Let's talk about Vice Magazine

Seems like a pretty forward-thinking staff to print it all things considered.

thanks markpanon

I'm interested in something nabisco said and to which suzy hinted: "I'm sorry, but I think printing a lifestyle and fashion magazine is inherently ignoring the poor and kowtowing to the rich.

I'm not trying to pick on nabisco, because he was careful to say that there's nothing wrong with this (I hope he meant fashion and lifestyle, not kowtowing to the rich, BTW) and because he is in transit to NY (yay!), but why are the poor not presumed to be interested in, or to be entitled to, fashions and lifestyles?

As Andrew Farrell said upthread: "Insisting that the poor prioritze the things you want them to => yellow card!"

As I mentioned on the "Style Mags C/D?" thread, it's fine with me personally whatever people want to do with their clothes, but as the first "anon" poster mentioned, I think Vice gives coverage to an aesthetic that has less to do with money than imagination. Sure, they are often mean, but it's never "oh look at the big occlusions in THIS person's diamond tiara, what an impoverished loser, haha" it's often more like "why did this person assemble THAT particular ensemble from the the thrift store and decide to wear all the tiger prints at once?" or "hey, it's kind of nifty when guys shave their legs below the knee."

You can see beauty and non-beauty everywhere in the world, if you want to, even in a pile of garbage. Just because I can't afford a Mantegna painting doesn't mean I'm not allowed to look at it.

'I checked out Gang of Four, Love, and Frank Zappa after hearing how influential they were and all I heard was a bunch of gay weirdos going “pajama people, pajama people.” Fuck that.'

I mean, who is actually talking there? Did the writer really do that and think that, or are they in fact a sophisticate with a huge and respectful knowledge of the history of rock? Is this a form of creative writing in which a journalist becomes a kind of dramatist, enacting his/her idea of a naive, 'hard-assed' music fan just about to form his/her own canon of taste? So then we have to ask, as a dramatist, can this writer construct a compelling or amusing or recognisable character?

I think we have to say that Vice does create an amusing parody of a certain teen nihilism, and that it's ambivalent enough to convince some teens, and to amuse some older sophisticates who see it for the fabrication it is.

Isn't it interesting that rock writers might be starting to play around with 'unreliable narration' in this way?

at the whorehouse with a face fulla makeup, where'd you think?

i haf read 0.0002% of this thread (ie jess promising he won't post again and the sentence before my own post)

er, good sleuthing there josh.

You have a heavy responsibility on your shoulders! But have mercy, before you fire off the post, ask yourself, would the world really be better without Momus and Vice? And while you're doing that, I'm going to call a referendum on alt.fan.momus and get a 100% confidence vote.

You stole my joke!

I posted a big long response to this then deleted it cz it's 5.35 am and I'm only bodily awake cz of my asthma, and no way is my brain awake.

f: who did that? you mean the populist thing? the nazis, for one.

dave: also they just met in springfield again and tried to come to chicago last year. (and killed some foax here about two years ago).

All the poster said was that vice treats the poor with dignity. Treating the poor with dignity is not the same as saying it's cool to be poor, and treating the poor with dignity is not synonymous with hating the rich.

(btw, those are two different "anon"s up there)

Although the racist language is impossible to miss, I hadn't consciously realized the pro-populism slant until anon's post. Sterling's post make me realize that the comparative subtlety of Vice's pro-poor (?) editorial content, and what history teaches about the potential dangers of that particular alliance, helps me understand why parts of Vice interest me but still make me uneasy without understanding why. (I fully understand why I don't like other aspects of Vice.)

No. Doing reviews in a "voice" is something the NME has been doing for ages. But they're not in NYC so fuck em I guess.

In fairness, the people at Atlantic might well have thought that OPM should be released in the states. They just didn't think they'd make any money doing it.

This is another of those intended slights which I rather like (I'm going to put it in my collection alongside '16 year old goth girl' and 'so far up his own arse that he's giving birth to himself' -- I'm trying to decide which of those to put on my tombstone).

Part of my appreciation for NY Vice is that I (heart) many of the people in the NY downtown scene who are making the magazine. I know that the UK edition is going to have a totally different tone, and I'm going to hate it. May I be the first to say 'UK Vice, we thought you were going to be subversive but you let us down. YOU ARE SO DEAD.'

'We had a show maybe twenty years ago and we showed a piece called 'Queer' and everybody was outraged at the word. They felt it was an aggressive attack on homosexual people. But three or four years later we were in a nightclub and we saw teenagers dancing the night away with 'Queer as fuck' written on their T shirts. And a year after that Queer Nation was founded, a very important movement. So in a way we robbed the evil word back from the enemy.'

"Nih ..... ger"
"Nih .. ger"
"Nigger?"
"Nigger!"

I think we got pissed off only after we wrote what came naturally to us and it offended people. We were determined to leave it in. It was just the way we talked. It’s surprising how brainwashed by hippies most of our generation is. Pro-love, pro-diversity, pro-tolerance–that’s the hippies’ bag. You want to hear people talk about niggers, try hanging around with black people. They are harsh. You want to hear anti-Semitism, go hang around with some Jews. You should hear Suroosh talk about fucking Pakis. It’s ear-burning. I’d argue that racists like the KKK don’t really have anything to say about niggers and fags because they don’t know any. They don’t go, "I am so sick of fucking drag queens. They are so self-indulgent. Fashion this, fashion that. Can’t you talk about politics for one second, you fucking transsexual?" They don’t know. We’re in the thick of it. When we’re pitching our television show, I say, "Understand that we are freaks. We’re not delving into the freak world. We live with the dregs of humanity.

I have no idea whether or not the Vice team *actually* live with the dregs of humanity (although somehow I doubt they hang out with pimps and crack addicts in their spare time), but this doesn't strike me as an attempt to recontextualise or reclaim language to me. It doesn't even strike me as genuine bigotry. It strikes me as a calculated attempt to shock liberals just for the sake of it. Very cutting edge... round of applause there Vice boys.

I don't understand this argument at all. Why exclude some of the people doing the recontextualising?

the point is, who cares who's first: what matters is that someone's last

Could you exand on this? Why is the person still using 'gay' to mean 'happy' (Robin Carmody, according to a recent essay of his) the important one?

As for the second bit, I'll expand on it (if necessary) once you've read it again, slowly and properly, actually noticing the words I'm using and thinking about their meaning carefully.