Two Unflinching Castigations: One Theme
The Dresden Dolls' Amanda Palmer and some hapless schmo at Bungie irk my ire...with sexy results.
Thursday, 2005-03-17 | Classic Gin, MASH, Music, Videogames
| "I'm still trying to express my truth, my place in the world, my belief." |
| Amanda Palmer |
I just realized that's it's been ages since the last time that I really just hauled off and ripped into these assholes.
Some (assholes themselves) might call that evidence that I've matured in some minute way. Others, however, will understand this lengthy period of reprieve for the dumbasses of the world for what it is: an error on my part. Without further ado:
I. The Dresden Dolls - I can tell you completely honestly that I hadn't even so much as heard the name, 'The Dresden Dolls' until RZL announced that NIN would be touring (extensively) with them.
Having learned long ago to regard Teh L33t Renzor's musical tastes and recommendations with suspicion--how else would you have me regard the opinions of a man who hilariously declared that "And All that Could have Been" was NIN at its worst or who told Rollingstone that holier-than-everyfuckingbody, nappy-haired sock-puppet Zach De La Rocha was a 'major' musical talent--I cautiously checked in on The Dresden Dolls. You can learn more about them here, but I don't recommend it: there are certain things you can't un-hear and, if you plan on seeing NIN on the 'club tour' that begins in a week or two from now, you probably want to encounter The Dresden Dolls with a blank slate in order that you might more easily be distracted by other aspects of the event and not feel compelled to hurl over-ripe tomatos and other rotting produce at the stage that the most-recent iteration of NIN will shortly be taking.
I should mention, before I begin, that I do feel slightly uncomfortable heaping scorn on The Dresden Dolls as a collective, however, because as far as I can tell, drummer Brian Viglione has so far had the good sense to keep his mouth shut and doesn't technically 'deserve' what's coming his way.
Viglione is, in the sense that he hasn't got much to say, completely unlike his vociferously and compulsively stupid partner, Amanda Palmer, who wears her blithe self-absorption, grotesquely inflated sense of self-importance and irritating, undisciplined aestheticism like Aurelius Commodus Antonious Augustus wore the lion-skin in a vain and hilarious effort to remind those who beheld him that he was related in some distant way to Hercules. Palmer and Commodus both chose at some point to present themselves as persons fit for reverence (he as a god, she as a virtuoso musician) but did so in similarly ill-fitting and unfortunate ways. Palmer recently had this to say to Billboard.com: "It's easy to like this band. Our music is aggressive but not confrontational. I think there's a lot of common threads running through [The Dresden Dolls and Nine Inch Nails]."
The chutzpah of this Boston-baked-bullshit-artist!
1.) If it's 'easy' to like a band whose sound is characterized by the intensely personal (in the very generic, My So Called Life sense of that phrase), antiphonal mewlings, yammerings and yowlings of a pudgy, over-wrought, unaccomplished 20-something goth with an art-school haircut and a tendency to whack her piano at forte fortissimo velocity in syncopation with her inane clucking, then it is also 'easy' to suck hardened cement through a little plastic coffee-stirrer.
2.) 'Aggressive' is an adjective that means, 'actively hostile; antagonistic.' 'Confrontational' is also an adjective. Here is what it means: 'to come face to face with, especially with defiance or hostility.' These words, while not synonyms, are nearly identical in connotation. What is she trying to say when she says her music is 'aggressive but not confrontation'? Well, to my tin-ear, this kind of potentially intentional antinomial poesy all sounds the same: 'I am special and I deserve special treatment and my inability to speak articulately is actually evidence of a unique interority that inspires me to boldly confront the paradoxical nature of language and being by calling into question linguistic certainty itself: I am not what I am and what appears in me to be facepalm-inducing ineptitude and a generally undisciplined carelessness is actually evidence of my unique and inspired genius.'
Due to Reznor's notoriously horrendous taste in music (he recently remixed a U2 song, for the love of Christ!) Palmer has been given a unique opportunity to ride his exceptionally long coat-tails; that she pretends to something more, i.e. creative consonance or some kind of shared artistic sensibility with him and with NIN, is a delusion that Palmer would like very much for others to share in.
No dice, though: because in the end, she's just another slap-happy, inarticulate teeny-bopper-for-life with a baby grand and a burning urge to inflict her journal entries on the world.
3.) Finally, Amanda Palmer says that 'there's a lot of common threads running through' her music and the music of Nine Inch Nails. It seems like Aman-duh is not only having trouble getting verbs and subjects to agree, but that she is also having trouble making her points stick; maybe it is my academic training rearing its fastidious head again, but the fact that she chooses not to develop this idea about 'common threads' in the interview in question inclines me to think that she has no fucking idea what she's talking about.
