I wrote a post a while ago about Joe Biel that got a moderate amount of traffic (including a rambling reply from Joe himself, unfortunately). Recently someone replied to that post with some jaw-droppingly disgusting abuse apologist bullshit. I debated approving it but decided to because this fool attached their full name to it, and I like the names of clownasses being attached to embarrassing shit they say.
In their second comment, they revealed something interesting. I have bolded the relevant parts. (Also: this is the kind of cartoonishly shitty abuse apologism you would expect from the villain in a Lifetime movie so do NOT read on if that stuff is gonna ruin your day).
My self-esteem couldn’t be higher. I was present in Joe’s life during this “abuse” and it’s bullshit. Alex is a weak little girl who thrives solely on attention. I thought people had issues with Joe’s “accountability” yet you have stated that he himself has admitted to the abuse? contradictory, which is expected. Facts are facts about abuse victims, if you don’t like them, too bad. I know that being a strong woman, someone could only abuse ME once. period. I sure did use my real name because anyone with some common sense knows i’m right. Furthermore, I’m helping Joe out with some resources to sue the shit out if her sad ass because he’s got a solid libel suit. As far as him admitting it goes, what other choice did he have against a low self esteem attention getter? Really…what other choice? Gimme a break. I was under the impression that most “women” who stay in abusive relationships stayed because of low self esteem and self worth. Now pardon me, my kitten needs my attention…
I don’t know about you, but I feel bad for that kitten. Also, looks like “community accountability” doesn’t do shit. In other news, the Pope is Catholic and water is wet.
Hi! So I’m in the midst of what will probably be an all-nighter, writing a profile of an academic library. Whoo. School. For some light amusement, however, I have decided to share with y’all some missives I recently received from a…gentleman…on OkCupid. (Yes, I do that. Whatever. I’ve met plenty of lovely people outside of my immediate punk/metal friend circle, which was more or less my goal there.) Apologies for those of you who are my Facebook friends who have seen this, but I don’t encounter this sort of 90-proof complete fucking batshittery often in my life, so I like to share the, uh, wealth when I do.
So. This dude’s opening line was telling me that John Carpenter’s The Thing was a remake (because I say in my profile that I like The Thing, but not the recent remake which exists for some fucking reason). Yeah, no shit, I read IMDB too. I scanned his profile, found little of interest, and decided to ignore him. Then this happened. (Changes in his profile picture come from him changing it as I screencapped all this nonsense, because apparently duckface vs. tired internet meme is a real tough decision.)
well, I can’t imagine why a total fucking prize like THAT is still single.
I just woke up! I’m drinking red wine mixed with root beer!
Anyway, have you all seen this nonsense? I have but a few things to add:
1. LOL @ someone who thinks Hollywood Undead is a good band thinking they have anything to say about metal that’s worth listening to at all
2. Double LOL @ someone using fucking Tumblr as a subcultural bellwether.
3. Ultra mega triple LOL @ the idea of using being into metal as a way to get male attention, because seriously, have you SEEN metal dudes? 99% of the time, I wouldn’t hit that with my CAR.
I just bought a ticket to Wacken Open Air 2013. Booked my flight to Hamburg. Return flight forthcoming, when I figure out travel plans a little better. Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy SHIT.
Any suggestions on fun things to do in Germany/Europe happily accepted.
Hellooooo! Dear god, where does the time go? I did spend a considerable amount of it putzing around on Tumblr (I deleted mine in the interest of not wasting any more time on the internet than I had to). While I did see some fairly interesting discussions, I eventually became disillusioned with the sheer number of times I saw social justice language applied to utter nonsense. Hey, you know what “singlet privilege” is? It’s when your parents refuse to acknowledge you’re sharing a body with anime characters. MOOOOOOOOM!
