2012: The Year in Review – Part 1: Culture

December 30, 2012 by Leave a comment

Back in February I had the brilliant idea of starting up a Tumblr, upon which I intended to note every record I bought, every film I watched for the first time and every new book I read, so that come December I would have the raw material for a review of my year’s cultural highlights.

I have managed to keep this going (unlike the Pinterest project, but that’s another story), and it has revealed, disappointingly, that the cultural landscape of my life is more akin to an arid desert than the tropical rainforest I imagined it to be.

I did best on the recorded music front, with 24 albums purchased, a fraction of what I consumed back in the 90s, but perhaps not too bad for an old dog. Books read numbered an embarrassing 11, none of them published this year, while my movie intake was a mere dozen, with only two actual trips to the cinema (and one of those was to see The Muppets). I seem to have managed to completely avoid going to concerts and exhibitions.

Have I descended then into philistinism? Has the pernicious effect of the accursed internet completely rotted my brain? Not quite yet I hope. I spend rather more time than I should on idle web browsing, but I do try to keep up with the Arts sections of the papers, so I can join in conversations about contemporary culture, even if most of my opinions are gleaned from reviews rather than direct experience. I still listen to music pretty much all the time, though I stick more to stuff I know I’ll like than I used to. I do need to start watching more films again, starting with the stack of DVDs I accumulated this year that I never quite got round to viewing.

Anyway, on with the review. Music first; here’s my 2012 mix-tape, made up from my favourite track from each of the records I bought this year, mostly new releases, but some older stuff too:

Chocolate Boy – Guided By Voices (Let’s Go Eat the Factory)
Norgaard – The Vaccines (What Did You Expect from the Vaccines?)
On a Neck, On a Spit – Grizzly Bear (Yellow House)
Wasted Days – Cloud Nothings (Attack on Memory)
Boyfriend – Best Coast (Crazy For You)
Secrets – Headlights (Wildlife)
Love Interruption – Jack White (Blunderbuss)
Can We Really Party Today? – Jonathan Wilson (Gentle Spirit)
Better Girl – Best Coast (The Only Place)
Be Impeccable – Guided By Voices (Class Clown Spots a UFO)
No Cars Go – Arcade Fire (Arcade Fire)
Neighborhood 3 (Power Out) – Arcade Fire (Funeral)
Yet Again – Grizzly Bear (Shields)
June – Unrest (Imperial f.f.r.r.)
Harnessed in Slums – Archers of Loaf (Vee Vee)
Polyester Bride – Liz Phair (Whitechocolatespaceegg)
Don’t Pretend You Didn’t Know – Dinosaur Jr. (I Bet on Sky)
Season in Hell – Dum Dum Girls (End of Daze)
Pinhole Cameras – …And You Will Know Us By the Trail Of Dead (Lost Songs)
He Gets Me High – Dum Dum Girls (He Gets Me High)
Waking Up The Stars – Guided By Voices (The Bears For Lunch)
Keep Believing – Bob Mould (Silver Age)
The House That Heaven Built – Japandroids (Celebration Rock)
The Anarchist – Rush (Clockwork Angels)

There are several contenders for my record of the year, including Attack on Memory, Silver Age, Celebration Rock and both the Dum Dum Girls’ EPs, but I’ll give the nod to the pleasingly complex Shields by Grizzly Bear.

The best book I read this year was The Cambridge Modern History Volume IV – The Thirty Years War, a majestic tome published back in 1906, available on the Kindle for pennies, which covers not just the titular conflict but also the English Civil War and religious, philosophical and cultural developments of the period. The editors’ Victorian prejudices do show to some extent, but the raw material is so dramatic that it can’t miss being a gripping read.

My fiction reading this year mostly consisted of catching up with books I’m faintly embarrassed to admit I hadn’t read already, like The Trial, The Gambler, Crash, and, my favourite, The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing. I liked it for its depiction of life in the CPGB in the 50s, which is a little specialised I guess, but it’s also worth reading for the experimental structure and proto-feminist sensibility.

Film of the year? I hardly feel qualified to comment, but I thought On the Road was quite good. The Muppets was OK too I suppose.

So, that sums up my year of culture. Not my best ever, but not too shabby. Hopefully I’ll be inspired to try a bit harder in 2013…

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The Lay of the Last Avatar

December 24, 2012 by 4 Comments

So the world didn’t end last week after all, which is a good outcome, I guess, not least because it means that the $80 I spent last month on renewing my Second Life premium membership for another year hasn’t been completely wasted.

