The Mountain Goats

We can compare that questionable behavior of the community member of ours to what Harvey Weinstein did instead.

Why isn't that more offensive than an offhand reference to consensual oral sex?

no good is gonna come of this discussion

i was about to apologize for misreading your v poorly-written initial post but xp

i also now hate that i told you to read a thread on ile about abuses of power

I have zero desire to fight, believe it or not. And maybe I am on edge because a friend I have known for 30 years died last night. If so, I apologize. Whatever, I'll bow out.

i am very sorry about that <3

also one of the reasons i haven't actually organized my thoughts about this is bc it involves someone who posts here, and it'd be very difficult to do it as carefully as i want without feeling i was applying a microscope to the interpersonal dynamic of one person who i sorta know through the internet and one person i don't know at all

Here’s my take after thinking about this this morning: if the screencapped conversations from OP with j0hn are real and there’s no reason to presume they’re faked, j0hn certainly laid some kind of emotional burden over a period of time on a much younger fan after meeting once after a show. This is an irresponsible thing for anyone to do, dropping emotional need bombs in private communications with a less mature near-stranger. If there is indeed a pattern of this behavior (and this is by no means clear) it’s something that j0hn should find a forum to own up to and address how he will stop doing it, because the power differential in being an older artist who a lot of young fans really look up to means that he is unlikely to be in a properly reciprocal friendship with anyone very young he meets after a show.

That said: Difficult relationships are a thing that can happen and leave people badly hurt, and I don’t think that’s a scandal.

I'll walk back my prior dismissiveness on this after some thought. I can see how this can be complicated. it's not clear to me from the screenshots what was so emotional or burdensome about it, but in the abstract, I can imagine something like this being weird to navigate. Probably unfair for me to just slam hero worshipping fans as well; obviously they exist, and even if I just think of j0hn as someone I know from ILX and FB some shows and book readings and not some savior, it's obvious some people do think that way.

My take, abridged: a self-professed superfan-cum-stalker is co-opting the language of "abuse" and "accountability" to further their obsession with their quarry.

The stalker's transparent toxification of musician's relationship with fans, musician's relationship with wife, and further bids for attention from musician, make it unbearably clear to me what is actually going on.

I trust your read on this a whole lot fgti, thanks for posting

yes, a voice of experience

I trust your read on this a whole lot fgti, thanks for posting

― faculty w1fe (silby), Thursday, September 6, 2018 1:18 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah same

your post on this was basically my untangled thoughts silby, so thank you for that, much as i'm now rethinking them

it is necessary to have empathy for all parties in a scenario like this

idk that's how i go into things

well yeah, but sometimes most everyone (myself included) could do with the reminder

to clarify, when i posted that link upthread i meant it as "why people believe this shld have been made public" & not a 100% endorsement, although i did think it voiced valid concerns. am also rethinking after fgti's post

well yeah, but sometimes most everyone (myself included) could do with the reminder

― imago, Thursday, September 6, 2018 1:24 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh sorry my brain switched the first two words in your post

This type of thing happened to Jerry lee Lewis all the time

i reread the post b/c i was worried i'd been too dismissive earlier and yeah, i think fgti is otm

I have more empathy for the "other party" than they probably deserve, if only because this individual is posting call-out posts on Tumblr rather than, say, mailing bombs to their target's family or sitting outside their idol's apartment with a copy of Catcher In The Rye. Blaming another person for your pain is a highly effective way of sublimating that pain-- everybody does it. However: it does not mitigate or resolve that pain. This individual will only find their pain resolved through other sources, not destroying the life of a former friend who has requested "no contact". My fury at this situation is not directed toward the "other party" so much as it is toward the way that Tumblr and Twitter have corroded the very real, very important cause and language of Restorative Justice and essentially granted any stalker, obsessed fan, ex-friend, ex-lover or whomstever a licence for "sanctioned abuse"-- because that is what this person is doing, they are abusing this musician. Textbook abuse. Not "oh he befriended me and he's old and should know better" ""abuse"". Targeting an individual's livelihood, an individual's marriage, toxifying the musician's relationship with their fans, and that musician's fan's relationship with that musician's music, implying that an individual's very human expressions of neediness and human contact with others is somehow covering up some sinister sexual impulse: this is abuse. And it is the co-opting of words like "abuse" and "accountability" by individuals who would-- unlike the musician in question-- actively seek to do harm to others? that is what fills me with fury today.

