amplified to rock
In celebration of Amplified to Rock's four-month anniversary, I present the Official Amplified to Rock
Cleverness Quiz. You should enter, the prizes are really swell. Thanks to Aaron for the special Cleverness Quiz email address.
Speaking of contests, tonight is the great Nanette vs. Aaron Trivial Pursuit battle. I'm going to whoop his ass. He underestimates my mighty power. I know heaps of useless shit.
The cam should be set up this weekend at the very latest. I've got a lame version up right now (no, I'm not going to tell you where it is) but it doesn't autorefresh and I need to make an actual page for it. When it's up and running, I'll link it.
Since
Indieshite hasn't said anything, I will: Today at
Pitchfork, we have the best of Kristin Sage Rockermann. The BEST? Uh, wait a minute...you know, there's actually good writers over at Pitchfork. Why a retrospective of the BEST of one of the WORST writers they have? I can at least get a good laugh out of Brent's flights of fancy, but Kristin's reviews are so awful that they make me want to break stuff. The outstanding characteristic of her reviews is her feeble attempts at humor, which always fall flat because they're so damn contrived.
But hey, you could write for Pitchfork. They're looking for news writers. Someday, if you're a good little unpaid Pitchfork news slave, you could be be promoted to record reviewer! Imagine the power! You too could write lengthy reviews that have nothing to do with the album you're reviewing! And maybe if you're a good little record reviewer, you can have a retrospective of your very own. Tempted though I am to apply for a position, I'm a little swamped.
The
Lincoln Park Trixies? Satire.
Luke Samuels, candidate for Homecoming King at Youngstown State University? I don't know...it seems too possible to not be real, but the photos of the guy look like they were scanned from a catalog, and it's just a little bit too over-the-top to be real. I love the blue eyes on the black-and-white index page photo, though. He looks so...deep. And soulful. If you read his mission statement, you'll realize that he really is deep and soulful. (Thanks to
Nathan for the link.)
Promote myself: Like everyone else, I registered with that
Bloghop thing. You know, the one with the little squares you click on to "rate" weblogs.
Go rate me, if you must. Remember that green means good, and you think I'm good, don't you?
Promote thyself: I'm getting ready to redo the sidebar links on this page. If I don't read your weblog/journal/whatever but you think I should, now is the time to
email me and alert me to its presence. An email does not guarantee inclusion in the sidebar links (I still have to like it and everything) but it just might help.
Twice this week I've been classified with age groups much younger than my own.
On Saturday, while browsing my stats, I came across the webpage of a petulant teenager complaining about how much the Internet sucks. It was the writing of a kid who was thrilled by the fact that she wasn't like others in her age group, but she was missing the sad truth that she is like others in her age groups--a lot of others--the different and proud crowd. And I'd roll my eyes and just say "ergh," but the truth is, if I had been born ten years later, in 1984 instead of 1974, that would have been me, bitching about how much the Internet sucks and considering myself rebellious and original and "making a statement" for doing it. I was a real shithead of a teenage kid, a total drama queen who always thought I was making an enormous statement and thumbing her nose at the world when really I was just acting like a little shithead teenage kid who didn't know anything but was willing to make a lot of really loud noise like I did.
So anyway, on this webpage, I was classified with the "teen domains." There's no teens at spoonbender.org, just a 26-year old former petulant teen shithead who is still (on occasion) living down some of her petulant teen shithead antics. So I fired off a quick email to the girl, just something to the effect of "spoonbender.org is not a teen domain." Now, in my stats today, I find that she's posted my email in her weblog, along with the comment "they're all teen domains to me."
Well, that's good to know. You learn something new from young people every day.
Then, in class yesterday, my professor was making some comment about the politics of 20-year olds. And she looked at me and said, "you're not 20, are you?"
I laughed and said that I'm much closer to 30 than I am to 20. Which I am. Sadly. And then I got the standard line of "well, someday you'll be really happy that people think you're younger than you are. Someday it will be a blessing."
And I know that's true. Still...sometimes I wish I could be young again. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that I wouldn't want to be young again. I'd never want to be that petulant teen girl again. I've got enough distance to realize how obnoxious I was, and whenever I come across someone who reminds me uncannily of myself at that age, I always want to say "hey, you're going to look back on this someday, and you're going to be really fucking embarassed. Go ahead and roll your eyes and laugh and make snarky comments and act like I don't know what I'm talking about. I do. I was you, pretty much, self-importantly rebelling against things that aren't important in the least. Put your youthful enthusiasm into something useful, because really, nobody cares about your opinions, and they aren't as radical or groundbreaking as you seem to think they are."
