Vice throwdowns? And other throwdowns, part 2

How do you contruct so many men, and so detailed? Are you _made_ of straw?

(through legal mumbo jumbo i can post on this thread.)

anyway, this is what transpired from a vice caption in the don'ts section of the last issue. (just hit enter at the u/p request)

"Pick one food for the day...like, an apple. Cut it into 8 slices. Eat 2 slices at breakfast, 2 at lunch, 2 at dinner, and you'll have 2 left for a snack! This way .your body thinks it's eating 4 times that day, but in reality you've only had 1 apple. The next day pick another food. Make sure it's only 1 serving that you split up into 3 or more throughout the day! "

"If you're a smoker and you're hungry, light up a cigarette...it curbs your appetite and you no longer feel hungry."

Why is that silly, nabisco? (I find this extremely interesting, I don't mean to be harping on you.)

Most fashion magazines decide, as you do, that fashion and lifestyle are reserved for the rich. Pointing out that Vice does not make that particular decision ("At least"), is not a defense of the magazine but an observation about one audience that they treat seriously. You responded at that time with a general statement that publishing a fashion and lifestyle magazine is inherently kowtowing to the rich, but now you characterize Vice as a satirical magazine about cultural luxuries.

People have been very rigorous on the race questions here, all I'm asking is for you to give the same level of thought to the class questions. Why do you find it trivial for a magazine of any genre to treat the poor with dignity?

I'm curious why none of the Vice haterz haven't yet focused on the sheer idiocy of this statement. It's got to be the stupidest thing (and man these guys sure said/say a lot of stupid things) said in that interview. Does anyone who's actually MET a Klan member or a Neo-nazi actually think they "don't really have anything to say" about blacks, gays, jews, etc? I mean disempowering the language of hate is one thing (note: I don't necessarilly believe this can or should be done, but at least I can understand the logic--however misguided it may be--of that argument) but Vice's editors are ACTUALLY arguing that what they are saying doesn't even exist as HATE language. This is fucking ridiculous. The Klan may not be talking specifically about bitch-y trannies, but Vice IS using the language that White Supremacists unashamedly USE. For these guys to pretend somehow that they are doing otherwise is fucking ludicrous.

Mark, you do need to read this thread, if only for one of the all-time great ILE lines, "So if I were an East End Bangladeshi..." You mustn't miss that one.

Am I alone in being surprised that "freaks" and the "dregs of humanity" apparently includes black people generally?

I've also been wondering how they feel about women. Given the real, street types they hang out with, are they also busy 'reclaiming' words like 'ho' and 'bitch'?

(Even after reading that anorexia message board, I still find the Don't picture hilarious. Does this make me a hypocrite?)

G, I would not oppose Vice if I genuinely felt it was subversive, or that that subversion would achieve what Momus wants - of course it would be good if these words lost their hateful effects. I do think Vice may be as subversive and cutting edge and zeitgeist-changing as Will & Grace, though. (I've only read the bits linked to from here, though.)

Another thing: can someone explain to me the difference between these two editor guys pointing at a gay painter they did a feature on or a lesbian DJ they employ as implicit permission for them to use 'faggot' (I imagine they associate with the odd black person too), and someone saying "no, I'm not racist - some of my best friends are black"? Didn't everyone grow out of that feeble defence a couple of decades ago?

WTF, Martin, what was your problem with that line, exactly? Not only have I had Bangladeshi in-laws, but as a freak in an eyepatch I tremble on the Bethnal Green Road when 'noticed' by the same skinheads who make elderly Bengalis tremble.

In your view, is it always pretentious to find common cause with people who are different from you (even if you've been married to one), is it always inadmissible to imagine the feelings of a different race? If you feel and imagine and experience in these ways, should you always shut up about it? If you speak about it, are you automatically put in the stocks and ridiculed?

The skinheads may not like you, but it's a lot easier for you to avoid their gaze by the simple fact that you are white.

'We like living in a squalid city, we love that, because every city that is clean we don't like. Every time we go to visit a city that has a clean pavement, we disappear immediately, because there is nothing going on there. Or a single class or a single race city always makes us very nervous. If we're in a city and we haven't seen a Bangladeshi person for three days we become completely edgy. It's very important that we are in it, we are part of the city, we are miserable like anybody else, or happy like anybody else.'

