Linking Time! Also: I Will Bring Shame Upon My Family

This morning, I woke up full of dread and shame. Bleary and haggard, I stumbled toward my computer screen.

"No," I muttered. "I didn't do that. I would never do that. I must have dreamed it."

But I was wrong. There, before my eyes, was a pale-blue Safari window, glowing with menace.

"Holy fuck," I said. "I just wrote 3,000 words about Valley of the Dolls."

On that note: it's Linking Time! My most favorite time of all! (Note: this is a lie. My most favorite time is actually Smoking Time, but I am going to give that up - again - in approximately 48 hours. I will be in Ohio, so you won't have to witness my Neely O'Hara-like withdrawal unless you are a member of my immediate family. If you are, well, sucks to be you, I guess!) Here are some people who are much better at blogging than I am:

Man Madness is the single greatest use of the Internet, whether or not you live in DC. Which is manlier - the FBI or the CIA? Place your bets now!

Mainstreaming feminism: it turns out that's a problem! This is because it allows Sarah Palin to cuddle and/or cash in on the movement like it's an adorable Downsy baby. Also, things only get absorbed into the mainstream if they're not that threatening in the first place, so feminism is selectively mainstreamed? And the good stuff about the movement then becomes invisible? See also: sex-positive movement, relationship of Sex & the City to.

You guys, the military is sad and scary. (Have you read Our Guys yet? If not, do it. Warning: it is the only book that ever made me vomit. Aside from Atlas Shrugged, I mean.)

Other things that are sad and scary include: violence against sex workers. The Good Guys trial reports are fascinating. It's like watching a really good procedural, except that Amanda Hess actually writes about strip club workers like they're people, instead of Symbols of Decadence and/or body-count increasing devices. Revolutionary!

Oh, hey, sheep people!

I read Emily Gould's blog. This rambling, ambivalent, occasionally mean, often sad piece - which touches on Emma Goldman,* "Song for Sharon," Prop 8, love, solitude, and that damn Beyonce song - is a good example of why I do that.

Some other people, who are funny and smart, are complaining about the Beyonce song, because they think it's kind of regressive, what with the forcing men to marry you and give you presents for sex and whatnot. Personally, I feel that the song's main theme ("don't be mad when you see that he want it / if you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it") is simply another way of saying, "if you were really that invested in our relationship, perhaps you could have made that clear BEFORE WE BROKE UP AND I STARTED MAKING OUT WITH OTHER PEOPLE," which is a sentiment for the ages.

Now that I'm defending Beyonce, I must also tell you that I read a Bukowski poem that I liked! What has become of my standards, I ask you?

* However, I must respectfully point out that quoting the Goldman piece without qualifying it is objectively kind of bonkers. People do this a lot! Often in Women's Studies classes! Goldman made quite a few points in that piece, many of which were specific to her day and age. For example, she writes that marriage may come about because of love, whereas love does not come about because of marriage, a point which is no longer even vaguely controversial, and which is the precise reason that people tend to live together before getting hitched. She also argues against compulsory marriage, marriage as the goal of a woman's life, and prohibitions against sex outside of marriage - and all of these pressures still exist, but are considerably less powerful now, given the fact that all but the most conservative people resist or ignore them. Goldman also speaks out against marriage as an economic arrangement while completely undervaluing the presence of women in the workplace. If you have no income of your own, you might have to stay with someone who treats you badly out of sheer financial necessity; if you have a job, an income, and savings, however, then you get to stay for precisely as long as the marriage meets your needs. (Hopefully it lasts forever, but, you know, things happen.) At the time Goldman wrote this piece - when you were expected to marry someone without sleeping with him, living with him, or even knowing him very well, and were also encouraged to give up your entire career once the wedding had taken place - some of what she had to say was smart and relevant, if overblown; now, however, people tend to quote the piece as a support for their vague "marriage-is-bad" arguments, which rest mostly on the fact that their parents were fucked up or their exes were mean and they're consequently scared of commitment. This is quite another thing. Anyway, end of post derailment.

