Qu'est-ce Que J D?

NO ONE WILL BE LEFT UNBONERED.

It’s my personal guarantee of satisfaction, except not so much satisfaction as… tumescence.

it is wikipedia exclusively for people who don’t give a shit about being right.

most of it is made up as a gross joke,

and the rest of it misses the point.

block it in your browser.

rhubarbrastreisand:

tumblr has made me want to reply to everything I read

I almost vandalised my neighbor’s mail today because I wanted to reply to his name

what is happening

why

adamwarrock:

JESSE DANGEROUSLY | ADAM WARROCK | MIKAL kHILL | TRIBE ONE

We’re coming to your town to rap. We’re bringing some friends:

9/1 TBA
9/2 Chicago, IL - Burlington Bar
9/3 Pontiac, MI - Crofoot Pike Room w/ Sample the Martian
9/4 Cleveland, OH - Roc Bar w/ MC Cool Whip
9/5 Philadelphia, PA - M-Room w/ DevoSpice, Zilla Persona
9/6 Worcester, MA - That’s Entertainment! w/ Shane Hall
9/7 Hartford, CT - Cafe Nine w/ Ceschi Ramos
9/8 Brooklyn, NY- Grand Victory w/ Schaffer the Darklord
9/9 Baltimore, MD - Metro Gallery
9/10 Chesapeake, VA - Chicho’s Pizza w/ The Nerdlucks
9/11 Chapel Hill, NC - Local 506
9/12 Atlanta, GA - Drunken Unicorn
9/13 West Columbia, SC - The Conundrum
9/14 Charlotte, NC - The Milestone w/ 25 Minutes to Go & South Side Punx

Full tour info/links and stuff here. Poster by Matthew Warlick.

Spread the word, my babes.

dahelm:

Hey Jesse I like you, many of your ideas, and I really like your music, but I wholeheartedly disagree with your stance on this.

That’s cool!  I appreciate all of those things.  I agree with some parts of your response and see others differently (I won’t quote them all here because tumblr is so ugly for detailed responses; I hope people click to read them though!), but the part of what you’re saying that confuses me is that you start off by explaining “Nolan is reflecting on matters relevant not only in today’s society, but in the 1930s,” but continue to say things like “relating exaggerated comic book themes to real life or viewing it as some type of commentary.”

Don’t those two things contradict one another?  Am I misunderstanding?

Aside from that even, I don’t think that just because something is fiction, or has fantastic elements, that it doesn’t say things about the world in which it was written, or at least the author’s perspectives thereupon.  It seems to me that they’re inseparable, overall.

This movie wasn’t really even set in Gotham, in spite of what they kept calling the place.  It was set in New York City - there was a long, juicy exterior shot of Sak’s Fifth Ave, even.  Gotham wasn’t conceived in the first place as an unrealistic place - it was patterned on New York City from day one (“Gotham” is a nickname for NYC dating from the 19th century), and drew upon that city’s reputation for corruption and violent crime for its meaning.  Things expressed about Gotham City in Batman comic books are things expressed about real US cities.

The thing is that even total fantasy that’s meant to be less specific than that still tells stories about the real world, and a writer can’t help but show their own views when doing that.

So I’m trying to figure out the fundamental point on which we disagree - am I misunderstanding, or do you feel the film is actually intended to have no message?

rhubarbrastreisand:

am i the only one still boycotting the olympics?

Ha yeah no kidding, right?

i mean i guess London doesn’t have the same issues of stolen land that Vancouver did, but i feel like the whole enterprise is pernicious. same as i felt before Vancouver.

Olympics is gross. All my timelines are made boring by it.

hassavocado:

[clipped: angry tirade about chimbley sweep no longer being an au courant marker of class privilege]

And I’d need to watch the film but I’m pretty sure not everything is as racialised as you remember?

[clipped: roughly 700 words rebutting critique of a film you haven’t seen]

For real dude don’t be bringing this weak-ass self-contradicting shit about accents when you’ve never set foot in London. I’m out.

Oh my son, you were out some ways up the page there, I’m afraid.

I don’t wanna fight about this stuff.  Mainly you completely misunderstood my points (you actually gave evidence of why I should rule out the possibility that Alfred LITERALLY was supposed to be a chimney sweep - well done???), and also you are just knee-jerk reacting to ideas you find threatening, like the possibility of poor racial or political analysis in a movie about a comic book you like.

That’s boring.  I’d love to talk to you about this some other way.  How about we reconvene when you’ve seen the movie, I guess?  Ta!

