Category Archives: Kultcha

Librarians Do Gaga

I like it better than the original. (Don't forget the data bases!)

It's an amazing world where a few clicks leads me from boingboing's overly enthusiastic endorsement of what it calls 'Afrikaans rap-rave' (check out the comments too), to this chilling, compelling, greasy-sickening south african trash-rap (now taking the world by storm) to this pointless confection to wikipedia's dry dissection of bubblegum dance.

Now if I could just decide which I more wish I had never heard of…

Update: To ice the cake, according to the folks from South Africa in this comment thread, Die Antwoord are playing roles. The lead rapper, for example, is Waddy Jones, who is anglophone, not an Afrikaner.

In the secret script at USA Networks (aka the enmeshed male), Grant McCracken thinks he's found USA's hit formula for shows like Burn Notice:

A man riding high is brought low. He now survives by dint of his wits and only because he relies on people he never relied on before. This man is now thoroughly enmeshed in a small group of friends and relatives. Without them he is nothing.

But his question is, Why this?

Explain, please, why this new pattern is so much in evidence in these USA Network shows.

What is happening in American culture that might help explain this new vision of our masculinity? After all, American culture has long been home to a notion of the unconstrained, rogue male. Consider all those tradtional TV heroes and movie stars, men who answered to no one. Why a new pattern? Why an enmeshed male?

He's even running a contest for the best explanation.

My only guess is that the imposition of great adversity makes it OK for traditional male hero characters to be a bit vulnerable, even sensitive. Which makes for better plots, and also makes plots that will appeal to women as well as men. And we've now moved to a state where a tough guy being a little vulnerable — with good cause — is not disqualifying.

That said, I still think from what little I've seen of him that that guy in Burn Notice is pretty wooden.

If I were in the CD selling business, and I were concerned about losing sales to things like MP3 downloads, whether legal or illegal, I think I would make it a little easier to open the seal along the top of the CD when folks brought them home from the shops.

Just sayin'….

OK, now to find a band-aid to cover up the puncture in my thumb from stabbing myself with the sharp object that failed to remove the #$&** barcode/title sticker on the top.

Improv Everywhere, No Pants Subway Ride is, after nine years, well on the way to becoming a New York City institution.

Maybe it's partly because I live in a warm place, but the appeal of going pantsless outdoors in the dead of a NYC winter is a little lost on me. I get the épatez les bourgeois aspects, but it seems from the video that the folks most épatez on the subway may be the least bourgeois.

On the other hand, the event seems to about double in size every year, which puts them on track for two million a decade from now. There's a thought.

I don't care much about the talk show wars, but I love this line at the end of a fine essay by Wendy Grossman, net.wars: The once and future late-night king:

When the history of the digital revolution is written, historians may pinpoint the day Carson announced his retirement as the broadcasting equivalent of Peak Oil.