My, What An Interesting and Exciting Day!

For people whose memories of the '80s and early '90s largely involve being driven to and from various functions in the Chevy trucks of their metal-enthusiast stepfathers, on those few occasions when the stepfathers in question were not asleep or working the night shift at Big Bear!*

First we have this fine piece of reporting, which I shall quote briefly:

Metal in America has never been a particularly urban movement; its environment is mostly suburban or rural, and its stronghold is traditionally the Midwest. The image of the stereotypical metal fan - young, white, lower or middle class - has been firmly entrenched in American pop-culture since the late '70s... the circumstances of [two Priest fans'] lives can tell us a good deal about the social circumstances of a large portion of metal's most fervent mid-'80s American fans. [They] both grew up in fractured families in a lower-middle-class area of suburban Reno; had histories of depression, substance abuse, and violence; and used their obsession with heavy metal as a way to define themselves as part of an oppositional subculture.

All of this is quite true, and well written.

Then, to top off the day, Chuck "Are You Being Sarcastic? Man, I Don't Even Know Any More" Klosterman contributed a review of Chinese Democracy to the conversation. That review is neither true nor well written, incidentally, as it is concerned largely with the tormented genius of Axl Rose and his Kaufmanian belief that "every single Guns N' Roses song needs to employ every single thing that Guns N' Roses has the capacity to do," which task no doubt made this album the long-delayed creature of legend that it was. This is incorrect. The reason that Chinese Democracy took fourteen years to complete was that it took that long for Axl Rose to purchase and listen to the Puddle of Mudd CDs that it sounds exactly like. There is no Slash on Chinese Democracy! No Slash at all! For this reason, it is morally wrong to consider Chinese Democracy a GNR record. Look, here's Slash now, doing something nice:



I'm so glad that Slash married a woman who shares his love of ridiculous hats.

Having established that Brian DeLeeuw's piece is the clear winner here, perhaps it would be good to point out some places it could have gone! For example, I think DeLeeuw underplays the scary/fascist elements of metal - and understandably so, because I think everyone of a certain age recalls the hysteria which led certain people to believe that "We're Not Gonna Take It" advocated the widespread tossing of parents out of windows. Still, those elements are worth a look. Yes, a lot of metal albums provided identities and revenge fantasies for suburban dweebs, but they also played into the idea that some people (yeah, THOSE people, you know them) need to be put in their place - and it was easy to work certain agendas into that framework, or to read them in. Then, too, there's the fact that the whole hail-Satan element of metal really only works in a culture in which Christianity is not merely an option, but the option, which does a lot to explain the suburban and Midwestern popularity of metal, and is also why I am not surprised (though DeLeeuw is) to find that one of the only remaining all-metal radio stations is run out of a Catholic school. Metal was a culture of opposition, sure, but one which only challenged certain (I would argue) superficial elements of the dominant culture - it was basically against anything that kept white straight dudes from doing whatever the hell they wanted without getting in trouble for it. Metal is the Libertarian party of rock.

Finally, I would like to point out that all of these elements, along with the presumed hyper-hetero-masculinity of metal (lots of songs about fucking! and sometimes raping!) were what made it possible for Rob Halford to dress like a Tom of Finland illustration for years without anyone thinking anything other than "man, that dude must get so much pussy."

Yep.

*Big Bear has a Wikipedia page. I consider this to be the finest achievement of American culture. I also particularly enjoy their early, ominous slogan, "You'll Be Surprised by a Big Bear." They never really dropped the "a giant bear is going to eat you" gimmick, as evidenced by the realistic, life-sized bear - posed with slavering jaws opened wide and one monstrous paw raised for the kill - that crouched atop the freezers in the frozen food section of our local outlet, which made me cry whenever I saw it for much of my young life. That's branding!