*sing* We don't need no, rantification...
May. 4th, 2005 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flewellynWell, here goes the first of my rantnesses. I hope that you enjoy. If not...well, then, you'll just have to be destroyed.
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pope_guilty wants me to rant about Starcraft.
If he means the video game, I can't comment, since I have not played it (yes, I know, gasp in horror). However, the brand of pop-up trailers are another matter; I have much experience with them.
My first camping experience was with a vintage 1966 Starcraft pop-up trailer. It was...well...what we could afford. And I was smaller then. Still, sharing such close confines with my family was trying at times, especially given the lack of proper facilities in many of the places we chose to camp. Not to mention the awful noise that rain and hail made on that aluminium roof. The gas stove, when it worked, was adequate. The beds, which were thin foam mattresses with no springs and stains of dubious origin, were less so.
When I was 13, we traded it in for a more modern Starcraft, which was bigger, had a nicer stove, and (best of all) clean beds. Still no springs, though, and still not much privacy. I guess I never got as much out of camping as my family did, in general; my allergy to those awful "Noseeums", the teensy little biting insects that can fit through screen holes, cut my camping career quite short. Even when my family eventually sold the camper, and got a cabin in the Adirondacks, I wasn't so inclined to go up as the rest of my family. OH, well. (I guess this isn't much of a rant, really...more of a random discourse.)
randallsquared has suggested the topic of paisley pants.
Truly, they are never a good idea. On men, they look horrid. On women, they look worse. And that includes attractive women, I might add. Paisley anything is never a good idea, to be perfectly honest; the pattern is very difficult to match with anything (even I, a fashion illiterate, know that), and it tends to look either horridly effeminate (on men), or just out of place and grotesque (on women...and on men, actually). On furniture, it's not quite as bad, though I have yet to see a paisley couch that really made me want to buy it. About the only advantage such a thing would offer is that it matches the color of most food stains, and so it wouldn't tend to look as bad after the relatives came over for Thanksgiving and let their toddlers eat on the couch.
cheekyweebisom brings up the topic of pretension in art. Now THIS is a subject I have ranted on a great deal.
My sister is an artist. My best friend Ed is an artist. My other best friends,limpingpigeon and achanchinou, are both wonderful artists. I have willingly gone to art galleries with my parents, pimped Jeannette's art at a convention, and gone to presentations at my college about the art history of various cultures. I like art. I like art a lot.
Pretention in art, however, is another matter. I have no patience for pretention of any stripe, and the art world is particularly fraught with it. I suppose this stands to reason, since art is less objectively measurable than, say, engineering or the hard sciences. In such fields, there is such as thing as truth: it doesn't matter how good a bridge looks, if it stays up and supports the expected load; a plane may look fancy and elegant, but if it doesn't fly, it's a failure; a mathematical proof is judged first and foremost on its correctness, and a scientific hypothesis must fit the observed facts and stand up to rigorous testing and scrutiny in order to be considered a proper theory. In science, of course, there ARE such things as beauty, taste, and aesthetics; such things are often guides for the experimentor or designer, since hypotheses, proofs, and designs which are correct and true tend to be beautiful. In art, however, the judgement is based on emotional reaction, expression of concept, and other measures which don't necessarily have to bear any relationship to objective reality at all; this isn't a weakness, it's just the nature of the field. It allows artists to express things which can't exist, so far as we know, in literal form, and to touch our minds and hearts in profound ways; it also allows idiots to get away with laziness and a lack of real creativity.
I break down pretention in the art world into two types: there are the pretentious artists--their art itself may not be pretentious--and then there is actually pretentious art. The first category is exemplified, I think, by Boris Vallejo in the visual arts; here's a guy who can do decent (though rather stereotypical) human figures, but he's just so full of himself it's beyond amusement. This is the guy who, because his plane was delayed taking him to a convention where he was the guest of honor, decided to just go home instead of show up. Prima donna bastard.
He's not alone, of course; heavens, no. In music, I might cite Yanni (he is so full of himself it's not funny), Tchaikovsky (did he ever have a single GOOD thing to say about his fellow composers?), and those idiots in Oasis (bigger than the Beatles, my duodenum!). And, in literature, I would pick on Gertrude Stein (saying the same thing fifteen different ways in a paragraph is not art, it's not "stream of consciousness", it's BAD), Anne Rice (oh, dear GOD..."every word is perfectly placed?" MAN, does this woman need editing) and, my least favorite author in the history of the universe, James Joyce.
