Re: Fashion Corner: It’s university graduation week in my city, which means there’s no going anywhere without accidentally stepping into a young woman’s SeXXXy bOObs photo shoot.
They’re posing by the fountain at the mall. They’re amongst the saguaro cactus landscaping behind Whole Foods. They’re twirling their tassels and thrusting one hip out everywhere I go.
It’s so bad. This is how we celebrate our education now? This is how we mark our entrance into the adult world? We put on cowboy boots and tiny cutoff shorts; trowel six pounds of slap on our faces, and bend forward like we’re going to give that flowering prickly-pear a thorough tongue bath?
I guess it is! Glad I’ll be dead no later than, I’m guessing, the year 2050.
Oh my God, Josh. Pure GOLD here. But I must disagree on one minor point. Matt Walsh recently made a hilarious video on YouTube where he introduced us to the Victimhood Pyramid, and to quote Matt, "nobody out-victims the 'T.'" If he makes it into a t-shirt, I will mail in my wallet stuffed with cash and tell them to take whatever they need and mail it back to me with my t-shirt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmSWb-7xXKE&t=2s
Matt makes the very interesting point that all a white man has to do to obtain social approval to lord it over absolutely everyone else, and the most conspicuous possible way is come out as trans.
*…and in the most conspicuous possible way, is come out as trans. PS I regret my use of the ‘coming out’ terminology. Not a fan of the ‘forced teaming’
Have you seen the latest commercial for the Apple laptop or whatever it is? So dystopian and anti-human, you have to wonder what kind of people made it. There's a little yellow cartoon head crushed under a hydraulic press, and the eyes are about to pop. Tim Cook's Twitter account has thousands of angry comments.
Rod Dreher's Diary's first item today is about the Apple commercial. I don't wonder what kind of people made it: dystopian, anti - human people made it.
If God is in the mood to bless us, Apple will run into Dylan Mulvaney/Budweiser type trouble because of it.
Oh Josh, I worked in the Village during college. I was the house manager at the Cherry Lane Theatre on Commerce St. until 1990. I was at that same pride parade! Did you ever stop by Crazy Nannie’s or The Cowgirl Hall of Fame for drinks? Madonna and Sandra Bernhard would swing by sometimes. We all swooned.
I enjoy reading everything you write. Looking forward to more. I like that you have happy memories. Listening to the Catholic guy was heavy so it's a nice contrast.
Totally accurate assessment of rap. Also, the observation that when someone counters with "in the '50s they said that about Elvis!" or "in the 1800s they said that about the waltz!", it's just not the same. Not even in the same universe. We are living at the nadir of mainstream popular "music". Brutal ugliness, or autotuned banality.
My mother, who died in 2001, had the interesting idea that God had withdrawn the gift of melody from humanity. I'm sure that twenty - three years later, she would think that while she was right, there was something far worse than lack of creativity which was plaguing popular music: the diabolical.
I feel like your assessment of the music scene is a few years old. I’d say hip hop has been culturally displaced by a harder to pin down approach bordering on an almost hyperactive y2k revivalistic trend mixtures with distorted TikTok snippets and maybe hip hop ish drums. Sorta like textured melted plastic. Atleast on the production side I’d say, and yes it sounds awful. This is what I’ve noticed atleast, I really don’t have the ability to describe it better, and my assessment is probably wrong to an extent.
I miss the music of the 80s and 90s. I miss the pre Internet world (and I was younger) when there was an adventure in meeting new people and yes including hook ups. Rap isn’t music, it’s strung out expletives. Getting older I turn to nature because nature rarely changes.
As a kid in the 70’s, tobogganing was a favourite last time sliding down that giant hill. Fast forward to the mid-nineties wanting to recreate that experience with my kids, drive to the location., car loaded down with the kids and crazy carpets, and thermoses of hot chocolate. Park the car, hike to the location, my eyes glazed over as I look at this anthill of a hill. My kids were thrilled though they were only 3 and 8 but for me it was a lunch pail let down. The ride which I remembered to be at least 5 minutes of exhilarating fun turned out for me to be a 20-second letdown. Oh well, now I try not to relive any fun experience and just let me relive it my mind.
