Let me hear you scream

The Times reviews a new book which argues that the internet is killing our culture (that's the book's subtitle) by giving free reign to the wisdom of the crowd:

For one thing, Mr. Keen says, “history has proven that the crowd is not often very wise,” embracing unwise ideas like “slavery, infanticide, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, Britney Spears.”

And democracy.
But also, this terrible wiki-novel.
On the other hand, The Wave. And the urban experience.

Final Tally
Crowd: 4 (Democracy, The Wave, urban life, and Britney Spears (even though citing Britney Spears as the emblem of a fallen culture is always a fresh and in-touch move, Andrew Keen);

Rugged Individual: 4 (a valiant opponent of slavery, infanticide, and the Iraq War, apparently; and way better at art).

Looks like it’s a tie. MC will leave it up to the Applause-o-Meter to decide the winner.

B- for effort

This is the cover of the most recent Newsweek :

Here's my impression of it:


What I'm trying to say is, "it looks like a magazine in a really awkward stage of coming to terms with how much it wishes it were the internet."

On the other hand, the one where I keep the things I actually believe, the magazine industry is looking a lot more like this to me lately


And what I mean by that is "thriving, giving me everything I need and more, and figuring out its shit and its place in the world like never before." For instance, the stories represented by the cover of this Newsweek are awesome.


On a meta-note: It's been a while. I'm so sorry. I've been super, super busy.

Women are great: A timely reminder

This was featured on myspace today and made me love women (this is earnest so don't wait for anything hilarious or overtly political. Learn to love, people. Learn to Love.):

missing my soldier

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Timely and timeless. Major kudos to this girl and even more major kudos to the beauty and strength of the feminine heart.


TO WOMEN!

A baby’s brain and an old man’s heart

Science has confirmed what I always suspected as a teen: rules are totally unfair. According to psychologist Robert Epstein, once we stop treating teens like idiots this they will stop acting so stupid.

Newsflash, Science: childhood is sacred. And according to the average American, MC still has 3-4 years left of sacredness. Don’t ruin this for us like you ruined deep-fried foods, God, and imagining time and space as two separate things.

Unconscious Optics

This is from the Norton Anthology of English Literature headnotes to “The Sixteenth Century”:

Renaissance literature is the product of a rhetorical culture, a culture steeped in the arts of persuasion and trained to process complex verbal signs. (The contemporary equivalent would be the ease with which we deal with complex visual signals, effortlessly processing such devices as fade-out, montage, crosscutting, and morphing.)

If I were to distill modernity into one quality it would be the overabundance of morphing. I bet things are morphing into other things right in front of me – cats into dogs, regular people into powerful rangers – so much that I don’t even notice. It makes you wonder whether our culture has become so saturated with morphing that morphing has lost its affective power.



I can process this image with amazing ease; much like how a sixteenth-century person would have processed an elaborate peroration.

Michelle Malkin is out of control

Who says young Republicans give off amateur porn molested vibes?*,**

This video is powerful 1) because of its message, and 2)because it is a bold first step in finally connecting isolated, rural Libertarians and lonely Conservative men to images of Asian women. And via the Internet no less. This video is pathetic because of everything it is, esp. the feeling that she made it by herself, and so probably went to National Camera Exchange and purchased a tripod by herself as well. And then just quietly set it up in her back yard. Silently put her hair in pigtails in front of her bathroom mirror. For those of you that don't know, Malkin is such a big name in conservative punditry that she full-on guest hosts The O'Reilly Factor sometimes. Apparently this is what big political thinkers do in their free time. Like how Hannah Arendt wrote poetry.

* If you have a minute read this shit
** Are there any other men out there who look at Bill Shulz through their TV like when you're on mushrooms and look in a mirror and see the most specific nightmare of what you never want to be/clearly are articulated in a way you can never forget?

They’re grrrrreat

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the words of this picture are: “it might be time to reconsider the meaning of protest as a form of activism.” Repeated 66.66 times.
An MC dramatization (TM):
Guy in the future: “Remember when globalization almost became the new paradigm of cultural, political, and economic order? That was a close one.”
Girl in the future: “Yeah, it’s a good thing some people took it upon themselves to dress up like assholes.”
It is one thing to protest Angela Merkel's attempt to put protesters scents on file (which, according to “The Lives of Others,” was also a Stasi tactic; so way to not repeat the mistakes of the past, New Germany), but protesting a concept like “globalization” seems like trying to have an argument with a baby. Or like protesting the world. And if that’s your goal, any teenager can tell you that the most effective way is to listen to music really loud and smoke cigarettes.