Cansei De Ser Sexy and Joss Whedon’s Firefly
CHAZZ: We’re going to dance to one song, and one song only. (sings) My hump, my hump, my lovely lady hump.
JIMMY: I don’t even know what that song means!
CHAZZ: No-one knows what it means, but it’s provocative.
JIMMY: No, it’s not—
CHAZZ: It gets the people going!
-Blades of Glory
If beauty so far removed from the animal is passionately desired, it is because to possess is to sully, to reduce to the animal level. Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
-Georges Bataille, Erotism
First of all, in case you have been living under a rock, as I have, I’m going to embed for you a YouTube video featuring Cansei De Ser Sexy (henceforth “CSS”). This is the first YouTube video I’ve ever embedded, and believe me, I do it wincingly.
In order to understand what we’re looking at here, we need to understand Chazz and Jimmy. They aren’t really separate figures at all, of course, which is why they figure skate as a unit. They are two sides of the same psyche. Jimmy listens to the Black Eyed Peas with contempt. Chazz, fulfilling basically the same function as Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Gob from Arrested Development, and (to a lesser extent) Homer Simpson, is the liar who knows he’s not telling the truth. Chazz actually agrees with Jimmy, which is why he has to interrupt Jimmy to roar. The problem is, Chazz is sure that if he gives in to Jimmy, he will suffer an irrevocable loss of desire and become part-asexual, part-gay: the blue uniform. As Slavoj Zizek, also a prominent YouTube figure, has argued, the modern free market has reversed the normal dynamic of repression, such that anything that is not enjoyment has to be repressed.
This brings us to CSS. The song, “Alala,” like the rest of the songs on their debut album, is a mixture of things that have nothing in common except their relationship to hipsterism, as adjudicated by white males. So, we have a pulsing “electroclash” beat, produced and programmed to sound either trashy or lackluster, depending on your point of view. We have a female lead singer who’s from Brazil, looks like an Asian doll, and sings through a vocoder with something resembling a German accent. It’s the grocery list approach: we’re reminded of the torrid, passionate tropics; of the fascination of the Asian woman; finally, of how we’ve been meaning to listen to more Kraftwerk. She appears to be saying things about glamour, by using words like “dirty” and “superfine” and “cool.” The other songs name check, among other things, the indie band Death From Above 1979, and Paris Hilton, who CSS don’t like. Isn’t that amazing? They’re just like you and me!
Then, in the video, this doll and her friends get all bloodied and covered in cake, except with constant, reassuring reminders that everything’s fine and the song is actually healing them. My point here is not that pretend violence of this sort is gnawing away at our moral fiber; rather, it’s just more of giving us what we already knew to want.
In the debate over CSS, which flared for an instant here, Anthony Paul Smith wrote: “CSS makes me want to dance and fuck and drink and smoke and generally be punk rock.” But this isn’t really the case; a whole set of social clichés make those things attractive. All CSS does is bring — fleetingly — back to life an assemblage of desires that are constantly in danger of guttering out. I cannot think of anything less punk rock than what amounts to inspirational music. The format here is the affirmation: I’m mean enough, I’m careless enough, I’m desirable enough. Who cares if you go out and do any of those things! The point is just to know that you can still want it. It gets the people going!
Which brings us to Joss Whedon’s little project Firefly, which as everyone knows, was canceled in one of the greatest tragedies since the Library of Alexandria. (The author would like to thank SEK for his generous loan.) Joss Whedon had a vision: a vision of an uncompromising space captain in a prototypically Western setting. There would be dusty planets, and there would be hyperdrives.
Here is the difference between Arrested Development, which was also mourned, and Firefly. If I tell you what Arrested Development is about, you won’t get it. It would take days and possibly weeks to go through all the in-jokes and setups from the first season alone. If you give me four sentences, I can tell you everything you need to know about Firefly:
1. Space is desolate and makes people crazy.
2. Bureaucratic governments can’t always control the outlying areas.
3. Technological development is uneven.
4. Morality, man. Whew. I get exhausted just thinking about it, it’s so complex. Who are the real good guys, anyway?
That’s it. Everything else, Whedon just steals. He steals the River plot from the Wolverine story and some other comic book sources, and he makes River as annoying as he possibly can — because for Joss Whedon, crazy people are all schizophrenics who mumble and lunge. (Hence Season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.) If the camera’s on River, she’s either mumbling, or lunging, or pretending to be in a high school version of David and Lisa.
The captain, Mal, is mostly just Han Solo, and the Serenity is the Millennium Falcon. There are a few other references, notably Rick from Casablanca. His crew consists of Joss Whedon (the pilot), Jonathan Harker (River’s brother), and The Three Eternal Women: The Tomboy, The Courtesan, and The Down Home Girl Who You Should Never Have Broken Up With. (There’s also a preacher who’s there to make the captain look good.)
Thus I have to believe that Whedon wants me to like Firefly because it’s sort of like watching Star Wars: repetition with nominal difference, as with CSS. He wants me to be proud of him for his predictable moral subversions. The other stuff, the plot such as it is, is just watching the ups and downs of a group of independent contractors.
Even Zizek, by the end of The Fragile Absolute, seems to argue that you can’t give up on a libidinal complex without condemning yourself to death: he describes the end of Hitchcock’s Vertigo as a death-in-life for Jimmy Stewart. But this seems to me to be precisely the “subjective desolation” that Jacques Lacan considered so crucial for the rebirth of the subject. You can either insist on desire, by repeating punk and space cowboy tropes, or you can try to rediscover it on the far side of a desert.
You pays your money, and you takes your choice.
