jakec:

Between showing up at relevant events with The Tangenitalia and helping other companies not look so shitty, Becky Lang exhibits her enchantment with the world via a limitless expression of creativity. She is not a proponent of the theory that you can unlock your creativity by doodling.

(Source: jakec)

“i kinda look like kristin stewart, but i’m not quite as pretty as her, and this creates many challenges in my life. it’s scary to face those challenges; it really takes guts. when i’m troubled, i like to ride my bike in front of a pastoral scene that reminds people of simpler times, on a bike that also reminds people of simpler times, at sunset. this clears my head and primes me to think about classic media and forget about ‘the twilight saga.’ when i think i’ve reached a decision, i stop for a minute to gaze into the distance. viewing the whole horizon really puts things in perspective. so what if i don’t have bella’s immaculately shaped brows? i have fringed loafers and at least 10 friendship anklets.”

One thing we love about media is watching characters we feel we intimately know undergo deep emotional catharsis. We love watching Buffy mourn about the trauma of coming back from the dead by hiding in her room and staking vamps with unprofessional gusto. We love watching Margot Tannenbaum smoke cigarettes in the bathroom to get over her horniness/isolation toward different members of her adoptive family. But there’s something we might possibly enjoy even more, which is watching characters underreact.

I say this because Netflix streaming has led me to watch “Pushing Daisies” and “Dead Like Me,” and there came a time when I was only watching shows where people experienced unexpected, brutal and gory deaths regularly. You’d think this might turn me into a nervous wreck who is afraid of falling pianos and renegade bees, but it actually had the opposite effect. I believe this is because the characters on these shows are unusual in that they severely underreact to these scenarios. I don’t think this is purposeful, but incidental. The plot development is so fast and so regimented (Ok, that guy got cut in half? We have to get back to the pie shoppe!) that there is little time to devote to not just how characters mourn, but how they physically react in the moment. 

George on “Dead Like Me” usually shrugs it off, while Chuck on “Pushing Daisies” says something cute and flirts with the piemaker. Except for the occasional scenario when its convenient for the narrative arc of the entire episode for them to emote, they are usually cool, calm, collected … even bored by death.

I think this is also why I like the episodes of “Beavis and Butthead” when they get hurt. Butthead might be dying of a prolonged nosebleed, but instead of freaking out he’ll just chuckle and say, “Cool.” 

We are simple creatures. We mock the facial expressions of people on TV because it helps our autonomic nervous systems understand how they are feeling (in other words, if you smile you will feel better, scientifically proven). After watching enough characters yawn at death, our own fears and anxieties seem a little bit easier. 

I’d never give up shows like “Six Feet Under” or “Weeds, which show the degradation of emotions that happen in times of trauma in insanely depressing ways. Those shows make our own process of dealing with things seem less solitary and private. But there is comfort in watching Butthead be too retarded to worry about the fact that he just sawed off the tip of his finger, and I am grateful for that.

Once, I got this idea in my mind - an idea about a movie, one that looked kind of like “The Matrix” but more expensive and without stupid Keanu Reeves. It did not generate deep within my subconscious, but instead entered externally, via everyone around me talking about it all the damn time. Finally, I went out, braving hell and high water (literally, drove my car like a boat) and saw it.

Since my old journalism days firmly tell me it’s too late for a relevant review, I’ll just write a few Becky Talking Points. I will intersperse them with minimalist “Inception” posters for your enjoyment and also to prime you for a later post about minimalist posters.

-I think that Christopher Nolan came up with the idea for “Inception” when he was watching “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and that beach house fell down at the end. He was probably like, “Whoa shit! Why can’t this movie be nothing but houses falling down in your mind? Now THAT would be a movie! Now if only someone could mix it with the sweet-ass, slow-mo, anti-gravity bending in ‘The Matrix,’ that would be $$$$$$.”

-While I liked the suspense, part of me kept wondering what “Inception” would have been like if it were more about character-development and emotion. Like if the idea they were planting was less important (a new flavor of Vitamin Water?) and we really zeroed in on Cobb and his wife and the hot business guy and his dad. I would have liked to see that go really Freudian. Less bombs please, we’re talking about the time he walked in on his parents having sex here. 

