We tumblin now

Liz: http://hereismybrain.tumblr.com/

Nick: TBA

Nick's summer mix: coming soon

Sumer Mix 2009

1.“I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked,” Ida Maria:

I'd like them better if they didn't almost look like a ska band, but other than that these guys are the real deal. Also, they share my Facebook quiz nationality (Swedish).

2. “Rhythm of the Night,” Corona:

Dance music of the era when dance music was for people with tops instead of plaid shirts. Now it's for people with tops AND people with plaid shirts. Democracy!

[Spoiler alert if you haven't seen Beau Travail. What happens right before this scene is that the male gaze gets reversed, and then some laboring bodies get eroticized. Oh and meanwhile the postcolonial psyche is really fragmented:]

3. “Get Ready for This," 2 Unlimited:

See above.

4. “Lisztomania," Phoenix:

You had me at Liszt. And at not being the Decemberists.

5. “Thug Passion,” 2Pac:

Last summer I bought a bottle of Alize because of this song. It’s gross FYI.

6. “You Get What You Give,” The New Radicals:

Did you know I love uplifting music? Almost exclusively. I don’t tell people that because it makes me seem like a sociopath. The kind of person who would order mint chocolate chips online. The only people who have listened to the New Radicals in the past nine years are ant torturers, YouTube commenters, and me. And probably Europeans.

7. “Little Secrets,” Passion Pit:

Sorry I’m a blogger :( It gets the party started, tho.

8. “Bizarre Love Triangle,” New Order:

I advanced the thesis that New Order was to 2009 what Led Zeppelin was to 2004, and my friend was like, “New Order is to 2004 what Led Zeppelin was to 2004.” Touché.

9. “American Girl,” Tom Petty:

The breakdown of the song always reminds me of a dad band. Just bein' moms and dads. But the outro really brings it in terms of shredding. And what other terms are there?
Play back to back with “American Boy” for an intergenerational battle of the sexes!

10. “Wannabe in L.A.,” Eagles of Death Metal:

Why yes I do.

11. Thermals, “Now We Can See”:

This song reminds me of my pure love for music when I was a kid first learning about music. One of The Thermals was like, “let’s just write a modest, breezy jam that we can play in basement house parties for eternity” and the other Thermals were like “why not?" Plus it's about what life would be like outside the Cave and shattering the progress myth, whut.

In short, if you need me this summer, I'll be sitting in my office quietly listening to “Jock Jams.”

Case Closed

I'm glad we, as a people, got to the bottom of this one in time.












You will live on in the best parts of our <3s





Peace.







Love Mr. Jackson

Short Story Review

Since this blog is now exclusively devoted to short stories and reviews, here's some exciting news: the latest Jonathan Franzen short story is about me! It’s set in Saint Paul in the 1980s and 90s (actually in Nick’s immediate neighborhood), and the main character’s son goes to our high school, class of 2001. So I guess it’s really about Nick. Anyway, it’s worth reading if you want a window into our lives. And isn’t that why we all read? For a window into my and Nick’s lives?

Even though the story is basically Stuff White People Like in short story form, I do think that it captures the local color in an authentic* way. And maybe that is actually why we all read. Maybe. Short stories, at least.

*I’m trying to bring back using “authenticity” without scare quotes. Join me! Unless you’re my student, in which case you probably need to think harder about how experience is always mediated, B+.

BWSS: Teacup Puppies

Have you guys ever seen or heard of these? They are puppies that have been bred inside teacups. You know, to meet mankind's unceasing demand for tiny things.

Aww.

(That's Nick in the background if you were wondering. This was actually his senior yearbook photo.)

But guess what. It turns out that "cuteness" as an aesthetic value can lead to practices that are morally -- wait for it -- questionable.

The Family of Man: Our love of the tiny unites us all.

Anyway, Teacup Puppies equal total genetic messes. Apprarently their bones are so brittle that sometimes they will just fall apart. They were not meant for this earth. It's sad and awful. It's a lot like Benjamin Button.

“Fuck you, Darwin.”

So, in short: we are tampering with nature in order to make it harmonize with our aesthetic values. But in so doing -- in our unceasing quest to produce a better, more beautiful product -- we are left with something frail and maladptive, something fundamentally broken, something whose very existence is an act violence.