Can I admit that I read through (with some skimming; it's long) the fan's Tumblr and kept waiting for a bomb that, as far as I can discern, never dropped?

I feel sick to my stomach about this whole thing and feel really bad about JD and feel like this should be locked or something.

bad for JD*

fire coming off that fgti post

lock thread

implying that an individual's very human expressions of neediness and human contact with others is somehow covering up some sinister sexual impulse

this is what bugged me hard about the tumblr post

glad to see we're all piling on this young person here

how wonderful it must be for someone who's like 20, who is clearly traumatized and on the receiving end of some communication that is substantially less than ideal given the power differential to be compared to people who mail bombs(!) or shot john lennon(!!)

also the original post had other people reporting similar weirdness, so that's a hell of a lot of people to be accusing of being stalkers

literally there is no possible way on Earth this thread goes in a positive direction for anyone

lock thread

― The Desus & Mero Chain (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, September 6, 2018 1:40 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Agreed. Locking this temporarily.

So there’s this new EP...

it's pretty good. also I'm finally getting time to dig into Goths which for some reason I just hadn't gotten around to spending lots of time with.

The stalker's transparent toxification of musician's relationship with fans, musician's relationship with wife, and further bids for attention from musician, make it unbearably clear to me what is actually going on.

Could I ask you to expand on this, fgti? I don’t see, for example, anything to do with his wife in the initial tumblr post.

I don’t think that topic was a good one for this website.

I like a lot of mountain goats songs btw.

Maybe not “a lot” compared to true fans. A bunch.

I found the way discussion got shut down in multiple threads pretty creepy, but I also recognize that nothing that happens on ILX actually matters

Agreed. In unrelated news, please visit my 'discussion of Simon H.'s off-board personal business' thread, where anything goes and we talk past the subject like he's not even here! Please don't censor me, bro.

I might be annoyed about it, but if I were a person of semi-prominence (I'm not) I'd like to think I'd accept that this sort of comes with the territory.

Honestly, if an unfamous poster was publicly called out, ilx would probably be way more willing to get the knives out (fairly or unfairly) than they were here. However, that is not a reason to have this discussions, which I don’t think was leading us to wisdom and was against the Socratic ideals of the board

there was the gawker drama a few years back, speaking of unfamous posters, but this is a bit different, in that this situation is not as cut-and-dried.

maybe poll the demand for an I Love Gossip board

we used to have that board but then it got turned into The Church? iirc?

Will incl. new song, sez here:
http://www.brooklynvegan.com/john-darnielle-curates-molly-ringwald-michael-shannon-more-for-halloween-stories-event/ Will this be like The Moth? Mothing Goats? And/or horror lit?

New Album! In League With Dragons arrives Friday, April 26th on Merge Records.

(Album art by Elton D’Souza)

1. Done Bleeding
2. Younger
3. Passaic 1975
4. Clemency for the Wizard King
5. Possum by Night
6. In League with Dragons
7. Doc Gooden
8. Going Invisible 2
9. Waylon Jennings Live!
10. Cadaver Sniffing Dog
11. An Antidote for Strychnine
12. Sicilian Crest

http://www.mountain-goats.com/

strong move

The dungeon synth Mountain Goats album we've all been waiting for

I like the new song more than most of the last album. Kinda a synthesis, stylistically, of the last few albums.

whoa Gooden

also i lived in Passaic in 1990