Culture

Rock 30

Chill Culture, Music

The US modern rock chart 30 years ago.

Some of those songs I don’t remember at all.

Of course, in August 1996 I was quite occupied being a paratrooper in the army. I believe I had just arrived in Egypt then so I was a bit disconnected from the music scene to be fair.

Best song on the list: “Angry Johnny” by Poe.

Worst song: “6th Avenue Heartache” by The Wallflowers.

I think “Tonight, Tonight” is the best-written song there, but I can no longer stand Billy Corgan’s voice so I could not choose that one. There are some great, great covers of that one, though.

Open Door

Chill Art, Culture

It’s become stylish to criticize people like Steve Jobs, Quentin Tarantino, Joss Whedon or even Lena Dunham for being jerks and (sort of) bullies. Want to cancel them for their alleged transgressions. But here’s the thing: those people almost certainly would not have been able to produce the quality art and products they have sans those characteristics that supposedly condemn them.

And you can kind of tell the effects this has had by absence — because the quality of art has declined enormously since woke, sensitivity readers and cancellation became de rigeur.

You do not get all that far by not pushing too hard sometimes. There’s a reason Tarantino always manages to coax the absolute best out of his cast, and that Dunham crossed boundaries with her actors: she was attempting to get something true out of them. (I’m not a fan of Girls, but the bits I’ve watched there’s no denying it’s well-made and has a voice.)

Artists are always transgressive and should be so. We need those people. They will always be going too far, opening doors many people feel should be left closed. And that’s exactly what they should be doing.

Not Just a Humblebrag

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Culture

Something else that is also worse since the 1990s.

Women have always had somewhat stricter beauty standards foisted onto them than men.

But in the 2010s with the rise of Marvel and other similar superhero movies, that began to change. Women were psyopped into believing that if you were not completely ripped Hugh Jackman-style 24/7, then you were out of shape and had a “dad bod.” Never mind that for those scenes, Jackman was on the verge of death from dehydration, etc.

So, now, men also have absurd beauty standards applied to them. I don’t completely blame women for this; as I said, they were psyopped into it.

As someone who has a physique now approaching the Marvel superhero ideal (and could get there easily with 2-3 days of dehydration after a month or two of cutting a few pounds), I can tell you it’s really very difficult to achieve. It requires working out an hour or more a day 4-6 days a week. And not just putzing around. You must do hard workouts combined with eating well. And if you don’t want to use drug enhancement (and I do not), you must do this for years.

These days women assume you’ve never seen the inside of gym if you don’t look like Chris Evans in his post-transformation Captain America shirtless scenes. And that is pretty fucking absurd.

Again, the 90s were better.

No Try

Chill Culture, Politics

This is true, but conservatism is equally stuck. There are no New Minds on the horizon. Neither party nor any other organization in contemporary American or European society has a worthwhile or suasive methodology for handling or even comprehending the problems and opportunities of the present, much less the future. It doesn’t appear anyone is even trying from what I can tell.

And we will pay a very high price for that.

Actual Observed

Chill Culture, Sex

The culture is more overall sex-negative and sex-phobic in general than any time since perhaps the 1740s. I mean in practical terms and observed behavior, rather than “I saw someone in revealing clothing on TV, therefore people are sex-positive.” That’s a wholly different thing (and is dumbass logic to boot).

Seaside

Chill Amusing, Culture

That is deeply ok. Not a fan of that style in general. And I do not say this because it’s revealing (women should be able to wear revealing clothes IMO) but it kind of looks like she’s wearing her underwear on the outside.

But mainly, it’s just not goth-y enough for me. Too sunny.

Hopeful

Chill Culture, Movies

A connection I’d never made before. Hope Sandoval is the real-life version of how Galadriel should’ve been portrayed in the LOTR films: fey, distant, ethereal, disconnected from mortal concerns.

I don’t mean Hope’s appearance. In the books, Galadriel is canonically described as tall with golden hair; Hope is quite short and very much dark-haired. I mean how they feel as personalities, as beings in the world.