In other words:

B.

W.

S.

S.

Or, I guess, BWSM (Busy Writing Scholarly Monograph)

Crash is a piece of junk

Nobody watch this movie. What a misguided, frustrating, misanthropic junk factory. Here are some of the questions it left me with, which may contain spoilers but you don’t care because you’re never going to watch it:

Are we really supposed to think, “Even though Matt Dillon is a racist sexual assaulter, he has been redeemed because he is nice to his sick dad and good at rescuing people from cars”? Because that’s what it seems like you’re asking us to think. Why does the Persian guy get so angry at the Hispanic guy? Calm down. How do people in this movie even know so many different racial stereotypes? It’s like they all Wikipedia’d “racial stereotypes” and made flashcards to prepare for the car accident they will inevitably be getting in tomorrow with someone of a different race. Why is Sandra Bullock such a crazy b? Why are we supposed to care about her?
WHY?





In the world in which the person who made Crash lives, everyone is:
1. Awful
2. Offended by ridiculous things, and jumping to the conclusion that people are being racist all the time.
3. Being racist all the time
4. Acting free from the dictates of reason, temperament, or any of the things we usually think of as “causes”
5. Shooting people all the time (“I just encountered a hardship. Time to shoot someone.”)
6. A terrible driver. The 9 or 10 characters get in like 6 car accidents in the course of one day. Seriously, guys, eyes on the road.

Also, in this world, there is no such thing as humor or the ordinary, just extremes of violence and sentimentalism. (Screenwriter 1: “We should do a close-up on the daughter yelling ‘Daddy’s home!’ right as the dad is about to get shot.” Sreenwriter 2: “That gives it more pathos.” The script doctor for this movie was actually Christopher Walken going “More pathos!” after every scene.)

"Not quite enough pathos."

Some of you may be objecting, “But Liz, it’s not supposed to be realistic. There are all those nods to magical realism, like when the little girl survives the gunshot (before we find out, seamless reveal!, they were blanks) or when the cops implausibly let Terrence Howard go or when the woman escapes the exploding car, which are meant to signal the film's true genre.” Maybe. Maybe. But first of all, you can’t be like “it’s magical realism, so it doesn’t matter that none of the characters have coherent motivations.” Second of all, magical realism is gay. Third of all, if you’re not working in the realist mode, don’t present yourself as a social problem film. It’s disingenuous.  Red pill or blue, Crash: do you want to be The Wire, and systemically trace problems through chains of cause and effect, or do you want to get high and cry about the evil inherent to the human condition and the whims of Lady Chance? You can't have it both ways. You can't expose something as "gritty" and "real," while at the same time allegorizing that thing in grotesque exaggerations.

Or at least you can't, Crash, because you suck. Some people can. To illuminate, and in the spirit of A Unicorn's Unicorn's "gayness scatter plot", I have constructed this Realness Scatter Plot (click for large view):




Additions and amendments welcome.

Finally, I leave you with a Would You Rather: Would you rather watch Crash every week for the rest of your life, or listen to "Crash" by Dave Matthews every time you have sex for the rest of your life?

report abuse

"I'm Done!"--> "Publish"


A hand well played.


I used to be worried that moms would never understand how to use facebook or be comfortable there, and that the understanding and comfort wouldn't show all over their face.


Diane's pretty proud of her job as a journalist at a totally regular kind of journalism job that merits pride.


I think we all know what kind of life situation resulted in the above here.


"I'm having so much fun picking my 5!" — Travis


Deirdre's life is right out of a book. (I was gonna do a link to the book, but I forgot which book was totally weird and gay).


yikes.


Nailed it, Jackson.


not at my wax museum!


His Didi Conn was weak.


to me this seems more violently anti-Eugene Mirman than anti-semetic.






A *very* u-good uuhhh-daaay. hey waiter...I'll have what he's having!

Women II

Here's a question for the ladies:

This picture would be so awkward to come across when you were going through old pictures with friends or family, right?



That's an inexcusable fashion "don't."

Now I'm imagining you as a grandmother, looking through old photos with your granddaughters and you come across it and they're like "Grandma!!!" and you just look at it like "fashions have really changed, haven't they?" and move on to the next without saying anything at all.

