Let's talk about Vice Magazine

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.

vice being first is meaningless if the repositioning doesn't happen
ie pioneers don't deserve props unless society realigns (fair enough, although I'd say that anyone trying to change things and stick their neck out deserves at least bravery props)

and of footnote-ish relevance if it does
ie Even if they're right, only historians care (well, that's a sadly anti-intellectual point, it seems mean to brush off even pioneers who really were prophetic)

(not that it IS first, obviously
So although you've made clear that Vice wouldn't qualify for praise if it were a false or a true prophet, you're also keen to suggest that it is neither. In which case, perhaps it's in the big knot of people who follow trends. But doesn't that make it like those kids in the disco wearing the 'Queer as fuck' T shirts? You seemed to think they were important?

but the point is, who cares who's first: what matters is that someone's last)
Well, this is gnomic. I can only assume you mean that nobody can come out of the closet until the last queer basher has vanished from the planet. Which is not a very brave position. But I'm sure I'm wrong. In which case, tell me what you did mean?

My feeling is if people who share common characteristics want to use certain terms to describe themselves, fine. Who am I to say otherwise?

Pardon? Why are you equating dress sense with sexuality? Aside from the fact that there are gay people involved in both.

In any case, you haven't responded to my point that using the word "nigger" or "paki" in an attempt to 'reclaim' it isn't actually any more constructive towards race relations than liberals not using the word at all, probably less so.

Short, mildly cryptic answer: their explanations -- in the form of their books -- were what were cutting-edge and subversive about them.

I love my mum and sister, but they can be a right pair of bigots sometimes (they move in pretty varied circles and like the Vice editors claim friendships with black people/gay people/etc so in no way are the Vicies subversive). The horrible thing is, they won't back down when I tell them they're talking utter racist shite; apparently if you're white and work 40 hours a week you receive special dispensation to disparage anyone on benefits, to moan about 'third-world' immigrants, to judge which black people are black people, and which are 'deserving' of some other epithet. It bugs the shit out of me that they cop these attitudes. What to do?