Rumours of whatever, greatly whatever

Rusty Schwartz = totally still alive

Just... so you know.

Update - 9:55 PM:

It is not the British spelling; it is the Fleetwood Mac spelling. You are welcome in advance.

Double update - 9:58 PM:

To reflect proper tyrannical Violetstyle.

the perfect ending to a perfect day

So, I was putzing around on Google Reader, updating my RSS feeds, and got a little subscription-happy applying with their bundles. And so, I applied to the Technology Bundle because hey, I like technology! I know what an RSS feed is! And I would totally get a flat-screen TV if I were rich.

So, I go back to my homepage, which displays my feeds, and up there at the very top is...

NEW HALO 3 ARMOR REVEALED

Oh. It's thaaaaaat kind of feed.

Vintage Violet

Look what I found on the wayback machine...

SO FAMOUS IT MELTS MY MIND AND MY FACE TOO.

ha ha i am posting again i am sorry i was gone it was time for the Rock And Roll Marriage Tour. In other news I need to find pay stubs in order to meet with a REAL ESTATE BROKER in (Neighborhood) and I need to get COLONOSCOPY. i am too famous to live in Mahnattan, my parents are always like, when are you moving out, you are so famous.

a thought on rusty's thought's on whatever rusty's thoughts were on.

I get - I really, really, really, really get - the folks who don't so much like the people with, like, IAmBigLiarHahaha! names commenting on their forreal work with their real, fancy names on them. I was, I promise, on the real-name side of this divide. I would get tons and tons of "you are dumb slut!" comments, or the more insidious "you would be great if you weren't a dumb slut" comments when I wrote for Magazine. And I couldn't even sic my boyfriend on these people bc they were fake!

No, but it was really unpleasant, actually - the criticism felt so much like having some anonymous gross guy whip it out and start wanking away on the subway, which, another post. But anyway. My editors advised that I grow a thicker skin, and I did, to a degree - I'd certainly recommend that strategy to anyone who is going to spend time around the 'tubes, just for sanity purposes.

But when we move away from a discussion of the pure expedience factor of various skin-thicknesses, can I say that I think a lot of the interestingishness of my writing at the time required that vulnerability? That unfounded assumption that people would take my words in good faith? Not that they wouldn't question or disagree, but that they weren't masked and hiding behind the computer screen ready to shame the first person who gave them an in. My writing's different now, and maybe I needed to learn how to deal with random shamers, but I'm just saying - something is there that wasn't before the shamers, and something that was there before the shamers (and that contributed to whatever discussion it was that i was having) is lost.

That said, oh my god, anonymous forevs. I don't think Staid Profession has reconciled itself to the new, public dimension of young workers' lives,* and while I think that will eventually happen, I am just not ready to be on that vanguard. I've given already.

*This is why the "you still build a reputation with pseudonymous comments" is a bit nerfy to me. The possibility of correlating a real life with food and dogs and monies to an internet presence is like, a non-negligible difference between pseudonymity and normal-nymity. I don't know, I don't belong to any non-three-dimensional communites, and so my analysis of them is likely to be not superinsightful. But there is begins to be, for what it's worth.

In which I discuss our rustiness and violetude

OR In which I always get chocolate stains on my pants

Over in some of the nerdlier corners of the internest, there's some silliness going on about pseudonymity. Naturally, this is an issue close to my (our?) heart(s?) so maybe it's worth at least a couple of disjointed paragraphs in our "pages", right?

So! I guess some old-style (not the good kind) curmudgeonly types in their fancy ivory towers are less than pleased about anonymous and pseudonymous criticism they keep receiving from our mysterious series of tubes.

ASIDE: you know what? I keep trying to write the long posts and I just get exhausted and I feel like the lady who wrote Seabiscuit* and I save it to a draft and say fuckitall! and post 10cc videos or whatever. BUT I WILL SOLDIER ON (so be warned)

etc etc... where was I?

As is often the case, Matt "Don't you know there's a war on" Yglesias says most of what needs to be said:

On the internet, everyone gets a chance to speak, but there's no guarantee you'll be listened to. If people are "amplifying" anticrat424's thoughts by linking to them, quoting him, etc., that's going to be either because he's saying things that people think make sense. People might quote anticrat424 for the purpose of refuting him but that, again, presupposes that some people are taking him seriously. And, of course, over time your handle gets a reputation -- good, bad, or mixed -- just like a name in real life.