I'm imagining all of you in that situation. I'm running the whole scene through from start to finish, over and over, placing each of you reading in the lead role of your own cycle of the fantasy. One after another.

Women

why is this always good?


This is what I imagine women do when I'm not around. I wrote a play about it:
Women
Stevie: It smells so good here.
Sue Ellen: We smell so good.
A Warm, Gentle Wind: Here I come: fresh white cotton dresses, wisps of long blonde hair, loosely tied bows of hair ribbon white and black!

Juliana: Let's share our worlds with men!
Sue Ellen: Let's destroy men!
Stevie: We will love men. They will destroy themselves, some of them. Others will be strong.
Juliana: let's sing a song.
Stevie: I've got one:


Sue Ellen: that was really good, guys.

Stevie: The sun and wine and weed make me so warm inside! I can barely keep my ....eyes....open....
A Warm, Gentle Wind: Sleep. Sleep, dreamless, sweetly.
[several hours later, the sun has set]

Juliana: [slowly opening eyes] Fireflies!

The End

In this economy...

Here's a game I made up. It's called "In This Economy..." or "Slate pitch meeting."

It's just fill-in-the-blank and the rules are whoever does it best wins.
Here's the template:
"In this economy, ________________________."

I'll go first.

In this economy, you have to get creative. Which is why I sewed recycled buttons all over my suit.

In this economy, I've gotten to spend a lot more time with my teenage son and that's worth a lot.

In this economy, you can still enjoy yourself and even indulge yourself!

In this economy, it's like DJ culture.

In this economy, I got a grant for my non-profit.

In this economy, maybe we should spend our money on everyone gets a cool gun and a cool knife.

2.
Here's a country hit (that might also be a viral hit (?) [I can't figure out the Billboard charts, here, but people are loving it on Youtube]) that's about the new economy/greater depression. It's by John Rich.

I like it when country songs do this. It makes me realize I sometimes don't know where to draw a line between gross opportunism and political relevance. John Rich wrote "We're All Raisin' McCain." He wrote it about how we're all just raisin' McCain.

Anyway, check this new economy song out. It contrasts the "make believe" of finance, sums like "billions," and New York, to the real world where they're shuttin Detroit down. It's politically complicated, it's surprisingly urban-centric, and it's legitimately good.




And then this

Breaking our silence

get thinky with that.

Best, always,

Nick

It's 2009: What's the new Furries?

"The more things change, the more things stay the same."
- Martin Luther King

I'm glad the feeling of finding out about Furries, and trying to figure out what was going on with Furries, coincided with the rise of the Internet and trying to figure out what was going on with that. Each helped me explore essential and otherwise hidden truths about the other, and from those truths I learned genuinely new things about people, the world, myself, truth itself, my roommates, etc. More simply, each — furries and baby Internet 2.0 — will forever be linked in my mind, as I fondly remember the brief period of time when 3/4ths of Google image searches included things like this:

(PS — if you like "there are two kinds of people in the world"s: Ta2KoPitW, ones who keep their image search safesearch on medium, and ones who look at those people like they don't understand the joy of living in the world at all)

But, now, The Internet is a different thing. The world is a different place. Researching, sharing, and discussing Furries is no longer a valid use of time. Bringing them up is sometimes necessary for reference, but bringing them up as central objects of talk dings culturally tone deaf, like mullet jokes or telling people discussing Facebook that you prefer real human interaction or Michael McDonald impersonations. It should all still be valid and fun, but, meme over.

But like I said, Furries wasn't any old meme, and it's being over has left a void. I wonder: what in our current cultural landscape has taken Furries' place? What could? What phenomenon out there is going to teach us and guide us, with the gentle nudging of the Furry-encounter's mixture of discomfort and too-much-comfort, toward the truths of our world, people, selves, and roommates today, in 2009? I'm pretty sure that's a valid question and that's how things work. As a wise man once said, culture and society maintains exactly the same structure, always, and progress is found in the variables. Like how cavemen had tiny dog-shaped dinosaurs for pets, and now regular men have real dogs. Or another good example is how cavewomen wore necklaces made out of jagged white rocks, and now women prefer necklaces made out of beautiful smooth pearls and knee-high leather boots over their pants even though it's basically like wearing a burkha in all-over print of the words "boring, let's Netflix entire seasons of HBO dramas." I can't think of another example, but probably just think about cavemen more. It's the best way to answer big social questions.