But Star Wars itself wasn’t sui generis; for one thing, it was heavily influenced by the conventions of Westerns (so was Firefly, obviously, and any explanation that doesn’t mention that element needs a fifth sentence). For that matter, in my mind the correspondences between the two don’t go all that far, since each has vital elements (Star Wars: mysticism and the supernatural; Firefly: the element of economics) which are absent in the other. Mal is not that much like Han, except by virtue of being a ship’s captain and having a three-letter first name. Han is a loner, cynical and mercenary; Mal has a crew, and his commitments to them interfere with his desire to take the money and run. Mal has a history, Han…I guess he flew the Kessel Run really fast one time?
I’ve noticed before that everything reviewed by Pitchfork is compared to something that came before, sometimes forty or fifty years before. If the reviewer likes a song, then it “evokes” the previous work or pays it an “homage”; if the reviewer dislikes it, than it’s “derivative” or simply “stealing.” While there’s no reason one has to like Firefly, let alone find it fresh and creative, I think it takes more precision to define it as good reference or bad reference.
Though, for the record, we have common ground in that River is really annoying. They write her better in the movie.
As far as I can tell, River has some kind of preternatural ability; she’s a psychic or some such. Mal ain’t much interested in all that, at first, and he thinks the quotin’ from the Bible is all hokum. Which sums up Han’s attitude towards the Force at first.
It’s true that Star Wars may have been the first Space Western, or the first really good, epic Space Western. I give it credit for being an original synthesis.
Han has a crisis of conscience in the first film that is fairly similar to Mal’s crisis of conscience in the pilot episode, and Han does have a crew, though it’s only one Wookie.
It’s true that there are some differences between Han and Mal; Mal is a quintessential Cynic With A Past, like Bogart’s Rick. It’s his past that has made him so hard-bitten. I’m just looking to expand beyond the idiom of repetition: “Here’s what I like, and if Firefly is gonna give it to me, then I like Firefly.” If I begin a work of art, and it’s giving me exactly what I asked for, I have to wonder whether I’m communing with the art, or just with my need to believe under conditions of strain.
I’m still excited to watch the movie, and thus to get a more concentrated dose of whatever can be called original here.
I don’t ‘debate’ music choices. I knew you’d be insulted, god, just knew it.
I love that you bring it all out here, being a non-radical, you have to point out that “They’re just hipsters! Hipsterdom is mediated by white males!!! Never mind that the only male, who is Brazilian, is gay!” That they are just putting together random themes, that they want to present themselves as ‘just like us’! It’s delicious this kind of way of saying, “I don’t really like that band.” This band would be much more authentic if they didn’t have a girl who looked Asian (OMG – maybe she is Asian! For the sake of authenticity Asians shouldn’t be allowed to be in non-Asian bands) or if they, I don’t know, just played Brazilian music.
I haven’t been in an argument about what punk rock is since I was 17, I’d like to avoid that argument for the rest of my life. But I see you won’t let me do that. It seems pretty obvious that, yes, punk rock has been co-opted since basically its inception. We really didn’t that pointed out yet again (Maybe you can reshot SLC Punk for everyone who missed it). I can’t wait unill someone says something like, “Isn’t it more punk rock to wear a pocket protector and get down to work?” I wouldn’t denigrate inspirational music though, but only because punk rock was inspiring for me. If anything what is wrong with punk rock is the individualist paradigm of ‘striking out on your own’. I got into punk rock and found a community. In that community was always the one guy bitching about everyone else’s favourite band, proving his loves were always more pure and considered.
Man, I hate this kind of theorising. It is the kind Mark K-punk usually specialises in “aren’t Sunn0))) really hauntological”. No, Sunn0))) are GRIM, you raise to them the GRIM-CLAW – can’t you turn it off for five minutes, you chin-stroker (PS I am half-joking here). If I see anyone theorising about Mike Patton I’ll kill myself.
In actual fact, you are talking rubbish. I live in Nottingham, which is a city well known for its pioneering electro/indie scene started by nights like Liars Club, Aint No T-shirt Rock and Rolla and continued on my nights like Radar, that are as influential as london nights like Trash. CSS have been around here for a while in the clubs, probably at least a year and a half. Since the aftermath of the rise to fashion of electro-clash and the importance of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, in fact, hipsterism has had less and less to do with white males. Women have really started to get a grip on the scene, and finally, at least weakly at first, white men are being pushed aside by women and responding to the question “why are there no girls in bands”. Witness the aformentioned Karen O, ADULT., Miss Kitten and The Hacker, The Gossip and more recently New Young Pony Club, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EJCPp9zJh8 – drummer is a girl too), Robots in Disguise and of course “the asian doll” Lovefoxxx. I could probably furnish you with many more examples than this, but I am out of the loop at the moment, my DJ friends could provide a list as long as my arm. Not only this, the DJs, the girls who really live for this stuff, who are the promoters, who are forming bands. Rather than simply objectify women, it has empowered them. I would actually say here, girls are equally and deeply into music, perhaps more than guys.
I might find New Rave culture utterly vomit-worthy in the way in which it is neither new nor rave, or good for that matter. But it totally embraces and is indeed formed by the non-white, the gay, the silly etc. I go out to clubs and for once it isn’t just white kids anymore.
I addition, though all this music is obviously a hyped up simulacra of music from times gone by, mainly the eighties, even down to the dresses worn. Yet this is hardly a set of signifiers thrown together: the mechanical voice etc. It goes all the way back to Japan, who were signified this “sexy” distance thing, then via Bowie back to Kraftwerk. These mixture of things have a great deal in common, that they have the last 20 years or so of musical history.
As for, just like you and me, well, they aren’t actually some perfectly manufactured pop product. They are a band who was formed, hyped and became famous. If the scene I have been proud to be a part of for the last 4 years is anything to go by, judging by the female fronted electro acts I have known, they really are just like you and me.
