If the definition of excellence is doing a difficult thing in a way that looks effortless, then Stevie Ray Vaughn was the embodiment of musician excellence. It's because of him that I would never learn to play the guitar. Watching what he was doing, and then what I was doing, I felt I might as well have been playing a tuba.
Stevie Ray Vaughn | in Friday Live I've written about a gazillion times about social broadcasting and the new mores of modern social interaction as well as the changes in the way we view and maintain privacy. I'm fascinated by the social implications, as well as all of the new technology involved. I live a discretionary public life. I say discretionary because I don't tweet about my weight (more than it should be and less than it was, thank you) and if I run into any unfortunate medical issues, I may not go into great detail with my dear readers. But a lot of what I think and do is out there. On the internet. In the clutches of the Google forever and ever. Obviously.
Perhaps not obvious to everyone these days is that the primary use of these technologies in the social sense is not, in fact, sharing with your friends and family what you had for lunch (cold pizza and beer, thank you) but information curation. If I follow you on twitter or Facebook or Google Reader it's probably because you share interesting bits of content from your corner of the internet. Then again, you might just be a family member or a co-worker or a distant acquaintance.
Which means that I have to police my broadcasts to suit the individuals in the crowd. I'm no longer curating my corner of the internet for my audience, my audience is hogtying me because I have no granular control over them. For example, there are a surprising number of friends and others who would probably find this totally uncouth and politically charged blog post entertaining--but then I'd have to explain to the rest of my audience what "wingnut welfare sugar daddy" means, among other things. At the same time, there is a whole other subsection of my internet audience who would have thought this was hilarious…but had I just shared it through the normal channels, there'd probably be some awkward moments in my future.
As much as you can--and should--call me out as a pussy ("Share it all and let the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the sky sort 'em out!") for not wanting to offend anyone (too much) the truth remains that none of the major social broadcasting players give us the tools to properly channel our interests to those who are most interested. There has to be a happy medium between the pure broadcast of twitter and the focused mailing lists everyone was making in the nineties.
This article in the New York Times which many of you have probably read or at least read some of really made me want to set my own hair on fire. Not because it was factually misleading in any way or because I felt it was being particularly unfair to my generation, but because it struck me as being similar to yelling at a houseplant for not thriving in your dank, windowless basement. As I told a friend of mine who brought the article to my attention, it's not that we're lazy or shiftless or stupid…we just have nowhere to go but sideways! We've thrown ourselves headlong into higher education and unpaid internships for lack of anything else to be done. The only upside to this is that no generation in the history of the world should be as mentally and socially prepared to rule the world as we are—so long as we have not simply become professional understudies.
I have a lot of really excellent memories from college. Most of them aren't particularly sharp, however. Many of them have grown fuzzy just over the last few years and a good chunk more were pretty damn muddled to begin with. Surprisingly, some of the more crystalline episodes are the political debates/arguments/drunken-shouting-matches I engaged in with my roommates and friends.
I attended a college with a largely liberal faculty and a student body that was made up primarily of the conservative sons and daughters of the Northeast's Republicans. The comedian Lewis Black took the stage on our campus by asking, "If you guys are conservatives now, what the fuck are you going to be when you're 45? Nazis?!" This demographic made for an interesting dichotomy and provided plenty of sparring partners for those of us who were politically aware and more progressively minded.
During the "War-or-Bust" Media Blitzkrieg that ramped up in the early months of 2003 I found myself incessantly engaging in a losing battle with those who had been told or decided for themselves that invading Iraq was an appropriate response to 9/11 and that the war would pay for itself, among other things. What struck me most about these skirmishes was not the delusions or cognitive dissonance of many of my classmates, but the sheer number of them that had never explored a single political train of thought in their lives. A truly frightening number of my classmates didn't know what they were for or against because they didn't know who they were politically. I don't mean that in the sense that they didn't identify with a party platform or know how to vote. More viscerally, they had yet to discover the things that would make them tick politically and how to properly separate the politically motivated and simplified assertions from the complex realities. And it's not all their fault. They, like me, came of age in one of the most prosperous and politically vanilla decades in the 20th century. There really wasn't much for us to cut our political teeth on back then. We were perhaps just too young to grasp the first Gulf War and we certainly weren't going to get worked up over a blowjob. Our first real taste of political blood came in 2000 with the election-that-wasn't-so-much, and even that went unmarked and unnoticed by the majority of my generation.
But now we've had a few crash courses in realpolitik (two wars, a recession, bank bailouts, Healthcare reform, etc.) and we've begun to throw our not inconsiderable weight around (SEE: Election, Obama) and that's a good sign. The question now, very well constructed by Dan Drezner, is what will become of our generation's politics now that we've seen and understood the politics (and consequences thereof) of our parent's generation. They saw Vietnam and railed against it and yet here we are eight years into two occupational wars. Are we going to make the same mistakes and believe that perhaps we can do better? Will we become isolationist to a fault as a result of the overreach of those who came before? The answers to these questions are several elections and perhaps a few world altering events away, but it's worth wondering, now that the baby boomer echo-wave has come out of its political shell, which way will we wander?
Generation Gap | in History, Politics, The Future I look away from the world for a week to move and get my life together (ask me how that went) and everything just goes to hell in a handbasket out there.
First, the Dodgers have completely fallen apart and even Andre Ethier is looking like he'd rather be anywhere but at the plate these days. I know the divorce is taking its toll and morale can't be all that high with Torre leaving, Vin retiring, and serious money woes, but you're still getting paid an obscene amount of money to play baseball. Would a little team coherence kill you guys?
While I was packing and unpacking my worldly possessions (very surprised to learn that I own a blender, by the way) the whole country decided to collectively go apeshit over a community center/mosque/Ground-Zero-Fuck-You-Care-Package-Love-Al Queda. This is really simple. If you have any faith (whoops!) in the Constitution of the United States or even just the method by which it was created, then this is covered and you have no reason whatsoever to worry your pretty little head about it. Particularly if you're the former-quitter-governor of Alaska. If, however, you'd rather live in a country where popular sentiment and the government get to decide who worships what and where, Saudi Arabian Airlines flies out of New York and Washington D.C.--buy a ticket.
Then during the first 72 hours of my, "Hey! Get your mouth off that!" vigil--still ongoing--Google decided that they didn't really mean all that stuff they said about Net Neutrality and don't really care what happens to the state of the internet beyond, say, next year. They're busy spinning this as "The best they could do." when in reality it's almost everything the Telecoms and Wireless providers have always wanted: a tiered internet in which they get to play gatekeeper to content and innovation alike. Hey Google, get your dirty mouth off my internet!
Pets are supposed to be therapeutic, right?