So what does that mean vis-a-vis your "friends" Rusty & Violet?

a) I (we?) say (or don't say) plenty of things. And almost nobody cares what we have to say (until we get famous). Of course, What Matt Says means:

b) We're gonna have to work and say things people give a shit about one way or another in order to get famous. Which basically goes against everything I (we?) want to believe, but I will give him the benefit of the doubt because he is more famous than us, for instance: he has been on television.

c) At present, nearly everyone reading this probably knows exactly who VB and/or I are. So this is all just some kind of stupid costume party. WHICH IS A LOT OF FUN I GOTTA SAY.

d) The last item probably means we need a blogroll of some sort. But this creates much anxiety!

e) on the last of many hands, I don't think anyone out there is gonna hate my work as much as I hate my work. I hope I end up with a good reputation, but I would settle for a Bad Reputation as long as it's the good kind.

and... Scene. I'm pretty tired.

*not to dminish the seriousness of chronic fatigue syndrome butyouknowwhatimean

UPDATED! because, among other things, I made the whole blog really small.

At 5 AM...

The copy on the interstitial for Don Julio tequila that I just saw on Salon reads: The true flavor of Mexico can not be found in a tourist book.

Do they mean a guidebook? Or possibly the clunkier "book for tourists"? Is this an attempt to sound authentically Mexican?

And I have visual confirmation of her cuteness, which is what really matters.

Despite my richly conflicted relationship with oh, say, writing? On the internet? And Young People? And despite my promise of a sharp stick in the eye to the next person who said anything about anything women did ever at all? Emily Gould is a little bit my mind hero, for sneaking the snappy feminism all up in Gawker's piece. And everyone's all like wha? And she's like, yeah, motherfuckers, that's right. Uh.

P.S. I had like 8 abortions today. They were AMAZING.

P.P.S. Not that I like Gawker, although I am obvs. reading it. I just like Emily. She should have her own magazine. I wonder what she'd call it.

Let's Teleport To My Closet!

Fashion is something that can be acquired. You too, be it male or female, can be very fashionable.

Mutter

It was my idea to go, and a focus of our trip to Philadelphia, the four of us, two young couples obsessed with greasy food and silly movies, arcana and the kitsch and trash. "They have," I said "SKULLS there. And GROVER CLEVELAND'S TUMOR. Can you handle it?"

It was everything I could have wanted in a museum full of skulls. It was small and a little dusty, specimens were kept in old-fashioned cabinets that lined the wall. It was gothic and delicious and symptoms of ravaging disease and deformity were everywhere, thrilling me. That's what syphillis does? Wow. Would you divorce me if I grew a horn like that? It was touching, too - the exhibit on Siamese Twins, on their recognizable reality and love for each other, their conjuncture hardly seeming a hardship, at least in these histories sketched out on poster board, behind those same old-fashioned glass cabinet doors. Maybe it was true, or just issued as a corrective, but in any case.

The giant colon downstairs terrified me - a swollen black eel the size of a man - to have that inside of you would be to know demonic possession. The ribcage of a boy woven through with overzealous bones, the babies in jars.

It sounds funny, it is funny! Babies in jars! The punchline of an intentionally tasteless joke that you'd tell on a first date in order to suss out whether this was someone you could spend your life with or not, whether they, too, love tasteless jokes. Babies in jars! And that's what they were. They floated in honey-colored fluid just like they had in the womb - their skin was waxy and dull, but they had petal-like feet like as live babies do, and smooth little noses. Some were twins, but instead of manifesting the loving symbiosis I read about upstairs each had been joined to the other in such a way that she had prevented her from ever taking even a first mewling gulp of air, some had been killed by forceps, or just born wrong. Babies used to die all the time, I remembered, an effort to steel myself in solidarity with history. I sought out the foeti in various stages of development and looked carefully at the very earliest, in which I could discern no human feature.

Best Student Misspelling of "Don Quixote" That Sounds Like It Would Be A Better Book Than Don Quixote and I Like Don Quixote:

Donkeyhotep.