Oh yay you got them! I went looking for the Granddaddy IU cassette specifically, but couldn’t find it…

I wanna go swimming in your tape collection like Scrooge McDuck in dimes.  But yo do you know I LOVE UMCs??   Everybody always thinks I mean Ultramagnetic MCs when I mention them and their impact on what I do… but then glaze over when I talk about how they’re the original crew to rep Staten as Shaolin, and how Haas G makes beats for Ghostface now and Kool Kim re-emerged as NYOIL with that viral hit dissing George W a few years ago… they’re like De La Soul meets Dream Warriors meets Digable Planets… they’re like the whole D section of my tape collection.

And Lyte is a hero.

And so are you.

Essential to the narrative of The Dark Knight Rises is the idea that a city is essentially relieved of violent crime by virtue of a piece of legislation that makes parole more difficult to attain for convicts associated with “organized crime.”

Tough-on-crime as a panacea, or even a bitter but effective medicine, is a conservative fairy tale.  More to the point, it’s a Republican (or any anti-social, regressive conservative) platform stalwart.

It’s not Gotham that betrays its fascist sympathies in this case - it’s the brothers Nolan. Their story rests upon believing that myth for its setting - unless it’s social science fiction, which it isn’t, that’s as core to providing a context for the meaning of what unfolds as an author’s presumptive belief in gravity to what happens when a character takes a step followed by another step.

If Ed Koch could have written your urban crime drama, you are barking up some wrong trees along the way.

TOTALLY UNRELATED OTHER CRITICISM: I found it pretty hilarious that the supervillain, Bane, was conceived with such unbridled comic book imagination and devoted sophistication that his so-called kryptonite, if you will, is that - spoiler alert - if you punch him very many times, and very hard, in the face, he will begin to experience great pain.  And then also, he may be killed if he is shot with a gun.  How do they come up with this movie magic???

hassavocado:

mercurialblonde:

Qu’est-ce Que J D?: White Knight

mercurialblonde:

rljd:

It’s been a minute since I’ve been as taken aback by a film’s values as I am by the new Batman.

I just don’t feel about cops, criminals, white people, parole, violence, “organized crime,” euphemisms, national anthems, the supposed bourgeoisie or the purported…

#spoilers

I think she was in it about as much as Batman himself was in it.  It is implied she came up from nothing and she is basically waging a one woman war on the rich.  Where Batman goes to the streets and beats up the poor, Catwoman is waging the same war with the same zeal against those most responsible for the problem.

She shows how disconnected Batman is from what’s really going on.  I think her big scene which shows her brand of crimefighting is toward the end when she saves the boy who has stolen a piece of fruit.  She saves him as almost a patron saint of thieves, and rather than admonish him for stealing as Batman might do, tells him not to steal things he’s not fast enough to get away with.  It’s a completely different message.  And I think made in deliberate contrast to Batman.  And in the end, he realizes her mission is the more righteous one, and he cedes his role of Batman to Blake and Kyle.  (there’s a great moment when Blake calls out Wayne for losing track of his funding to the orphanage—and you see just how isolated and above everything Bruce is, just because of his wealth and status)

I think it’s all notable because it’s one of the rare times when one of the iconic heroes whose job it is to uphold the status quo, is shown to be holding up a broken evil status quo.  And I don’t think the film runs from this awkwardness but seeks to explore it.  And that’s why it worked for me. 

Word! What’s more, from the start of the film we’re shown a world that no longer really needs Batman. Gotham is a far cry from the haven for mob bosses and corrupt cops that was presented in Batman Begins. Things are a lot more gray now, there’s not really anything for Batman to “clean up”; he’s so far from his original purpose and the only thing that really seems to bring him back into the fray is Bane’s ties with the League of Shadows. I definitely felt that the Batman’s necessity in today’s world was questioned throughout the film, especially in the instances mentioned in the above post.

Er now wait a second

I don’t disagree that Catwoman in this film holds up a mirror to Batman in this film to show him things he’s doing wrong, by the standards of this film.

I definitely disagree that this film posits any corruption in the institution of police whatsoever, let alone anything broken or evil in the status quo.  I can’t see where this film doesn’t pay trembling devotional service to the status quo, especially the institution of state security, which may have some cowards who don’t represent it well enough but they are a disgrace to its noble purpose, which is indefinite incarceration of the criminal races.

It’s genuinely unsettling to me to see the world of that film described as “today’s world.”  It’s a fantasy world, based on fear of the most privileged segments of society that their grip might slip.  It’s a tale admonishing against complacency, against ever believing that the war against people who are just plain bad can be suspended.