-Expanding on that idea, “Inception” was a pretty pure concept film. There was almost no cultural context. You could say it was kind of like the opposite of a Nick Hornby book/film; no one’s gonna stop and talk about Joni Mitchell or the price of hot tubs. That makes it easier for the film to avoid being dated and to feel more “universal,” but that got me thinking: Isn’t most media now primarily about cultural context? I feel like media that doesn’t reference pop culture and current events feels flat and boring, and now we expect films and books to be time capsules for future nostalgia. The idea of separating themes like love and death from our personal connection to media seems completely foreign to me now. What’s a breakup this decade without listening to The National?

-There also weren’t many phones in “Inception” - I think I counted 2 or 3 times when they took out phones, and that was only, oddly, in the dream. I’m not crazy about what I’m about to do, but I’m going to try to connect it to a common “problem.” The characters in “Inception” seemed to have an uncanny knack for connecting with one another, meaning they knew how to be in the same place at the same time, without letting us know how they got there (like a dream?!). To an audience that coordinates every second of their day using cell phones, Twitter and Facebook, that seems strange. Maybe it’s expressing a fantasy of modern society where people a) wish they could take the next step, unplug from the wireless hub, and connect with people on a more psychic level b) feel paranoid about this wireless hub of connection we’re on and want to connect with people in a more private place, which, at its most exaggerated, would be a dream.

-Would you say “Inception” is this decade’s “The Matrix?” That was the dumb question I liked to ask people who talked about “Inception” all the time. So, asking myself, I would say yes. It makes people question reality, has enormous presence as a meme and created special effects that are novel and haunting. I do think “Inception” shows society at a different place than “The Matrix” did. Instead of feeling paranoid about institutions and disenchanted with urban isolation, “Inception” is more about foggy introspectiveness. Whereas before we were worried that we were dissociated with reality and other people, we now feel so wired into other people’s lives that we feel comfortable turning inward, and even letting other people in on the process.

Or maybe it’s that we fear we are boring so we all want to imagine that we have complex layers and massive creative power that could bend Parisian cafes in a million directions and spray them all over. 

5. Red Stag Supperclub

4. Lush Nightclub

3. Donnie Dirk’s Zombie Den

2. Cult Status Gallery

1. Loring Pasta Bar

#5 was hard. up for suggestions.

Favorite things - Do yours too!

(coolest bathroom - Cult Status)

Favorite art galleries

1. Altered Esthetics

2. Soap Factory

3. Cult Status

4. First Amendment & CoExhibitions

5. Rosalux

Also recently became acquainted with Intermedia Arts, which is doing very cool things.

Favorite bands (completely arbitrary order)

1. Private Dancer

2. Phantom Tails

3. Bight Club

4. Buffalo Moon

5. Blind Shake

6. Dada Trash Collage

Favorite restaurants

1. Hell’s Kitchen

2. Birchwood Cafe

3. Bulldog NE

4. Bad Waitress 

5. Village Wok

Favorite Bars

1. Triple Rock

2. Kitty Cat Klub

3. Hexagon

4. U Otter

5. 501 Club

Favorite artists & designers, not in order: Danimal, Michael Gaughan, Jennifer Davis, Broken Crow, Aesthetic Apparatus, Mike Davis & Burlesque, Adam Turman, Biafra Art, Anthem Heart, Lovely MPLS, Terrence Payne, Chuck U

plus a bunch more I probably forgot.

Also one of my favorite things that doesn’t fit in any of these categories is MPLS.TV!

I think the American subconscious mind of the late 20th century is perfectly portrayed in Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video. It starts out with a white blonde kid (Macaulay Culkin) trying to piss off his parents with rock’n’roll by shooting his dad out of the house using speakers set to the volume “Are You Nuts?!” He ends up in the sahara, watching Michael Jackson, some tribesmen and some lions sing and dance. After that its a full-on buffet of diversity as MJ dances with every American stereotype of foreign cultures.

