Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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There’s Something About Zeitgeist

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Zeitgeist. In one of those late nineties years it got to be a popular term to bandy about in conversation, though not one that could be easily defined. Paradigm? Sure, you can pick that up from context. Modernity? Its word root tells you the whole story. But Zeitgeist? It was always used in association with (pop)cultural trends, but in my anorexic teenaged mind all it did was draw up a picture of Linda Blair reading a little bit of Vogue every time her head spun around to the front.

You can look at the dictionary definition, but i think to really understand this work you need to understand another accompanying term: Jumping The Shark. It originated on Happy Days. The internet pretty much specializes in defining Shark Jumping, so i won’t bore you with an extended explanation. The short of it is that when something very popular becomes uncool or passé, it has jumped the shark. It has reached the end of the cool spectrum. People at the water-cooler are now openly mocking it, when at one point they were climbing over each other just to talk about it.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is zeitgeist. Z is the way you can measure of whether or not something even ranks on the sliding scale of coolness to begin with. It’s like a Technorati or a Blogdex of culture at large; a cultural trend-line. Z is the difference between invisible and up-and-coming, between Visqueen and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, between Line of Fire and CSI: My Ass.

Z can be a undertow you are swept into and a crest that you ride upon. To further beleaguer my metaphor, depending on how far upstream in cool river you are, you will get early indications of new phenomenon. I tend to have good advanced warning of new music, decent knowledge of upcoming movies, and relatively no knowledge of hip technology stuff.

I have prepared three examples to make light of this, but you’ll have to come back after i get out of class to see what they are (see, isn’t that responsible of me?).

Jennifuh! (and other pre-dinner fun)

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No time to unload the lengthy post i’ve been jotting down between hours of research — i’m heading to dinner at my favorite restaurant with Elise, who got us onto the guest-list for a show tonight. While you await my return, here’s some quick hits that i might develop further when i return.

This week’s American Idol bootee Jennifer Hudson has a new fan site. It’s quite frightening. I was always on the fence about Jennifer, but after watching her duet with Barry Manilow currently linked from the main page i have changed my mind. That performance easily trumps anything i’ve seen on idol so far this year.

Is Google the beginning of Skynet? Excellent daily read TDavid urges Terminator fans everywhere to imagine the possibility.

I make it a point not to follow celebrity court cases, but VH1 (of all place) offers a very human peek at how Michael Jackson’s current controversy got started. The facts seem to check out, which only makes this latest saga even sadder.

Denmark vs Canada: A Bitter Cold Grudge Match! In a peek at the intellectual humor that marks his concerts, my folk hero weighs in on this conflict over a “small, frozen rock.”

I love reading SugarMama. Apparently, so does Jett. I love how Jett continues to make appearances in comments all over the web while she procrastinates in getting her kick ass blog back on schedule. Meanwhile, Look for sugarmama to appear on the sidebar any minute now.

I’ve stopped being able to tell the fact from the fiction over at Acerbia, but i’m hoping this recent post is the latter. A great example of how you can use blogs for nefarious unbloglike purposes.

Will i shave? I don’t want to meet the band looking all scruffy, but this is my last chance to endure the scraggly stages of my virtually non-existant facial hair to see if it can turn into something more dignified before i head out into the work world. Can you imagine me with a moustache? Would i just look like a bad porn star? What about a goatee? Discuss.

Dead Soldiers and Spears. Live Music.

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First off, a big round of applause to Scott Andrew for what sounds like a terrific gig opening for Josh Kellley. Photos here. ::sigh:: I wish i could get out to see more awesome shows like this. ::double sigh:: I wish i was playing awesome shows like this.

Soon. Soon. First, Copy, Right? blogs excellent cover tunes from a range of artists, along with intelligent commentary. With sidebar links to SongFight and a referral from Largehearted, how could it be anything but good?

