Let's talk about Vice Magazine

Dated, lame and deeply pretentious. (Putting it that way makes me see why Momus is so keen on it: you could say, without being mean, that rehabilating the pretentious in all its facets is one of his goals as a public figure.)

Well FUCK THAT SHIT. Getting 'tude for broadly "caring about things" from a magazine with fashion spreads is like being criticized by a doll collector for taking music "too seriously."

Vice is a 'boundary-pusher' and a trend-setter. Its New Brutalism is a pastiche, a well-captured adolescent voice designed to alienate one generation and consequently attract a new, younger one and pass it on to the advertisers. We should save the derision we're currently pouring on Vice for the much less intelligent imitators coming even now in its wake. For if Vice is Ziggy, watch out, here comes Alvin Stardust!

he is four years old = "faggot" is transgressive (and funny!)

DJ the Girl (Amy Kellner), DJ Soccer Star (Meredith Danluck), Boney M (Michal Jurewicz)

Is the Art Fag crew.

ART FAGs TUESDAYs is this Tuesday Night at Passerby, 436 W 15th (btw 9/10) (no cover). Every Tuesday except the first Tuesday of the month (which is Nico Mazet "Undertone")

Hear the music!

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Anyway I really wanted to post to note that I actually think Maxim and Vice are a different kettle of fish in a certain way. For one thing, Maxim can be pretty consistantly funny and veers from the "transgressive" aesthetit of vice for a more pc-backlash "we think sex an beer are cool so whatever you wanna think, fine" sorta way which can lead to scary places but hey -- I like sex and beer and cars and gadgets. They're not ALL I like, but I don't mind something which focuses on them since actually I don't tend to encounter much on them elsewhere, at least not like maxim does and in a way i can tolerate and maybe this is my limited subset of existance more than anything else but...

Also, I think some of the only smart pop-cult crit. Camille Pagillia has done in a long time has been her praise of the Maxim aesthetic in photography of hot chiXor.

(2) Jody writes, re the question "don't you guys have any sense that...that they are satirizing themselves and their readers and the conventions of music mags?": "Nah, I think they're just picking at their own scabs, and by doing so, they make themselves look even uglier." I think there's a degree to which it is satirical, but the more overt stupidity of it makes it untenable as such for a lot of people, including me a lot of the time: the joke that fell into itself, in a way. I also think people who compare Vice and Maxim have pretty obviously never read either.

So even though we're offended by Vice's content, we should just stop complaining because we'll sound silly in thirty years when we're all saying 'pass the salt, nigga' at the dinner table?

Also, please answer my previous question, Momus. In that 'nerds' article, how did you interpret what the writer was saying (assuming that he or she really wasn't advocating beating the shit out of nerds once again)?

(Dan - you and Sterl are right, my argument was reductionist. I was really just trying to make the point that I hated the way they said whatever they were saying in that article, and that I couldn't imagine a reading of it that would redeem the style they used)

Ken Tynan was the first man who said 'fuck' on the BBC. It was in 1963. Now it's pretty much a daily occurrence. King Canute was the man who tried to order the tide to stop coming in. Brian Eno said that he had learned to curb his instinct to hate hyped new bands because he knew his hatred was a waste of energy. If these bands succeeded, they would redefine the context in which everyone worked. So he skipped hate and went on to the next phase, working with the new context.

In that 'nerds' article, how did you interpret what the writer was saying (assuming that he or she really wasn't advocating beating the shit out of nerds once again)?

The article says 'In the old days, being on the side of nerds was subversive. Now, when Bill Gates rules the world, it isn't. So to be subversive, we need to do something else. Reset your watch, pay attention to the changed context!'

in any event, if you didn't notice the incredible amount of ill will and tension dredged up by this thread (and i'm not even including conversations i've had with people about it outside) that might tilt it towards "godawful" then, well, damn.

i can't shut my personal feelings off when i'm arguing with my friends, i suppose.

matos: apparently so.

I'm not a fogey for finding Vice tactics kind of suspect in a boring lowest-common-denominator sort of way (and yeah, they are Albiniesque - yucch - and in the parlance, Albini = weenie).Someone upthread mentioned the whole 'clothes + swearing = junior high' vibe of Vice. I'm of the opinion that ALL of the current celebrity culture is just way too much like junior/high school - which is exactly why I loathe it. In that context Vice is just in compliance with stuff like:

People who are considered 'popular' (insert your fave TV presenter here) but nobody you ask actually likes them, or knows why they're popular.

Having to have the hot new label before everyone else, but not being seen to be imitating someone 'popular'.

Really mainstreamed approach to what's cool.

Getting the smart/artistic kids to do all your work for you, then passing it off as your own, and then calling names in a just-joshing way.

Bleurggh.

Hey, you're already gathering features ideas to pitch to the editors! You're a sly one!

How about 'The Vice Guide To Why Vice Totally, Like, Sucks And MUST DIE'?

Oh, sorry, Jess got that one.

Also if Vice is more subversive than Bill Gates cos its smaller and less powerful then surely NOT HAVING A MAGAZINE AT ALL is even more subversive yay! From where I'm sitting, if you're dealing with advertisers etc you're PART of the status quo, you're doing fuck all against it.

Karma is a bitch, Momus, and it will come down on your ass.

He may have done. I know another radical iconoclast who marked a decade, Malcolm McLaren, thinks Eminem is the closest thing the world has now to a Sex Pistols.

Nitsuh's question was not 'invalid', but it was a question which questioned questioning itself. It seemed to imply a deep conservatism. Why, one implication of the question runs, would anyone even want to make a statement that society might find uncomforable? And I'm astonished to have to even answer that, but I will. The American and French revolutions, for one thing, would never have happened if people had never, for fear of giving offence or going out on a limb -- or even causing some bloodshed -- questioned the status quo.