“The people who spurned you, canceled you, abandoned you, took your job or your family and friends away from you, […] will hate you because their abuse did not silence you or kill you.”
Or, as I’ve heard it said: Europe will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust.
That 1989 pic is a classic. That was my old hood, and I def marched that year too. It was my second year in the city (age 28) and one of the best years of my life. Your photo captures the memory without replacing it.
Agree wrt rap eviscerating pop melodies for the sake of belligerent, self-serving text, so that ego displaces all musical values that might eclipse the soloist’s verbiage. Granted, the genre sometimes generates genuine rhythmic interest, but usually as a secondary feature that’s still subservient to the syllabic declamation’s self-aggrandizement. The vocalist wants us to understand the words above all else — hence no melismas (we never hear more than one note per syllable, so as not to obscure the pronunciation of the text) — at the expense of music’s most powerful, nonverbal resources.
The brightest spot for me in 1990-2000s pop music is Aphex Twiin, but of course his techno/ambient style almost never foregrounds vocals, and lyrics are essentially absent — we just wanna dance, not think verbally..!
I recommend two Substacks to you, Josh: Rod Dreher's Diary and Paul Kingsnorth's The Abbey of Misrule. Both men are converts to Eastern Orthodoxy, and both men write primarily about the doom which is in the air.
Dreher has written quite a bit about the Russian and general European ruling classes' amusement and fandom of the convulsions that were coming their way in the early 20th century. Kingsnorth, a former radical environmentalist, now, a better tempered environmentalist, writes about The Machine which has been carefully wrapping its tentacles about us for the last two hundred years.
About the generally crummy quality of products: maybe I just lived in the wrong parts of America, but cottage cheese, which I loved when I was a kid and a young man, stopped being good circa 1980. I have always believed that this had to do with the switch from cardboard to plastic containers. I know nothing about science, but my sense is that cardboard is a better conductor of cold, and that this kept the cottage cheese much fresher.
A few months ago, at least here in Indiana, a cottage cheese with the dopey name Good cottage cheese started being sold. ( Who has ever wanted crummy cottage cheese? ) It seems a miracle, but its quality is a throwback to 1968. And yes, it comes in cardboard cartons. A small, even trivial, thing, maybe, but it has added maybe 5% to the quality of my life.
The zeitgeist glowers more fiercely as it crowds more and more good things out of our lives, but ha! ha!, it hasn't been perceptive enough to squelch the production of this cottage cheese.
Oh, for Heaven's sake, yes!! For twenty years, I have been willing to pay two or three times more to get milk which comes in cardboard cartons. It's worth it.
I'm delighted that Good cottage cheese is being sold in New England. Let us hope that its imperialistic vigor will assure it many, many years of profitability. ( I think it will. It's so frequently out of stock at the primary grocery store I shop at that I'm always tickled when I can snag some. )
And I think you are spot on with the "performative penance for sins they didn't commit" - it seems to me like white middle-aged women in particular love engaging in this, at least in the supposed red state that I'm from.
Re: Fashion Corner: It’s university graduation week in my city, which means there’s no going anywhere without accidentally stepping into a young woman’s SeXXXy bOObs photo shoot.
They’re posing by the fountain at the mall. They’re amongst the saguaro cactus landscaping behind Whole Foods. They’re twirling their tassels and thrusting one hip out everywhere I go.
Whores.
It’s so bad. This is how we celebrate our education now? This is how we mark our entrance into the adult world? We put on cowboy boots and tiny cutoff shorts; trowel six pounds of slap on our faces, and bend forward like we’re going to give that flowering prickly-pear a thorough tongue bath?