I also, unfortunately, became more familiar with s.e. smith. While it’s true I don’t really care for most professional internet feminists (and yes, I know s.e. smith doesn’t identify as a feminist, but ou still seems to write quite a bit about it), that’s mostly because I think their writing is not very good/creative and just tends to go the easy route of “glancing blows at wide-open targets.” (A good example of this is Tiger Beatdown’s post on the Song of Ice and Fire series, which sorta-kinda broadly covers the main issues with George Martin’s treatment of women, but also grossly misinterprets a lot of stuff and totally ignores what I thought were some obviously objectionable storylines, because…I don’t know, reading is hard, and why bother when you can skim things and dash off something snarky that will automatically make 10,000 people internet-high-five you?)
smith’s e-fame, on the other hand, is something I actually find kind of troubling, because so many of ou’s written pieces reflect what I see as the toxic runoff of internet social justice. This horrible piece on mental illness, for example, in which smith basically upbraids strangers for not wanting to act as ou’s therapists. While I certainly don’t think that people who act “crazy” in public should be mocked or belittled, there is something to be said for managing one’s mental illness and not expecting randos to come up and help you. If I see someone displaying mental illness symptoms, I will feel bad for them and hope they get what they need. But I am not going to try to help them because I have no context for how they got like this. Abusive family? Toxic social environment? Just the demons in their own head taking over? I. DON’T. KNOW. And speaking as a (recovered! don’t fret!) self-injurer, I think that smith needs to stop speaking for me right the fuck now when ou mourns the fact that people ou barely knows won’t acknowledge ou’s self-injury scars. You know what I like? When people don’t bring that up, because either they don’t think it’s worth commenting on (because I am more than my crazy) or they know that those scars are from a very dark and sad time in my life that I don’t want to discuss right at that moment. Also, I don’t bring up other people’s scars for the same reasons, and because I find such discussions triggering. Hi, s.e. smith, sometimes the way other people manage their crazy precludes everything being about you.
And ou’s criticisms of feminism make me want to spew burrito chunks. Now, if you don’t want to do the work of reading the rest of this blog to find this out, I will state right here that I am all for criticizing the shortcomings of feminist movements when it comes to intersectionality. I think it’s crucial to do so in order for feminism to stay relevant and evolve. So, my gripe with smith is not that. My gripe is this: in pieces like this one, smith names famous feminists who have said and done some awful things, and rightly calls them out on it…but totally fails to acknowledge that women (some who ID as feminist, some who don’t) have been voicing criticisms of these folks for years. In fact, ou implies that these criticisms have yet to happen: “Until we start talking about this, until we start exploring the roots of the feminist movement and the origins that lie behind some problematic feminist thought, we cannot even begin to hope to create a truly intersectional feminist movement.”
“START TALKING ABOUT THIS”?! LOLOLOLOLOL but seriously, fuck that shit. We don’t need to “start talking about this,” we need to acknowledge women like Sandy Stone, bell hooks, Chandra Mohanty, Angela Davis, Uma Narayan, and so forth, who have spent quite a bit of time deconstructing the -isms within feminism, and we need to continue that dialogue. Oh, but why admit that these criticisms of feminism have been voiced already when that would detract from your Internet Social Justice fame?
Weirdly, smith said it best: “Privilege is not having to bother naming the people you take from, and getting away with it.” Yeah, so like how you mention the writer of “The Transsexual Empire” with nary a peep about “The Empire Strikes Back”? Or how you mention Mary Daly without mentioning Audre Lorde’s well-publicized open letter (to name ONE of the many criticisms of Daly I’ve seen that are far from recent)? You know, those people who were articulating anger at these ideas before you were born, and whose anger you appropriate but don’t acknowledge? Yeeeeah.
And do not get me started on “queerplatonic.” It’s called “friendship,” you try-hard assholes.
So I sleep badly, most of the time, and this is what I blame for this. Woke up around 3am, couldn’t get back to sleep, and started dicking around on Facebook, where I unfortunately encountered a post from my friend Aaron alerting me to the existence of these clowns:
“So what?” you might ask. “It’s just a boring song.” Yes. Yes it is. However, the frontman of this ensemble, one Hunter Hunt-Hendrix (forgive my juvenile attitude here, but…SNORT) has decided that not only is this boring-ass garbage FASCINATING, it also RUNS CIRCLES AROUND ALL THOSE OTHER METAL BANDS THAT ARE FORMED BY PEONS NOT SMART ENOUGH TO REFERENCE ZIZEK IN INTERVIEWS. Witness his TRANSCENDENTAL BLACK METAL MANIFESTO (sorry for linking to the hipster swamp that is Vice, but sadly it’s the only place on the internets with an extended excerpt of this claptrap), and then promptly hork your guts out.