Speaking of stealing links from the good denizens of my own sidebar: The Go Fish exposes a must-read story about Tami Silicio, a cargo-worker with Maytag Aircraft who snapped a photo of flag-draped coffins being returned to the United States. The Seattle Times published her photo, and she was subsequently fired. The fact that the single picture of these coffins had to be obtained in such a fashion, and the fact that it got its photographer (and husband David Landry) fired are both absolutely beyond comprehension. Please become informed about the facts of this story, but also try to be cognizant of what they represent in the bigger picture. Perhaps Tami had no right to take the picture and deserved to be fired, but the fact remains that American journalists should not be prevented from photographing casualties, let alone in a tasteful and respectful fashion. Photographs are a powerful facet of journalistic storytelling, and the story of America’s war cannot be complete without them.

On a brighter note, i had forgotten that GoFish’s Nicole was a fellow American Idol addict. Further AI fixes can be had from an editorial lamenting the manipulations of this season as well as an overwrought Washington post recap. My aforementioned monster American Idol post still to come!

Oh, hell, let’s just stick with the music theme. I can’t believe that Melly convinced me to watch what i thought the worst music video of all time, but then realized is standard fare for the current MTV Generation. Witness as Britney… oh, hell, don’t witness it. It was terrible. Britney dies in what was originally scripted as a suicide, but now appears to be an accidental drowning by stupidity. This after her and her boyfriend yell at each other a lot while throwing and kicking things. Also, for a second consecutive single, Britney pretends she has singing range. Ten bonus points to the reader who finds me a Britney drinking game that involves shots every time they use Pro-Tools to correct her pitch or intonation. Hmm… maybe that’s why she drowned…

Okay, okay, something about a respectable muscian now. Beck? Do we still respect him? Well, in any case, his website is presenting a special ten-year retrospective slash making of his debut disc, Mellow Gold. You have to give up some personal information to access the feature, but it sounds lovely. In an alarming spate of cultural convergeance: link via both GloNo & MeFi.

Yikes, i think that’s plenty for now, and i have a karaoke hangover to finish sleeping off.

Red v Blue

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God, i should really know better than to open up Metafilter just before i’m ready to put a post to bed. As if there’s not gonna be any interesting links at MeFi. Nope, never happens.

We’ll start with the easy stuff. This map scares the shit out of me. Red areas are concentrations of Democrats, blue of Republicans. It scares me ’cause:

A) Aside from that one odd spot in South Dakota i don’t even see any heavy red marks

B) Good grief, looking at it this way i can see the logic behind thinking that liberals are really a tiny, mostly coastal and urban voice that’s screwing things up for everyone else. Ahhh, bask in the self-loathing.

C) Electoral College results seem almost inevitable if you assume most Americans are partisan voters.

D) It says a lot about self-segregation. That’s what The MeFi Post is about, though i think the more informative read would be this Atlantic article’s remarks on Thomas C. Schelling.

Schelling’s research with artificially constructed societies informs us that like prefers like. Seems elementary, you might think. Yes, it’s elementary if every citizen wants to live somewhere where 80% of their neighbors are similar to themselves — so long as they don’t specify what demographic the other 20% should be made up of, they’re most likely just going to wind up in a big 100% block of homogeneity.

The revelation (for me, at least), is that even if you say “i’ll be happy if just half of my neighbors are similar to me” you will eventually become a part of a stratified neighborhood that looks a lot like the scary map (see figure 2 in the article, via another MeFi thread). Of course, most people think of halfway immersing themselves with a different race, culture, or political viewpoint makes them incredibly open minded. And, furthermore, who doesn’t want to find at least one out of two faces to be sympathetic? Still, it says very significant things about human psychology, the basic nature of discrimination, and maybe even why Democrats can only win certain southern states.

Good lord, that took forever. Maybe we’ll let that be a post all by itself. Yes. The other dozen links soon to follow.

Questioning My RSS

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I am attempting to learn more about the intricacies of RSS, as Philly Future has picked up the feed that i created as a lark. However, for the moment forget intricacy … this is a Blogger.com nuts’n’bolts question.

My RSS feed currently publishes hyperlinks to where Bloggers thinks my posts live (example [Ed Note: This example no longer works]), but in reality they ought to point to the posts’ home in the archive, where my permalinks point (example [Ed. Note: This example no longer works]). I cannot find anywhere in Blogger’s settings to alter this code. Can it be done? Any helpful comments are greatly appreciated.

In fact, if any knowledgeable bloggers out there would like to point me to your daily neighborhood RSS faq, that would score you major bonus points.