"true stories about the future"

From the archives, pt. II.

From the archives, pt. I.

Leonard Cohen as a young Canadian poet.

So, I had intended to post “The Brilliant Dance,” a song from Dashboard Confessional’s MTV Unplugged v2.0 appearance.

Then I remembered that one of the last papers I wrote as an undergrad addressed the use of “emo” as a pejorative. I had defended the right of emo kids to be as sad as they were despite having “nothing to be sad about.” First, my argument,  recovered from an old PDF, for the anti-emo position:

An historical ennui that latches onto the youthful disaffectedness that might otherwise become dangerously productive, the emo genre manufactures and promulgates misery that stays self-contained. […] For the sake of order, a degree of damage is permissible, but the shrewdness of emo’s inoculation is that it requires no admission of “acknowledged evil” on the structural level (150). The self-damaging teenage subject dutifully manifests this acknowledgment and punishes itself.

Pro-emo:

Another inoculation is taking place when the public mercilessly thrashes this particular subculture, because through mockery we are saved from considering the unsavory truth emo kids represent, the truth that it’s still possible (and quite common) to be miserable despite having all the material comfort designed to stave off misery.

I have a lot more to say about this, as well as the historical circumstances under which I bought this album, but I could not find any of the hard copies of the papers I wrote for this particular professor (nor did the song upload successfully).

All that is a way of saying is that the whole process of composing this entry has gotten me into an even deeper funk than I was in when I started listening to DC again.

In other, further words, maybe next time.

Nick McDonell, An Expensive Education, p. 27

Fringe

A thing I got recently.

Jonah Lehrer

This is how we talk in Business.