Things I Am Not Buying

Somehow, this issue of immigration came up at dinner, which was about as fun as you might imagine.

Latino immigrants just don't make enough of an effort to assimilate/learn English. Discuss. Attempts to refute don't work It didn't work, obvs, because at this point the vocabulary of the resources/language/jobs debate is just a flimsy cloak for fear of brown people that doesn't engage reason. Though my opinion isn't really reasonable as in here's-a-workable-solution, either - I want everyone to lean Spanish, I want every public school to be bilingual, I want to see the US move toward being a country with two official languages and no official culture.

I do the same thing with every big problem I'm presented with. Flip it upside down, find the least feasible solution, and become deeply attached to it. So it's been pretty difficult for me to stand idly by and watch the women-working-or-staying-home parade trod the same now-grassless ground for the past few years. While I think all the standard criticisms about how this is a problem one is lucky to have apply, I don't think that means there is not any interesting thinking to be done anymore. Unfortunately, I just don't care. The next person to cash in on the desire of everyone in the entire universe to jizz all over the tits of young mothers while telling them what poor choices they are making gets a sharp stick in the eye.

In last week's New Yorker (missing the stick in the eye threshold by only a few days!) is a review by Rebecca Mead of a book by Leslie Bennetts about how stay-at-home moms are deluding themselves and fucking everyone else over and laughing about it at their monthly symposia. And Rebecca Mead is all, but staying home is a valid choice and emotionally fulfilling and baybeeezz why are you all up in their grillses? "Interview after interview reveals a woman who seems, actually, pretty happy with her lot," Mead writes "at least until Bennetts sweeps in and points out how terrible things will become if her husband leaves her."

Where is he now? Sure as fuck not in this article. Where are the dads in any of these articles, these descriptions of the ecosystems in which all of our professional and feminist choices bind us inextricably? Just working away on autopilot, oblivious to any of this? Patented Violet Beekeper problem-flipping coming atcha - why don't we start approaching this problem by looking at the choices men make ... and at men who make unconventional choices? Is there no thinking to be done there? Is this opt-out revolution discussion not really a discussion but instead an excuse to shame women a la everything else ever? Noooo. Couldn't be.

"But," you say "it wouldn't work! The mens, they are obviously too attached to their provider role and its perks to give it up! It is totally like when they killed antelopes on the veldt, and women stayed at home giving interviews to itinerant authors working on projects about the state of contemporary feminism. I mean, we are talking about i-bankers here."

And I say "why?" Seriously. Do we need a book and loads of commentary on a book about this? Holy shit, THIS JUST IN: SOMETIMES I- BANKER WIVES MAYBE A LITTLE BIT SHALLOW AND LAZY. I- BANKERS POTENTIALLY ATAVISTIC AND EMOTIONALLY INVESTED IN THEIR EARNING POWER. NOT CHAMPIONS OF PROGRESSIVE GENDER ROLES MORE AT SIX. I only know the dudes I know, and the dudes I know are mostly dippy urban liberals (hi!), but I guarantee you a hundred percent that if you proposed to them that maybe you should start discussing how they could work less and hang out with babies more, they would be on it. HERE IS A BIG EFFING SECRET: dudes totally like babies. And they're not even all assholes! Some of them don't even like to go to Hooters, even ironically! I know, right? It's enough to make you want to totally want to punch modern male mythology in the cock.

And I think that journalists who have any investment in feminism would be well advised to punch it in the cock with me. To divest from an anti- feminist-even-when-it's-feminist media paradigm that gets paid for picking like a zealous facialist at women's contradictions and ugly compromises. To examine men's choices and ask them to examine their own - many of them aren't well served by their current options and know it - maybe, if we try solving this equation for Y, interesting things will begin to emerge. Just a thought.

Things not addressed here -

How the constant and consistent preoccupation with stay-at-home-or-work bs has probably done more to alienate black feminists from media feminism than anything else.

The tricky fact of pregnancy. Not that I don't have theories about this.

The awesome New Yorker article about the Pirahã - I also feel like Tavis Smiley is kind of what would happen if they had developed a broadcasting tradition parallel to ours.