This band would be much more authentic if they didn’t have a girl who looked Asian (OMG – maybe she is Asian! For the sake of authenticity Asians shouldn’t be allowed to be in non-Asian bands) or if they, I don’t know, just played Brazilian music.
I’m not saying that they would be more authentic if they were from Great Neck. I’m saying that the fact that I’ve heard numerous times (not just via The Weblog) their whole story is a little curious to me. I know basically nothing about Wolf Parade or Bikini Kill, yet I still enjoy listening to them, and have had some good conversations about them.
Why do we hear about these things? Because they sing in English but named themselves “Cansei De Ser Sexy.” Because they dressed up their lead singer like a six year old.
It seems pretty obvious that, yes, punk rock has been co-opted since basically its inception.
Not to me, but that’s because I’m not looking to use that co-optation to call something punk rock, and then turn around and say, “It’s meaningless! It’s all meaningless!”
I can’t wait unill someone says something like, “Isn’t it more punk rock to wear a pocket protector and get down to work?”
That move annoys me also. On the other hand, I’ve found that “whatever, it’s all just for fun” lasts for about ten seconds, and then you go back to work, not thinking it’s punk to do so, but not any less trapped either for your ability to run into a phone booth and quickly make the switch.
Man, I wish there was some kind of community out there where I could get to pretend to be Lester Bangs by being grumpy. Instead, it’s pretty much just me with my headphones and my copy of iTunes, as it is for everyone I know, whether they live close by me or not.
I’ve been a part of various music-loving communities, and they have two things in common. First, they always risk devolving into almost non-verbal head-nodding enthusiasm. It’s the case of the guy who doesn’t know what to say, so he puts on Neutral Milk Hotel or Jawbreaker for you and prays you’ll understand him. I don’t get much out of being a pass-thru gate.
Second, they’re fickle. Nobody’s going to be talking about CSS two years from now, but the whole point is to tacitly deny that fact as vigorously as possible.
You’re assuming that my whole motivation here is either being offended, which I wasn’t, or being nonconformist for its own sake. I can assure you that the crank in the corner doesn’t need more people triumphantly proving that he’s the biggest faker of all, and then vigorously nodding to each other. He already feels lousy, hence the antagonism. But it’s not exactly as though “belonging to a community,” and being super-positive about everything that comes along, is exactly a sign of authenticity either, or different in any way from the communities formed by keggers and Sugar Ray.
Man, I hate this kind of theorising. It is the kind Mark K-punk usually specialises in “aren’t Sunn0))) really hauntological”. No, Sunn0))) are GRIM, you raise to them the GRIM-CLAW – can’t you turn it off for five minutes, you chin-stroker (PS I am half-joking here).
I can’t turn it off just to prove that I’m fun, or whatever, and then go back to the rest of my blogroll and suddenly try to remember where we left off in our discussion of ownmost being.
CSS have been around here for a while in the clubs, probably at least a year and a half.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER MISSING FROM ORIGINAL POST: If you are spending all your nights dancing, and occasionally, in these fun clubs and long nights, “Alala” comes on and it makes you dance even harder, then I have no kind of criticism to make of that at all. I have not had the opportunity to dance, except in a corny forced way in my room, to “Alala” at all, and neither have any of the people in my immediate area, which, of course, is Orange County, CA.
Since the aftermath of the rise to fashion of electro-clash and the importance of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, in fact, hipsterism has had less and less to do with white males.
Right, and see, I would love to lump CSS in with these folks, but the truth is that you get more out of one song by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or Lali Puna, or LCD Soundsystem, or the Faint, or the Gossip, than you get out of the whole CSS album, because CSS is the only band on that list that refuses to take a single fucking risk. The Gossip — there’s another band I like where somehow nobody’s needed to tell me their fabulous origin myth.
Well, I don’t have a whole lot to say about the punk rockin’, so I’ll just interject with my very important opinion about Firefly: Although I remain a steadfast fan of the show, I agree that River’s really poorly written. You’ll notice that even episodes that don’t focus on her have a “River moment” during which the camera focuses on her, the music goes all creepy, and she suddenly rips the labels off a bunch of cans or speaks in a Cockney accent before disappearing for the rest of the episode. Whedon just needed to, you know, remind us that she’s there, and crazy, and totally useless before going back to the plot.
Fine, you don’t like them, but you’re pretending that is a deep and meaningful intellectual task when it really isn’t. And, yes, barring something I don’t forsee, no one will be talking about them in ten years. But that isn’t an argument for anything, let alone the kind you think you are making here. I can’t even believe I am having this conversation with you! It has to be something afoot in English departments…
‘Why do we hear about these things? Because they sing in English but named themselves “Cansei De Ser Sexy.” Because they dressed up their lead singer like a six year old.’
Umm… no. First off, some of my friends dress like six year olds. They’re clothes, get over it. Do you deserve an award for dressing like an adult? Second, I heard about them from a friend who is into tropicalia. He seems to think they are connected to tropicalia, I don’t know, seems plausible on some levels.
I don’t understand your comments about punk rock and work. I do think if you’re stuck in a basement working on your dissertation, listening to sonic youth all day on your iTunes, you need to go out and shake your ass at least a few hours a week. Do something. But, no, I’m not interested in this conversation at all. I don’t think it’s going to get less boring than it already is. Do me a favour and please don’t mention my name on your blog again if it has to do with music. I would hate to get another technorati poke for something this silly.
GD, seriously, yeah: It was the cans that got to me the most — that one moment. What did they do to her in that academy? Make her afraid of stewed carrots?
Anthony, protecting you from Technorati vanity pings is not my major concern.
Fine, you don’t like them, but you’re pretending that is a deep and meaningful intellectual task when it really isn’t.