Why are there so many people in the film scribbling bat logos, and asking one another “Do you think he’ll ever come back?” if the scene being described for us is one where he would be redundant?  Wanton suppression of the other is fetishized to the point of being seen as a drive essential to the Gotham psyche.

There are so many clashing idealisms and cynicisms… one pitfall this film fell to - that, for example, Akira didn’t (but The Matrix, another white power trip, did) - is that in the scene where the cops go all Braveheart on The Criminals, neither the scene’s writers nor the audience take a moment to reflect upon who The Criminals are.  They may as well be Bane’s thugs, but the premise of the action at that point is that The People - a proletariat best addressed directly by staging an execution at a football game, providing supposedly contrapuntal poignancy to the little white boy national anthem - have risen up and claimed the streets.

Now we see at the end of the Occupation Movement when the bomb doesn’t go off that some small contingent of Decent Folk have simply holed up in their modestly mortgaged dwellings, and it is of course hilarious that what they emerge into is peaceful stillness and not the National Guard descending upon their heads, but apart from them those people that the cops are Bravehearting are The People.

It’s a wild frontier fantasy, a horrifically imagined context for power differentials to play out, where the cops are justified in just having open season on folks who are not Decent Folk.

The story of this film lacks the scope of social consciousness to racialize the contingent of the population that are enemies to the cops, but as a parable we might apply to the world in which we DO live, where it IS open season on The People, that contingent IS racialized.

The Green Hornet lacked the grandiose trappings of a Nolan Batman, but at least when its spoiled and safe rich kid ventured forth to punish poor people for congregating, it was honest enough to have Seth Rogen just wantonly kill some Black and Latino men.  It lacked the self awareness to address that as a tragedy, which is what makes it a pernicious work along the same lines as Dark Knight Rises, but at least there is one point on which it didn’t kid itself, or us.

Take a look at the scene in DKR where they unveil the Winston-Churchill-as-Batman statue.  That tightly circled enclave of severe white powerbrokers - that’s the team we’re supposed to be relieved are restored to their rightful place as the guys who decide what’s going on.

The POTUS wasn’t even Black.

That movie sucked.

p.s. whose bright idea was it to let Michael Caine do Alfred with the accent of a cockney chimbley sweep?  Alfred is a posh, sophisticated butler - he puts on airs. That has always been The Thing about him.  I certainly don’t wish to hear him give two giant, emptily fraught emotional speeches in the film’s first forty minutes in that affectedly earthy brogue.  God what a gaping pit of wasted time.

p.p.s. there are lots of movies I think are great

I just discovered that at the coffee shop where I work, the fruit and cheese platter includes a gluten-free cracker.

Do you get why that excites me? Say it out loud with me!

The FRUIT AND CHEESE PLATTER

has a GLUTEN-FREE CRACKER.

No?

It’s a five-syllable rhyme!

mercurialblonde:

rljd:

It’s been a minute since I’ve been as taken aback by a film’s values as I am by the new Batman.

I just don’t feel about cops, criminals, white people, parole, violence, “organized crime,” euphemisms, national anthems, the supposed bourgeoisie or the purported proletariat the way you’re supposed to for that exercise in paranoia to work.

Three hours of brutal, humorless fear.

It did not make me feel good.

That awkwardness was why I liked it.  I thought Hathaway’s character was the hero of the film, and acted as a stern criticism of those aspects of the Bat-mythos

But she was barely in it and had no subjective qualities.  She didn’t have any individuated motivation for anything except a vague wish to start over, and a giant sign over her head reading JUST WAIT FOR MY HAN SOLO MOMENT.  I don’t know where to read the stern criticism from her role in the film.

I mean her very presence illuminated the hypermasculinism of the whole enterprise, but mainly by failing to provide contrast.  If being exemplary of a problem functions as criticism, then okay, but she still didn’t do anything to be like “WAIT… cops and prisons are actually pretty TERRIBLE, what gives!??”

It’s been a minute since I’ve been as taken aback by a film’s values as I am by the new Batman.

I just don’t feel about cops, criminals, white people, parole, violence, “organized crime,” euphemisms, national anthems, the supposed bourgeoisie or the purported proletariat the way you’re supposed to for that exercise in paranoia to work.

Three hours of brutal, humorless fear.

It did not make me feel good.

hey friends on tumblr!

sorry for all those weird SoundCloud posts from last night! they were created automatically when I authorized CDbaby to share. they also blasted my twitter feed, I think.

it’s a selection of tracks from my older albums, some of which are hard to hear online without buying. I like to share my embarrassing childhood with you!

thanks for understanding,
(or not),
Jesse

Don’t say “bitch,” ever.