I think you have to understand this attitude in its context, which is that it comes out of certain areas in certain cities where artists and immigrants are living together, partly because of poverty, but also from choice. They're together because they feel a similar alienation from the mainstream of society (though for totally different reasons, and with different trajectories and consequences). The mainstream proposes itself as 'clean'. Whether it really is clean or not is immaterial. Its centrality allows it to commandeer terms like 'clean' and 'normal'. It's power which makes you clean and makes you normal, because power allows you to define words.

The inner city ferment happening in these areas where artists and immigrants intermingle is an extremely important generator of social change. Without them, no jazz, no jungle, no Gilbert and George, no Vice... etc etc. There are two strategies of resistance to the mainstream's branding of such areas as 'dirty'. Either you say 'No, in fact it is in such areas that people are truly kind, good, clean and human!' (this is a kind of Noble Savage Romanicism) or you say 'Yes, we are abject! But it's great to be abject! Because that's what's real!' (the path chosen by G&G and Vice).

Which is why I used the neat little word 'if', rather than some ludicrous formulation like 'As a Bengali, I would just like to say that our whole community feels...'

Well Momus, in "your view" it is always reactionary to ever disagree with people who are different from you (or, rather, different from "everyone else" whatever that means).

Anyway the problem with recasting "dirty" is that it sucks to live in filth, as most people who live in filth will tell you. It's unhealthy, unsafe, and unpleasant.

Also "It's great to be abject! Because that's what's real!" IS noble savage romanticism. And finding humanity, community, etc. in poor places is boring and done to death because of course the human spirit shows resiliance and humor because that's just the way the fucking human spirit is, okay? So people should get over it already and start talking about how being in abject conditions sucks anyway.

No Norman Mailer = someone else would have come up with an equivalent term and been just as wrong and you would have used that one instead.

You really do have a knack for misreading.

I have read it, yes. I was just pointing out that we don't 'get over' something as big as white people picking up on black style and lingo just because we get over Norman Mailer.

Feck, how many times do I have to tell you I married into that ferment? Come with me to a house in east London 1994 and I'm in a room of Bangladeshis, my father's beside me, he's hugging her father, there's an imam there, several uncles are telling me that I must convert to Islam, give up music and make a pilgrimage to Mecca before I can marry their niece, her brother's telling me he's going to kill me...

19th century novel? Well, maybe... Looking down? Scientific? I think not.

'We like living in a clean city, we love that, because every city that is dirty we don't like. Every time we go to visit a city that has a dirty pavement, we disappear immediately, because there is too much going on there. Or a mixed class or a mixed race city always makes us very nervous. If we're in a city and we haven't seen a white person for three days we become completely edgy. It's not important that we are part of the city. We don't have to be miserable just because other people are, or happy just because other people are.'

Now it sounds just like your Tory aunt from Buckinghamshire, doesn't it, talking about how she hates to go down to London?

So if I were an East End Bangladeshi, I would cease to feel nervous passing a white guy on the street with a shaved head, knowing that he was probably on his way to buy a nice bottle of chablis rather than a copy of British Bulldog.

I'm probably a hell of a lot closer to being perceived as an East End Bangladeshi than Momus is (and that isn't all that close), but I accept that Momus would also have been pretty likely to have been beaten up for wearing an eyepatch and having had a Bangladeshi wife. But still, having had "Paki!" shouted out in the street at me on numerous occasions (actually considerably less now than a few years ago), I felt far more jittery about not being able to tell the racists from the Guardian readers. Ditto with language, if everyone starts throwing the word "paki" around to the point that it becomes meaningless, how do you tell whether the person using it is racist or otherwise? It's obvious in some contexts, but not in a lot of others.

What Vice is clearly saying is 'We live in the world of Is, not Should. We keep it real. We use the 'hot' definitions of the streets and not those of 'cold' liberalism.' But they use a different kind of liberalism to justify this; they say 'We are living amongst the people we are 'slighting' with these epithets, and we're using them because that's the language they use. It would be presumptuous and pompous of us to use cold liberal terms in that context. We aren't the KKK, but we also aren't hippies. What unites the KKK and hippies -- the cold left and the cold right -- is their abstraction of minorities into devils or angels.