How can I argue with this? It’s not even an argument!
Do you deserve an award for dressing like an adult?
No, and neither do they for being gigantic clichés that will destroy the Earth.
I do think if you’re stuck in a basement working on your dissertation, listening to sonic youth all day on your iTunes, you need to go out and shake your ass at least a few hours a week. Do something.
Totally. I might even pick a good band to shake it at.
But, no, I’m not interested in this conversation at all. I don’t think it’s going to get less boring than it already is.
Here’s what I love: not only can you talk about “ontology,” you can and do get people informing you all the time what ontology is, at extraordinary length. Likewise with “critique,” “dialectic,” and so on. If people find it boring, they just don’t read the blogs involved.
On the other hand, if you start talking about categories like “punk,” you get told you are being boring and that art of this sort is something ineffably beyond discussion, unless the point is that it’s so exhilarating just to be alive and dancing. But not in that hippie way.
‘Anthony, protecting you from Technorati vanity pings is not my major concern.’
Really? That’s a shame. I was hoping it was. Still, I would think you would respect the fact that I don’t want you to. Notice how I never mention your name on my blog?
‘How can I argue with this? It’s not even an argument!’
Yes, I know, and neither is your post on this matter.
‘No, and neither do they for being gigantic clichés that will destroy the Earth.’
Oh my Christ! Are you serious? And how can I argue with this non-argument?
‘Totally. I might even pick a good band to shake it at.’
Pretty subjective there. I think part of your problem is that you’re confusing your opinion with the actual social reality. I for one have never been told ‘origin myths’ about The Gossip or CSS.
‘Here’s what I love: not only can you talk about “ontology,” you can and do get people informing you all the time what ontology is, at extraordinary length. Likewise with “critique,” “dialectic,” and so on. If people find it boring, they just don’t read the blogs involved.
On the other hand, if you start talking about categories like “punk,” you get told you are being boring and that art of this sort is something ineffably beyond discussion, unless the point is that it’s so exhilarating just to be alive and dancing. But not in that hippie way.’
No, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying you don’t have the right to be wrong on this stuff. By all means, shout your wrongness to the ends of the blogosphere! But the minute you lump me in some camp of white male hipsters intent on annoying you, or whatever the hell your real problem is with them, I’m going to find it boring. I find this particular discussion boring because you are dressing up your opinion as theory. I don’t see much about this that is interesting at all. If you wanted to do a history of Brazilian music and show how CSS was somehow ‘bad’ in relation to that, fine, go ahead. Instead we get a reference to a lame comedy and what effectively amounts to a kind of Zizek-parody with lots of moralising on top. Now, believe me, if I could per formatively demonstrate that you were being boring I would, but the only thing I know how to do is tell you.
Basically I’m pissed at you for ruining one of the few fun things I do. I’m very sorry my musical tastes are not as refined as yours and that by downloading their album off the internet I’m somehow destroying the Earth.
It was the cans that got to me the most — that one moment. What did they do to her in that academy? Make her afraid of stewed carrots?
To, um, elevate the discourse by talking about Firefly? So be it. That first question is the important one, and one that’ll be addressed in Serenity. A couple of notes: one of the problems with judging Firefly as we have it is precisely that it was canceled. Not that they’re equivalent, but I wouldn’t want to judge the inventiveness of Ulysses based solely on “Telemachus,” which is the choice we’re left with. Whedon’s singular talent is fiddling with cliches, something he never had the opportunity to do with Firefly. He was afforded time enough to introduce the cliches and suggest that there was something more. That’s it. Now, we shouldn’t judge a show by what it would’ve done, but I think we can discuss the person responsible for it based on his previous work.
I don’t know if CSS are cliches, or any more cliches than the other female fronted acts you mention (with the possible exception of the far more glitchy Lali Puna). Mean, Karen O is great, but isn’t Lovefoxxx just borrowing the same moves from the same canon – Blondie and Patti Smith, Iggy and Bowie and Kraftwerk and everything that followed on the fades, electro, detroit techno etc. And as for her dress sense, am I the only one who is going to come out and say it plainly – she is hot.
To be honest, APS started this “discussion” on a Haloscan thread that basically collated YouTube videos that he had been enjoying recently and made a content in a hypobolic way for kicks and all. He said it off hand. Who are you: the theory police? Does everything anyone says on the internet have to be rigorously theoretically discussed? If Anthony had started an extensive theoretical discussion on the history, capitalisation and importance of punk rock, I could understand everything that follows. But it is just simply opinion in Zizek’s clothes, which is fine and all, if you realise this is all that it is, rather than some “insight” into the inner working of capital. Its not like and God Forbid – Anthony is policing the discourse here, or making a strong claim like “Punk is a kind of vitalist elan vitale that can never be defined, it exists in a realm of pure forms untouched by complete knowledge” he is just pointing out that you making more of this than is needed.
Yeh, we can talk about punk rock and maybe dabble in some theory, but don’t dabble in some opinion and claim it is theory.
PS Quote from At the Drive-in’s Cedric Bixler Zavala – the punkiest kids are the ones with books in their hands.
PPS This thread has distracted me from working, so good show.
SEK,
It’s true that the cancellation played a big part in my willingness to go forward with Firefly. If they had had the space to develop these characters, I would probably have stuck with it. In that sense, I agree with the comparison to Joyce, and look forward to watching the movie.
Still, I would think you would respect the fact that I don’t want you to [mention my name].
OK, that makes sense; I’ll honor your request to the extent that I understand it.
Are you serious that CSS will destroy the earth, or was it hyperbole?
It was hyperbole.
Calling CSS clichéd isn’t an argument.