Anyway, Furries 2009. What will it be/is it? It's an open question, readers, but I'll get the ball rolling with some options I figured out. I'm grasping, though.

Still, here goes:

Possible Contenders for the Furries of ObamAmerica

1. Dubai


Reasons:
Like Furries it is jacked-up, mysterious, 80's-style dreamy looking, fascinating, fantastical, futury, foreign, not nearly foreign enough. It's like a weird part of our collective dreamscape that we never believed was actually in any real world until we heard whispers of the dream, somewhere, being true, and then tried to research on the Internet only to get locked into a frustratingly asymptotic journey of confusion.

Like Furries, Dubai is often referenced as a "symptom," and as such is rumored to be the subject of an upcoming MTV TrueLife, just like Furries were.

Additionally, Dubai seems like where Furries would live.

This might be because pictures of Dubai look like things from Second Life, and Second Life legitimately has a lot of Furry avatars in it. See, the Furry wiki for more on that, if you want to save your linden bucks




Witness: Furries in Second Life watching a Second Life TV show called the Funday PawPet Show, that looks like it was filmed in first life:


Remember this insane misunderstanding of the Internet? When Second Life Newt Gingrich held a virtual press conference announcing that the conference itself was the "future of government"? To a crowd of horrible monsters, face-morphing and flying around on segways?

But all that might take Dubai out of the running. Dubai might be too much like Furries to be the new Furries.
Furries : sex :: Dubai : architecture
I think that's the final verdict.

2. Reborns


Reasons:
Similar internet/blog buzz, subject of similar BBC documentaries, similar mix of the most benign love and the most perverted.

The structure of reborn moms' relationship to their reborn babies might be similar to relationships in Furry-dom as well. On the documentaries they always say things like "all the good parts of being a mom and none of the bad!" They're obsessed with living some very particular Oprah-set-hued dream-image of babies/motherhood and not the "real" experience of babies/motherhood.

It's about loving/living images like these:


not these:


Similarly, Furries are are obsessed with a very specific 70s-80s Japan-ish cartoon image of animals, and not actual animals at all.

It's about being overly attracted to animals like these:



Not these:


Outside of both groups being likewise locked into a very specific world of images, both include a weird shared world of tactile and "thing" obsession. Technicalities of latex and fur and fake eyes, as well as an obsession over the materials and techniques of making the actual fur costume/fake baby look like the the image in the Furry's/re-mom's respective minds, dominate discussion on both crews' message boards. Furries are obsessed with working jaws and eyes for their costumes. Reborn ladies are obsessed with wrinkles and veins and individual hairs. In the BBC doc a lady is pacing for the arrival of her "mixed race open-eyed smiler," but then, after it arrives, she is forced to return it because it has a crack in the back of the neck and she doesn't want anything "not perfect, because its supposed to be perfect."

Furries have the added tactile obsession of rubbing and cumming in their costumes. Cumming doesn't seem to be on Reborn ladies' minds. But I guess that's ladies for you. Why periodically milk the cow for milk it needs to be milked for when you can have the rubber baby to love for $200-$1000?

As a side note here, regarding the place between being trapped in a world of images and an obsession with weird tactile sex things: A friend of mine was telling me that she had a friend who made fur sports mascot costumes for a living, and she was amazed that most of said friend's clients weren't actual mascots but just people who wanted the suits for themselves. She didn't know what Furries were. But then my friend said "she says they're almost all autistic." That's one to put in your pipe next time you're trying to figure out autism.

ANYWAY—

Final verdict: just maybe. But still, I don't know what additional lessons reborns teach us that Furries don't.

There is even this strain of reborn-dom:

Which makes enough sense to reborners that dolls like that are included alongside pure human reborn dolls available for adoption at this reborn nursery.



3. MonKids

I guess this one is more for the easy segue than an actual contender. "MonKids" was a brief but noble effort on behalf of ABC News and the Internet, but learning about women who buy monkeys as a replacement for dead/impossible children didn't really teach me anything new about people, and instead reassured me that people's misunderstandings of monkeys are timeless. Monkey babies can't be the new Furries because monkey babies are the monkey babies of forever.

