Brian Phillips Covers The Iditarod

Grantland sent sportswriter Brian Phillips out to Alaska to cover The Iditarod, a huge annual sled dog race (on which I wouldn't normally be inclined to seek literature). Phillips came back with this transportive 18,000 word masterpiece reminiscent of Hunter Thompson's infamous journey to the center of the Kentucky Derby. But Phillips is more mature, humanistic and grounded, realizing a style of writing you can call "Gonzo grown up."

The Grantland piece incorporates a dazzlingly interactive multi-media map of Alaska which allows you to take the trip visually while you take it emotionally. Even though these features were tasteful and fun, I hardly noticed them due to Phillips' serene, thrilling, funny and even poetic descriptions of this other world I never thought I cared about. And that's ultimately the most important thing he--and any great writer--does... He opens up our worlds, engaging us to the profundity of something that never really blipped on our rader.

The Brazen Heads Podcast

Mark Derian and Derek Bronish's The Brazen Heads podcast exemplifies our current generation of well educated Maslow-champions fueled on opinions and addicted to catharsis. Their sometimes infuriating but always interesting discussions on art, entertainment and 28 year old culture appear weekly on iTunes along with a summary post from the podcast's sister website, Animus Empire.

The long-time friends have struck a dynamic which suits them. Derian--or sometimes, "Diz"--comes off as a bizarre art-snob / fraternity-bro hybrid. He assails you with anti-feminist manifestos and "kids today.." rebellion which lends a needed touch of bar-stool to Bronish's coffee-shop aesthetic. Currently a graduate student pursuing a career as a therapist (?!), Derian's cock-rock credos [he generally finds music boring, with the exception of Guns N' Roses, which he finds transcendent] are usually extreme, frequently annoying, and occasionally pure genius.

While it's Diz who makes the Brazen Heads funny or compelling or--well--brazen, it's Bronish who actually makes it consistently listenable. His even-keeled voice-of-reason narrative is like carbon rods keeping the Brazen power-plant productive whenever Diz gets sucked into feedback loops about the importance of getting laid or yelling at liberals. A potent critical thinker, Bronish will tell you, in crisp baritone, that academic navel-gazing need not be a pejorative term. He operates with a refreshing neglect for connotative language and general understanding that opinions are more about doing the work than being right.

On his own, though, Bronish simply isn't eccentric enough to cut through the Throught Catalog-era Internet din, which is why Diz makes for the perfect co-hort. With a show title taken from an old mythology about "bronze heads" which were able to answer any question, a casual listener might say the main theme of the podcast is over-intellectualism. But ultimately, their bottom line is about emotional freedom--even if over-intellectualism is the road they usually take to get there.

I'm not sure whether or not the Heads will ever enjoy popular podcast success. They may not, due to the heavy 'NPR" nature of the podcast world so far. But at the moment, they're doing a decent job "finding their people". For more with these dudes, check out their interview on Article 25 News.

Calling out the A.V. Club's Sean O'Neal for Being Really Cunty

You know by now that Zach Braff asked for donations from fans to finance his next movie. Two days ago, the Onion A.V. Club's Sean O'Neal sorta treated ZB like a huge tool for attempting to crowd-source funding.

If you're not familiar with O'Neal, he seems to spend most of his AV Club by-lines pointing out when famous people aren't acting cool enough. It's really frustrating because he's actually a good writer, but he often succumbs to the pressures we all feel to carry the tone of a condescending hack.

At the core of O'Neal's gripe-fest seems to be the passive indication that Braff's attempt to crowd-source money for a movie is patently unreasonable. Or maybe it's self-absorbed to an extent which warrants commentary. But that's all passive-aggression. On a literal level, he is simply attacking Braff for not taking the traditional steps towards funding a motion picture.

"Braff just wants to make it okay to feel something again—namely the freedom from financers who demand things like input into casting or final cut or an actual return on their investment, when instead he could just seek out donors who will be happy just knowing he’s happy."

Sentences like this one litter the entire three-paragraph post. They are not technically incorrect. But they seem to carry an immense spirit of disapproval which might almost confuse a reader who doesn't presume Braff's actions to be douchey. If you were unfamiliar with Internet-era snark, you might almost read this post as straight news, with no realization that we're supposed to be laughing at Braff for being... what? An entitled west-coast celebrity brat? Phony in his continued portrayal of unconventional quirkiness? Unwilling to do hard work and make sacrifices for his craft? Predatory?

