You are a liar.

You don’t actually give a shit about Britney Spears’ health. Admit it.

“Now, now,” you say. “Her descent into drug abuse and mental breakdown is a fascinating case study in the tribulations of fame. But it’s tragic, and we shouldn’t forget the human being underneath. And her children.”

Fuck you. You are a liar. You don’t give a shit about this latest celebrity burnout. Why would you? You don’t know her, she’s fucking rich, she can’t sing and she probably can’t even read. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, per se, and not that she hasn’t made some good songs. But you don’t actually care at all. You know you should care because that is a human being, so we are continually told. Yes, this sack of flesh in a wig and stupid sunglasses who has done nothing but stupid human tricks since childhood has to be human. And so we’re supposed to care.

But you don’t give a shit. You don’t care about her kids either; they’re destined for spoiled-rich-celebrity-idiocy and they always were. Fuck her kids. Fuck Britney. But most of all, fuck you.

farewell Stylus

I was there, man….

While quitting things too early may not strike you as unfashionable lateness, I assure you it’s merely the dialectic negation required for true UL-osity. And so as OiNK goes, before I’d really milked it for its goods, so goes Stylus, the music website I helped kick off and quit right around the time it was getting good. But I was there from the beginning, man. Back when it was the Oligarchist Home Journal and I was writing cheeky reviews of Pootie Tang in my underwear.  See, while I was learning the hard facts of college life, like how to smoke weed in the dorm bathroom and juggle girls, with the occasional crappy take on some pointless record or another, Todd was learning HTML and hiring and firing, staying up late at night making something beautiful and valuable and maddening but always interesting.

I was there when we recruited writers (mostly shit) from the old Pitchfork messageboard.

I was there when Pitchfork turned around and snatched the best writer away to make their editor.

I was there when they kicked off Pop Playground, when in some weird fevered burst of creativity rarely to be matched I wrote 3,000 words on the first N.E.R.D. album, when I convinced Todd to add comments to the pages like on Bogdan Raczynski’s site (oh yeah I’ll take credit for that), when one of my reviews got published in an actual paper magazine (gee, only like FOUR YEARS ago), when I garbled out a stoned screed about Britney Spears’ In The Zone that somehow now qualifies as a credible citation on Wikipedia, when I tried to start a fashion column when I knew absolutely nothing about fashion, when I started accruing actual promos and for whatever reason couldn’t bear to review them (apologies to Lil Jon, the Greensleeves label, J.G. Thirwell, and most of all to Genghis Tron who sent me a beautiful 10-inch record for nothing — I bought your latest album out of the guilt I still feel).

I was there.

And then I wasn’t.

And now it’s gone.

I’m fucking old.

There’s something about trannies

Picture courtesy of sfphotorama.com

Speaking of internet porn…

Transsexuals! They’re the hottest thing since… well, since homosexuality was considered no longer very threatening, perhaps. Corporate entertainment has devoted plenty of time to this increasingly visible segment of the population. A couple nights ago, two TV documentaries were running concurrently on the fat-mom channels (you know, Discovery Health, TLC, etc.); I opted for the one focusing on a couple middle-aged female-to-male trannies who looked straight out of Tom of Finland’s work. A couple weeks ago, Oprah had on a teenage FTM with a mother so supportive, in another situation her daughter/son would probably have been a Disney Channel star (no mention of the father, interestingly). Documentary films aren’t to be left out; I can think of several new releases at the video store I used to work at off the top of my head (one had the horrible name of “Gendernauts,” although I didn’t ever see it, so maybe it’s actually good — for some reason I doubt it). And they aren’t just a media phenomenon either; they’re throwing their hat into the identity politics ring, demanding to be included in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, even though it’ll inevitably torpedo the bill. Bully for them, I say.

What’s interesting to me is the fascination regarding the transsexuals and the peculiar disavowal that takes place in the media. The TV doc went through all the typical motions, wherein 5 minutes of actual content is stretched to 22, with repeated assertions of the “normality” of transsexuality. They eat, go to work, shave, and have sex, just like normal people. As one of the advocates on the show pointed out, “They’re the people you see every day. They’re lawyers, doctors, university professors…” — I laughed at the last one, as gender diversity certainly is a (often quite pedestrian) growth industry in academia. Yes, this normality is always maintained — notice how the advocate points to professional occupations as proof of their worth. Transsexual advocates typically maintain, in move similar to the gay rights movement, that they were born with their condition — they’ve simply been wired incorrectly, placed in the wrong body. Nothing more to see here. They’re as normal as you or I, QED. Pretty soon they’ll be minor sitcom characters (oh wait, Wikipedia informs me they already are).

