independent music boys club

Having been involved in the independent music/college radio world for the last five or so years, and spending far too much time, energy, and emotional involvement on it, one of the most contradictory aspects of it has been the way this scene posits itself as liberal/leftist and progressive in a nearly self-righteous way while also existing as a sub-culture more male-dominated than our mass culture. The latest microcosm of this situation that's been ruffling my feathers is Dusted Magazine, which describes itself thusly: "Daily online magazine highlighting independent and fringe artists. Features a weekly radio chart and interviews"

It's sort of a smaller, snobbier Pitchfork (less pop, less mainstream), but less obnoxious than Pitchfork in that it lacks the preponderence of silliness of Pitchfork, like those damned 1-10 scale ratings for each record. But a smaller, snobbier Pitchfork is the sort of thing I go for, plus Dusted functions as an alternative to the indisputably very very obnoxious CMJ (College Music Journal). Good labels that release worthwhile music pay attention to Dusted. I know a few people personally who are contributing writers.

But Dusted's dirty little secret is that looking at the list of writers is like looking at the list of characters in Tolkien novel: almost no women at all. To be precise, out of 42 writers listed on their website, only 3 have names that could be female (Britt Brown, K. Ross Hoffman, Casey Rea). That's 9.5% women, if they are all women. I know from experience that women constitute a bit more than 9.5% of the contributing body of college radio. From what I understand, the guys that run Dusted, Otis Hart and Sam Hunt, mostly acquire writers by asking people they know of one way or other to write for the online mag. On the "About" page of the site, they claim "Our reviewers live all over the country and vary greatly in age and background." Unless, of course, you consider gender as part of background.

So, this great progressive music website leading the vanguard of people who care about independent music? A fucking boys club. I could just decide that Dusted Magazine is a hypocritical, pretentious publication not worth the eye-strain I sacrifice to read one paragraph from their site. But that would deny that Dusted actually has an important role in things I care a great deal about, that good friends of mine (yes, male) contribute to it, and that women are frequently excluded or subordinated in a sub-culture that brightly paints itself as liberal and progressive.

I wrote a polite (no, really, I was actually polite) email expressing my thoughts on the matter to them today. I haven't heard back from them yet. But I do encourage anyone reading this to also send an email to dusted@dustedmagazine.com, if you feel so moved.

Fuck you, Dusted Magazine Boys Club.

an imperial post

Recently, at my job working for the Office of Computers 'n' Stuff at Southern Private University (where, I must clarify, I don't actually do things that require a special knowledge of computers 'n' stuff), I downloaded a driver for a new program made by people who work about ten feet away from me that promptly killed my brand new laptop. Well, it killed the Windows start-up, at least, so I spent the whole day in a small gray cube twidding my thumbs. The only reading material available was a 1973 edition of Websters New Collegiate Dictionary. The result of my perusal and boredom is a quaint little story, below, illustrating ten different definitions for the word "imperial."

"Ah, the life of an imperial[1] subject," he sighed, stroking his imperial[2] as he read the imperial[3] decree printed on a sheet of nearly imperial[4] size paper. "Despite my imperial[5] yearly stipend, the task of spreading the imperial[6] measurement system to every corner of the imperial[7] world is quite an imperial[8], and leaves me wishing I were instead an imperial[9] in days past slaying heretics and heathens for the holy imperial[10]."

1. adj; of, relating to, or befitting an empire or an emperor
2. n; [fr. the beard worm by Napolean III]: a pointed beard growing below the lower lip
3. adj; regal; imperious
4. n; a size of paper usu. 23x 31 inches
5. adj; of superior or unusual size or excellence
6. adj; belonging to the official British series of weights and measure
7. adj; of or relating to the British Commonwealth and Empire
8. n; something of unusual size or excellence
9. n; an adherent or soldier of the Holy Roman Empire
10. n; emperor

mouse on mars vs. mark e. smith

If you, like me, have always thought that the one thing conspicuously missing from your sweaty booty-shaking dance party was Mark E. Smith, your dreams have come true. German techno funksters Mouse on Mars take what is arguably the best track from their last full-length, "Wipe That Sound" (a song that made my list of Top Booty-Shakers of 2004) and remix it with fucking Mark E. Smith in the "Sound City" remix. Pure fucking genius. The dancefloor will never be the same-uh.

joys of apartment living

For all of you out there who own your own home, or at least a portion of your own home, let me remind you of those quaint, care-free apartment days.

Charming aspect of apartment living #1: Tomorrow, you may or may not be living in the rental property you may or may not think is really great and you would like to live in for a long time. My two housemates and I are being kicked out of our happy home (a delightful one-story 1920's era affair in Old North Small Southern City) because the bastard that owns it has decided he wants to live here again. I won't go into details. I leave that up to Dick Umbrage, who may have already ranted about the ordeal. If not, he probably should, and file it right next to the story about the asshat who was listening to the radio station 24 hours a day.