It has been almost completely wasted though, since I don’t currently possess a computer capable of running the viewer, and I have no plans to purchase one in the immediate future, which will obviously limit my enjoyment of the service a bit (unless the Lindens get their act together and release some sort of mobile client). I did hesitate a little before handing over the cash, but in the end my sentimental attachment to my virtual land was strong enough to convince me that the relatively modest investment was worthwhile.

Sir Walter Scott, in his narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel, wrote:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!

There are a few places I have stayed in the real world that have seemed like home, for a while, but that feeling invariably faded, as time moved on and people and places changed. I have occasionally tried to recapture it, but without success – you can revisit a physical location, but you can never really go back, because the person you used to be exists only in your fading memory.

So I find it comforting to think that there is some corner of a virtual field that will be forever the same, a home for my eternally youthful avatar. I can only hope that there are enough other people who feel the same to keep Linden Lab in business…

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End of Daze

December 19, 2012 by Leave a comment

I’ve not had much time, nor inclination, for blogging in the last month, for one reason or another, but I thought I had better get myself together to post a final word or two ahead of the end of the world on Friday.

Of course the rational side of my brain is aware of the cosmic narcissism implicit in believing that the Universe turns according to an arbitrary schedule pulled out of the air by a long-dead member of our insignificant species, but my more fanciful side can’t help hoping that the promised UFOs will show up, bearing benevolent aliens who will issue us with personal rocket-ships and immortality pills.

Failing that I guess I might be able to shake off my torpor long enough to compile our usual year-end review. We’ve been pretty quiet over the last twelve months (and we already did a five-year retrospective back in May), so it shouldn’t take too long…

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Post-viral fatigue

November 9, 2012 by 1 Comment

So, I was looking at our traffic statistics today, and I noticed that this had happened last week:

That’s right, one of our posts had gone viral. Sort of. For a couple of days. How exciting! Unfortunately, the piece in question was this one, which is whiny and narcissistic, even by our standards. (Though if you ask me I will, of course, claim it was obviously meant ironically.) Also, all the extra traffic came via Plurk; it’s just about possible to imagine that someone was saying something nice about us, but probably not.

Anyway… another week, another list of Second Life blogs that we’re not on, this time over at New World Notes. I guess our omission can be rationally explained by reference to our obscurity, lack of recent SL content, and general rubbishness, but irrational theories are much more satisfying, so I can’t help suspecting that Hamlet is still pissed that we called him a Stalinist that time. (Though, now I’ve looked at it with eyes unclouded by paranoid jealousy, I see that this is actually a list of those blogs which fell outside the top ten, which Hamlet is going to reveal next week, so we might yet make it. If so, please disregard the above.)

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Four more years

November 7, 2012 by Leave a comment

So Obama won fairly comfortably in the end, though Romney turned out to be a much better candidate than I had expected, especially after he quietly dumped most of the wingnut baggage he had been obliged to pick up to get through the primaries.

It’ll be interesting to see what lessons Republicans learn from this defeat, and their failure to dent Democrat control of the Senate, which was at least partly thanks to the blunders of Tea Party favourites Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. The obvious, sensible, conclusion would be that they have to move towards the centre, but that’s the obvious, sensible conclusion they have repeatedly failed to appreciate in the last four years.

Other results approving same-sex marriage and legalising marijuana made it a good night for the progressively-minded. Obama will probably end up disappointing us again, but let’s enjoy this while it lasts.

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Another message to my friends in the US of A

November 6, 2012 by Leave a comment

I haven’t written as much about the US Presidential race as I did back in 2008, even though, or perhaps because, it has been much closer and more exciting this time around. The late polls seem to show Obama drawing ahead in the swing states, but just in case it does go to the wire, and the exclusive demographic of SLS readers proves to be the decisive factor, I’ll repeat my plea of four years ago:

[Thanks again to Matt Groening.]

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It’s an ill wind…

October 28, 2012 by Leave a comment

It seems that the Good Lord Himself has decided to intervene in the final week of the US Presidential race, as Hurricane Sandy threatens to disrupt campaigning in several swing states.

Opinion is divided as to whether the influence of the ultimate super PAC will favour Obama or Romney. My feeling is that God is a Republican; judging by the actions of the men who run his earthly franchise He clearly sides with the wealthy, the powerful and the status quo.

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Guess I’ll go eat worms

October 19, 2012 by 4 Comments

Second Life Shrink has been going for well over five years now, and in that time we’ve racked up nearly 400 posts. Our Second Life coverage may have waned a little recently, for one reason and another, but we do have an extensive archive of articles on the topic, and our pieces on SL demographics and SL addiction are still highly ranked on Google. We have a Facebook profile and a Twitter feed, not to mention our associated Tumblr and Pinterest sites. We featured in the last big survey of the SL-blogosphere, just outside the top 100.

