Back of my head: Rousseau’s ~Amélie~
Front of my head: Heh.
Back of my head: Well is it really impossible that the theme of targeted interventions into–
Front of my head: THIS IS A SHITPOST NOT AN EFFORTPOST
Emergency Broadcast Network came out with this in 1993, over 10 years before Youtube was founded. They’re the forebearers of Youtube poop. Still holds up too.
this was made 22 YEARS AGO.
holy shit
oldtube poop
this has the structure and most of the standard joke formats of a modern 2015 youtube poop i’m completely blown away
I consider EBN one of the great influences in my life and have been fortunate to know a couple of it’s members Joshua (a tiny bit) and Greg (a lot.) Joshua is a brilliant video editor and Greg frikkin wrote frikkin After Effects (the greatest post production software of all time, imo.)
Really good YouTube Poop is hard to make. Making videos like EBN did in the early to mid-90′s was nearly impossible. This is because the tools for transforming video digitally were primitive, the machines costly (an Avid or Media 100 NLE cost upwards of $50,000 to build and thousands more to maintain) and hard to access (the only people who owned them were broadcasters, post production studios, and the like.) The source media itself had shitloads of copyright on it which has no practical meaning now but meant quite a bit way back when.
The 1990s were an age of tightly controlled analog mass media outlets and in it, EBN’s work was subversive for both its politics and its disregard of intellectual property rights. EBN wasn’t commercially viable (the legal sampling war had just begun) and it wasn’t pop (even though it was danceable in that 90′s techno rave sort of way) which meant that their work never traveled far beyond its most immediate social networks of media, art, and technology. EBN was signed to the indie TVT Records imprint but they considered themselves, primarily, live-remix performance artists who occasionally “recorded” albums (TVT distributed licensed versions of EBN’s work on CDs, VHS tapes, and 3.5″ floppies.) This combination of factors made it nearly impossible to experience the bulk of their work.
That isn’t to say that they weren’t extremely influential. If you ever saw or heard about the remixed visuals of U2′s groundbreaking ZOOTV tour, then you’ve seen the work of EBN. The group was also commissioned by MTV to make a half hour special about their work with U2 (back when it seemed like everyone watched MTV) and they even made a bunch of visual idents for the network. This exposed millions of people to the EBN remix aesthetic, rhythm, and structure even if they didn’t know where it came from. (Of course, that aesthetic had it’s own immediate roots in the work of The Bomb Squad and Public Enemy but that is a post for another day.)
So while it’s unfortunate that more YTP creators aren’t conscious of their Emergency Broadcast Network ancestry, considering the time and circumstance under which EBN existed, it’s totally understandable and it’s great that people have even discovered it at all.
Watch (and listen) to their work here. We Will Rock You, Psychoactive Drugs, and Get Down are some of my favs.
This is all amazing but of great personal importance: I loved Zoo TV–The Television Program and whenever I bring it up no one ever knows what I’m talking about. To the point where I was starting to get convinced I made it up / hallucinated it. I had no idea it was an EBN project! This is very exciting and validating for me.
What the fuck one of the guys from EBN made after effects???
boobtube poop
Thinking, as always, about the 90s, Seinfeld, and Friends
Seinfeld specifically was a back-to-the city premise – it’s a place where clever adults always have something to talk about – and an exposition of Larry David’s vision of secular Judaism as a model of urbanity – rabbinically arguing, testing, hair-splitting over everyday life, with Festivus as a feast of the Ordeal of Civilization, where we drop our social facades (airing of grievances) and engage in primal contest (feats of strength)
Friends still the city as setting for the new life stage it’s about
I talk about how Ross is supposed to come off as behind the times, the point is that he never intended to live this life, he expected to be married in the suburbs until his wife broke off their engagement (citing a newly realized lesbianism, which means a 90s sensibility of seeking your true self is the thing that disrupted his happy ending, but also that he really needs to develop a better sense of who would be a good match for him)
Rachel’s marriage was more intended for her than by her, in rejecting it she becomes the 90s spirit of seeking your true self as a disruptive force. Which is what powers the Ross/Rachel central spine, ending, as comedies must, with a wedding.
But afer the curtain falls, once they don’t need a stream of new people to date how long do the married Ross and Rachel stay in Manhattan? Joey went to LA, right, (I guess Mad About You was the married-having-kids version of the back to the city show)
And what about the show has to be in Manhattan? The offscreen recurring joke guy they can see naked in his apartment in the next building? I suppose even a coffee shop hosting uh, coffeehouse musicians was pretty novel in the early 90s. (Cappuccino in wide cups used to have some of the symbolic significance lattes do now but calling back the beatniks, see also Mike Meyers’ So I Married An Axe Murderer)
I’ve talked before and…
that’s the second post today I know I made but can’t find… here! about HIMYM as the updated successor and how Friends’ arc is Ross gets engaged like three times by his early 30s and finally it sticks, Ted Mosby’s is he realized one of his friends was his real soulmate but by the time they get through all their preliminary stuff they’re 50
So the “government-issued gfs” thing going around got me thinking about Billy Joel’s Allentown again.