There have been worse authors than Joyce, of course, such as Laverne Ross (author of "Night Travels of the Elven Vampire", a trainwreck reviewed bycrevette in this beautiful yet horrifying entry), but they were not made canon and taught to helpless high-school English students. Joyce earns my ire because, not only could he not write--I'm sorry, but it's not "experimental" when you don't punctuate--he thought he was the greatest thing since...well, since he was Irish, whiskey, probably. (*RUNS AWAY!*) To anyone who has read his "A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man", first off, my profoundest sympathies. You will heal. But beyond the sheer pain of it, there's also the observation that, really, such a book (a fictionalized autobiography?!) is literary masturbation, plain and simple. And as for such drek as the incomprehensible "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake", well...I'm with his wife, Nora, who is quoted as asking him "Why can't you write books that people can read?"
Now, aside from pretentious artists, there is also art which is, in and of itself, pretentious. You know the sort, I'm sure: sculptures which looks like crashed spaceships or random bits of junk, paintings that consist of a single polygon or even just a dot, random splotches on a canvas, anything painted by Jackson Pollock, and the music of Phillip Glass and John Cage. Also, the works of Gertrude Stein are themselves pretentious, above and beyond her own egotism; and I might also point out that fanfic is almost always pretentious, in that very precious "I can do better than the original author!" way. (No, dear, you can't, especially not with a Mary Sue.) Such things, I almost go so far as to declare not to be art at all, though my sister always disagrees with me ("it may be bad art, but it's still art").
parrhesia speaks of the appalling fact that, while the rest of our cultural institutions are allowed to decay, sports always gets top funding.
Boy, could I ever rant on this. The local university in Fargo, NDSU, recently tried to ram through a proposal to build a huge hockey arena in the middle of downtown Fargo, on "Broadway", in an area full of old historic buildings and funky stores and restaurants. They of course pitched it as an attempt to "revitalize" downtown, but really what they wanted was someplace they could hold "Division One" hockey games, without having to pay for it themselves. Thankfully, the taxpayers of Fargo voted the proposal down; it would have resulted in living expenses tripling in the area, and would have done nothing to revitalize downtown at all, except revitalizing the need for traffic cops.
Sanity may have prevailed here, but it's the exception. Why, oh why do sports teams always ask for huge tax breaks to build their stadia? If they'd be profitable, then the cost is worth it to the team owners (who often have more money to spare than the city governments); and if not, then there's no point in building it. Furthermore, what on Earth makes sports so worthy of public funding and support? I hear arguments all the time that sports "build character" and "promote good values", as well as of course providing an economic boost. But what kind of character do we find in sports teams, particularly football, the biggest? Gambling, drug abuse, rapes and assaults and crimes of all sorts. It's not isolated, it's not unusual, and it's certainly not restricted to the professionals: college and highschool teams all over the country are known for their "wild parties", frequently accompanied by rohypnol and other illegal drugs. If this is the sort of character that sports builds, we don't need it.
And as for the economic benefits, well, who reaps them? Usually the owners, and the players, and the big corporations that back them. The boost to local businesses is often miniscule. As an example, in the Fargodome (NDSU's monster arena), almost all of the food stands are owned by national chains. I counted ONE that was from a local store, and it's reported to be struggling. So who's winning the big bucks from this?
Indeed, what DOES promote local growth and build character is centers for the arts. But, in America, that's not a popular sell; it requires too much, y'know, thinking.
xuincherguixe, whose name I have yet to learn how to pronounce, asked about the "existential programming language".
That's all I got to say about that.
spooke, of ancient Malkavia, has asked for a rant about factory farms and animal testing.
Well, about factory farms, I have nothing good to say. Disgusting things, utterly immoral, and they can only compete with sanitary farms by breaking the environmental laws anyway. Ought to be shut down, the lot of them. I'm fortunate to live in a part of the country where my grocery store is mostly supplied by local farms, which are predominantly free-range setups; many are in fact certified organic growers. Every grocery store here has an organic foods section, and decent, well-raised meat is easier to come by. (I highly recommend bison meat; it's more flavorful than beef, always free range, better for you, and comes from my own backyard! The animals are native to North Dakota, so they take very little effort to raise, and many of the local bison farmers are natives, so the money goes to help them rebuild.)
As for animal testing...it depends. For actual medical purposes, such as finding cures to diseases, I can't say I'm opposed. It should not be done cruelly, but if it means saving or improving the lives of many people, it's necessary. For cosmetics research, however, it's utterly disgusting.
motodraconis queries whether I think my vote matters. Should I bother voting?