Of the characters in the films, if it’s not obvious I was most disappointed by Galadriel1. She just lacked the gravitas and remoteness that are both well-described in the written version and that would befit someone who is about 8,300 years old. And I don’t think it was Cate Blanchett’s fault. She had poor direction and poor writing to work with. Though other parts of those films were excellent, the writers of the LOTR films just did not know what do with Galadriel.

The films completely miss her power, her pride, her strangeness, the fact that she’s one of the most dangerous beings in the world, no matter what her intent is. She seemed there like a lugubrious Renaissance fair refugee rather than someone who could’ve potentially taken on Gandalf and triumphed.

And that was a real failure.

  1. Other than Tom Bombadil not being present at all. He was the most important entity in Middle Earth!

Und Fic

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Culture

Kat Rosenfield (@katrosenfield) / X

I agree with Kat that this dumbass take that “writing about something is condoning and endorsing it” is not exclusive to liberals, but it has become far more prominent among them over the past decade or more. Gen Z seems incapable of understanding fiction at all, and believes that anything written about no matter the context must 100% match the feelings and desires of the author.

Art is doomed with this attitude. I cannot understand why this absurdly clownish belief became culturally mainstream, but it is now. And the world and art is vastly worse because of it.

Files

Chill Culture

The X-Files Has Made Me Nostalgic for a Time I Never Experienced.

I experienced that world, and many things were in fact better.

Gender relations were much smoother; men and women did not loathe one another as they seem to do now. Everyone was much more optimistic. We thought we’d solve all our problems and build a better future. And no, it wasn’t just young people. Everyone believed that. Now we know that we certainly will not solve nor fix anything. And what a difference those two divergent weltanschauungs make.

This reminds me, I’m generally sick of clowns writing about the 1990s when they didn’t experience it. If you weren’t there, you don’t know. And no, being three years old in 1999 does not count (though many of those doofs think it does).

Even some of the linked essay (which I like, as it does not presume to know about something they did not experience) is wrong, but this part is 100% correct.

Technology went from functional in the 90s, to fun in the 2000s, and is now – somehow – neither.

In the 1990s we were attempting to give people more freedom. Now we’re making every effort to take all that away and put the information genie back in the lamp. That is the crucial difference.

This next part isn’t quite correct, though.

It’s been said too many times, but I will repeat it at the risk of sounding decades older than I am – television like this simply isn’t made anymore, I believe in large part due to the rise of digital cameras over film.

Cinematography is much worse now, but that is not mainly due to digital cameras. The real explanation is that it makes production cheaper to use neutral, even lighting. And that’s for two reasons. The first is that it’s just more economical not to have those complex lighting setups like The X-Files used. And the second is that it’s far easier to alter something in post with the au courant bland, even lighting.

The next bit is the strongest part of the essay, and all correct; the social milieu was vastly different then. Vastly, vastly different.

Drop by a friend’s place, chat to a stranger, uncover a government conspiracy relating to alien-human hybrids… well, maybe not that last one – but live in a way that almost resembles the human condition! Our brains are made for living in a village, not isolating ourselves behind glowing blue squares. We can pretend that pixels on a screen are equivalent to sharing an impromptu coffee with a friend, but we are kidding ourselves. Normal human life was left in the nineties, and I never got a chance to experience it. The X-Files has shown me that working, thinking, and socialising were not the same then as they are now, and may never be again.

Just dropping by — which was common then — is absolutely verboten now. What a different world that was, and anyone who claims anything else is almost always just too young to actually remember it.

Deva

Chill Culture, Evil

alexandriabrown (@alexthechick) / X

This is a terrible trend. Even my anti-social ass used to love to go to the arcade when I got the rare opportunity to do so as a kid. That we’ve just collectively decided to sit at home and scroll on phones is so, so evil.

Censor Sensor

Chill Culture, Evil

And a decade prior to that — in 2006 — it was even freer. That was the heyday of blogs. By 2015 the internet was already quite censored compared to 2003-2006. It is indeed far worse now, though.

The gatekeepers are returning, in a way. Admittedly they are stupider, less conscientious and far more venal than before. But as I’ve said in the past, the huge project being undertaken now is the elite striving very, very hard to get the information genie back in the bottle again. And they will not stop until that is accomplished.