The kid from “Home Alone” plot is the American microcosm. Domestic angst, generational misunderstanding, a longing for an urban life that looks like “Sesame Street” played by humans. The foreign dancers are the American macrocosm. It’s what we think is out there - hazy, simple, funny-dressed, antiquated. So what is MJ to this scenario? I think he’s sort of a guide forged out of the melding of Jungian opposites. He is man-woman. He is man-boy. He is dark-light. 

There is also a long section where people change into other races and sexes. In each of his videos, MJ gets lighter skin and longer hair. It’s like he is daring people to react to it. Or like he is trying to make us share his fantasy of transforming. 

Anyhoo, this probably all seems really obvious or cultural studies 101, what have you. I haven’t watched a Michael Jackson video since I was a little kid, so it was weird to re-watch them all last night as an adult, knowing everything I now know about his career and life and death. 

Here’s a link to the video.

Also, I usually don’t have patience to watch videos online, but this is so funny:

I’m going to write a novel starring all of the hurricanes from 2008. They are less generically white than I remember hurricanes being. I might leave out Wilfred, or people will not buy it. Maybe Bertha too.

Beware …

HURRICANE KYLE

On M.I.A.’s latest album, /\/\/\Y/\, she does a lot of hating on the Internet. The first track warns that the Internet is practically becoming part of our bodies, and in the bonus track, “Internet Connection,” she raps, “You don’t understand me/What’s the malfunction?/ Internet connection.” She also makes fun of a guy for tweeting at her too often, and in the track “Space Odyssey” she fantasizes that her lines are down and no one can connect to her. Sure, as she said in an interview with Nylon magazine, she genuinely believes that Facebook and Google were invented by the government. And while big brother-style paranoia should definitely be kept alive in the new millennium, I can’t help but wonder if M.I.A. also hates the Internet because she has accidentally created an Internet persona that undermines her credibility with her mainstream fan-base.

The idea that there is a gap between our real life presence and our Internet persona has finally become more of a common idea than an abstract speculation. Usually it’s manifested in joking lines like, “They’re only Facebook hot” (I call this the “Facebook Hotness two-point margin of error,”) or “She’s cool in person but online she seems motherfucking crazy.” A couple years ago, Chuck Klosterman wrote an essay in GQ about how “Hannah Montana” symbolized a unique psychological problem for tweens: The dissonance between their lackluster real-life personality and their hyper-manipulated online personalities. Back then this seemed like a leap, but after Twitter, Foursquare, yada yada all became the territory of those over 18, it is starting to become clear that representing yourself accurately online is a talent.

M.I.A. has always had a controversial online presence. When I wrote a review of her last album, “Kala,” Pitchfork was in the process of making her look completely retarded by re-posting angry, all-caps quotes from her MySpace and pondering if she had gone crazy. Now that she’s tweeted Lynn Hirschberg’s number as punishment for writing an unflattering profile of her in the New York Times, M.I.A. has even further proven that she cannot translate her fiery antics online in a way that her fans will accept. 

Here are a few traits that characterize M.I.A.’s online presence:

-She writes in all-caps

-She uses visual decoration

-She uses letter repetition to represent emotional emphasis

-Subjective phonetic spelling (“whyte”), letter/number substitution (“b” “4”)

-She ignores the current trend of minimal formatting

Basically, she speaks in what I call “Netspeak,” of which all of these are traits.

English is changing on the Internet, but the first people to adopt it are those who do not feel pressure to conform to Standard English. Invert that sentence, and it basically means people in lower socio-economic strata, who are less educated in a traditional manner. That’s why it was so easy for Pitchfork to look intellectually superior just by excerpting her MySpace writing. If you simply converted it into Standard English, it would not seem nearly as “crazy.”

Despite the fact that almost every interviewer (other than Hirschberg) calls her incredibly articulate, and her lyrics prove that as well, online she uses traits that have become associated with “ghetto” English. This goes back to a battle that has forged on in the history of every language. The elite people in power always cling to standardized versions of their language while in the less regulated parts of society, new words and habits are cropping up all over the place that eventually “trickle up” and change the entire language.