In a word: oh hell yes. (That's three words, I know; I'm a heavy tipper.)
Voting is how citizens of a democracy make their voice heard. Now, being that I live in something that is almost, but not entirely, unlike a democracy, my voice probably isn't heard very well. But that never stopped me before. I am a Jew, and one of the things about Jews is, we do not shut up. If we see something which we find immoral, unethical, or even just annoying, we will kvetch about it all day long. (Hence the word "kvetch"; Yiddish is the world's best language to complain in for a reason, ya know.) This has, of course, gotten us into trouble over the millenia...but it has yet to stop us. And, in times like these, the more voices yelling, the better.
Besides, my country is in the mess it's in precisely because of low voter turnout and apathy; if I stopped voting, I would stop being part of any solution, and become part of the problem.
Now you,motodraconis, do still live in a democracy of sorts. Constitutional monarchy counts, especially if the monarch has powers as limited as the Queen's, and your elections are indeed important. Plus, you have an actual chance to have a third party, which is something we have never managed to pull off above the local level (and, considering the nature of most of our third parties, this is not a bad thing). So go out and vote! Who knows, you might actually make a difference.
Thus endeth the rants, for now. But I'm open for any more suggestions! This is fun!
pope_guilty wants me to rant about Starcraft. If he means the video game, I can't comment, since I have not played it (yes, I know, gasp in horror). However, the brand of pop-up trailers are another matter; I have much experience with them.
My first camping experience was with a vintage 1966 Starcraft pop-up trailer. It was...well...what we could afford. And I was smaller then. Still, sharing such close confines with my family was trying at times, especially given the lack of proper facilities in many of the places we chose to camp. Not to mention the awful noise that rain and hail made on that aluminium roof. The gas stove, when it worked, was adequate. The beds, which were thin foam mattresses with no springs and stains of dubious origin, were less so.
When I was 13, we traded it in for a more modern Starcraft, which was bigger, had a nicer stove, and (best of all) clean beds. Still no springs, though, and still not much privacy. I guess I never got as much out of camping as my family did, in general; my allergy to those awful "Noseeums", the teensy little biting insects that can fit through screen holes, cut my camping career quite short. Even when my family eventually sold the camper, and got a cabin in the Adirondacks, I wasn't so inclined to go up as the rest of my family. OH, well. (I guess this isn't much of a rant, really...more of a random discourse.)
randallsquared has suggested the topic of paisley pants. Truly, they are never a good idea. On men, they look horrid. On women, they look worse. And that includes attractive women, I might add. Paisley anything is never a good idea, to be perfectly honest; the pattern is very difficult to match with anything (even I, a fashion illiterate, know that), and it tends to look either horridly effeminate (on men), or just out of place and grotesque (on women...and on men, actually). On furniture, it's not quite as bad, though I have yet to see a paisley couch that really made me want to buy it. About the only advantage such a thing would offer is that it matches the color of most food stains, and so it wouldn't tend to look as bad after the relatives came over for Thanksgiving and let their toddlers eat on the couch.
cheekyweebisom brings up the topic of pretension in art. Now THIS is a subject I have ranted on a great deal.My sister is an artist. My best friend Ed is an artist. My other best friends,
limpingpigeon and achanchinou, are both wonderful artists. I have willingly gone to art galleries with my parents, pimped Jeannette's art at a convention, and gone to presentations at my college about the art history of various cultures. I like art. I like art a lot.Pretention in art, however, is another matter. I have no patience for pretention of any stripe, and the art world is particularly fraught with it. I suppose this stands to reason, since art is less objectively measurable than, say, engineering or the hard sciences. In such fields, there is such as thing as truth: it doesn't matter how good a bridge looks, if it stays up and supports the expected load; a plane may look fancy and elegant, but if it doesn't fly, it's a failure; a mathematical proof is judged first and foremost on its correctness, and a scientific hypothesis must fit the observed facts and stand up to rigorous testing and scrutiny in order to be considered a proper theory. In science, of course, there ARE such things as beauty, taste, and aesthetics; such things are often guides for the experimentor or designer, since hypotheses, proofs, and designs which are correct and true tend to be beautiful. In art, however, the judgement is based on emotional reaction, expression of concept, and other measures which don't necessarily have to bear any relationship to objective reality at all; this isn't a weakness, it's just the nature of the field. It allows artists to express things which can't exist, so far as we know, in literal form, and to touch our minds and hearts in profound ways; it also allows idiots to get away with laziness and a lack of real creativity.