As opposed to the abstraction of these minorities into the "dregs of society" you mean? The speakers in the Vice interview are talking in terms just as abstract as what you call the "cold left" and "cold right". In any case, I find the assumption that being a well-meaning but possibly naive liberal and a nasty racist, homophobic bigot implies some sort of disengagement with the subject is dodgy to say the least.

And once again, Momus has failed to explain why the "we use this language because we are appropriating the language of the people we live around" is a good thing, or any less pompous than a self-righteous liberal viewpoint, or actually constructive at all. I don't want to reclaim the word 'paki', and even doing so wouldn't disempower the racists who originally uttered it. They could just call me a wog instead.

Matt, that's because M.'s position isn't an entirely honest one. If he were to start out by saying "Look, that shit in Vice makes me giggle, I don't consider myself racist (and look here you I was once married to a person from another culture so that means there is absolutely no way in hell anybody gets to call me a racist, see, because no racist ever ever married outside his own culture, just like no man who ever married a woman can possibly be sexist) and people getting offended by Vice's shockspeak strikes me as a little myopic," that'd be one thing. Instead he couches his arguments in a sort of modernism-redux newspeak, attributing all kinds of transgressive sleight-of-hand to something far smaller than his analysis thereof. The very hippies he decries have the answer to this problem: "let it all hang out," i.e. say exactly what's in your mind/heart/libido, not what you came up with to justify what you found when you went digging around down there.

Himself wrote: Now it sounds just like your Tory aunt from Buckinghamshire, doesn't it, talking about how she hates to go down to London? Yes, EXACTLY: M.'s own position and that of the Buckinghamshire aunt strawman are rhetorically identical, which means that at core they are ideologically nondifferent.

BTW my new band is called the Buckinghamshire Aunt Strawmen and as we are planning on being a very big thing indeed we are going to need as many musicians as we can find: who's with me?

"Oh, my god, did you hear what he said? Are there any niggers here tonight? Is that rank! Is that cruel! Is that a cheap way to get laughs? Well, I think I see a nigger at the bar talking to two guinea owners and next to them....Now why have I done this? Is it only for shock value? Well, if all the niggers started calling each other nigger, not only among themselves, which they do anyway, but among others. If President Kennedy got on television and said:'I'm considering appointing two or three of the top niggers in the country to my cabinet'-if it was nothing but nigger, nigger, nigger- in six months nigger wouldn't mean any more than good night, god bless you...-when that beautiful day comes, you'll never see another nigger kid come home from school crying because some motherfucker called him a nigger."
---Lenny Bruce

'nuff said. i agree with momus - and find it silly that we are still talking about language.

When really - the world is just as offensive and shocking as it was when Lenny was last arrest in 1964. So nothing much has really changed. And that in itself is still pretty shocking - i.e. that people can get some friggin' upset over words.

Arrest Record

Dates Charge Location
September 29, 1961 Possession of narcotics Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
October 4, 1961 Obscenity Jazz Work Shop, San Francisco, California
October 6, 1962 Possession of narcotics Los Angeles, California
October 24, 1962 Obscenity Gate of Horn, Chicago, Illinois
January 1963 Possession of narcotics Los Angeles, California
April 1964 Obscenity Cafe Au Go-Go, New York, New York

hahahaha...

the thing is john - Lenny understood that the world is fucking cruel and funny.

and it was '64 when Lenny did that - Lenny wasnt exactly a 'Live Aid' a performer (i.e. acoustic guitars and decrying the ills of the world) - Lenny, TO ME, was funny because he picked fun at 'taste line' barriers - SO - given that context - that is what i'm talking about.

anyways - it's funny. not intellectual. hardy har har.

i made this mention at the last family gathering which was the death of my grandmother. and we all laughed. and then we forgot about it and got on with the business of living.

which is what i'm going to do.

c'ya.