M.I.A., being politically against everything that comes with regulation and domination, is actually being true to her beliefs by using this newer, “dirty” brand of netspeak. 

Not that I’m saying she is the ultimate example of how an anti-establishment musician should act online. The main purpose of the traits she uses (all-caps, letter repetition) is to express emotion, which suggests that she tends to use the Internet impulsively rather than with careful thought and articulation. 

Conveniently, “/\/\/\Y/" ended up being the album that articulated her frustration with the Internet just as her online persona bubbled over the limit that her fans were willing to accept. While it may have been inappropriate for her to tweet the journalist’s phone number, it’s also unfair for hipster kids (her basic fan-base) to expect everyone to conform a standardized, upper-class, mostly-white definition of how you are supposed to act online. 

What do you think?

I’ve been watching “Pushing Daisies” and I’m starting to suspect that it is a subtle metaphor about a shift in men’s attitude toward sex. The old attitude was that men like sex but don’t like that it creates babies. The new attitude is that men like that sex doesn’t have to create babies but they don’t like condoms or STDs. And finally, a third attitude has arisen, held by what some might call “the reptilian man.” The reptilian man wants sex to create as many babies as possible while he runs off to other exotic places creating more babies. That man is sad that sex has become impotent. 

The basic plot of the show is that this guy, Ned, can bring dead things back to life just by touching them. But he’s gotta be careful, because if they stay alive for more than a minute, someone else dies, and if he touches them again, ever, they die. Occasionally he abuses this power for someone or something he really digs, like his golden retriever and his childhood sweetheart, who looks kind of like Zooey Deschanel plus Isla Fischer but less pretty than both. The former he scratches with a wooden hand, and the latter he kisses through a sheet of Saran wrap. Starting to see the condom metaphor?

Ned, like penises and sperm, has life-giving power. Let’s say Ned uses this power like a traditional mammal that is somewhat of an alpha male. He runs around poking everyone to life and saying, “To hell with the consequences. Life-giving sure is a rush!” It’s all about the numbers. In a sense, this is how human penises are wired. 

But remember, when Ned brings someone to life, someone else dies, or the initial person has to die again. In sexuality studies, they point out that condoms have accidentally equated sex with death. During the AIDS-prevention movement, public service announcements about using condoms accidentally made them a reminder that sex can kill. They became the signifier of this paradoxical function of procreating (and all its similar gestures). 

Ned realizes his life-giving power has a reaper-faced flip side, and it becomes a real big drag. Nevertheless, his desire for love, lust and affection occasionally leads him to get close to the precipice of letting that big drag happen. He is forced to explore those feelings through a “barrier” that requires constant upkeep and also makes him feel like he’s “missing out on the real thing.”

This works for awhile but leaves Ned with an existential ennui. Every time he kisses through plastic he is reminded that life-giving can equal death, and he has to live with a dulled sensation forever.

The plastic (or the wooden hand) comes to symbolize that sex has become something different to the human psyche than it used to be. It separates sex from its initial function - baby-making - and makes it into a leisure activity that has somehow accumulated death as a possible consequence. This confuses the reptilian man, who doesn’t realize why he’s poking and poking at thin air. Will Ned and the reptilian man develop a new strategy?

I’m only on episode 6, so we’ll see.

Review: “King of the Beach” and also Nathan Williams’ merit as a human

Last year everyone loved to hate Nathan Williams (AKA Wavves) because his album was too lo-fi, he sucked live and he couldn’t hold his drugs well in front of cool European kids. Plus, Pitchfork liked him, so turning up one’s nose was a quick way to show that you didn’t give a shit wat P-fork thought.

Despite my usual urge to be a total lemming by being an anti-lemming, something attracted me to Wavves. Actually, 3 things:

-The array of weird-ass metaphors journalists were coming up with to describe his scuzzy, lo-fi sound. They were all like, “It’s like fiber glass made of fairy dust!” “It’s like a garbage can full of cotton candy!” 

-The doubled-up “v” in his name and the tripled-up “v” in his sophomore release “Wavvves.” It was like the extra “v’s” were used to create … waves.

