Without Panic! At The Disco, I wouldn’t be who I am today.
I can say that about a lot of things, we all can, because aspects of our lives that take up space and influence choices…. do just that until they change their surroundings and trajectory. It’s just especially poetic to say that this week, ten years after PATD released their first album, which intersects neatly with YouTube’s first year.
Those things are intertwined for me, as outlined in my article for The Daily Dot. But on a more base level – I would not have moved to NYC without Panic! At The Disco. I wouldn’t have had any of my subsequent jobs. It’s very likely I’d live in Canada, and I’d have a PhD by now, or at least part of one. But that’s just me guessing from the dividing point 10 years ago. Who knows!
My YouTube up until 2011 is a documenting place for the canon of a fandom, one that still gets interaction to this day, and I’m so glad I picked up a camera and built it in a time when making YouTube video was still just an idea. I’m glad that band made that music to entertain me along the way, and I’m glad for all the great friends I made because of it.
thousands of men enter your life. they are just belts.
nothing is clandestine. the bathearts hear your secrets and carry them with you wherever they go.
wrds dnt hv vwls anmr nd nvr wll agn
ryland and alex are the latest to enter the basement. it isn’t actually warmer there, they are never heard from again.
panic at the disco wear makeup, you wear makeup. panic at the disco wear waistcoats, you wear waistcoats. panic at the disco is slowly disappearing, you are already half gone.
the exclamation point is inside you. it curls into a question mark, asking should it stay. you don’t know if you like it or not.
frank iero lives inside a tulip on your windowsill. he is so small but he thinks he is big. you fear you will crush him one day.
the cab is only alexes. it is a legion of alexes. you will assimilate. you are alex.
the stage itself is gay
words mysteriously appear on your throat in handwriting that is not yours. you are not a gazelle, but you will become one soon
gabe saporta and greta salpeter are dating. you dont understand why.
ur sidekick keyboard opens. from that another flips open, an endless staircase of keyboards. ur fingers are 2 sad to type any.
“brother noooooo!” you scream, waking from a nightmare in a cold sweat, a knife sticking out of ur chest.
it is raining and you are shivering. dyw does not invite you inside. you will die unloved and your work will die with you.
you drop brent off at home. he disappears from ur sight. u go to the door. his mom says brent has been dead for 80 yrs.
you are william beckett’s secret child. you never knew.
the year is 2006. 2006 was 10 years ago. the year is 2006. 2006 was 80 years ago. the year is 2006. 2006 was 200 years ago.
when u were a young boy ur father took u into the city to see a marching band
So, in my art history class today, my professor was talking about something that is so fuckin awesome.
These are warrior shields from the Wahgi people of Papua New Guinea. The warriors paint them with imagery meant to symbolize animals who have traits they wish to embody in battle. These depictions are intended to give the person using it the powers of what they’re depicting.
Now. Look at this Wahgi shield:
Hmm. That looks a bit different from the others.
That looks VERY different. Why, it looks like
The Phantom… American comic book character by Lee Falk. And that’s because it is.
The Wahgi people were isolated from the rest of the “modern” world until 1933. They came into contact with WWII service men who shared some aspects of western culture with the tribesmen. In particular, they showed them the comic books they read while shipped out. The Wahgi loved them. In particular, the Wahgi adored the stories of the Phantom, who wasn’t even particularly popular in its home of America.
He is so popular that the few Wahgi who can read english will read the comics out loud in the village center and hold out the pages for everyone to see, so the whole tripe can enjoy them and marvel at the Phantom’s might in battle.
They identify with the Phantom because he came from a jungle territory, like them, wore a mask to fight, like them, and came from a long line of warriors, which the Wahgi, who worshiped their ancestors, deeply respected. Further, despite not really having superpowers, the Phantom is strong, clever, and incredibly fast. He was so fast that his enemies began to believe that he was impervious to bullets and could not be killed.
Therefore, the Wahgi began painting HIM on their shields to invoke HIS abilities in battle. There are TONS of Phantom-Wahgi shields out there.
So, you might think that you’re huge comic book fan, but the Wahgi have taken their Phantom fandom to the next level and have made the Phantom a fucking talisman to carry into battle for strength.
I won TheListerve, a lottery where you can write a story to everyone who subscribes, with a different person a day. I had a hard time deciding what short story to share, until I remembered I’d never really written out my penguin-eating obsession as a child.
Repubbed on medium as well today. The only part your missing is my stanning for Hamilton, and request for feedback on digital entertainment.