I am familiar with most of the NIN corpus and have studied it exhaustively. Whatever this bitch says about she and Reznor as kindred spirits has something to do with auras, essences or a 'vibe' because it sure-as-shit has nothing to do with anything that exists and can thus be explained.
II. Bungie - While a certain former roommate and I like to butt heads over industry politics, he, an avid Nippo-phile and staunch supporter of Nintendo's rigorously enforced heterodoxy, and I, a devil's advocate who tends to pit the middle against the beginning and the end, both manage to see eye-to-eye on the question of Seattle-based developer Bungie.
While Lars derides the firm responsible for such seminal titles as Halo and... well, Halo, for their practice of serving flavor-less pablum to the slack-jawed masses, I take issue with these artless mountebanks for entirely different reasons. Where my un-equivocating former roommate criticizes Bungie's corporate lack of creativity, I prefer to take cat-o-nine to them in a more ad hominem style for more ad hominem reasons.
If you follow the profane and licentious VG-centric webcomic Penny Arcade, you know by now that Krahulik and Holkins have recently (cf. PA comics for 03.16.05 and 03.18.05) been embroiled in a good-natured row with their fellow Washingtonians. While there's nothing obviously objectionable about the manner in which PA and Bungie are currently exploring the fraternity that comes with contending against one another in multi-player videogames, Bungie's account of their friendly competition with PA reflects a stupidity so base, so unseemly and disagreeable that it demands redress and censure.
From Bungie's website:
'Amusing interweb humor destination, Penny Arcade was walking down the street the other day (as cumulative entities are wont to do) and it started boastfully extolling its own virtues and saying what an hilarious organization it was, and that no video game character would go unskewered by its rapier wit. From Pac-Man to Ms. Pac-Man, no target of its ruthless brand of stinging satire would go unburned. Even Bungie. And thusly, they challenged Bungie to a duel.As C.E. Winchester III remarks in a certain episode of MASH, 'this verges on the precious.'
Bungie, meanwhile, was downtown at the homeless shelter moistening the cracked lips of orphans with camphor, and soothing the fevered brows of sick kittens with champagne-soaked chamois. When Bungie heard about Penny Arcade's vainglorious claims it humbly submitted that Penny Arcade seemed like a decent enough sort of website/gaming organization and that it was entitled to its claims, boasts and challenges.
However, when Bungie heard that Penny Arcade had declared itself absolutely opposed to women's suffrage, like a final slap of a wet leather glove, it was on like Donkey Kong. A lunchtime match at exactly 12pm. A high-nooner, if you will. This is how it all went down.'
'[C]umulative entities'? Why not 'corporate' or 'collective'? This catachritical moment (and the myriad others like it in Bungie's document) are irrefutable evidence of a lack of facility with language that, so long as it does become apparent while the writer is attempting erudition or attempting to demonstrate his verbal dexterity, does not bother me. The un-ignorable fact of the matter, however, is that whichever clownshoe at Bungie wrote up their version of events uses 'thusly' at least twice (I couldn't bear to read the whole thing) in the document.
'Thusly,' any child knows, is not a word; 'thus' is an adverb and thus 'thusly' is akin to saying something like 'Bungie's mouthpiece writes unintelligentlyly.'
Pedantry aside, my point is this: there is nothing that is quite so irksome to me as when ill-equipped verbal Busch-leaguers jump behind the word-processor and proceed to blithely wade into the part of the municipal pool of diction in which they are clearly out of their depth and shove their shit-eating grins into my face. I was minding my own business. Can you not mind yours?
Supercillious pomposity couched in such egregious syntax errors as 'like a final slap of a wet leather glove,' (emphasis mine) inspire in me a comtempt that is identical to the contempt inspired in me by the egotistic caterwauling of college kids who first learn about the word 'normative' and then proceed to wander about half-in-the-bag disabusing us of our 'normative commitments to comprehensive and totalizing narratives, dude', brandishing the term 'normative' like it was the legendary Vampire Killer (against which our carelessness and complacency was utterly powerless).
If this ill-advised and poorly executed attempt at satire--we imagine that Bungie's man was attempting to satirize the often sententious (but well-executed, insightful and frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious) prose of PA's Tycho or perhaps just sententious prose per se--is the best that Bungie can do in terms of wit and composition then they really need to either 1.) get a new web-guy or 2.) earnestly consider the old saw about how 'silence is golden.'
And so, as we have learned, if you haven't got anything intelligent to say, then don't say anything at all; it'll save me the effort of having to parade your half-baked flapdoodle down the via sacra on my way to the trash pile where it belongs.