Ok, I’m not really at all invested in black metal subculture – I only like a small handful of bands (Emperor, Enslaved, Ludicra, Watain, Wolves in the Throne Room, Dissection, and Bathory if you count them), “kvlt” pissing contests bore me to tears, and certain areas of black metal have a high level of tolerance for racists and other such assholes (and yes, I realize some of those assholes play in a couple of the bands I just mentioned…thank god for used record stores, huh?) that does not sit well with me. That being said, Hendrix’s blowhard “manifesto” sits even less well with me, for a variety of reasons.
The first one is fairly obvious to anyone who listens to metal. Hendrix’s assertion throughout the piece that “transcendental black metal” – that is, black metal that does not fit strictly within the traditional formula – is some new thing (pioneered, he implies, by his band) is patently false. While some bands are certainly content to stick with the tried and true (and there’s nothing wrong with that, in my view – who doesn’t love blast beats and Satan?), bands like Enslaved, Alcest, Sigh, Melechesh and Ulver have been messing around with genre convention for years, and their genre experiments are generally much more worth listening to. I’d much rather listen to Melechesh playing Middle Eastern scales and quoting the Enuma Elish, or Enslaved combining a Viking chant with a weird proggy time signature, than witness some underfed hipster douchebag flail about dully in an attempt to (I’m guessing) ape Swans* or something.
And part of this is me being a nitpicky snob but I think it’s part of an unfortunate larger pattern of artistic expression not being considered legitimate until it’s expressed by a member of the socioeconomic elite. Hendrix has a degree from philosophy from Columbia, connections to the New York art scene, and the spare time to bloviate nonsense about his mediocre output – I am going to guess this detachment from the working-class associations of heavy metal is part of what makes him think his unremarkable music is such a big fucking deal.
Hendrix’s privileged viewpoint is visible in a few other ways, as well. In an interview, he expressed shock – shock – at the level of homophobic slurs leveled against his band. As a queer woman who has to hear that shit every time I go to a large metal show, I would like to advise him that maybe he should be a bit more informed about the subculture he’s attempting to yak about at length. Dismay is a legit reaction, certainly, but surprise indicates straight-up ignorance.
But what else would I expect from a dude who says things like this: “America is an eternal ideal representing human dignity, hybridization and creative evolution.” And later on: “This America [that ‘transcendental black metal’ represents] is a metaphor for pure unrestricted creativity, the courageous exercise of will and the joyful experience of the continuity of existence.” While he stresses that this is an ideal rather than a reality, “[a]n America that has never existed and may never exist,” for whom has this ideal historically even been a possibility? To whom does America represent those things (even if it fails to live up to them)? Sweet smokin’ Judas, man, have you ever cracked a history book at all?
Ugh. Anyway, if you’re a-hankerin’ for specifically American black metal, I’d recommend Ludicra’s tales of urban decay or Wolves in the Throne Room’s deep ecology jams (finally got Celestial Lineage recently, and it did not disappoint), both of which take on the characteristics of their environment without any weird cheerleading of American exceptionalism.
*nothing against Swans. I love Swans. I paid an excessive amount of money to see them last fall, and it ruled. It’s like the Pogues – love ’em, cannot stand people who try to sound like ’em.
Why do I still pay attention to feminism on the internet? Because I hate myself, that’s why.
This, for instance. So, someone reposts a Christina Hoff Sommers article that is idiotic and misogynist. This is not shocking, as Christina Hoff Sommers has made quite the cottage industry out of saying such things in public. This is the first thing that irritated me about this, frankly – I am really not a fan of reading things along the lines of OMIGOD SOMEONE WHO HAS BEEN AN ASSHOLE IN THE PUBLIC EYE FOR YEARS PROVES THAT POINT YET AGAIN!!! I mean, duh, of course they did.
And, of course, the first comment is someone losing their fucking marbles over the title originally including the phrase “you stay classy, Christina Hoff Sommers” and accusing the original poster of “throwing working class women under the bus,” going on to call her a “fake ass feminist,” blah blah blah.