These are the things that--if pressed to conjure up specific accusations regarding his movie Kickstarter as culturally degrading--I might attempt to state outright, and then support with further claims. [What would press me to attack someone in this manner, I wonder... other than genuine outrage or maybe a desire to generate quick, entertaining content at the expense of an easy target?]

But O'Neal doesn't really state anything like this outright, for which I don't blame him because it would require extra work, and it'd be ultimately over-reactive. Instead, he oozes the painfully average slime of modern critical voice into chunky excretions like discarded tubes of Go-Gurt garbage, and puts forth sentence after nauseating sentence propelled by the context that when a celebrity has been considered generally un-cool since 2004, the Internet is here to feed-bag your hater short-hand whenever he draws attention to himself in a manner which isn't nobly self-deprecating. And since writers are good at sounding smart, and average personalities want to read things they agree with, the content in this type of writing simply becomes a priori annoyance towards anything promotional, obvious, nakedly sentimental, or non-self-deprecating--but the author doesn't tell you WHY you're right to feel annoyed, they simply reinforce THAT you feel annoyed.

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Since I'm not afraid to actually go out on a limb and say things which I might be called on to back-up, I'm gonna say that O'Neal's post about Braff is the worst type of junk-food blogger prose available. There's no nutritional substance, no advancing discussion, just the same easy chuckles that nine-year-olds get from other nine-year-olds at the pool when they dunk a seven-year-old's head under the water. Lest some uncool, tasteless seven-year-old attempt to distinguish himself, the shitty douche-bag...

Please, For the Love of God, Mustaches Can Not Be "Ironic"

At some point in the admittedly fun but inescapably hypocritical sport of hipster-hating¹, people started to refer to skinny jeans and ironic mustaches as the flagship hipster emblems. This is not inaccurate, but increasingly, the look itself, as opposed to the corresponding set of personality traits, is becoming the main draw of the ire.

As you probably know, this term "Hipster" was more or less popularized by Alan Ginsberg. Howl's "angel-headed hipsters" dug live jazz and slam sessions, and preferred intoxicated, late-night intellectualizing to white picket fences and going to church. My guess is that they were synonymous with the beatniks until the term "beatnik" got too "heavy". Hippies took over the anti-establishment scene and were almost the exact same thing as beatniks except alcohol, nicotine, benzedrine and heroin were replaced by cannabis, LSD, peace, love, compost and voting. Hippies had a good long run and then died with the Johns in 1980. Everything sorta reset and became a weird nebula of cocaine, hardcore punk and tv sitcoms for ten years until the multitude post-Reagan children of baby boomers found ourselves so far up on the hierarchy of fulfilled needs that the only thing we had to rebel against was our own mediocrity. There's a large, unfortunate window of slightly above-average intelligence--I call us the intellectual top forty-eight percent--wherein a young adult just capable of comprehending the implications of a bell-shaped curve is granted magnificent vistas through which to regard his own unexceptional potential. And since psychology is increasingly finding unfulfilled egos wildly unsuitable to the fed and clothed of our species, the good Lord sent down Prozac and alternative rock during the early 90's as a swing set for that old rebellious spirit of the original beatniks.

But aye, there's the rub... There's a reason the beatniks effortlessly gave way to hippies when the Vientam war got out of hand. Just as a government needs an "enemy" against which to rally its citizens, our counterculture needs it's own out-of-control villain in order to flourish. Mediocre minds need objects on which to focus our creativity--we don't do well with a blank canvas.²  During post-war economic booms, it's really hard to compose particularly compelling manifestos, which is why music was sounding so shitty until the internet's ubiquity gave us simultaneous offerings of all the world's injustices and all of Canada's independent rock bands. That plus a stock-market crash and we have a new counterculture breed.

If I'm being completely honest, this recession is kind of a joke. I'm not saying people aren't doing poorly in their professional lives, but as far as attempting to fuel a counter-culture--every forty-eight percent'er with a liberal arts degree still has plenty of couches on which to crash, and pabst blue ribbon lets em drink like a redneck. It's so indulgent that I'm close to getting into a conspiracy theory like some Ra Ra Riot fan purposefully arranged our housing bonds with fraudulent AAA ratings so the stock market would crash and his buddies would have an excuse to dress like Bubs from The Wire.

Sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me summarize before I return to the original point of this article, which of course is a discussion about why even though you have a lot of reasons to be mad at hipsters, MUSTACHES AREN'T ONE OF THEM.