Like, the whole conceit of the song is “Our fathers went off to WWII and in return the country moved heaven and earth to make them patriarch-princes, we went off to Vietnam and now we’re treated as disposable.”
(He’s forgetting Korea in between, but that’s OK, everyone does.)
And given the title the focus is on the fall of the unionized Rust Belt heavy industry, but look at this line
met our mothers in the USO
asked them to dance
danced with them slowthis is literally, 100%, a lament for when we had government-provided gfs
The morale-boosting USO, now best known for in-theatre concerts and airport lounges, ran homefront clubs and canteens near soldiers’ postings, and a major role was providing the troops with female attention, recruiting girls from the area to free dances with regularly paid soldiers, hiring staff hostesses whose job was to flirt.
(This in a period where “courtesan” jobs like taxi dancer or cocktail waitress, with a career path culminating in marriage, were more of a thing)
And it wasn’t just the USO. Part of the point of the WAC was to match the supply of single women to the demand of support roles, freeing men for front-line service, part of it was just to have some young women on base. (Here I vaguely gesture at Miss Buxley, General Halftrack’s buxom secretary in Beetle Bailey)
Then there were nurses. Male military nurses in the war had a reputation as twinkle-toes homosexuals, drawn by the constant flow of strong yet vulnerable young men in uniform far from home to comfort. The male ones, of course. (Florence Nightingale’s innovation wasn’t young women going abroad to tend to soldiers – field armies ALWAYS drew trains of camp followers to attend to the men’s needs – but rather an idiom to do it compatible with Victorian sensibilities)
Like, guys, the government very much did try to provide gfs. And it didn’t stop with the war.
There’s this Rosie the Riveter impression that women streamed into factories in WWII but faded at its end, in fact post-war female factory employment was lower than before the buildup. (If women in factories started with WWII, how would you explain the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911?)
And this came amidst government pressure (from an extensive wartime central planning system) to clear out women and make way for returning men. There was a fear the Depression would return (this is why the war economy was never unwound) to a country of battle-hardened men and provoke Communist revolution; it was a high priority to keep men occupied, loyal, and rewarded as patriarchs.
Daniel Moynihan took shit over his famous report for suggesting the solution to the black community’s ills was government-backed patriarchy, Earl Butz took more shit for putting it thus:
“I’ll tell you what the coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.“
For how colorful the language might be, though, that formula – “rising standards of living through improved access to consumer goods and women” was the exact same deal the United States made with its whites, as the basis of the postwar golden age.
I could talk about the postwar expansion of high schools and the creation of the “teenager” and all the courtship stuff there, hosting proms and football games and teaching how to dance in gym and how to wife in Home Ec and showing film strips and Coronet 16mms on how to get a date, but that’s a bit of a stretch. The point remains, though, under the New Deal social compact, from the Depression into the 1970s, the government was ABSOLUTELY in the gf-providing business.
No. Immortality has been “just a few improvements on the current state of the art” away for approximately ever.
Don’t tell the most recent immortality cult about this. It would break their clichéd little hearts.
Yeah the funny thing is how the “state of the art” consistently refers to whatever field’s particularly prominent and cutting-edge at the time.
It’s been alchemy in medieval Europe and ancient China, electricity in Revolutionary France, extremely low-temperature liquid circulation in the rocket age, data storage in the computer age, now it’s biotech because of course it is.
In 16th Century Spain with the whole Fountain of Life thing it was fucking western hemisphere cartography.
“In 16th Century Spain with the whole Fountain of Life thing it was fucking western hemisphere cartography” holy shit this is 100% right
This post was one of the ones that “made me” early on
Illustrations <3
1. Sometimes I draw random people from IG
2. Multitasking Morning
3. BiciMAD… almost there 🚴♀️
4. Me working for Procreate on We are Playgrounds Eindhoven/Berlin 2019
5. Spidergirl into the Spider Bathroom (We are Playgrounds 2019)
6. Say I love you to that person sitting or standing right next to you
7. How often do you worry about the future?
Golden age Americana gets like one notch trashier when you realize the omnipresent Coca-Cola was an energy drink and Hershey’s milk chocolate was an energy bar
A eulogy for Shakesville (posing Melissa McEwan as sympathetically, fundamentally ridiculous) that’s basically a eulogy for web 1.5 and a reminder that life before social media was just the same shit at different scale
The Road to Terfdom – Lux Magazine
This is an article about what exactly Mumsnet is, and why it’s so critical to the UK/US split on trans discourse
I see it’s not just a forum, but also sort of an evolution of those young-kid parenting magazines you’d subscribe to for the time, with scored reviews of products, but also definitely a forum, for 20 years, drawing users to stay for and become the culture
Author’s thesis is it’s about all these middle-class women who have a child and for the first time feel the world isn’t built for them and connect that with their experience of using their body to bear a child and their continuity with Womanhood through doing so in honestly a really ‘80s Second Wave way
And I can’t help but wonder how much we escape that cause our equivalent online scenes like, uh, Pinterest? are suffused with a culture that vocally affirms motherhood-as-purpose in not a feminist but a Christian or even Mormon-flavored idiom
leveraging motherhood as shared experience for women in much the same way that much of the twentieth century made military service the shared experience for men, and the downstream political implications of that.
