“Online Scribes: You Are Not Defendants”

Interested people are interesting people. The non-affective is the ineffective. At least, I hope all this is the case — if it becomes the contrary, then maybe we truly do live in a Fascism and should do away with the second amendment.
As it stands now, I see different people’s lives as very circumstantially distinct, which is the exact essence of plurality, you might say, and the best writing I see on blogs is on the ones that are even lower than mine — the hungry, the truly channeling of music’s MEANING, not just its quantifiable sonic rudiments.
Lots of things, then, are sort of balancing each other out, not so much in MY mind but in the bland, median middle-class liberal American mind that might take one vacation a year (I haven’t had a vacation in 10) or own a dog, or something like that. One is that, even though the written word is sort of losing clout what with things like emojis, acronyms and Youtube videos infiltrating our realms of communication, another thing nobody could deny is that THERE IS A LOT OF CRAZY SH** GOING ON NOWADAYS.
Almost every day, on my walk home alone, I go through some wigged-out sh**, whether it’s some dude whose house just got broken into bit**in’ at me, or some black dudes asking if I’m “Aryan Nation” when I’m walking home with the bald head, to the point where books, like movie documentaries, are always taking on increased importance. St. Louis Cardinals center fielder Dexter Fowler made one little answer to a question on the immigration ban that “It’s tough when you can’t see your family” and the fu**ing fat single-celled organisms of that city jumped on his case about it, that he should “Shut up and play baseball,” and whatnot. HE WAS ANSWERING A QUESTION. And he didn’t even say anything derogatory against the immigration ban — what he was addressing was people’s ability to contact their loved ones when they so desire.
And this Harvey Weinstein sh**, all the extraneous stories as distractions, all the celebrity guest spots accusing him of vague things, stinks to high heaven, in my opinion. The world we live in is a land mind of misconduct on the part of supposedly trusted parties. Individual human perspectives should always be valued over the media machine. So when I get this email from Pitchfork about “18 New Music Books to Read This Summer” and it’s written in this totally condescending tone, claiming to cater to “music nerds” and the Lou Reed one is so defensive of the overall endeavor that the blurb just bleeds with self-defeat and discursively suicidal lunges toward relevance, I can’t help but think that there are better hands out there who could do this, who could actually have some perspective on these products that are coming out other than “Here is my desperate attempt to ascribe value to anything in the world that isn’t food, fighting or fu**ing.” Like, the writer of the blurb’s name is “Sasha Geffen,” and she randomly starts talking about the author’s profession and the entity of homosexuality in her blurb, and the author of the book’s name is “Ezra Furman.” Were these people like produced in the same “cool” basement laboratory or something, to garner these only marginally disparate names? Are there any normal people left out there who don’t REALLY care what Lou Reed wears or if he’s gay, but rather about the music itself? Geffen feels the need to defend Furman as “somebody who really loves (Lou Reed),” as if there are music fans out there who don’t love Lou Reed. It should be obvious from the fact that he’s written a book about the musician and it’s effective that he “loves” him — Geffen’s presumed obligation to state this bespeaks a calamitous emotional void at the center of American culture today.
And as for the music itself, Sasha Geffen cites it as “affectionately playful” and “disdainfully violent,” two redundant phrases, and what she misses is that rather than being a “complicated” record (which The Velvet Underground & Nico probably is, in every way imaginable), Transformer is in fact simple for the roots rock and roll mood through which it channels all these lyrical images. True rock inspiration is too pure to be complicated. Convolutions in music amount to ennuis — imagine if Modest Mouse had crafted a two-minute jazz interlude in the middle of “Float on” as a way of being more “complicated” or “playful.” Also, there are no “violent” songs on Transformer… Geffen’s ridiculous assessment is based on the album’s first lyric “You’re vicious / You hit me with a flower”, which is actually a quote straight from Andy Warhol. I wish they wouldn’t even try. As it stands, I keep getting emails from Pitchfork and The New Yorker, two publications both owned corporately by Conde Nast, and as much as I try, I just cannot seem to cut them out of my life and mental diet, hence the frustrated impetus for this post.