Due to the feedback loop of rebellion / nothing really to rebel against, today's hipsters have decided to combine the weird early 90's mixture of narcissism and self-loathing with a Bill O'Reily-esque "culture-war" culture (except coming from the left). And this latter part is why hipsters remain a big problem. The example I always give when discussing the moment I first realized I was an insufferable human being is from 2007 when I was in my old nine to five cubicle. My manager said, "I can't wait to see that 'I pronounce you Chuck and Larry movie.'" I immediately thought to myself, "Wow, what a douchebag." And then I had the unfortunate realization that, "Oh wait... This regular joe six-pack isnt' a douchebag... This guy just wants to work during the week, catch a Philly's game and maybe spend a few hours on Saturday laughing at goofballs in some movie. I'm the douchebag." I was a douchebag for projecting my own disgruntled hopes for the cinematic arc of American entertainment onto another guy's personality. And in the secret confines of my skull, I still do it to this very day. I try to make the necessary mental corrections fairly quickly. But I still react negatively to people whose tastes or values differ from mine, and this lies at the heart of my mediocrity.

So the next time you see some hipster with skinny jeans and a mustache, and you commence a mental snarkisode about the irony of his look, stop confusing the issue and just try to remember: A mustache is not a statement. Unless of course you count "I like having a mustache," as a statement worth being disingenuous about... then knock yourself out, I guess. If his attitude about culture is bullying and presumptuous, or he condescends to people that are too obvious or predictable, then I can see why you'd find him distasteful. But if you seriously have a problem with his weird or shabby appearance, stop being such a shallow cunt, go get a master's degree or two and try to hoist yourself up beyond the intellectual top forty-eight percent.

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1 I call hipster-hating hypocritical because it's never done by people older than 50 - those people don't have a clue what a hipster is. It's never done by unself-aware frat bros in Ed Hardy shirts - those people don't even notice hipsters; it isn't done by hippies - those people don't generally hate others (which is one of the reasons hipsters hate them so much); it's not done by wealthy, bubbly airheads, the socially awkward or the brilliant. It is not really done by anyone except young entertainment-minded people who are inflamed by obviousness." Basically, it's done by other hipsters who simply aren't quite as bad as that guy.^↩

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2 For the record, this author considers himself just as mediocre as the next person, with the exception that he doesn't consider the label an insult.^↩

Louis CK New Special, "Oh My God" Premiered Sat Night on HBO

The sentence, "The new Louis CK special isn't as good as his others..." almost sounds surreal. Airing over the weekend on HBO--following up his wildly successful self-published web-special, "Live at the Beacon"--"Oh My God" marks the first time it can be said about a Louis CK special... it was just okay.

The good news is that I can tell you right off the bat why "Oh My God" was a departure in quality. And the future need not be bleak. The man who has over-shared every innermost confession from inside his shameless skull--much to the squealing delight of pretty much everyone--is running up against a realistic limit to the number of thoughts a human man can have about his own life during a given period of time. The result on "Oh My God" is a disappointing, but certainly well-earned proportion of increasingly observational humor at the expense of Louis talking about what we love most--himself.

For example, an early chunk of his new material discusses how nobody cares about the differences between seals and sea-lions. An extended segment in the middle addresses how some people are simply not destined to get laid. To be sure, Louis can do observational material as good as anyone else. But at this point in the game, listening to Louis do jokes about sea creatures is like watching Stephen Hawking explain the basics of fossils. Let Bill Nye handle that, dude! Give us the black-holes and aliens!

Needless to say, "Oh My God" isn't without his trademark: scarily relatable moments of 'Here's why I'm an asshole deep inside'. I won't break the seal on any of these, but if you're a fan, there are certainly golden nuggets to enjoy in his fifth hour-long special since 2007.

So the big question at hand--the question comedy nerds knew we'd have to face for quite a while now--is, "Will Louis CK burn out?" The answer is, when it comes to his chops for relating the intellectual and emotional experience of modern humanity... definitely not. The only bummer is that at some point he's going to need to slow down because he's starting to process his life experiences for our enjoyment at a rate faster than he can experience them. And now we're right with him, pressed up against his horizons and hoping like vampires that he has another fucked up year.

A word of advice, Louis, painful though it may be to say it: The reason you're so funny is because you're NOT super-human. We admire your work ethic and adore your personality. But don't feel bad if you need to take some years off working to let life pile back up for a while. There's a reason touring comedians all do routines about airports... To quote your contemporary Pete Holmes, "You need to live a life worth commenting on."