I am the one thing in life I can control
I am an inimitable, I am an original
I’m not falling behind or running late
I’m not standing still, I am lying wait. - Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton
So Staff tried to make a “fun” joke out of using the (problematic) new reblog system, but the better joke is if you go to this link on the staff blog the old system is still there (because the ugly reblog structure only exists in Dashboard, not on posts.) So everything is broken even more, since jokes in one format don’t even hold or translate when applied to another format, both of which are automatic on the site, albeit in different parts.
I’ve been a hyper-loyal tumblr users for a very long time, and I just can’t even enjoy my dash right now because the whole linguistic structure of what this platform is about is messed up. from an academic perspective, it’s an interesting case study because it’s basically how technology can wave a magic wand and rearranged language structure, when in traditional practice that kind of linguistic shift takes a long period of time to restructure itself.
the only time that the intersection of technology and linguistics is both disruptive and positive is starting points, because when you build a new system and then invite the speakers to play, they get to build style around that. but abrupt changes midstream from the technology end, not the user end, is incredibly disruptive to the language community.
I’ve been quieter on my blog for a while now, but this change is making me really rethink my use of this space, and not in a good way.
However unflattering the old design may be, Tumblr users have adapted to it and used it in their blogging over the years. The update, according to Tumblr, will work retroactively to all posts on the dashboard, but will leave posts on individual blog posts in their original form, “for now.” The update also removed the ability to delete one part of a thread and leave the rest intact. Users must eliminate all of the captions, or leave them all.
Tumblr users have been posting their reactions to the update on the site, overwhelmingly unfavorably.
Once at a 9 hour flight from Paris to Tokyo I had offered the guy sitting next to me a Finnish candy, Sisu (kinda like salty liquorice but not, but also not liquorice with menthol but kinda like?) He then showed me something, roughly the size of a breath mint. So I took it and put it in my mouth, because hey, they ate my Finnish Black Bomb so I’m going to taste their French Thingy.
Except it wasn’t a candy. In fact it was nothing edible. It was a fossil they wanted to show me. I just put a fossil in my mouth. Somebody else’s fossil.
This is the text of another Instagram post that I put up last night.
The opening act to the Angel Haze show I went to last night was a crew of young hip hop artists from suburban Sweden that was talented and skilled and ethnically white. I purposefully didn’t tag them in my ig post and I’m not tagging them here because all the shit I’m writing about is beyond their control.
The lead rapper was a slight blonde girl who had crazy lyrical talent that sounded straight out of late-80′s Queens, New York. Clearly she had studied the flow of Native Tongues artists like Monie Love, Jungle Brothers, etc (or at least derivatives of their work.) Her beats also had a similar 1990 NYC feel.
The second act was equally fascinating. Two girls from Sweden who had taken on the inflections and delivery of Lauryn Hill and Foxy Brown. Their vocals were East Coast but their instrumentals were mid-90’s West Coast Dre-style funk. With no respect to hip hop politics, they just straight up lifted the sounds that agreed with them.
Somehow these sounds had traveled across time and space and through a confluence of cultural pressures had re-manifest in three girls from a Swedish suburb which is just 😳
When Iggy Azalea became a phenomenon, I remember thinking that the most interesting thing wasn’t Iggy herself but the probability that there now existed a virtual machine of culture, society, and technology that was Iggy-producing. It flattened the cultural context of African American hip hop and reassembled its sounds into a sample pack that anyone could use without paying the royalties of authenticity.
In New York where authenticity is still a strong filter, this machine is usually hard for me to see until someone makes it to the top. In Sweden last night, it appeared right on stage.
this stuff trips me out. there is another half to it where something like 90′s hip hop (just for example) gets beamed into Sweden via the pop apparatus but then gets relatively isolated there from both the pop apparatus and hip hop’s point(s) of origin. and in that isolation it changes to fit the needs, conditions, and desires of it’s new environment. it becomes something markedly different than what it was.
then maybe at some point the pop apparatus discovers this “new thing” and beams it all over the place as an authentic Swedish cultural production.
and so on and so on. this process is part of how culture works, although the pop apparatus (and historically, Empires) speed it up.
the best working definition for pop i’ve found is that something becomes pop when it’s travelling faster than it’s context.
it makes me think of conversations in the 90′s media about how “selling out” as a negative, or looked down upon practice, was a white thing and that black hip hop artists more or less saw selling out as a positive. that conversation always felt oversimplified to me.
something becomes pop when it’s traveling faster than it’s context.