OK, I don’t speak for all working class women or whatever, but since I am a working class woman I would like to offer my two cents. Know what I worry about in terms of my class status? How I’m going to get food. How I’m going to pay rent. How I’m gonna take care of my debts. How I’m going to take care of myself when I’m sick. I worry about the prevalence of the idea that being poor means you’re a parasite and lazy, and how that idea is used to justify laws that fuck over people like me. And yes, culture reinforces this, and words mean things, and so on. But you know what, I DON’T GIVE A SHIT if someone wants to use an overplayed line from Anchorman, and seeing a bunch of people get THAT self-righteous about it just fucking annoys me and makes me think they have no sense of history or priorities at all. (If the worst way you can “throw working-class women under the bus” is using some movie quote, then by all means, chuck me under that there bus.) Yeah, I would prefer if people didn’t use the term “classy” in a non-sarcastic manner (and last time I checked, its usage in that particular context WAS sarcastic, but whatever), but clawing furiously at low-hanging fruit like that and then high-fiving yourself for striking a blow for working class solidarity reads like jockeying for Internet Social Justice points more than anything. Kind of like seeing people lose their shit when someone says “crazy” as a negative descriptor. Again, I fall into the demographic supposedly being oppressed here, and yet I can’t seem to muster up much outrage. Maybe I’m some kind of mental health Judas, or maybe I don’t see the point in crapping my pants with rage every time someone uses a colloquialism that is vaguely but not really related to my condition, especially when there are much more pressing issues relating to that condition. Minimalizing? Yeah, whatever. It’s called “prioritizing” and I think it’s swell.
I’m willing to guess that pretty much every gal who’s pursued women’s studies academically has met a tool like gender studies professor and “feminist” Hugo Schwyzer: a dude whose feminist work primarily consists of delivering glancing blows to wide-open targets and then expecting all the ladies around him to reward him with high-fives and handjobs because he deigned to acknowledge that gender inequality is a thing that is bad. It’s not news that feminist writers who simply repackage shit that’s been circulating for decades can make it big, especially if they’ve cultivated internetz fame first (ahem, Full Frontal Feminism), but the gender dynamic in Schwyzer’s case makes it especially bothersome.
And that’s not even getting into his past. Hold on, I got myself a bottle of wine this afternoon and I’m going to need to uncork that before I continue.
…oh cheap Riesling, you’re my pal! ANYWAY. So, Schwyzer, by his own admission, is a former drug addict who ;once tried to kill both his girlfriend and himself;, and early on in his academic career engaged in creepy and inappropriate sexual behavior with his own students (sleeping with four of them on a field trip, for example). Granted, all of this shit happened quite a while ago, but Schwyzer continues to address these events in ways that are, to say the least, bothersome. His tone when writing about his attempted murder/suicide comes across as wheedling self-pity, and although he claims to regret sleeping with all those students, his website still proudly notes that he is rated as the hottest professor in American on ratemyprofessors.com. Um…
Yeah, no, sorry. Yes, people can change, even after committing heinous acts. But when a dude who has an abusive past like that attempts to reinvent himself as some kind of feminist champ while still displaying such problematic attitudes towards his past behaviors, I. Am. Not. Buying. It.
This is why I prefer my heavy metal dude pals to dudes like Schwyzer: because I know that when I call them on gender shit (which, granted, isn’t all the time…picking my battles, etc.) and they say that they are considering my point (which, again, isn’t all the time, and sometimes we just end up disagreeing because such is life), I know that they are actually considering my point because we’re pals and they respect me, not because they’re desperately jockeying for ally points and trying to build up an image as someone who “shatters gender myths.” “Never trust a Nice Guy(TM)” is a swell motto to live by, I think.
Shorter everything Harmony Korine does: “Teehee! Poor people are so funny!“ Bonus points for the jaw-droppingly awful faux-Native American costumes! A little late to jump on the obnoxious hipster headdress trend, but ah well, I guess when that was happening our Harmony was too busy trying to shock upscale audiences with footage of teenage black girls drinking malt liquor. Oh please, you edgy chap, SHOW ME HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.
So between two jobs and library school, I barely have time for my fun pastimes like this anymore, but I would like to drop in quickly and share this nonsense, which was sent to the woman who booked the Dinner & Bikes tour in Lawrence Kansas and then canceled when she found out about Joe’s abuse history. For context, Elly is Joe’s lady friend and tourmate.
“Please consider this email a formal request for a retraction of your defamatory statements about Joe Biel, Microcosm Publishing, and the Dinner & Bikes Tour.
Also attached is an invoice. We had agreed to a $150 guarantee for our event in L…awrence. But because for such an event we would expect to make at bare minimum $300, and because the cancellation was not in good faith, I am attaching an invoice for the larger amount. Payment is due immediately.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions. I hope that we do not have to take this to the next level.
Elly”
So yeah, trying to extort hundreds of dollars is totally punk. I guess? Har har har VOMIT.
Order of the Gash 