So if you heard that someone had set out to compile a new list of SL-related blogs, and had managed to identify over two thousand examples of the genre, then you might think that we would be in there somewhere. Well, you would be wrong. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know why we bother…

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Power and ideology on the internet: thoughts on the Violentacrez case

October 18, 2012 by Leave a comment

I guess anyone reading this will already be familiar with the story of Gawker’s exposé of notorious Reddit mod Violentacrez; if not, the short version is something like this: Violentacrez was well known on the social media site as the éminence grise behind various unsavoury subreddits, like “Jailbait”, which featured pictures of young girls culled from their Facebook pages, and “Creepshots”, a collection of leering photos of unsuspecting women; writer Adrian Chen, feeling that Violentacrez should accept responsibility for his actions rather than hide behind a pseudonym, did a little detective work which revealed Violentacrez’s real identity, one Michael Brutsch, a programmer from Texas; following the Gawker article Brutsch lost his job, and presumably has had some awkward conversations with friends and neighbours.

What are we to make of this? Gawker and Chen have been heavily criticised by the Reddit community for supposedly limiting Brutsch’s right to free speech by violating his privacy and exposing him to intimidation. On the other hand, Brutsch was happy to get his kicks by trespassing on the personal space of countless girls and women without their knowledge or consent, so he can hardly claim that his own boundaries should be sacrosanct.

So three cheers then for Chen and his righteous take-down of a sleazy douchebag. But isn’t there a nagging problem? Like, who elected Chen to be sheriff of the interwebs? How is he accountable? What if tomorrow he, or someone like him, decides that bloggers I agree with, like critics of repressive governments, deserve to be stripped of their anonymity too? What if he thinks I need to be exposed for my serial offences against good literary style?

There are two issues to consider here. The first is the liberal notion of Free Speech, as summed up in Voltaire’s (misattributed) dictum “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”. I fundamentally disagree with this. Not all opinions are equally valid, and there are some that are so toxic that they need to be suppressed. I may get upset when viewpoints which have my sympathy are censored, but I’m not so bothered, in principle, when the likes of Brutsch are marginalised in the public discourse.

(That’s the theory anyway; in practice it’s a little more complicated. The second thing we have to think about is who actually has the power to regulate the promotion of ideas. The people who run the world are not, by and large, fans of my leftist ideology, so if there was an effective mechanism for controlling what appears on the internet, most of the time it would be employed to squash things I am in favour of. Thus I generally find myself campaigning against web censorship, though on pragmatic rather than principled grounds.)

The underlying point is that society is divided between classes whose ideas are incompatible; the liberal ideal of a society where all points of view are given equal respect, presided over by a benign state that sits above the class conflict, is an illusion. The dominant ideology of the ruling class finds its expression in many ways, from the high politics of a presidential debate to the low culture of Reddit’s misogynist underbelly. We can fight this as it presents itself, but we will never fully defeat it until we build up our forces to a point where we have the power to eradicate the ideology of our class enemies; a dictatorship of the proletariat for the information age. This will solve the problems of democracy and accountablity, for, as Lenin put it:

…proletarian dictatorship is the forcible oppression of the resistance of the exploiters, i.e. an insignificant minority of the population, the landowners and capitalists. It follows that proletarian dictatorship must inevitably entail not only a change in democratic forms and institutions, generally speaking, but precisely such a change as provides an unparalleled extension of the enjoyment of democracy by those oppressed by capitalism…

As ever, the problems that arise in the course of online life turn out to have their roots in more fundamental aspects of society; the solutions lie in the offline world too.

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Hooray for Hugo

October 13, 2012 by Leave a comment

After giving last year’s award to worthy women’s rights activists, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee seem to have rediscovered their sense of ironic black humour. They haven’t quite managed to top their 2009 masterstroke, when Barack Obama got the nod for his work in spreading goodwill and understanding by escalating wars and terrorising whole populations with killer drones, but giving the medal to the European Union, at a time when EU macroeconomic policy is spreading fear and despair through much of the continent, does come a close second.

It’s been rather a depressing week all round, from a left point of view, what with Romney making up ground in the US and our own Tory government promising all-out class warfare. There was a bright spot though; Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution marches on in Venezuela. Chavez has his critics on the left round here – proletarian bonapartism is a phrase one sometimes hears – but his record of improving the lot of the poor beats anything we’ve managed in the last half century, so more power to his elbow I say.

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