I break down pretention in the art world into two types: there are the pretentious artists--their art itself may not be pretentious--and then there is actually pretentious art. The first category is exemplified, I think, by Boris Vallejo in the visual arts; here's a guy who can do decent (though rather stereotypical) human figures, but he's just so full of himself it's beyond amusement. This is the guy who, because his plane was delayed taking him to a convention where he was the guest of honor, decided to just go home instead of show up. Prima donna bastard.
He's not alone, of course; heavens, no. In music, I might cite Yanni (he is so full of himself it's not funny), Tchaikovsky (did he ever have a single GOOD thing to say about his fellow composers?), and those idiots in Oasis (bigger than the Beatles, my duodenum!). And, in literature, I would pick on Gertrude Stein (saying the same thing fifteen different ways in a paragraph is not art, it's not "stream of consciousness", it's BAD), Anne Rice (oh, dear GOD..."every word is perfectly placed?" MAN, does this woman need editing) and, my least favorite author in the history of the universe, James Joyce.
There have been worse authors than Joyce, of course, such as Laverne Ross (author of "Night Travels of the Elven Vampire", a trainwreck reviewed by
crevette in this beautiful yet horrifying entry), but they were not made canon and taught to helpless high-school English students. Joyce earns my ire because, not only could he not write--I'm sorry, but it's not "experimental" when you don't punctuate--he thought he was the greatest thing since...well, since he was Irish, whiskey, probably. (*RUNS AWAY!*) To anyone who has read his "A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man", first off, my profoundest sympathies. You will heal. But beyond the sheer pain of it, there's also the observation that, really, such a book (a fictionalized autobiography?!) is literary masturbation, plain and simple. And as for such drek as the incomprehensible "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake", well...I'm with his wife, Nora, who is quoted as asking him "Why can't you write books that people can read?"Now, aside from pretentious artists, there is also art which is, in and of itself, pretentious. You know the sort, I'm sure: sculptures which looks like crashed spaceships or random bits of junk, paintings that consist of a single polygon or even just a dot, random splotches on a canvas, anything painted by Jackson Pollock, and the music of Phillip Glass and John Cage. Also, the works of Gertrude Stein are themselves pretentious, above and beyond her own egotism; and I might also point out that fanfic is almost always pretentious, in that very precious "I can do better than the original author!" way. (No, dear, you can't, especially not with a Mary Sue.) Such things, I almost go so far as to declare not to be art at all, though my sister always disagrees with me ("it may be bad art, but it's still art").
parrhesia speaks of the appalling fact that, while the rest of our cultural institutions are allowed to decay, sports always gets top funding.Boy, could I ever rant on this. The local university in Fargo, NDSU, recently tried to ram through a proposal to build a huge hockey arena in the middle of downtown Fargo, on "Broadway", in an area full of old historic buildings and funky stores and restaurants. They of course pitched it as an attempt to "revitalize" downtown, but really what they wanted was someplace they could hold "Division One" hockey games, without having to pay for it themselves. Thankfully, the taxpayers of Fargo voted the proposal down; it would have resulted in living expenses tripling in the area, and would have done nothing to revitalize downtown at all, except revitalizing the need for traffic cops.
Sanity may have prevailed here, but it's the exception. Why, oh why do sports teams always ask for huge tax breaks to build their stadia? If they'd be profitable, then the cost is worth it to the team owners (who often have more money to spare than the city governments); and if not, then there's no point in building it. Furthermore, what on Earth makes sports so worthy of public funding and support? I hear arguments all the time that sports "build character" and "promote good values", as well as of course providing an economic boost. But what kind of character do we find in sports teams, particularly football, the biggest? Gambling, drug abuse, rapes and assaults and crimes of all sorts. It's not isolated, it's not unusual, and it's certainly not restricted to the professionals: college and highschool teams all over the country are known for their "wild parties", frequently accompanied by rohypnol and other illegal drugs. If this is the sort of character that sports builds, we don't need it.
And as for the economic benefits, well, who reaps them? Usually the owners, and the players, and the big corporations that back them. The boost to local businesses is often miniscule. As an example, in the Fargodome (NDSU's monster arena), almost all of the food stands are owned by national chains. I counted ONE that was from a local store, and it's reported to be struggling. So who's winning the big bucks from this?