America would’ve won a total nuclear war in 1951 and MacArthur shoulda forced *Truman* to resign
Just discovered Barstool’s “Grading the Newest Sex Scandal Teacher” where every few days since like 2009 they put up the hottest photos they can find and a few hundred-word lascivious “review” of female teachers caught fucking their students (they’re pro-)
Barstool actually reminds me of the turn-of-the-20th-century “sporting press”. Focused around sports, with an eye on reports of use to sports bettors, these publications were really a men’s press, circulated through masculine outlets like saloons and barbershops, offering up tittilation and sex industry advertising on the side, playing to a rough tits-n-beer (-n-fisticuffs) single men’s culture. Y’know, punters. The guys on the barstools.
Some vestiges remained in America - racing forms, Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue, the way “alt-weekly” urban tabloid newspapers took a gritty tone and sustained themselves on prostitution ads. But Europe’s stronger sports betting and prostitution culture (arguably both downstream from a stronger urban working class culture absent the US’s midcentury “mass middle class” suburbanization) and national publication markets means the tradition carried on more intact.
And now we’ve got the internet, and a return to the cities, and moves to open up sports betting, and a new sex work culture and a growing men’s culture that doesn’t even aim at bourgeois respectability (both downstream from the end of the mass middle class) so no surprise Barstool’s a thing RN
Official Charlie Brown x Evangelion parody strips distributed by Gainax with the release of Neon Genesis Evangelion on VHS.
A Cruel Angel’s Thesis (Neon Genesis Evangelion theme)-CHIPTUNE VERSION
So I hear you guys like musical theater about American political history. Here’s an emo-rock opera about Old Hickory, the President of the Common Man.
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson
Populism Yea Yea
Paul Elstak - Life Is Like A Dance
One of the first happycore songs I ever downloaded. I never really understood the Dutch or Spanish scenes. From Badtz’s hotline server, if that means anything to anyone. I was Paperthin.
the thing about Taylor Swift’s Reputation is that it makes perfect sense as a graceful recovery from 1989′s effort at bare-ribbed taste-making
like back to “oh better take all of contemporary America into me and re-present it back thematically united through me” which worked when she came up, when we had different subcultures, that had different thematics
It’s the most lyrical album of hers, I think, and I’m not really sure who it’s for
It’s the first time her songs pose her as getting drunk
…Ready For It? announces the theme of the album - a bit of producer beats and rhythmic lyrics and being so past white boys, a bit of revived vulnerability, and that little throat-clearing at the start makes it all quotative anyway
End Game (feat Ed Sheeran & Future) - feat Ed Sheeran AND Future. I wonder if she’s got a separate UK market strategy
I Did Something Bad - is it an “owning being a manipulative relationship user” song or an “owning being an unapologetic social media troll” song? It really leans the first early on with only the “flames” bit suggestive at all, but then the “pitchforks and proof, their reciepts and reasons, they’re burning all the witches even if you aren’t one” into the “light me up” breakdown..?
Don’t Blame Me - yeah you know what Taylor Swift could make a good trip-hop song, sure
Delicate - it’s not my thing but she carries more of this song on her voice than most but that might be because her tuning’s entirely electronic tbh, this might be a CRJ dig
Gorgeous is a classic Tayswift crush song, like pre-Red, with that papery hi-hat
Getaway Car is like ½ classic Tayswift and 1/6 Outrun signifiers and 1/3 actual “oh shit, Vangelis” ‘80s
King of My Heart might be a sorority girl-daddy song, or a first interracial relationship, or a Michael Jackson tribute, honestly, while being perfectly serviceable generically
there’s that semantic overloading
Dancing With Our Hands Tied - acceptably laser-gridded song, you can read the initial “25 years old, how were you to know” towards either partner with thematics intact
Dress – she always does “I can do my rivals better” songs and this is Carly Rae Jepsen - breathy, a little desperate friendzoned from the girl side - which is to say like her old high school wheelhouse but also her recent BPD Queen personas, throwing in just enough anchors to read your own story into - flashbacks/mistakes/rebounds/earthquakes
This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things - these days you need to try a lot harder to keep your feuds in the news to earn a feud song. the “bouncy, childish” affectations just sound childish. the return of the Bill Hader-ass “laughing out of the script” is cute
Call It What You Want – “yeah I lost that last callout war and went dark on social media, but I’m getting the best dick”, that’s one of Taylor Swift’s biannual Songs For Our Time
New Year’s Day - this is totally the “sorority girl reassuring herself about the relationship to her fraternity guy” - the “please, don’t ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere” echoes the “but if god forbid, fate should step in” verse from Long Live but you know they’ll have a location wedding with a mason jar reception themed after that interwar party from Starlight