Hahhahahah - that's what I do when I crash diet, actually. It's a good tip!!

and almost everyone opposing momus is pointing out that seeing as "when that beautiful day comes" is a long long long time in the future and will require a lot more work* than a tiny number of artists playing with words and then — and this is actually the bit which is surely irritating most people — awarding themselves great big medals for their tremendous contribution to making the word "nigger" nice again

(*eg work = actual real political persuasion and actual real soul-searching, a transformation in the world not a change in the meaning of a word)

i'm afraid momus's pantheon of artistic cool and cultural bravery comes across to most as the endless (and relentlessly conservative) *resurrection* of the political order he appears continually to congratulating himself for opposing: "artistic" is for him defined entirely in conventional terms, as we've seen in dozens of other big thread throwdowns

meanwhile, norman mailer is currently artistically "uncool" so momus distances himself, even though mailer was i. pretty much pretty much making exactly the point momus is making, and ii., doing it at a historical moment when it was genuinely a scary and daring thing to do, not 40 years later, when niche-marketing has opened up all kinds of very safe little zones in which to act out these kinds of imitative tantrums

(also: lenny bruce and norman mailer were reading from *exactly* the same page, so you can't quote lenny AND agree w.momus until he defends mailer and hippies against vice's we-today-are-so-enlightened smugness)

the vice stance is obnoxious as much as anything because they cop the attitude they do at hippies: ie themselves 30 years earlier (cf endless use of the word "spade" by magz like Oz => which kind of gives a clue as to exactly how effective politically this approach is, once it carries beyond the space it appears to make sense in) (ie no one uses the word "spade" any more, postively or engatively, but racism carries on carrying on)

momus also makes no distinction between the mere private announcement of the intention to reclaim, and the social fact of reclamation (which is presumably why he couldn't make head or tail my earlier intervention: i objected bcz i think this sets the bar incredibly low, as regards supposedly praiseworthy artistic contribution to the Struggle, and the only way he can seemingly inch it back up again is by claiming points for Unrelated Artistic Status)

your post, it must be said, rules

O.k, Mark, I can actually understand, the view point of Momus - however, that says more about his art than anything re: what is the point. Basically, Momus is saying, I can use nigger/fag etc and what not - because I am an artist - but anyone else cannot do it and is the enemy - then, yes, that is wrong. However that demonstrates how insular he really is and how far away from the 'people' or the 'non-creatives' he really is (and probably speaks for himself in his lack of the pop hit) ...

arrggh.

Let me say this simply. Yes, I agree on some level on what Momus is saying, using those words, playing with language, is good.

However, i disagree with him on his utter insularity.

Though - myself, when i use words such as fag, nigger, etc - i am vibing off of my enviroment or my anorexic short story which was indeed poking fun at anorexia, but, i was taking it out of the current oprahesque view point and putting into a different sense so people can actually think about anorexia by uncomfortably laughing at it. Though I was hassled for it. I thought it was good - but that story was inspired by non-artists. So, in effect, he can't really say that, though, the first part of the thought is good.

in other words, he is perfectly happy for racism and homophobia to continue forever, bcz they provide a material for him and his buddies to "operate oppositionally" against

which is a trueism - i just think about what somebody once said after a recent funeral - and this is a simple kid thought but sayign i don't believe in heaven - becuase if everyone in heaven good, forever, than how will there know, that is good - that there are good because there isnt anything bad to have them understand what is good. Ok, i'm relying a five year old's anxious thoughts about heaven but do you see what i'm getting at? there will always be something rally against.

and almost everyone opposing momus is pointing out that seeing as "when that beautiful day comes" is a long long long time in the future and will require a lot more work* than a tiny number of artists playing with words and then — and this is actually the bit which is surely irritating most people — awarding themselves great big medals for their tremendous contribution to making the word "nigger" nice again

however, you are underestimating the voice of the artist in politics.

meanwhile, norman mailer is currently artistically "uncool" so momus distances himself, even though mailer was i. pretty much pretty much making exactly the point momus is making, and ii., doing it at a historical moment when it was genuinely a scary and daring thing to do, not 40 years later, when niche-marketing has opened up all kinds of very safe little zones in which to act out these kinds of imitative tantrums

I agree with you at this point - Mailer is the bomb - but even then it's obvious that Momus has never been to a trashy town where the kids call everyone, black or white, "my nigger...."