A Window on a Twisted Soul

I have been busy setting goals for myself - I am a big procrastinator, and one way to avoid getting things done is to create complicated schemata detailing exactly what things I will get done. However, it might work this time, because I have broken it down into big motivating goals and their subsidiary task-goals, and because I am out here on the internet holding myself accountable.

First Category: Family!

The Big Picture: Act like an adult re. my parents. Be nice to my brother and cultivate that relationship. Help fairly around house and do not pick on Hazzard (which is what I think I am calling M. Beekeper 'round these parts) about work.

The Really Big Picture: Get things in shape to get a baby up in me within 7 years. Look into being more Jewisher than I am

Down in the Mud With the Peasants:

1. Do not call/email about help on dumb things I can do myself (daily)
2. Do not borrow money except for discreet, pre-identified expenses, eg, tooth fillings (daily, I guess. This isn't really a problem I have, more of a reminder. )
3. Call das brutterstein once a week and stay on phone 15 min even if he is not saying anything which is likely. (1x/week - Fridays?)
4. Do not bug H. about work stuff (daily)
5. BUT have once weekly family meeting to allay my concerns (1x/week)
6. Do dishes OR cook 5x/week (5x/week)
7. Walk dog 5x/week (5x/week)

Second Category: Jobbsers!

The Big Picture: Actually put some effort into my pay-the bills job even though it is stupid crazy easy. Finish manuscript. Get to know folks at Professional School For Professionals. Be productive. Don't be unproductive.

The Really Big Picture: Be Nancy Pelosi.

The Wheel to Which I Am Putting My Shoulder:

1. 90 minutes/day 5 days/week on my pay-the-bills job (my job is honestly so easy that this will be a stretch) (5x/week)
2. Write 1000 words/day 5 days/week (5x/week)
3. Plan next day's writing 5 days/week (5x/week)
4. Don't be on internet for more than 1 hr/day (daily)
5. Only watch pre-deteermined tv for a max of 2hrs/day (daily)
6. Write 3 Prof. school emails/week
   

Third Category: Save The Whales!

The Big Picture: Live in a way that is increasingly consistent with my beliefs. Have some idea of how to articulate my beliefs, "I love Mexicans!" does not count.

The Super Big Picture: Total Transcendence.

The Protestant Work Ethic:

1. Phase out incandescant light bulbs, 1/week (1x week. This is really hard for me. I am going to need to put yellow gels on all my energy-save lamps or something.)
2. Don't drink milk out of carton (daily. This lets me buy the more expensive organic milk, since it does not disappear as fast.)
3. Volunteer (schedule deferred until Thurs, when I have a meeting re. this.)
4. Get Green Energy Info (deferred until I know whether I am moving or not)
5. Write 1 letter to a publication 1x a week. (weekly. I am really really good at getting letters to the NY Times published, let's see if this carries over.)
6. Read newspaper. (daily)

Fourth Category: Strong Teeth And Bones

The Pig Bicture: Control Athsma. Be Hottt.

The Really Pig Bicture: Be Really Hottt. Some day, far off, eat less cheese.

Hottt Was Not Built in a Day:

1. Yoga class (3x/week)
2. Practice at home 20 min a night (daily)
3. Dessert only twice a week (I guess I will define that as no desert 5x/week)
4. Meat only twice a week (ditto - 5x/week)
5. No cigarettes EVER (daily)
6. When drinking, 1 drink per 75 min, maximum 4. (daily, I guess? It's not really an issue daily. Also, I realize that may sound a bit stringent for a hip young person - or not? - but I am literally the pukiest drinker EVAH. So less = better).
7. Find some cardio ish thing to do (deferred)

Fourth Category number 2: Monies

Blah Blah: Pay off Credit Cards. Save 10,000

Blah Blah Blah: Don't be poor.

How We Do:

1. Save $75/week (weekly)
2. Pay $75 to credit cards/week (weekly)
3. Don't buy any clothes/shoes/makeup for one month (uh? check in weekly?)
4. Only one iTunes album every 2 weeks. (bi-weekly or biweekly?)