Charming aspect of apartment living #2: Your delightful spring evening may or may not be interrupted at any point by a man with a chainsaw. Right now (and it's 8pm, mind you, and he's been here for at least half an hour) there is a man with a chainsaw hacking away at a line of ornamental trees in our backyard with complete disregard to Designated House Naptime (daily between 6:00 and 8:00pm), my Tuesday Night Post-5.2 Mile Run Law & Order SVU Marathon (8:00 to 11:00pm), or the principles of bonsai. I mean, how can I enjoy Detective Benson's nail-biting interrogation of an alleged homeless ex-preacher coke addict rapist with VROOM VROOM every three seconds?

boredoms bliss

Ah, thank you Japanese noise-rock heroes Boredoms for providing my daily dose of the sublime. The 18-year-old group (ooh, does that mean I can have sex with it now?) has just released a new one in the U.S. on Vice Records. This one contains two long tracks that fall wonderfully outside my expectations for noise-rock: "Seadrum" clocks in at 23:03 and sounds more like jazz in the rhapsodic, spiritual fervor of Eddie Gale (and the vocals sound quite alot like Joann Stevens-Gale, featured on Gale's Ghetto Music and Black Rhythm Happening); "House of Sun" runs barely shorter at 20:03 and is a hypnotic, Eastern-inflected droney affair. Add it all up and you get forty-three minutes and six seconds of FUCKING AMAZING shit.

I'd post links to the tracks, if I could get my damn file transfer client to work.

garrison keillor: radio icon, rambling old fucker

In a move that has a faint whiff of BW Ventril's recent post on trite celebrity opinions plopped onto a website like warm turds into a gently leftward-flowing stream, Garrison Keillor gets all "I'm gonna talk about what radio is like these days" in this piece in the latest issue of The Nation.

You may think, as I did, that Keillor will take this opportunity to address some of the profoundly fucked-up things going on in radio today, like the reactionary FCC or the genocide of local radio programming at the hands of frequency-gobbling corporate monopolies, from his particular perspective as one of the most popular voices on non-corporate radio.

Instead, Keillor takes up space that could have been used to advertise important products that could improve my life and help me find my SoulMate(TM) to convince me that he is completely drunk. In his typical mode of self-indulgent, nostaligic literary excess, Keillor makes some limp jabs at Clear Channel, right-wing AM ranters, iPods, and an even weaker attempt at coherence. The man jumps from anecdotes about retarded girls to George McGovern (" a kindly, grandfatherly man who lives in Mitchell, South Dakota, and winters in Florida and every year") to shameless promos for NPR syndicate-pals and sums it all up with these words of Zen-like mysticism:

We will make the demented uncle shut up so we can listen to somebody who actually knows something.

Who the fuck is The Demented Uncle?

i'm the flash animation that's sensitive about menstruation

In honor of the 45th anniversary of The Pill's approval by the U.S. FDA, the PBS website has some special features on the good ol' contraceptive, including this animation of the woman's monthly hormonal cycle with and without the pill (click on "How the Pill Works"). I stole the link from this metafilter post.

But hey, where's the bleeding? Despite the lovely colorful dots representing hormones drifting from the lady's brain to her uterus (somehow it reminds me of a Target commercial), I'm pretty disappointed to find PBS has not even attempted to subtly suggest the process of menstruation as so many female hygiene product advertisers have mastered, let alone display it in all its fecund glory. More like the Pussy Broadcasting System, I say, and by that I certainly don't mean the good kind of pussy. They passed up their chance for that.

Honestly, I'm pretty impressed by PBS's presentation of information, as it's informative and remarkably pro-pill (counting down to decreased federal funding, ten, nine, eight...), if not exactly exhaustive. I don't think I'd ever heard about early opposition to the pill from segments of the black community due to suspicians that it was an attempt to control black reproduction to the point of being called black genocide. And check out the Chinese paper pill.

Ok, PBS, I guess maybe you can be the good kind of pussy too. But just this once.

burn my eye, boil my water

I stumbled across the Bartleby.com website today, and though I'm quite sure I'm the last one to hear about it, I thought the idea of an online resource of complete texts of books was rather neat. The question is, does anyone actually want to read an entire book from the monitor attached to their humming electro death box? As one who has recently been chastized by an optometrist/diagnosed with neovascularization , I don't think spending hours staring at tiny font on a luminous square is quite for me. And the constant scrolling? Eesh.

I ain't no technophobe, now. On the contrary, I am smitten with my hummming electro death box. However, I think computing technology seems to excel in doing things quickly, and fails miserably at the sort of task that is supposed to take a great deal of time. Like reading 19th century novels and boiling water*

*If your CPU can, in fact, be used as a make-shift hot plate for boiling water, you are a) lucky to be able to make yourself cups of hot steaming beverage without missing a single refreshed page of a webcam and b) likely developing some sort of tumor in a place you didn't know you could get a tumor, like the earlobe or Islets of Langerhans.**

**This reminds me that I intended to include an example of the sort of delightful prose that can be found on Bartelby.com, this one by the fantastically named author Björnstjerne Björnson from the equally fantastically named book A Happy Boy:

He got hot all over, looked about, and called: “Goatie-goatie, and goatie-wee!”

(It's not a Fall quote, but I do like to think of Mark E. Smith saying it.)