No, not by itself; but the exposition is in the original post. Calling my original post a non-argument is a convenient shortcut to avoid responding — which you aren’t obliged to do.
Sure, saying at random that I’m going to pick “good bands” sounds subjective. But I’ve done plenty to make my point about this band.
Yes, you have been told origin myths about CSS. They’re Brazilian, they’re punk rock (even though they appear to be an 80s retro dance band, with only the vocals being even vaguely ‘punk’), and they’ve got connections in the tropicalia underworld.
A word about this hysterical recourse to “boredom.” The whole incentive for me to write this post was to explain why I find CSS boring, and why I found Firefly boring. They’re “tired of being sexy”? I’m tired of being told they’re sexy.
Furthermore, just because something has positive content doesn’t mean that it’s not moralizing. A statement like “you need to go out and shake your ass at least a few hours a week” is pure, didactic morality. So is the idea that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all, even on your own personal blog — in fact, that gets us right back to morality as prohibition. Likewise the idea that you don’t have to know a thing about Brazil to like CSS, but if you want to say the least thing against them, you have to be the original founder of Os Mutantes.
Basically I’m pissed at you for ruining one of the few fun things I do.
Why should a post that you hate from the bottom of your soul ruin a YouTube video, with a bit of minimal commentary, that you posted to another blog? That makes no sense. This is sort of the point — if somebody posted a critique of the Beatles, I might disagree, or I might not. In no case would anything be ruined. I enjoy blogging about Chaucer and Derrida, and I enjoy blogging about pop music. Blogging about pop music isn’t one of the “few fun things I do,” but it is fun, and part of that fun is having the space to just plain dislike things, and to dislike them for reasons that also inform what I love.
No, nothing on the blogosphere has to be anything, least of all apologetically symmetrical. Who’s getting policed? The video is linked right up front, as is the link to the original post, which makes both more popular to some tiny extent.
Actually, that is exactly what he is saying, and he’s trying to put it in the strongest form possible by acting as though any form of counterargument is terribly unfair. From my point of view, it’s much sillier to try to attach arguments I never made, as well as pocket protectors, to me and the post.
As for whether “opinion” is “theory,” any criticism — that’s what this is, criticism — that was too timid to make value judgements along with descriptive statements wouldn’t be worth the pixels it was posted on.
Oh sigh. You just aren’t getting it at all. And what it is, is simple: Anthony made a fairly throwaway statement, and then said that since it was throwaway, it probably didn’t warrant this extensive meta-discourse fun we are having, where we get out our Zizek and point at words (from by far his worst book of a bad bunch, in my view) and see his statement as indicative of everything wrong with capitalism. No he liked a band, said it was punk rock as hyperbole and here we are. Coming close to claiming APS is trying to “shut down” discourse and doesn’t allow counterarguments, well frankly is a bit silly.
In short – isn’t this just a high theory sponsored edition of “your band sucks”?
I’m not observing CSS closely because Anthony linked them; if that were going on, I would have had to write separate posts on every other video he embedded. This isn’t all about Anthony: the fact that he posted this video, with a few comments, in and of itself, isn’t much.
There are no criteria for how closely something should be observed; I assume you don’t actually object to my writing about Chaucer, even though somewhere on the Internet somebody is saying “Chaucer SUX lol.” Yeah, it’s true that Anthony got named and quoted; it’s also true that he posted under his own name, and should ignore the post if he doesn’t want to respond.
I don’t think he was trying to shut down discourse over at his blog, but that is certainly what he’s been trying to do here.
The reason I wanted to say more about CSS is because they represent something I don’t like. It’s not because the hook fails to grab me. The hook is decent. It’s because I don’t like to structure my life as a series of oppositions, such that I stop having fun when I read, and stop thinking when I go out and dance. The first is a crying shame, and leads to a lot more bad writing on “serious subjects,” because writing that feels like a chore to the author feels the same way to the reader. The second is simply unnecessary.
You’re thinking that I tried to invent reasons because I was unmoved. I’m telling you the reasons why I was bored. If I’d just said that CSS sucks, it wouldn’t have bothered anybody, because it wouldn’t have had any content whatsoever.
Joseph,
Last thing I’m saying on this, since I doubt you’re going to redact your implication that I’m somehow complicit in all the evils of the world by virtue of liking this band:
1) By one of the few fun things I was referring to blogs. Blogs are no longer fun places, but just one people’s trial after another. I post videos of songs I like now and then, I wasn’t planning on then having to defend myself from orientalism, collaboration with hipsto-fascism, general idiocy, etc. It was the way you equated my throw-away comment with some kind of theoretical stance that bothered me and turned this into yet another people’s trial.
2) I don’t mind people writing about Chaucer, no, but I don’t really find it interesting that they do so. I find it even less interesting when people write about Chaucer ‘critically’ without understanding what’s going on in Chaucer. If you really wanted to take this analogy to the end aren’t you going to have to say that people who know nothing about Chaucer can write about him? Since people who read him and like him without knowing anything are allowed to like him? When I say “shout your wrongness” I’m quite serious. Your post demonstrates that you haven’t done your homework, and so it’s just an opinion piece written by an intellectual person. That just so happens to equate something I like with destroying the earth, thereby equating my existence with destroying the earth. That would be the part that bothered me. If you could have, I don’t know, not used some throw away comment of mine to show your theoretical rigour, I would have ignored it.
3) I think it would be ridiculous to live our lives as you suggest. There is a difference between the enjoyment I get when I go out with friends, drink, ‘dance’, act foolish, whatever, and when I sit down and read a text, struggle with the ideas, struggle with my own idiocy, attempt to formulate a position, etc. When I’m having sex should I be philosophizing about the act? (Sorry if that is crude, certainly not a pleasant picture, but I wanted to pick the most extreme case of disconnect possible.) When I’m on my bike should I be considering the politics of cycling? Of course thought is going on during the most affective parts of our lives, but the intensity at which we do it should be different.