Now, I figure if I am hitting at least 75% of each category and at least 85% overall at the end of a month, I can get a reward. But what? I was thinking I would go get a massage, but then that costs money and then, then I would be like, well, actually it would be bad to meet my goals because then it would cost me! So I should just go watch My Super Sweet 16! The perils of being a nutbar.

A bunch of different kinds of update.

A what does Seth Stevenson Look Like Update - I google-imaged Seth Stevenson but all I got were stills from the commercials he's reviewed. Which is like thirty different kinds of post-post modern. In my mind he is now a chimera with the faces of the Mac ad guy, the BK king and a bowl of soup from Malaysia.

A what does Violet Do Instead of Playing With The Dog Update - I read this post on this obscure little blog I found. It is by a "No Nym," not by the main blogger who is some professor chick? Or something? Here's what happens:

This blogger-academic types says, I found a job that does not crush my babies in to paste and my getting perspective on what I WANT as opposed to what grad school told me I want helped with that. Everybody normal is all yay, then everybody crazy is all, why did you even have babies if you didn't want them to be crushed into paste, because I mean, there are plenty of us academics out here who would be totally willing to crush our babies into paste for the right job, and you are just wasting everyone's time and gumming up the works but not with baby paste which is actually good for the works.

Observations and Commentary:

Uno) I am the child of one and a half normal academics, one half Indiana Jones and zero stay at home parents. I totally did not turn out being paste.* Sometimes, we ate lots of mac and cheese because no one had time to cook anything else, but sometimes we also went to the zoo or played Candyland. This is all, I think, more about parents – and parents’ marriages – then about babies, who tend to grown up into dysfunctional nuthats like the rest of us no matter what, though they do need to be fed and not beaten, no matter what. Parents want to feel good about what they are doing for their children, but a lot of jobbsers count on encouraging feelings of inadequacy that ripple throughout an employee’s existence. I think it is supposed to be motivating. **

Dos) However, I kind of sympathize with the crazy people, because whenever anyone talks about their own experience, I read that as a criticism of mine to the extent it differs. And I guess, if someone" had peed in your coffee that morning, you could read the post as a little bit of The Secret-Style you are the engineer of your own destiny think happy thoughts blah zee. He could have gotten only one of those job offers, or none at all, and then there would be no happy story about how he told the fancy robber baron school that no way no how was their steel mill getting built on his pristine farm, nuh uh. But. There would still be a story there about how there is a whole lot of weird professional dogma that got all put up in our brainpiece and it’s a liberating exercise to reject it, even if it’s still just you in your hovel rejecting.

Tres) I am really, really curious about bringing up family stuff being a no-no in interviews, causing bad reactions in hiring committees and the like, only because I hear about it often and from people whose perception of their own experiences I trust, and I’ve seen what seem like its effects on the broad social level and in my own brainpeice, but my actual experience with jobs/schools etc. has been v. much the opposite. I’m literally incapable about being anything but totally candid about my personal life, because I have a huge huge mouth and am obsessed with myself, and will have been talking to total strangers (whom I need to impress because they own my job) about my reproductive decision making within thirty seconds of meeting them. I applied for a very staid-sounding scholarship at Big Shot Professional School for Big Shot Profession and it was all corporate corporate corporate, and one of the interviewers, who was wearing cufflinks and everything was chatting to me about his granddaughter, and I was literally like, “I’ll have to get started on kids in school, because I want like thirty.” I got the scholarship. And that is one example out of many. My theory is that corporate types in cufflinks find me a charming breath of fresh air because I am and they are like, let’s give our money to the flighty girl with the runs in her stocking and see what enchanting indiscretions she commits with it, and that if I were someone who were more like them or didn’t have runs in my stockings, the dissonance between my persona and my family concerns would make them all who does she think she is? Or maybz, because I know Goodman Beekeeper is all babies all the time, and I know I can count on him to hold that shit down no matter what, I don't display any anxiety when talking about this and that works in my favor? Or maybe I have just dealt with awesome people so far?

*My brother, on the other hand, starved to death during MLA ’89.

** The academics of whom I am the child, upon hearing that I was considering applying to X-Subject PhD programs were like, so, what about nursing school? And then all their friends revealed a secret desire to have gone to nursing school. And these are some people who have totally won the professor game. Meanwhile, my friends in nursing school really like it. I am not going to school for X-Subject.