But they can make their own mistakes, just like I did. That's their right. And now, it's my right to be the cranky, jaded adult who has been there, done that, and is still getting teased about it.
I've wanted to jump into The Great
Led Zeppelin Debate since it started, but I felt that it was too late, that the whole thing was already over. But then Tanya posted
her views today, so I realized that it wasn't over and that I could jump right in whenever I felt like jumping right in.
Anyway, I heard "Whole Lotta Love" on the radio the other day. Whenever I hear that song, I wonder if it was *ever* considered sexy. It's such adolescent buffoonery, with its thinly-veiled double entendres and all that weird orgasmic noisemaking. (You know, the moany bits.) I'm not the sort of person who likes to get clubbed upside the head with themes. I like subtelty. You want to give me sexy, give me something subtle. (I think this is also why I can't stand R&B "slow jams" with all their silky-voiced smooving: I like to think that I am too smart to fall for that shit. And I am too smart to fall for that shit if you're going to make it obvious that you're trying to smoove me.)
Once, as a joke, I said that all Led Zeppelin songs deal with one of two themes: hobbits and fucking. The songs are either about some sort of fantasy scenario, or they're about sex. The two themes are both woefully adolescent. Has your woman done you wrong? Go stick your nose in some Tolkien and write a song about it. "It" being the woman who did you wrong *and* the hobbits. My crack was pretty well on-target: I have heard very few Led Zeppelin songs that were not about hobbits or fucking. But really, what else matters? What else drives humanity besides hobbits and fucking? I mean, really. They've boiled life down to the essentials for us, *and* they've made it rawk.
And that said, I actually don't mind Led Zeppelin. They have their moments. They rawk. Yeah, their songs sound cliche to us today, but that's because rock bands have been ripping them off for years now. I'd love to see a good discussion of bands who egregiously rip off Led Zeppelin, right down to the cornball lyrics. (Have you ever listened, I mean, really LISTENED to the words to "Stairway to Heaven"? They're total nonsense. Now I'm going to go duck to avoid all the missiles that are likely to be thrown at me for making such a statement.)
So why was I gone? That's an easy one to answer: school. (No,
Kev, it wasn't Aaron. I wish...) I've had a 5-7 page paper due every week since this semester began. This wouldn't be cause for complaint if I was taking more than one class, but all this writing for one class has sapped all my energy. Anyhow, I turned in the third (and second-to-last) short paper of the semester yesterday, so now I feel like I have some room to breathe again. It's not like I put a lot of effort into the papers--on the contrary, I put very little effort into them--but they still took up time that would have been better spent, well, blogging, or at least writing something more interesting than a discussion of feminist psychoanalytic criticism of
Hamlet.
If you're from Chicago, you'll understand
The Lincoln Park Trixie Society without any further explanation. For non-Chicagoans: Lincoln Park is our yuppie neighborhood, full of perky young women in capri pants and the former frat-boy lawyers who love them. Lincoln Park used to be home to Lounge Ax until it was shut down due to noise complaints from the people living in the overpriced condos across the alley (among other things, but I think the bitching yuppies had a lot to do with it). Every city has a neighborhood like this, so even non-Chicagoans can see the humor in it. (Thanks, Matt, and Matt's co-worker Rodd, for the link.)
I'm taking a brief break from posting. I'll be back on Tuesday night or Wednesday...and when I return...I shall unveil my brand-new WEBCAM! Yes, now you can watch me engaging in such exciting activities as sitting around looking at the computer screen and sitting in bed reading. Get excited.
Also, I'll be having a special contest to celebrate two years of writing on the internet...you could win an entire box of stuff I bought for ex-boyfriends. (Well, it's stuff I bought while I was still interested in them, but then everything fell apart before I could give it to them...it's part of a clutter-reducing project that I'm working on.) So watch for the webcam and the Cleverness Quiz. And if you miss me so much that you just can't handle it, you could always email me or go check out my Damn List at Splendid E-Zine. Or you could go check out Krystyn's journal: we're 100% compatible according to thespark's personality test. Speaking of that personality test, the only person who got a higher level of compatibility with Aaron than I did was Andrea. I'm jealous, but at least I was outscored by someone cool.