(also: lenny bruce and norman mailer were reading from *exactly* the same page, so you can't quote lenny AND agree w.momus until he defends mailer and hippies against vice's we-today-are-so-enlightened smugness)

But is it smugness - werent the intellectuals of the day saying the same about Mailer, Mark?

momus also makes no distinction between the mere private announcement of the intention to reclaim, and the social fact of reclamation (which is presumably why he couldn't make head or tail my earlier intervention: i objected bcz i think this sets the bar incredibly low, as regards supposedly praiseworthy artistic contribution to the Struggle, and the only way he can seemingly inch it back up again is by claiming points for Unrelated Artistic Status)

I didnt understand what you had written - break ti down for me, please. I get lost with academia - I have to swot too hard.

and ps - i always thought lenny wasnt funny when he would read the transcripts of his trials - intellectualism broke his power. faded that pioneer.

Still at the same time you could say that Lenny Bruce and Norman Mailer were pompous and self regarding or the justified people that are for Mailer and Bruce are pompous and self regarding - i.e. - that Vice is just there, it sees the world cruelly but when asked to justify it nobody can say - oh yeah - i uncomfortably was laughing at the anorexic in the picture but in public i find it horrifying. To deny ugliness is to deny beauty - i.e. I don't think that Vice are particularly clever in their defense but neither was Lenny Bruce - both got bogged down with cod-intellectualism and is better just 'as is' rather then 'this is it because...' Do you know what I am saying? I don't think Lenny Bruce was trying to change the world - i think that his was unconscious and only became conscious when people asked him to define the ugliness that he talked about - however, both made it funny. Why is it funny? Because to some extent we identify with what is being said - and it's shocking. arggghh....let me put it simply.

Vice is funny because it represents uncomfortable aspects of life and makes you laugh.

Defending it is impossible. Because it just is...

3: yes i think the intellectuals of mailer's day were saying much the same, and they were being smug too, then, and that's part of the point i'm making: that ppl are being a lot too quick to award themselves kudos for an intervention which is actually symbolic rather than political, and peters out a lot quicker than you'd imagine (shock in art is like special effects in movies: the day it comes out it's amazing, a year later it's meh, ten years later it's hidously laughable, 20 years later it's quaint, 50 years later it's an invaluable social-historcal resource of extreme scholarly fascination lamentably overlooked by mainstream historians)

Then the argument is there that by nature and design that the shock of Vice magazine is needed....as getting a rise out of people is harder than originally imagined....

And look at the debate it inspired - Vice has got people talking....about things, which is not necessarily a bad thing though I must admit i just read it and laugh.

4: the power of the voice of the artist is a function of the power of the artist's audience to mediate and transmit that voice into something beyond themselves

Exactly - and that is what Vice has done - it's got people talking - not a bad thing.

5: OK i will reconfigure my earlier post but not now as i have dinner guests arriving any moment!!

Phew. I was a bit - huh...what are you talking about.

Now, with that snippet of Lenny Bruce's dialogue, or piece, as john calls it ... do you find that offensive? I find it funny - just because it is true, i can relate to it, it's outlandish because it will never happen and the nervousness it inspires makes me laugh in the right way thinking - but finally, you make the world more banal by denying it's ugliness.

and i've been called faggot, etc, before....and it's all sort of meaningless - you, the audience puts the context into it.

instead - the real question is why doesnt momus hang with retards?? i am picturing him with a cap on a jaunty angle with an inscription that says: Mom's Handicam - going on a daytrip with the retardsto see the david lachapelle exhibition with a t-shirt that reads 'You don't have to be crazy to work here but it helps' as he tries to control 'the kids'... whilst holding several bags.

more of that, please.

Momus at the David LaChapelle exhibition: It looks like some fag went crazy with the soft lense and staple guns in here....

momus: only artists have ever done anything worthwhile in the battle against racism!!
mark s: that isn't really true you know
momus: mark s is a reactionary bourgeois who supports racism!!

i don't care as long as he isnt a fag retard!!

Hey, that's not what I meant to say. I meant to say GO BACK AND READ MY POSTS VERY...

