History of Violence, Crash and Capote). Needless to say, kitsch is always bad.
Camp -- deliberate bad taste -- is in fact the opposite of kitsch. Camp uses more resources than its aims require. Camp puts a certain amount of ingenuity, subtlety and creative talent into a work which is obviously silly, stupid, or tasteless. Camp can be sublime; sometimes artistic truth is found in expressing more than what is needed or strictly tasteful. Even bad camp is usually better than kitsch. Many objects of fandom are camp. Examples of camp include Handel, Vivaldi, Queen, disco, Raiders of the Lost Ark and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Opera, a ridiculously contrived medium, is more or less camp by default. The same goes for any good stage drama.
Trash aims low and is low. Thus, bad camp can also be trash. Sometimes trash is worse than kitsch, sometimes better. Examples of trash include Russ Meyer movies, Troma movies, death metal, most porn, most pop music, reality TV, in fact most television, most advertising, in fact most of the art people get exposed to in their lives.
To clarify the distinction, here is a quick reference guide.
index
Many critics of the Singularity Institute focus on its cult-like nature: the way it presents itself as the only protection against an absurdly unlikely doomsday scenario; the way its members internalise a peculiar voculabulary that betrays itself when they step outside the cult confines; the way they keep pushing the work of their idolised cult guru on unwilling readers. (In particular, they keep cheerleading for Yudkowsky's endlessly dire Harry Potter fanfic, Mary Sue and the Methods of Rationality.) While all these criticisms are legitimate, and the cultish aspects of the Singularity Institute are an essential part of its power structure, I'm more concerned about the political views it disseminates under the guise of being stridently non-political.
One of Yudkowsky's constant refrains, appropriating language from Frank Herbert's Dune, is "Politics is the Mind-killer". Under this rallying cry, Lesswrong insiders attempt to purge discussions of any political opinions they disagree with. They strive to convince themselves and their followers that they are dealing in questions of pure, refined "rationality" with no political content. However, the version of "rationality" they preach isexpressly politicised.
The Bayesian interpretation of statistics is in fact an expression of some heavily loaded political views. Bayesianism projects a neoliberal/libertarian view of reality: a world of competitive, goal-driven individuals all trying to optimise their subjective beliefs. Given the demographics of lesswrong.com, it's no surprise that its members have absorbed such a political outlook, or that they consistently push political views which are elitist, bigoted and reactionary.
Yudkowsky believes that "the world is stratified by genuine competence" and that today's elites have found their deserved place in the hierarchy. This is a comforting message for a cult that draws its membership from a social base of Web entrepreneurs, startup CEOs, STEM PhDs, Ivy leaguers, and assorted computer-savvy rich kids. Yudkowsky so thoroughly identifies himself with this milieu of one-percenters that even when discussing Bayesianism, he slips into the language of a heartless rentier. A belief should "pay the rent", he says, or be made to suffer: "If it turns deadbeat, evict it."
Members of Lesswrong are adept at rationalising away any threats to their privilege with a few quick"Bayesian Judo" chops. The sufferings caused by today's elites — the billions of people who are forced to endure lives of slavery, misery, poverty, famine, fear, abuse and disease for their benefit — are treated at best as an abstract problem, of slightly lesser importance than nailing down the priors of a Bayesian formula. While the theories of right-wing economists are accepted without argument, the theories of socialists, feminists, anti-racists, environmentalists, conservationists or anyone who might upset the Bayesian worldview are subjected to extended empty "rationalist" bloviating. On the subject of feminism, Muehlhauser adopts the tactics of an MRA concern troll, claiming to be a feminist but demanding a "rational" account of why objectification is a problem. Frankly, the Lesswrong brand of "rationality" is bigotry in disguise.
Lesswrong cultists are so careful at disguising their bigotry that it may not be obvious to casual readers of the site. For a bunch of straight-talking rationalists, Yudkowsky and friends are remarkably shifty and dishonest when it comes to expressing a forthright political opinion. Political issues surface all the time on their website, but the cult insiders hide their true political colours under a heavy oil slick of obfuscation. It's as if "Politics is the mind-killer" is a policy enforced to prevent casual readers — or prospective cult members — from realising what a bunch of far-out libertarian fanatics they are.
Take as an example Yudkowsky's comments on the James Watson controversy of 2007. Watson, one of the so-called fathers of DNA research, had told reporters he was "gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really". Yudkowsky used this racist outburst as the occasion for some characteristically slippery Bayesian propagandising. In his essay, you'll note that he never objects to or even mentions the content of Watson's remarks — for some reason, he approaches the subject by sneering at the commentary of a Nigerian journalist — and neither does he question the purpose or validity of intelligence testing, or raise the possibility of inherent racism in such tests. Instead, he insinuates that anti-racists are appropriating the issue for their own nefarious ends:
Yudkowsky appears to think that racism is an illusion or at best a distraction. He stresses the Bayesian dogma that only individuals matter:
Here, he tells the victims of racial discrimination to forget the fact that their people have been systematically oppressed by a ruling elite for centuries, and face up to the radical idea that their suffering is their own individual problem. He then helpfully reassures them that none of it is their fault; they were screwed over at birth by being simply less intelligent that then creamy white guys at the top:
Yudkowsky would reject the idea that these disadvantaged individuals could improve their lot by grouping together and engaging in political action: politics is the mind-killer, after all. The only thing that can save them is Yudkowsky's improbable fantasy tech. In the future, "intelligence deficits will be fixable given sufficiently advanced technology, biotech or nanotech." And until that comes about, the stupid oppressed masses should sit and bear their suffering, not rock the boat, and let the genuinely competent white guys get on with saving the world.
He is kind of right here