ICP: RIP, Part 3
This is the third installment of a three-part essay. Part 1 can be found here; Part 2 is here. The release of the Insane Clown Posse’s sixth joker card album, The Wraith: Shangri La, did not mark the end of the world, but for many Juggalos, it may as well have. On the album’s final track, “Thy Unveiling,” the duo revealed that their mission as musicians had always been... Read More
ICP: RIP, Part 2
This is the second installment of a three-part essay. Part 1 can be found here; Part 3 is here. In recent years I’ve watched the reemergence of Weird Al Yankovic with a bewilderment bordering on irritation. As a child, I always responded to his music with something like a feral baring of teeth; he was the kind of goof I spent my childhood trying to maim with dodgeballs.... Read More
ICP: RIP
This is the first installment of a three-part essay. Part 2 can be found here; Part 3 is here. If Internet memes are in fact like viruses, a certain unhealthy fascination with the Insane Clown Posse seems to be one bug that our collective body has at last overcome. Rewind eight months, when most of us contracted (or re-contracted) Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J on YouTube, that great... Read More
Defenseless Marriage
I have to start this piece with a sort of humbling retraction. A few months ago, I wrote an essay for this blog about the recall of three Iowa Supreme Court justices due to their having ruled in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage in that state. I also remarked on the fact that, despite a red tide giving Republicans majorities in state legislatures across the country, Democrats... Read More
Searching for Authenticity
Men sporting galoshes and long un-ashed cigarettes zip by me on their turret trucks and I half sit on a ledge to make room. As it turns out, I also half sit on a cutting board used to slaughter fish, leaving a perfect line of blood on the butt of my new khakis. I duck into a footpath to catch a glimpse of huge frozen tunas being cut with electric saws and almost knock over a Styrofoam... Read More
The Facebook of Living and Dying
In the past couple of years, two of my closest friends, both in their twenties, have died. They were both people whom I saw on an almost daily basis, and both left behind various physical reminders of themselves scattered about my apartment: a length of prayer flags, articles of clothing, books, handwritten letters, photographs, a rusting bike still locked to my front porch. Sometimes... Read More
The Book as Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction
For those of us who love the printed word, and tend to view each new sign of its decline in apocalyptic terms, Penelope Green’s article in the New York Times last month had a real Book of Revelations vibe. Green’s piece describes a hot new trend in home design: filling vast interior spaces with “decorative book solutions.” Read More Read More
Fire Olivia Munn
Olivia Munn is still working for The Daily Show, and I’m outraged. I’m not outraged for the same reasons that girl-power blog Jezebel was when they wrote about Munn’s having been hired last July. The blog alleged that Munn—former Attack of the Show host and inspirer of ejaculate the internet around—was obviously only hired as eye candy, because The Daily Show thinks that’s... Read More
Uninspired by True Events
“James Frey is an asshole,” someone said to me recently during a discussion about Frey’s most recent endeavors. I don’t disagree. Four years after The Smoking Gun revealed that Frey had exaggerated parts of his memoir A Million Little Pieces, about triumphing over addiction, he’s back in the news with his own fiction company Full Fathom Five. Frey’s been doling out miserable... Read More
Yes We Kanye
Barack Obama doesn’t care about black people. That’s the position taken by Toby Harnden of the Daily Telegraph – Britain’s highest-circulation daily – who believes that Obama has neglected the well-being of his own minority group: “It will take [a new voice] to break down the racial barriers in America that the first black president has been content to leave in place.”... Read More