A Bro is Born Every Minute

There's an article on Slate about Crispin Porter & Bogusky and the Burger King etc. commercials. I guess I could embed a commercial here, but I don't believe in visuals.

I read this article, because it is by Seth Stevenson, and I have a conflicted and compelling relationship with him in my mind, and also because if there is one thing I am interested in, it is commercials on the TV. Also, because during the five minutes I thought I might work in advertising and was reading the relevant trades, Alex Bogusky came up a lot so I felt smart for recognizing his name and also I vaguely remember thinking someone needed to call his mother and tell her that he was not acting very nice.

The article explores wtf is up with the agency relentlessly relying on a tired Bro experience, i.e., eat of this burger my son and basically you will be the king of a tribe of strippers with machetes, haha, do you see the kitsch value there, but anyway that's implicitly, explicitly you will just be eating a burger.

Observations and Commentary:

a)Seth's problem with the ads were that they weren't funny, weren't ever funny, and weren't really funny because they promoted and spoke unequivocally to the creepy, boorish masculinity of Bros, and that was not a good thing. My take is a little different. I actually thought those King (that is not obno slang for Burger King, I am talking about the ads with the weird guy in the full-head king mask) ads were amazing, way back when. Like, it takes somenads to sell burgers via creeping people the fuck out. I don't know, because I only eat amazing Neptune Diner burgers* but if I were going to eat fast food, sure, I'd eat Burger King, based solely on how much I liked those early King ads.** Unless I lived in California because blah blah In n Out blah blah blah.

a1)There are no more free rides on the Bro humor paradigm train. Because, in part, of Crispy Porter, Bro humor has been a part of non-Bro culture long enough that to have any effect presently, it needs to be funny in a way that transcends, and it takes a pretty deft hand to exploit Bro conventions without relying on them to be the joke. Even the most skilled can eff it up, see below. Obviously I am using a definition of Bro humor than encompasses basically everything.

Funny,*** meanwhile, not that funny.
Funny, meanwhile, meh.

a2)I, me personally and I, me representative of everyone are both kind of tired of mean ads, if only because it's very perplexing to be assaulted by your very own television to
which you have been so kind. AHHHHH CAR SO FAST IT HATEFUCKS YOUR WIFE AND EATS YOUR DOG AHHHHH. Um, no thanks...

b)I feel like this article exhibits a sort of painful irony, in that I've always considered Seth Stevenson Slate's resident Bro. He sounds cute though, I bet he is cute. I am totally going to google image him later.

3)Also, me and Seth Stevenson fly through time. The first BK ad I saw after reading this article was one with actual bros drawing on each other's faces and taping each other to chairs. For analysis, refer to paradigm train leaving station, above.

*No link to reviews because I could not find one that did justice to the giant stained glass Neptune in the back.

**I am the ideal consumer, I buy products for which I am totally aware I have neither need not desire because I liked the ad - this is a conscious part of my decision making process, and one for which I make no apologies. If we could bottle my brain, we would make a lot of money. Unf, it is stuck in my head, impoverishing me.

***The funniest part is the commenters insisting that THIS IS NOT EITHER Tarantino's directorial debut.

Brunch with Pat Nixon (and 11 other things you do when you get to Hell)

And so, dear Internet, it begins again. Looks like this is my return to "blogging" (but since I find that such a grating neologism, I prefer to consider this the glossiest & cheapest magazine ever). See, once upon a time I was a big-shot famous "blogger" - or at least I was occasionally read by people who are occasionally read by people who are marginally well-known. In certain circles. So here I am, writing pseudonymously (alas! Rusty Schwartz is people fictional!) not so much because I don't want you, dear Internet, to know who I am, but simply because my name must never be spoke. Please accept my apologies.

So thanks to Mrs. Violet Beekeeper for curating this - ahem - magazine and I look forward to fully engaging my obsessive-compulsive tendencies (do you know how long i agonized over the capitalization in the post title? Do you?). I'm tanned pale, I'm fit malnourished, I'm ready starved for attention.

But don't worry; it's Jazz!

Dear Internet,

This is Beatdown Magazine; I think you'll like it.

Love,
Violet