This is the part that bothers me. I have no problem with transsexuals, and strongly believe that they should have all the rights and protections that American citizens enjoy, something I shouldn’t even have to say. What gets my goat in the pure disingenuousness at the way the transgendered are presented in the media, as if the whole point is to show you how normal they are. Obviously the wave of tranny media has to do with the fascination, the titillation, the erotic/exotic appeal of this strange other, an effect heightened by showing how “normal” they can appear. But even more insidious is the emphasis on proving how trannies are just regular folk — clearly they aren’t, or there wouldn’t be such a market for shemale porn. Nor should they pretend to be.

This is probably personal bias (I’ve never found regular people very interesting, instead gravitating to weirdos, the socially awkward and maladjusted), but I think has an important political implication as well. The continued pressure in our corporate-media-driven culture is to continually make ourselves over as normal, to fit into certain lifestyle patterns deemed acceptable, to regulate our behavior to assure the smoothest possible social cohesion. The polemical insistence on tranny normality is just a way to incorporate a segment of the population genuinely threatening to the established social hierarchy. Transgendered people throw a lot of cultural assumptions out the window that SHOULD BE thrown out; turning them into happy family-unit-ready regular folks who want to be white collar professionals lets those assumptions in through the back door.

This is what happened to the gays. At one point, homosexuality was threatening, bizarre, and fascinating (it still is to many people, but not the way it once was). Gays were queer — they didn’t add up, they called assumptions into question, they had freaky sex that you couldn’t comprehend and they rubbed your face in it. Now mediated gayness is mostly a matter of physical comportment and lifestyle marketing — gays (at least the well manicured, white collar “regular folks” ones) are a highly coveted group among marketers. Any hint of the weirdness, the queerness, the aspects that threatened official dogma of before are swept under the rug or banished to John Waters movies (Waters has had a long affection for the genuine queers of the working class). While it’s certainly not easy to be gay, it’s really hard to do so without succumbing to the stereotype-turned-demographic vomited forth incessantly by the Logo-Bravo-MTV-Oprah axis. This is why I have a gay friend who says he’s homophobic: he’s not self-hating (in that way at least), but he hates the silly mincing caricature he’s supposed to be. I had an argument with a lesbian colleague in grad school who maintained that gay characters on TV was some sort of progress; I tried to explain that this just puts the powers to define homosexuality in the hands of corporations. “Sometimes it’s powerful to see someone like you on TV, it’s a source of strength,” this short, fat, farm-living, child-raising, no-money-having woman told me. “What makes you think they’re like you?” I responded. They weren’t like her at all — there are no characters like her on TV, because all the lesbians on TV are either fratboy wet dreams or terrorizing bull dykes, and they’ve all got money.

There needs to be a concerted effort to reclaim queerness as a viable political position, and fuck this assimilationist crap. Who wants to assimilate to this fucked, diseased, insane culture anyway? [Full disclosure: I'm a straight white male, and I know I've had all the breaks.] The first place to start: drop the biological essentialism. I want to see trannies (and gays for that matter) stand up and say, I chose to be this way. I wasn’t born as a man in a woman’s body; Judy Butler reminds us that you can’t be born a man or a woman at all, it’s something that comes later when we’re taught what those words mean. So say you made a choice. Say you woke up one day and thought you’d do it for a lark. Say you did it for the freaky sex you would have because of it. Yeah, people will be “horrified” by it, but then they’ll go home and whack off over it (plenty of people already do), be bothered by it, maybe even have some of their cherished ideals threatened by it. I think that’s a bigger accomplishment than turning into a bunch of Crate&Barrel commercials. And if GLAAD won’t stand up for you, at least I will. And shit, I’ve got a fucking blog.

new stylee

I’ve avoided talking about myself too much on this very tiny little page, but I’m rethinking that strategy. I have reservations about excessive personal disclosure, both on the internet and real life, sort of a personal problem I guess, but with important concerns behind them. I learned early on the weirdness of having internet life collide with real life — I started using the internet as an escape from real life, where I could go somewhere besides suburban Ohio and make distasteful jokes and write about shitty music and not even go through the crucible of having anyone I know actually read it. Of course this separation inevitably collapses once everyone else is using the internet all the time too, and when my internet life threatened to become my real life — when it looked like if I kept going and played my cards right I could make some sort of minor web writer thing work for me, I up and quit. It got weird, man. I never wanted real-life people to read my internet self, especially when I was being honest. And of course there are professional considerations as well: even before I one of my grad school friends was compelled to quit after the faculty discovered some MySpace blog posts that Google snatched up (a situation ironically handled quite unprofessionally), I understood how easy it is for prospective employers, current bosses, and innocent doe-eyed students to discover the horrors of your controversial political views and casual drug use.

Nevertheless, I think I’m ok with letting more of my “real” self invade my soft warm internet space. In fact, I welcome it, since it’s so hard to keep up with geographically dispersed friends, and I don’t have the patience for the social networks any more. I even like to think of this as somehow mature. So I’m planning to cover a bit more of the mundane details of my life, which I will do my utmost to present in an interesting way. No guarantees though: This is the internet, you can always go watch porn instead.

Funny thing about blogs…

You never update them.