I guess it is! Glad I’ll be dead no later than, I’m guessing, the year 2050.
Good grief. I just realized that at first I thought you meant tassels on pasties. You meant the mortarboard graduation 'hat.' Right?
Yes, but the mortarboard tassels are only the LETTER of the twirling, while the pasty tassels are the SPIRIT of the twirling.
Oh my God, Josh. Pure GOLD here. But I must disagree on one minor point. Matt Walsh recently made a hilarious video on YouTube where he introduced us to the Victimhood Pyramid, and to quote Matt, "nobody out-victims the 'T.'" If he makes it into a t-shirt, I will mail in my wallet stuffed with cash and tell them to take whatever they need and mail it back to me with my t-shirt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmSWb-7xXKE&t=2s
Matt makes the very interesting point that all a white man has to do to obtain social approval to lord it over absolutely everyone else, and the most conspicuous possible way is come out as trans.
*…and in the most conspicuous possible way, is come out as trans. PS I regret my use of the ‘coming out’ terminology. Not a fan of the ‘forced teaming’
Have you seen the latest commercial for the Apple laptop or whatever it is? So dystopian and anti-human, you have to wonder what kind of people made it. There's a little yellow cartoon head crushed under a hydraulic press, and the eyes are about to pop. Tim Cook's Twitter account has thousands of angry comments.
And they dared to use “All I ever Need is You”, by Sonny & Cher, which is about human connection and relationship!
Glad you caught that too!
The scene you mention is nightmare fuel. The whole thing is existential horror
Rod Dreher's Diary's first item today is about the Apple commercial. I don't wonder what kind of people made it: dystopian, anti - human people made it.
If God is in the mood to bless us, Apple will run into Dylan Mulvaney/Budweiser type trouble because of it.
Could you post a link to that commercial? I don't think I've seen it.
https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1787864325258162239
Ugh. Gross.
Oh Josh, I worked in the Village during college. I was the house manager at the Cherry Lane Theatre on Commerce St. until 1990. I was at that same pride parade! Did you ever stop by Crazy Nannie’s or The Cowgirl Hall of Fame for drinks? Madonna and Sandra Bernhard would swing by sometimes. We all swooned.
I enjoy reading everything you write. Looking forward to more. I like that you have happy memories. Listening to the Catholic guy was heavy so it's a nice contrast.
Totally accurate assessment of rap. Also, the observation that when someone counters with "in the '50s they said that about Elvis!" or "in the 1800s they said that about the waltz!", it's just not the same. Not even in the same universe. We are living at the nadir of mainstream popular "music". Brutal ugliness, or autotuned banality.
My mother, who died in 2001, had the interesting idea that God had withdrawn the gift of melody from humanity. I'm sure that twenty - three years later, she would think that while she was right, there was something far worse than lack of creativity which was plaguing popular music: the diabolical.
I feel like your assessment of the music scene is a few years old. I’d say hip hop has been culturally displaced by a harder to pin down approach bordering on an almost hyperactive y2k revivalistic trend mixtures with distorted TikTok snippets and maybe hip hop ish drums. Sorta like textured melted plastic. Atleast on the production side I’d say, and yes it sounds awful. This is what I’ve noticed atleast, I really don’t have the ability to describe it better, and my assessment is probably wrong to an extent.
I miss the music of the 80s and 90s. I miss the pre Internet world (and I was younger) when there was an adventure in meeting new people and yes including hook ups. Rap isn’t music, it’s strung out expletives. Getting older I turn to nature because nature rarely changes.
As a kid in the 70’s, tobogganing was a favourite last time sliding down that giant hill. Fast forward to the mid-nineties wanting to recreate that experience with my kids, drive to the location., car loaded down with the kids and crazy carpets, and thermoses of hot chocolate. Park the car, hike to the location, my eyes glazed over as I look at this anthill of a hill. My kids were thrilled though they were only 3 and 8 but for me it was a lunch pail let down. The ride which I remembered to be at least 5 minutes of exhilarating fun turned out for me to be a 20-second letdown. Oh well, now I try not to relive any fun experience and just let me relive it my mind.