From where I'm sitting, if you're dealing with advertisers etc you're PART of the status quo, you're doing fuck all against it.

That's kind of binary, isn't it? You have to be totally outside, in which case you're powerless, or totally inside, in which case you're corrupted and complicit? Such fatalism breeds a terrible complacency, methinks.

Now I'm being threatened with Hindu theological concepts! For what crime, exactly? Hope?

Yes, the ancien regime is bad, but if we revolt and try to found a republic there will be a Terror and then a Dictator, and isn't that worse?

Yes, if liberals take over the language and semiology of fascists it will diminish the power of fascist heraldry, but it will inevitably make fascism more acceptable. Let's not go down that path!

Yes, 'A Clockwork Orange' contains an intelligent critique of power, but if we release it with a U certificate young and impressionable people will just pick up on the violence and the streets will be full of mayhem.

The end results of the caution behind this argument is 'put all that nasty stuff back in Pandora's box'. But you can't. So what you do is make a liberal version of the New Brutalism. Which is what Vice is. There's a pretty obvious Reithian spirit lurking just behind its faux-brutalism. What makes it a successful mass market product is precisely this clever combination of Apollo and Dionysus.

Meanwhile I'm delighted to have made a statement SO binary that it brought that accusation from you! I suppose what I'm saying is that a magazine's sphere of influence (i.e. the things it actually can 'subvert') doesn't generally include Bill Gates and his cronies. The only things it can 'subvert' are its audience and the fashion system its operating in: accepting advertising, getting rich and floating on a coke'n'hype bubble for as long as it lasts are all wonderful things (particularly if you're a Vice magazine editor!) but I don't see where the subversion comes in.

"So what you do is make a liberal version of the New Brutalism."

Are you so bereft of imagination that you cannot think of any other way to address the very real threat of the New Fascism? If so, we're in trouble.

Are so bereft of imagination that you can only read "let's not go down that path" as "let's not go down any path"? If so, you're in trouble.

The issue is about questioning everything, not about questioning nothing, Momus. I'm astonished that I have to point out that your 'status quo' isn't a monolithic bloc but an innumerable range of different and nuanced worldview spinning around a hegemonic axis. You seem enormously keen to point out the enormous fluidity and multiplicitly of language (whilst simultaneously trying to explain that some in-groups have special access to what's really happening right now); would it kill you to acknowledge that this is true of meaning, culture and society more generally?

"The American and French revolutions, for one thing, would never have
appened if people had never, for fear of giving offence or going out on a limb -- or even causing some bloodshed -- questioned the status quo."

You said way way above that: change is normal (check) and that nothing changed unless people stuck their necks out (not check) (no pun intended juxtaposing that next to the French Revolution). By temperament I'm a utopian idealist, but even I can see that social and cultural change is the water we swim in. IT's dialectical, not the exclusive result of a bunch of avant-guardistes pushing the boat out and looking on with an 'I told you so' smile as we all eventually catch up with them.

Well, even to use the word subversive, as the Nerds piece does, in a positively-loaded way is a start. I don't see Maxim or Loaded talking about how they feel let down by people they had hoped would be more 'subversive'. It's also rather interesting that they use contemporary art to illustrate a teenzine-type article. Nobody was forcing them to do that. And nobody is forcing them to write about figures like Larry Clark, who is genuinely a subversive character, whether you like what he does or not.

Ellie / Tom, can I just say, on this question of binaries, that you can use binaries (we all do and we all have to) without pledging allegiance to their arbitrary divisions, which always fail reality. Eno has a nice riff (in his 'Swollen Appendices') about 'axis thinking'. Imagine a pile of spills. Each represents a binary concept: short / long, black / white, good / bad... Each on its own is flat and reductive. But imagine them all stuck through each other. That's more like reality. It's 3D. You can locate a point in the middle of your cat's cradle of spills, and it'll be at *this* point on the binary spill 'wet /dry', and *this* point on the binary spill 'rough / smooth'.

I'd also cite Barthes, who said that language structures our thought, but that we should learn to 'abjure' its structures, in other words abandon them quickly, like temporary scaffolding.

Misunderstanding of these points is why I'm so often accused in these threads of setting up binaries but also of abandoning them and changing positions. That's the whole point. Apollo / Dionysus, for instance, is a binary. But it's only when you put it up against another binary like 'Left wing / Right wing' that the dialectics -- and the thinking -- really begins.

I think you mean collaborating.

(Rimshot.)

I now have a computer screen full of coffee.

Momus = an MP on Question Time. "I'm very glad you asked that question. (Answers different question)"

Momus
Oy smartass!

can you explain why exactly
You probably can't, but come on, we want to see you wriggle a bit

you see inherent value
The word 'inherent' means the questioner wants you to explain without reference to any contingent or contractual value. He's forcing you to be a Platonist, knowing full well you aren't one.

in people's doing things society disapproves of?
Wha...? I thought this was going to be hard. Is he really asking me to justify any form of action which is not in total lockstep with some notional monolithic society?

As you can see, when I look more closely I see that Nitsuh's very question was full of propositions ('inherent value', the idea of society en masse 'disapproving') which are alien to my conception of the world. Perhaps he meant it as a trick question.

I would read it as applying to a range of objects as applying to the characteristics that they have in common, that distinguishes them from what they aren't, which is (to start with) the single-facet description of those objects that is the next clause. Would the word "intrinsic" help instead?

Is he really asking me to justify any form of action which is not in total lockstep with some notional monolithic society?

You've loaded this sentence the wrong way round. He's asking if you will justify "(any form of action...)" which is a large group with only one obvious thing in common, not that you pick any (form of action...) and justify that one thing.

Perhaps he meant it as a trick question

Then why did you answer?