Indeed, what DOES promote local growth and build character is centers for the arts. But, in America, that's not a popular sell; it requires too much, y'know, thinking.
xuincherguixe, whose name I have yet to learn how to pronounce, asked about the "existential programming language".(let (existence nil) (if (eq (reality farce)) (until (vomiting-p) (read 'Jean-Paul Sartre)) (give-up)))
That's all I got to say about that.
spooke, of ancient Malkavia, has asked for a rant about factory farms and animal testing.Well, about factory farms, I have nothing good to say. Disgusting things, utterly immoral, and they can only compete with sanitary farms by breaking the environmental laws anyway. Ought to be shut down, the lot of them. I'm fortunate to live in a part of the country where my grocery store is mostly supplied by local farms, which are predominantly free-range setups; many are in fact certified organic growers. Every grocery store here has an organic foods section, and decent, well-raised meat is easier to come by. (I highly recommend bison meat; it's more flavorful than beef, always free range, better for you, and comes from my own backyard! The animals are native to North Dakota, so they take very little effort to raise, and many of the local bison farmers are natives, so the money goes to help them rebuild.)
As for animal testing...it depends. For actual medical purposes, such as finding cures to diseases, I can't say I'm opposed. It should not be done cruelly, but if it means saving or improving the lives of many people, it's necessary. For cosmetics research, however, it's utterly disgusting.
motodraconis queries whether I think my vote matters. Should I bother voting?In a word: oh hell yes. (That's three words, I know; I'm a heavy tipper.)
Voting is how citizens of a democracy make their voice heard. Now, being that I live in something that is almost, but not entirely, unlike a democracy, my voice probably isn't heard very well. But that never stopped me before. I am a Jew, and one of the things about Jews is, we do not shut up. If we see something which we find immoral, unethical, or even just annoying, we will kvetch about it all day long. (Hence the word "kvetch"; Yiddish is the world's best language to complain in for a reason, ya know.) This has, of course, gotten us into trouble over the millenia...but it has yet to stop us. And, in times like these, the more voices yelling, the better.
Besides, my country is in the mess it's in precisely because of low voter turnout and apathy; if I stopped voting, I would stop being part of any solution, and become part of the problem.
Now you,
motodraconis, do still live in a democracy of sorts. Constitutional monarchy counts, especially if the monarch has powers as limited as the Queen's, and your elections are indeed important. Plus, you have an actual chance to have a third party, which is something we have never managed to pull off above the local level (and, considering the nature of most of our third parties, this is not a bad thing). So go out and vote! Who knows, you might actually make a difference.Thus endeth the rants, for now. But I'm open for any more suggestions! This is fun!
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Request for a further rant?
Date: 2005-05-05 04:37 am (UTC)The rant re the sports funding, perhaps there is summat you can clear up for me. (Being a confused foreigner and all.)
We get heaps of American teen sitcoms over here, and from what snippets I've scanned, (and believe me, I ain't no fan of such TV, Buffy excepted,) I get an impression from them that sport is the major, overriding important thing in US schools. That is is far better to be, say, good at football than academic. (Or, heaven forbid, interested in Science.) Academic types tend to be portrayed as frail, weird looking, sickly geeks, the inference being that they study because, (poor souls,) they don't have the stamina for football and baseball or cheerleading.
!!!!
Surely it is not like this in real life? Surely this is some bizarre, distorted TV la la land being portrayed? That this could be even remotely true would be horribly depressing for me.
I cannot relate to these shows at all, my own last years at school, academic excellence was the big thing. Sport was just some kind of tedious semi-compulsory lesson designed to burn off the odd bag of chips. The cool kids were the ones going to Oxford and Cambridge to study esoteric stuff like philosophy and pure maths. I was the rubbish disappointment at my school for going to a vocational University to study something as dreadfully work-centric and middle class as Architecture. (Dammit girl, if you want to work, study medcine. That's what the cool kids do.)
So tell me, is sport the all consuming Point Of Life in School, or am I being mis-lead by twisted sitcoms? (Reassure me please.)
:-)
Re: Request for a further rant?
Date: 2005-05-08 07:58 pm (UTC)In most schools, if the budget is cut, the first things to go are art and music. Even if the school goes to an austerity budget, sports are still given preference to academics.
Now, this varies by region. For example, the school I went to in upstate New York (far from NYC) had a rather strong and well-known arts and music program; our school musicals were big draws, and most of the football team was in the band or theatre.
On the other hand, in Texas, to hear natives tell it, football is practically a religion. Of course, in Texas, there's a lot of really strange shit that goes down, so this doesn't surprise me.