I’ve just thought something. Couldn’t I just say that you don’t like CSS, coz like, you don’t like hot Brazilian girls playing electro filth. This is a joke – but more seriously isn’t their a puritanical streak to what you are saying? Think of the kids!
Can we please step as far away from the phrase shutting down/policing/spanking the discourse as possible? I am so heartily sick of hearing that phrase in every single discussion, particular those of The Weblog versus The Valve/Larval Subjects or SEK versus Craig blog wars. No one is really policing anyones discourse. This is the internet, sometimes people tell people to shut the fuck up, without extending a quote from Lacan to explain why. Or they really just can’t be bothered to discuss certain things, so say the same. Maybe I am wrong, but as long as the comment thread is open, no one polices any discourse.
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3. When I’m having sex should I be philosophizing about the act?
I want to be as clear as possible about this: Watching a music video on YouTube is not having sex. It’s not even dancing or riding a bicycle. That said, dancing is also not having sex.
Is it surprising that the metaphor went immediately to sex? No, because “Listening to that band was like having sex!” and “That omelette was like having sex!” and “I have such a total crush on Cat Power!” It’s like the Depression in Germany, where inflation was so bad that you had to use a wheelbarrow full of money to buy bread. Maybe if we add another “t” to “hot,” our descriptions won’t sound strained, y’think?
I predict, in one month or less: “The sex was so good, it was like having sex.”
2. I don’t mind people writing about Chaucer, no, but I don’t really find it interesting that they do so. I find it even less interesting when people write about Chaucer ‘critically’ without understanding what’s going on in Chaucer.
Right. You find writing about Chaucer boring. You find writing about CSS boring, unless it’s exuberant and clocks in at one sentence long.
You know what? That’s boring. That’s what’s been done and said a million times. CSS has nearly 80,000 friends on myspace. Go join that community if you want to hear your own opinions parroted back to you a dozen times an hour, or if you think that somehow me and my army of one blog post are cutting off your oxygen.
Also, when I teach Shakespeare to students, or when I take literature classes, the idea is always to produce readings. They wrote a text, you’re reading it, you have the right to judge it and reflect on it. The idea that I would have to know the history of Brazilian music to understand a knockoff electroclash song about being somebody’s “bitches” is just an idiotic ploy to forestall criticism.
1. By one of the few fun things I was referring to blogs. Blogs are no longer fun places, but just one people’s trial after another.
I want you to know that when you give me, and maybe two or three other intellectual blogs, rights over the whole blogosphere, it makes me very happy. As if there weren’t billions of blogs out there, right now, with meaningless YouTube embeds and “CSS rocks my socks off.”
It was the way you equated my throw-away comment with some kind of theoretical stance that bothered me and turned this into yet another people’s trial.
Fortunately for you, you are insignificant. You may not give two cents for the orientalism. I take you at your word — you have all these punk rock desires, to smoke and drink and chew gumballs and fuck and bale hay, and CSS reminds you of them. You didn’t conceive the video, write the song, or hype the band.
The fact that you think a post about a band and about Firefly, which briefly quotes you, is you “on trial” is very strange. On the other hand, the fact that some comment was a reflex for you doesn’t mean it has no ideological content. It just means that you’re so used to its content that it’s always on the tip of your tongue.
That just so happens to equate something I like with destroying the earth, thereby equating my existence with destroying the earth. That would be the part that bothered me.
No, that would be a comment that followed you going absolutely insane. And it was hyperbole. Do you even read the Weblog? You’re telling me that my using hyperbole is throwing you off your game? If so, then maybe that’s for the best.
I’ve just thought something. Couldn’t I just say that you don’t like CSS, coz like, you don’t like hot Brazilian girls playing electro filth.
Sure, you could say that, but since Lovefoxx is not all Brazilian girls, nor CSS all electro, it wouldn’t be very meaningful.
This is a joke – but more seriously isn’t their a puritanical streak to what you are saying? Think of the kids!
No. There is a Puritanical streak to thinking that sex is so dirty that it requires stupidity and can best be represented as getting beaten into a bloody pulp. CSS is just inverted Puritanism.
Also, the fact that I don’t like one band’s vacuous take on sexuality isn’t a statement against sexuality in general. It’s also Puritan to think that it is, and that otherwise, desire itself will somehow vanish.
Can we please step as far away from the phrase shutting down/policing/spanking the discourse as possible? No one is really policing anyones discourse. This is the internet, sometimes people tell people to shut the fuck up, without extending a quote from Lacan to explain why.
Alex, earlier in this thread you wrote: “Who are you, the theory police?” I said no, for exactly the reasons you’re giving here.
That said, if this or any other thread I’m administering turns into bullying, rather than just nerd-baiting, I’ll delete those comments. This isn’t “The Internet,” it’s my blog, and I don’t buy the critique of etiquette.
HAHAHAHA. genius. are you having fun?
there’s nothing like indignation to bait total annihilation. score!
btw, can you teach me Othello? I have a final exam on Thursday…
sorry…
Ho hum. It isn’t a critique. Not everything that comes out of people involved in academia is a critique. Sometimes it is just a statement, a comment, an asside. The paper I am writing on Wittgenstein is a critique, though probably a shit one: posts on CSS and the responses to them aren’t, they aren’t even discourse. Anthony wasn’t making a theoretical claim, he was just saying he liked the song.
Reading this thread again, and playing the video, it makes me love the song more and fancy their lead singer more. So mission accomplished the insidious forces of capitalism.
PS The design of this site is natty. Did you pay to do a custom ahem CSS?