Still, I will never forget Angelle Sampey:


She was a professional motorcycle racer who "didn't have time to be pregnant" so she raised a monkey as a child, until it attacked her and she sent it to the old monkey sanctuary.

The best part of the Primetime special featuring Angelle was when she visited the sanctuary where her MonKid lived and her MonKid only came up to her to eat her carrot pieces and acted like he had no idea who she was and then she said something like "It's good that he doesn't recognize me. That's what we want. That's why he's here. So I'm glad he acted like that."

The truth: she wasn't glad.

Devastated.

I guess MonKids could be like:
Reborns : thing theory :: MonKids : animal rights arguments.
in that there is clearly a similar disconnect between what the moms in both of these situations are giving and what they're getting. And the complication for us watching from the outside is that the moms seem to be getting everything they want. It's not a comforting thing to deal with, and watching the story unfold with MonMoms forces us to that dark place in our minds via real living animals instead of just inanimate objects. It's kind of like when Werner Herzog talks about how bears don't care about us in Grizzly Man, which was a furry-like phenomenon in it's own right.

Actually, redact that "best part." The real best part of the special was when she said "everything was going great" while they showed her buying baby clothes for her monkey. Because, like I said, the joy is in being reminded that monkey babies are the monkey babies of forever. Also I wonder if, since the monkey was already in the sanctuary, Primetime didn't make her fake buy baby clothes for no monkey. "Everything was going great."

Verdict: no dice, but I'm glad I finally blogged that off my chest.

4. Masking
This gets included because the way I found it was via a horrible youtube accident, and that's part of the Furries experience I'm looking for in my quest.

If you don't know what masking is, it's when people get into wearing full-head latex masks of other people. Or even full-body latex suits of other people. Then what they do is they put them on and then take off. And that's it. In their videos they never reveal their actual faces, and sometimes pull off one latex mask to reveal another latex mask underneath. Sound stupid? It is...STUPID LIKE A NIGHTMARE!




Here's someone's masking playlist. It includes masking vids, scenes from movies of people taking off masks to reveal themselves, scenes of Tyra Banks's face looking like a mask, a new way to never trust other human beings again.

[crying break]

Verdict: This one is another too-close-for-comfort with Furries. The masker's inclusion of mask-reveals in famous movies gives it the same heartbreaking, trapped-in-image-prison quality of Furries and reborns, but where the latter vibed of an image of love and/or fun, this one vibes of pain-sex and death and a history of molestation. There doesn't seem to be anything to learn that I can't get from an essay about identity by a lesbian.

Actually, an art collective in Berlin called AIDS-3D "explored" masking recently.

They're young, so maybe they know something I don't. Check 'em out. AIDS-3D. Minnesota boys. GO TWINS!

Conclusions:

If you feel unfulfilled, I'm with you. Maybe everything seeming too much like Furries already suggests that I was going about the whole thing wrong. Maybe being trapped in weird love-and-fun-centered image-cages isn't the lesson of 2009 at all. Maybe the fact that Obama is already kind of an instance of that — like how he's rendered in Furry-hues, he seems like a cartoon president from the 80s, he's futury, he's alien, he's all too human— actually suggests this is an old frontier. Maybe Furries can't guide us anymore because we live in a Furry world now. Maybe "lesson learned," time for the truly, structurally new, you know?

Maybe, like everyone said after the election, and then again after the economic collapse, it's time to "get real." So maybe that's how we re-structure the cognitive building blocks of the Furry encounter in our heads before we go out looking to see what meets its requirements. Like, what if the new furries are "vertical farms" or something?


IDK, folks. I truly dk.

In closing, here's a list of proto-furries from the much realer 90s, chronologically to the point of the first — at least my first — real Furries encounter:
1. Conjoined Twins
2. Primordial Dwarves
3. Ren Fair People
3.a Historical re-enactors
3.b LARPers broadly
4. Diaper Fetishists + Dommy Mommies
5. Cartoon Porn like those pictures of Belle blowing Beast and Judy Jetson ft. Mr. Spacely's creampie.

Thanks for coming along with me!

"You want a piece of a Furry?"


Later, dude. Later, Bush-era Internet.