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?

????? 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.