Not everything that comes out of people involved in academia is a critique.
It’s true, but I’ve actually seen discussions of etiquette that take the normal stuff (“It’s the internet, I can say what I want”) and spool it out into a critique. This probably does not surprise you.
The paper I am writing on Wittgenstein is a critique, though probably a shit one: posts on CSS and the responses to them aren’t, they aren’t even discourse.
And thank God, I hate “discourse.”
Reading this thread again, and playing the video, it makes me love the song more and fancy their lead singer more.
Strangely, this makes me sort of glad.
PS The design of this site is natty. Did you pay to do a custom ahem CSS?
Cheers! It’s the regular WordPress theme “Quentin” with a few custom text boxes, but no custom CSS.
Right, yes of course.
APS – Punk as fuck.
Pardon me for lurking, and then posting without the proper introductions. And pardon, too, for not having a single thing to say in response to the many comments above, which I have not really read, but which do seem to touch on all kinds of issues I’d ordinarily love to comment on (don’t you just hate it when you stumble across a ripe topic only after it’s been plucked and tossed about to the point of being little more than pulp?) — but I have to ask this:
Am I the only person who watches Firefly and thinks not so much Star Wars but the original series of Star Trek? I mean the whole space western reading (and this is not in the least bit of a criticism of Firefly, which I love almost as much as Buffy) was virtually advertised each week: “Space… the final frontier”!
Well, I was just wanting to know…
There is something there, I think; the frontier is a Western trope, the crew have pistols (phasers), and many of their interactions resemble meetings with discovered indigeneous tribes. Perhaps, though, the more important point is unseating Star Wars as the first space Western. In Firefly, the crew is smaller than on the Enterprise, and there are no frontiers, only borders. The edges of the world are the semi-defined borders of deep space, also the limit of the Alliance, which has decided to leave it to Reavers.
Ah, cheers. I’d always assumed that the space western reading of Star Trek was pretty widely recognised — though, that didn’t stop me from exploiting that reading for a paper I once wrote on the question of genre. Here’s how I put it then:
…it is actually very easy to see Star Trek as “drawing upon” the conventions of the Western. Every episode of the original series, in fact, affirms Star Trek’s affinity to the films and books of the Western genre through the statement over the opening credits of the line, “Space: the final frontier.” And where the ‘significance’ or meaning of the Western ‘formula’ is usually thought to lie in its exploration of the themes of “nature vs. civilisation, the code of the West, or law and order vs. outlawry” (Cawelti 1976, p.6), episodes of Star Trek invariably feature men (predominantly) “boldly going where no man has gone before,” establishing peace (“law and order”) by fighting those who resist Star Fleet’s mission to bring democracy (“civilisation”) to the far reaches of outer-space (in the face of the perils of “nature”), and by fighting especially the bloodthirsty Klingons (the “Indians”), all the while adhering to the masculinist, romantic code of the West, embodied in the heroic figure of Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner). Put that way, it seems that about the only thing that does qualify Star Trek as science fiction is the fact that it’s set in space!
Hey rob, I’m right there with you on the Star Trek-as-western, at least for the original series (well, and Deep Space Nine). But TNG, undisputably the best series, invokes the genre sporadically… overall I’d say it’s way more like True Life: I’m a UN Peacekeeper.
I suppose it’s a fair point that since Firefly didn’t last past its first season, we can’t criticize it for being full of boring, lazy writing and idiotic stereotypes about race and gender (including The Mystical Black Man). Oh wait, no, that’s a totally crap point. I’ve rocked Buffy marathons just like everyone else, but come on, Whedonites! Snap out of it. This show is inferior, and so is the movie.
“But TNG, undisputably the best series, invokes the genre sporadically… overall I’d say it’s way more like True Life: I’m a UN Peacekeeper.”
At last someone who sort of agrees with me about Star Trek. (Deep Space Nine was styled more like Casablanca than a Western, though.)
Rich, I hope you’ll stay tuned for my revelatory blog post, ‘Casablanca Was Really a Western, and Other Thoughts on Intentionality’.
rob, I thought this was a terrific set of comparisons, point by point. It’s worth noting what it elides. In my review of Firefly, I omitted any mention of Jayne, who is actually a decent character; here, we don’t hear anything about Spock, who introduced the alien (ha!) discourse of logical positivism into the colonial dreamscape of the Western.
Here’s what I love: we’ve come full circle back to the Casablanca reference in the original post. But is Casablanca really a Western? That sad bastard can’t fight or he’s guaranteed to lose, the whole movie long.
Kugelmass! If you think that CSS is bad, you really should listen to Bunny Rabbit – Lovers and Crypts. Uber-minimal beats and filth infused lyrics – you’d hate it but secretly like it deep down. She has a song called Dirty Dirt and features the following (swearwords somewhat censored, partly for comic value)
I expect a post this artist during or after the weekend!
I think what happens, for most people, is that they acquire these things illegally. I am on a University network (and am a person of incredible moral credentials), and, tragically, will have to take your word.
I’ll keep them in mind, and an eye out, though. Meanwhile, in other news, Elliott Smith rarities are shipping to me tomorrow.
There is also an interesting “theory” angle here, since the rapper (white, blonde) Bunny Rabbit is a lesbian and her (black) producer girlfriend lays down/beatboxes most of the beats and has the stage name Black Cracker. It is explicit stuff, particularly in the gay stuff – lots of lines about toys etc.
I have it on good authority those rarities are incredible.
The cans – and slashing Jayne’s shirt – were references to the ‘Blue Sun Corp.’, the group that runs the Academy, for which the Blue Hands Guys work. As Whedon puts it, they’re Wal-Mart plus Microsoft plus GE plus whatever else, and they’re basically a corporate shadow government. He left that plot aside for the film, for concision’s sake.
