o lordy! what drivel!
(from lileks, that is -- not you, roy.)
Isn't he a "house husband" like the goldstein chickenhawk? I refuse to take 'men' like them seriously.
Or, "If I like it, it's art. Hey, you over there, shut up!"
To anyone yet unsure where their own personal threshold for inanity lies I recommmend listening to at least one Lileks podcast—you'll never do it again. (Pick any one, they're all the same. Here's today's.) It's like being corralled in the window seat on a bus from Minneapolis to Milwaukee by a guy who just won't shut up, and he's even brought along a boom box to illustrate key points of the twaddle. Be prepared, Lileks' drone demonstrates stamina that Lance Armstrong would envy. It's impossible to sit through the whole thing without thoughts of suicide. Somewhere in the middle of it, you will arrive at that Ingmar Bergman moment where you look at your reflection in the bus window and think, "what has become of me?"
And then it will finally end, and you will cherish life all the more.
"...those who add to the sum of ugliness are welcome to do so, but they have made themselves irrelevant."
That's the basic unit of wingnut cultural criticism right there. The same blunt trope works equally well for artistic as for political enemies. The UN? Irrelevant. Old Europe, Democrats? Irrelevant. Naughty dance troupes? Irrelevant. The check-out girl who won't wish me a Merry Christmas with sufficient gusto? She has made herself irrelevant.
But irrelevant to what, exactly?
I liked how he bolstered his (or Dennis Praeger's) pontifications by misquoting the most famous line of Keats.
I think you should send Lileks the link to that Reverb Motherfuckers video.
His column is so aptly named--"the bleat" indeed. The perfect description of his feeble inanity.
PETRUCHIO
What! with my tongue in your tail? Nay, come again,
Good Kate; I am a gentleman.
What? Shakespeare making a joke about rim jobs? That guy just made himself irrelevant!
Dude, how do you stand reading that stuff, even if it's just to "shorter" it later? I read today's post, and the one before it, and had to give up just as soon as he started in with the Target and the meta-blogging references.
And is it just me, or does his habit of stating what he thinks people are thinking if they disagree with his point, in an attempt to trivialize and marginalize us, piss everyone off?
Good lord, R. P., Lilek's "Diner" is even worse than you describe. I imagine he fancies himself a Garrison Keillor for Freepers or some such...
" That’s always a strange thing to see on a gloomorous afternoon; the sun suddenly illuminates everything in glory and warmth, then steals away."
Give the poor man a break, this is a man that is confused by passing clouds. Maybe Gnat is ghost writing his columns now.
gus, do you ever have anything else to say? I've seen you repeat that idiotic line in several blogs over the last month. If you really believe that "house husband = weak" bullshit, then you need to pull your head from deep within your bowels and get a lungful of oxygen before your brain shuts down completely. Lileks and Goldstein should be ridiculed, yes, but not for staying around the house. But, nah, I bet you're just a trolling pinhead. Bad me for indulging your stupidity.
See - here's the difference between Lileks and me...(ok, maybe only one difference). Those clouds he's talking about? Well they happen every year - it's a sign that Spring is happening, it's the reason the grass is getting green and the tree pollen is kicking my ass and is *not* about gloom, and oh to hell with Lileks....he's such a wuss
Thorlac, I agree, being a househusband is one of the (very) few redeeming features of Lileks. His enthusiasm for dead popular culture is almost another (or would be without the sneering).
"The Diner" though, purely sucks. Wry observations on MSG and hamburgers and crime just don't cut it, especially when it's not so much wry as droning and trivial.
I did like the one song from the wife-beater's point of view.
Househusbands are alright. Right-wing househusbands are funny. That's why Tom Selleck was in Three Men and a Baby, see, because everyone knew he was a Republican, so it was funny when the baby pooped and he had to clean it up. See also Kindergarten Cop.
We make fun of Lileks's and Goldstein's houshusbandry not because we have a problem with househusbands but because it's so at odds with their tough-guy-bad-ass routine, their fightin' keyboarder personas, and their continual bemoaning of how liberalism has ruined modern society and how things were so much better Back In The Day when men were men and women were ladies and the kids today with that noise they call music and their crazy haircuts. They aspire to a 1950s white upper-middle-class social ideal and denounce society for failing to live up to that ideal, when their own lives are built around a complete reversal of traditional social norms.
Live by the idealized alpha-male social structure, die by the idealized alpha-male social structure.
Ah, I see. So I was mistaking the comment as being more general than it was intended? Sorry, gus; I'll lay off the 'plodiness next time.
I read the Bleat today and I sez to myself I sez, "Why I bet that Alicublog fellow has something to say about this!" so I came here and sure enough you did. I heart the Shorter Lileks.
Ye gods and little fishes, it's the "abstract painters have no technical skills" argument. Never thought I'd see it come from someone educated after the Second World War.
How is it that every time one of these maroons ventures off into aesthetics--or science, for that matter--he manages to betray a cheerful ignorance that that Western Culture he so bravely defends includes several centuries worth of discourse on the subject? Would it kill the guy to watch Sister Wendy with his precious Lil' Insect sometime, or at least read John Canaday so he could sound like he'd given the matter a moment's thought?
Doghouse - see, the great thing about Traditional Western Culture(tm) is its inherent goodness and awesomeness and superiority, which is so self-evidently awesome and good and superior as to require no debate or book-learnin'. Your suggestion that they read a book or do some research before spouting off indicates that you do not, a priori, believe that Traditional Western Culture(tm) is self-evidently and inherently good, awesome, and superior - which marks you out as some kind of decadent America-hating blue state elitist liberal hippie commie.
See how that works? Real free-thinkers say what they think and don't need some fancy-schmancy books to tell them what they know. It's liberals, with their 'debates' and 'evidence' and 'schools of thought' that can't see things clearly. Why, some of them believe in 'science' - which is forever being proven wrong and changing its conclusions! That's right, they don't believe in anything! Is it any wonder we have the problems we do in society today?
For extra fun, google up Umberto Eco's essay on the symptoms of proto-fascism and it's worship of forceful action over thoughful consideration.
Shorter FMguru: Lileks doesn't need to read a book to tell him what he already knows! Books are for dumbshit liberals who can't think for themselves.
I'm getting a real "I went to the Grosse Deutsche Kunstasstellung, and boy did the state-approved art speak to me" vibe from his addendum. Am I misreading him?
Kunstausstellung, dangit.
Say what you like about that Stalin but at least he got the artists to paint properly.
lilek's idiom:
The Evil of Banality.
Let this be a lesson: if you play too much with kitsh the toxic fumes go to your head. You become a drooling idiot: over time the fumes eat away at your sense of irony. You buy the old advertising posters because they are campy, and then you buy them because they are A Bit of Traditional America and it is all precious and holy to you. Then in a couple generations you're cooing over Franklin Mint plates.
Lileks seems to be a very advanced case: he looks at a bunch of Soviet Realist art, which has been campy for what, 60 years? and he is moved by the picture of the doubting general and the innocent but profoundly wise child looking confidently into the future her face aglow with bright hopes. Message clear: don't trust anybody who can think.
It's like seeing someone's irony cells getting eaten away, right under a microscope.
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