-Most importantly, his talent for mixing fuck-up male energy with artsy psychedelia.

Yes, I enjoyed “Wavvves.” I liked his self-loathing, his outward loneliness, his windy static sound, and his trippy vocal harmonies. The song “Beach Goth” was like a mixture of Panda Bear’s looped nature sounds with the film “Lords of Dogtown.” 

Now he’s on his third LP (the second one if we’re counting records that anyone cares about), “King of the Beach” and he has 3 new points of attraction for any reluctant haterz:

-He’s dating the chick from Best Coast, and her album “Crazy for You” is possibly the best album out this year. (Granted, it’s been a bad year.)

-He has somehow copped the late Jay Reatard’s band, meaning that he is no longer just a loner droning away but now charged with the task of carrying on a beloved musician’s legacy.

-Pitchfork rated his album Best New Music, again.

And yeah, ok, they’re probably right. “King of the Beach” is a good album from top to bottom. The lo-fi glare that hung on the last album like smog on Mexico City is gone, which makes it less artsy and controversial. Sad for artsy, controversial kids like me, but oh well. Instead, things are a little bit more Reatarded, as in it has that ’90s punk sound that you’ll keep on because it’s catchy even though it might make your roommates think you’re not old enough to buy cigarettes. Half the songs follow that vein, and the other half are reminiscent of when Panda Bear teamed up with Atlas Sound and made that cutesy “Walkabout” song that made the indie world cream its pants. Weirdly enough, tracks that don’t fit that vein could be dead ringers for Architecture in Helsinki. Totally forgot who they were? Too bad, cuz Wavves is bringing back their twee-muppet sound.

Best tracks:

“Mickey Mouse” - Sorry to mention Panda Bear AGAIN, but it looks like Panda Bear’s “Tomboy” might not have quite the majesty or the melodies of “Person Pitch,” but at least Noah Lennox has developed a few understudies by now. This track makes with the beach-like loops and the unselfconscious “woooooo oooos” that made me love Wavves in the first place. I think he’s saying, “I never wanna be (something), when the pig in the back of my brain/ Told me that I don’t mean shit.” This is exactly the quasi-schizophrenic lyrical tone that Panda Bear is aiming for when instead he falls into un-clever irony - “Do you know what coolness is?” Yeah, it’s dating the girl from Best Coast.

“Green Eyes” - The best of the punk tracks. In case you were wondering, fame is hard for Nathan Williams, just like it is for um, Heidi Montag. As he sings, “My own friends/ Hate my guts/ So what?/ Ah so what?/ Who gives a fuck?” He wines. He yells. He curses. He sings. He even breaks it down at the end: “I’m so lame/ I’m just not man enough.” It’s like watching Jennifer Aniston get dumped by John Mayer. There is something relieving about projecting shitty problems onto people a) hotter or b) richer and more successful than you. Since your friends probably don’t hate your guts, you’re bound to feel good that you’re at least more popular than this guy, even though he’s getting more and more famous providing that service for you. Watch out, Williams, or people won’t hate you and then you won’t have anything to sing about.

(via Magic Molly)

SPLURGE ON:  Space cars

UNDERSTAND: Space languages

BUTTER: As a tanning method to soak up awesomely strong future UVs

AVOID: Getting in arguments with people who think that the Mac iSpaceship is pointless

PURCHASE: A young clone of myself to watch TV with and feed future snacks and warn about her capacity to get cavities. 

RESEMBLE: Christopher Walken

DEFLECT:  Pleas to trade my gold bars for cash.

OWN: The domain name snackattacklive.com

RENT: A houseboat because renting a spaceship will still be for yuppies

COLLECT: Test tube Pokemon

LAUGH: At future sitcom “Post-post-modern Family”

APPRECIATE: That “Star Wars,” in the long run, was more of a cultishly-adored big box phenomenon than “Avatar”

GOSSIP: About all the gross old people fake parts my friends will get installed

HAVE PROVEN: That in my twenties, I was just quasi-mortal-ish enough to survive to the era where science can reverse self-destructive behaviors

FEAR: Getting reincarnated as a test tube Pokemon

What’s on your list?