No, that's not it either. But I'd love to know where this particular straw man said only artists had ever done anything worthwhile in the battle against racism. I recall asking Mark, after a very close reading of his comments, why he thought Vice, if it wasn't a pioneer of the reappropriation of slight words, was *not* like the kids in 'Queer as fuck' T shirts he was approving of? And he hasn't answered that.

I also didn't say that anybody here was a reactionary bourgeois who supports racism.

If Mark's Tessa Jowell, I'm Jack Straw.

Despite the desire on many parts to conflate sexual identity with racial identity, that shit don't fly, so I think the "Queer As Fuck" T-shirts are red herrings. One can always change one's shirt.

And by the way, Mailer is extremely fashionable just now, thanks to his collaborations with Matthew Barney, the world's official Greatest Living Artist. (Covers head.)

????? i never said shockig = revolutionary????

i find tipex/white out revolutionary but not shocking.

Break that down on how you garnered that one?

As I am perplexed.

I'm also interested in Mark S's use of the term 'imitative tantrums' to describe the 'white negro' phenomenon. As a rock critic, do you really reduce such an important part of the history of the popular music of the last 50 years to 'imitative tantrums'?

suzy already owns well-argued mag-insider angle on this one (and anyway hurrah pub philosophs - haha why hello Momus!!)

Momus is right - even though this is way off the track - which is where i like to situate myself but that is a great phrase imitative tantrums and have written it down.

but none of you have really lived in harmony korrine's vision of america, like this dear narrator, so i take your opinions with a grain of salt. how can a media insular populations truly break down and discuss this - i.e. "be of the people" instead of being "off the people"

off to watch pop idol.

Although I have to say Nick's launched the paper tiger version of himself here, or you guys are just jousting at it. I don't think he actively goes out seeking friendship with artfreaks and/or anyone because they're artfreaks etc. (nobody has that much power to draw people to them) but because he really gives no concern to the origins of his friends, it's just something one comments upon after the fact.

Also bear in mind issues around the use of language and racial perception are among the most difficult to elucidate because the vast range of people's experience brings to bear the most individualised possible viewpoints on the subject(s). We are all having problems finding the words to convey the meanings and emotions we feel, and sometimes there are not enough words people won't fight over.

Doomie, I wasn't attributing the shocking=revolutionary equation to you but to Momus. Whose every opinion suggests that this is in fact his position, however much he'd like to distance himself from it.

(p.s. mark s -- I totally disagree with you on any Bruce/Mailer similarities. Their points are utterly different, as are their general outlooks and pretty much everything they did. Bruce was a humanist trying to be an asshole because the world was fucked. Mailer was an asshole trying to be a humanist because other people thought the world was fucked. His vision of the "white negro" is of fundamental incomprehension. Bruce's race point is based on a vision of an integrated audience laughing as one at LBJ's speech-coaching)

But WHY? To what end? To what purpose? What is the point of doing this? Will it make a blind bit of difference to the existence of the sentiment behind the original meaning of the words? Why is Momus persistently failing to answer my questions along this line?

i stand by that, g

sterl: if two ppl are reading from the same page, then one of them must be reading it upside down (unless they're choirboys, obv).

Anyway I just remembered a great Lenny Bruce routine along the lines of blackpeopleloveus.com. He does this great shtick on hyper-liberal condescending "tolerance" at a dinner party. Just to make the point that he's more complex on race issues than that one quote seems.

I like that.

http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/2002/120502/news3.html

really, though, isn't an article where mcinness deplores "the dumb generation" and brags about his $10 million empire just rich with irony?

Publisher to American Conservative: Youth are stupid conformists but may be improving.
Writer to editor: Is publisher just trying to drum up finance capital, or does he really believe that stuff?
Editor to writer: He believes it, but wouldn't think of using Vice to impose those views on the readers, who he admits are 88% liberal.
Writer: Okay, let's continue writing intelligent and liberal content (does so).
Editor: This content is too intelligent, I'm cutting it way down and removing all ideas.

I suspect, though, that content for any wide circulation publication would have Guy Debord references removed at this point. That's basically an editor's job, unfortunately, just like it's a publisher's job to cultivate rich and influential people, whatever scum they are and whatever toss they talk.