Most modern music is the auditory equivalent of junk food.
“The people who spurned you, canceled you, abandoned you, took your job or your family and friends away from you, […] will hate you because their abuse did not silence you or kill you.”
Or, as I’ve heard it said: Europe will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust.
I guess it *is* human nature
That 1989 pic is a classic. That was my old hood, and I def marched that year too. It was my second year in the city (age 28) and one of the best years of my life. Your photo captures the memory without replacing it.
Agree wrt rap eviscerating pop melodies for the sake of belligerent, self-serving text, so that ego displaces all musical values that might eclipse the soloist’s verbiage. Granted, the genre sometimes generates genuine rhythmic interest, but usually as a secondary feature that’s still subservient to the syllabic declamation’s self-aggrandizement. The vocalist wants us to understand the words above all else — hence no melismas (we never hear more than one note per syllable, so as not to obscure the pronunciation of the text) — at the expense of music’s most powerful, nonverbal resources.
The brightest spot for me in 1990-2000s pop music is Aphex Twiin, but of course his techno/ambient style almost never foregrounds vocals, and lyrics are essentially absent — we just wanna dance, not think verbally..!
I recommend two Substacks to you, Josh: Rod Dreher's Diary and Paul Kingsnorth's The Abbey of Misrule. Both men are converts to Eastern Orthodoxy, and both men write primarily about the doom which is in the air.
Dreher has written quite a bit about the Russian and general European ruling classes' amusement and fandom of the convulsions that were coming their way in the early 20th century. Kingsnorth, a former radical environmentalist, now, a better tempered environmentalist, writes about The Machine which has been carefully wrapping its tentacles about us for the last two hundred years.
About the generally crummy quality of products: maybe I just lived in the wrong parts of America, but cottage cheese, which I loved when I was a kid and a young man, stopped being good circa 1980. I have always believed that this had to do with the switch from cardboard to plastic containers. I know nothing about science, but my sense is that cardboard is a better conductor of cold, and that this kept the cottage cheese much fresher.
A few months ago, at least here in Indiana, a cottage cheese with the dopey name Good cottage cheese started being sold. ( Who has ever wanted crummy cottage cheese? ) It seems a miracle, but its quality is a throwback to 1968. And yes, it comes in cardboard cartons. A small, even trivial, thing, maybe, but it has added maybe 5% to the quality of my life.
The zeitgeist glowers more fiercely as it crowds more and more good things out of our lives, but ha! ha!, it hasn't been perceptive enough to squelch the production of this cottage cheese.
Oh my word, Good cottage cheese, yes! Wow, I was bowled over by how delicious it is.
Lots of stuff tastes shitty now because it's in plastic. Milk especially.
Oh, for Heaven's sake, yes!! For twenty years, I have been willing to pay two or three times more to get milk which comes in cardboard cartons. It's worth it.
I'm delighted that Good cottage cheese is being sold in New England. Let us hope that its imperialistic vigor will assure it many, many years of profitability. ( I think it will. It's so frequently out of stock at the primary grocery store I shop at that I'm always tickled when I can snag some. )
Adore this Josh!
I couldn’t help laughing at that picture of what is supposed to be a representation of Eve.
More like a poor man’s Taylor Swift.
Sorry, I am not buying it.
I suspect that Adam and Eve had dark skin, hair, and eyes.
You mean, if they were real. I think your evolutionary moderation is awesome. It surprised me, but I respect it.
And Eve certainly wouldn’t be wearing makeup 😂
I love the photo! And the 5 shit-tons of dill.
And I think you are spot on with the "performative penance for sins they didn't commit" - it seems to me like white middle-aged women in particular love engaging in this, at least in the supposed red state that I'm from.