The depiction of River’s craziness is much more methodical than you suggest (realize?). Which is to say: the film is goddamn awesome, how have you not seen it yet? Much more streamlined and Just The Good Parts style than the series. Plus: much starker, darker Mal.
Star Trek comes in for criticism from Whedon in Firefly as a moral model for frontier exploration – the stately Steadicam shots in the Alliance vessels, the well-meaning bumbling by Alliance types. A fuller notion of Firefly might be: what would happen if Act Two of Star Wars took place in the Star Trek universe, with zombies?
Plus, Joseph: I don’t get the sense that the ‘Weapon X’ origin story for Logan was taken seriously as politics (and it’s recently been written out of the continuity, right? or revealed as a hallucination or some bullshit?). The River-is-a-creepy-psychic-warrior stuff is meant as a specific political echo of one of Whedon’s Big Cultural Notions, i.e. you can’t make people better, only circumstances. Which sounds simplistic but doesn’t play that way, surely not given his portrayal of the varied awful costs of misunderstanding that point.
Waxbanks, I’m dying to see the film. Honestly. It’s killing me. I just moved it to the top of my Netflix queue.
The point about River’s craziness, and the reason that I made the reference to X-Men, is that the way it is shot is horribly conventional. It’s possible that Whedon is sneaking all kinds of broad thematic tapestries in via ordinary events; again, I would’ve given him the benefit of the doubt if the show had had time to breathe. But as it is, the constraints of the show (4 discs) means that I have to enjoy the thing somewhat on its own merits, and I just can’t enjoy nightmares about surgeons in blue suits, because I’ve seen it too many times.
There are a lot of similarities to Season 5 of Buffy, I think. Whedon was making some interesting points about madness in that season — Dawn is suffering from depersonalization, Glory has multiple personalities, Glory’s victims go mad, and so on — but it didn’t mean you actually wanted to watch either Dawn or Glory on screen, because their personalities were insufferable, and that made their maladies annoying.
I know that you’re putting it succinctly because it’s a comment box, but still: “The River-is-a-creepy-psychic-warrior stuff is meant as a specific political echo of one of Whedon’s Big Cultural Notions, i.e. you can’t make people better, only circumstances.” See, this is what I hate about Whedon, and about the renaissance of superhero culture more generally. Yes, with great power comes great responsibility. Yes, people never change, but sometimes there’s a little beauty in the world. I know Whedon’s trying to be subversive, but it’s a bit of a comedown to be spoon-fed Whedon’s Big Cultural Notions immediately after reading Nietzsche’s Big Cultural Notions or Proust’s.
I’m not saying that there’s no place for pop culture, obviously. I’m just saying that one has to have a little perspective on what somebody like Joss Whedon is actually contributing to debates about morality or ethics.
The antiparallel argument, though, is that Whedon is feeding moral arguments directly into the popular media stream that otherwise might never be articulated in that sphere; he’s working directly with ‘consensus narrative’ forms in genres that’ll be appreciated and pored over by teenagers and adults alike, which we can see as a project wholly distinct from Nietzsche. Only asshole teenagers read Nietzsche, right?! But Whedon’s working well above the pop-cult moral median, and tailoring his messages to his form. The Wire and Deadwood are probably the most morally complex shows on American TV; basically no one watches them. Buffy may have gotten crap ratings, but Buffy is everywhere. At day’s end, that means Whedon penetrated mass consciousness in five years in a way grand novelists and philosophers couldn’t dream of doing today.
Plus I’d say the work of Firefly is more nuanced than my earlier thumbnail gave credit for – the portrayal of prostitution and sexual/emotional caregiving is slyly progressive, and Mal’s uneasiness about Inara’s work (and the complicated way the word ‘whore’ moves from denigration to matter-of-fact label in ‘Heart of Gold’) does justice to a whole host of alpha male neuroses about female sexuality. River’s importance to the story (it pains me to admit) is a bit like Tara’s on Buffy: what’s key are the situations she forces the other characters into. The sheer casualness of the show’s moral ambiguity masks its subversiveness; the film is more on-the-nose because it has to be. It tells River’s story, but its emotional line is largely Mal’s. (And it’s closer tonally to the show’s original style: in the original conception, as Minear and Whedon put it, Mal would never have returned the medicine in ‘The Train Job.’ The film basically resets to that mood, craftily so.)
God I’m hungry. By the way your porn post at The Valve was excellent – I’m not sure I’m ready to accept AWB’s framework but it’s one of the more compelling posts in a while at that site, along with Adam’s Rand-takedown.
Wax Banks,
Sorry for the slow response; I got completely absorbed in my frustration over being blacklisted. Thanks for the compliment on my Valve post!
It’s true; same thing with Arrested Development, probably the most complex comedy on American TV. I’m excited to start watching The Wire. I just stopped watching Deadwood, actually, right where Season 2 begins, because I thought its moral complexity had created such a series of deadlocks that one was left to wonder about fairly insignificant things, like whether profits at a saloon owned by a jerk were up for the month. (A canny jerk, but still.)
Also, while I agree with you about Buffy, he who lives by popularity dies without it. If Firefly didn’t really catch on, and got cancelled, then it doesn’t get the same wreaths for bringing the Big Issues to the people.
We disagree about Inara. Nobody has much trouble with the concept of the geisha, nor did Dangerous Beauty create much of a stir. These are figures who inhabit galaxies far, far away. My concern, in writing this post, wasn’t to examine how much harm or good these artworks do in the society at large, but rather to express frustration with them personally, as well as frustration with the idea that they’re things I would or even should like. Inara was my favorite female character on the show, by a long shot, but almost everything she does is done better and more richly in Collette.
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