Let's talk about Vice Magazine

(thx jess)

Apples vs. Oranges: FITE!

I can criticize this editorial choice, though, can't I?

I don't think Vice is always funny, and as I did say upthread, I don't think they try hard enough. I think quite a few of their jokes do fall flat; if I was their editor I would probably recommend to them to lay off the coke and head for the beer.

I don't read it regularly or anything, BTW.

PS I've always found The Onion to be total shit.

The only tone I detect running through all of them is this phony transgression thing, where this big value is placed upon anything that stirs people up or gets them defensive or assaults their sensibilities -- apparently for the sole purpose of the text sort of lording it over you afterward and trying to make you feel like an uptight pussy for disapproving. I really don't like that whole thing, in that the underlying message is "You care about something? That's so fucking lame."

Weird thing is that I've always sensed that they do care, though in a specifically delineated way. Fashion? Definitely. Music? More than I think is being given credit for (the music review section at the back often has some sharp, scabrous and celebratory entries). Perhaps they're like the Onion in trying to have their cake and eat it too, except that their own version of the AV Club isn't specifically set apart from the main text.

The Onion has been really lacking these days, sadly.

There was an article about Colombian art students that was sort of interesting, but then they had to go and fuck it up and spell the nationality "Columbian" in the title. Talk about not caring.

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!

*********************

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.