October 29th, 2004
Galley Friend M.L. sent along a link to this item from Andrew Sullivan, which was posted last Saturday:
“The unutterably cool Bob Mould has put together a live blogjam in DC tomorrow night. A bunch of us will be reading from our blogs live, followed by Bob’s now famous Blow-Off night. There’s me, Wonkette, Geekslut, Vividblurry, Dog Poet, and many more. It’s at DC9 at 1940 9th Street NW, starting at 7 pm. Come have fun. Meet sexy bloggers. Dance. Forget about this damn election for a couple hours. See you there.”
What to say? In the Blogger Bible’s Book of Genesis, it is written that the blogosphere arose in answer to the vanity, pomposity, and self-regard of old-media journalists. What do you think the blogosphere would say if Tom Friedman, Dana Milbank, and Adam Nagourney announced that they were getting together at the Kennedy Center and have a jam session, where they would read–live!–from their newspaper reports? (Followed by dancing and a chance to meet “sexy” reporters, of course.)
On Sullivan’s behalf, at least you can say that he’s an interesting and engaging writer. Still, one doesn’t need to hear him read “Begala Award Nominees” in person in order to grok the essence of his craft. But check out some of his fellow blogjammers. Take GeekSlut, for instance. Here’s a sample from GeekSlut’s last posting:
The need for seed. Once a natural part of queer culture has become a sleazy kink. We glorify it. We enjoy it. I guess its payback, you know. After spending years, our cocks wrapped in plastic marching to the “Safe Sex” rhythm. That didn’t work. It was doomed from the start. We’re human beings. Men. We’re not above nature, we ARE nature.
Seed is a gift, it’s love, it’s acceptance. Taking a man’s cum [in your ass, down your throat, rubbed into your skin – whatever], even if you don’t know his name, is closeness. It’s an act of love and trust. Even if yawl just met! Both the bottom and the top walk away smiling . . . and content. Now it’s a sleazy affair that boys get cracked out of their minds for. Like it’s an embarrassing nasty secret thing to want. This is so fucked.
The Old Media is dead! Long live the blogosphere!
There’s more, of course. There’s always more in blogland, because “more” is the internet’s central comparative advantage. Galley Friend M.C. sends along this link to blogger Matthew Yglesias.
You may recall Yglesias from the last time we visited him during the Republican national convention. Classy kid. And now he’s blogging about sitting in a Starbucks while German television cameras film him:
Okay, now we’re going and there’s demand for me to write something so here it is. “Something!” I assume Germans all understand about the evils of Bushism, so there’s no particular need to emphasize the point in this context. And then, you post the thing.
Boy, am I glad we have bloggers around to teach those old-fogey journalists a lesson.
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Uh, I don’t think I’d like to be at a party with GeekSlut in the same room….yuck.
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The big blog and the little blog are totally different. I don’t really get the big blog (e.g. wonkette and all these weirdos you keep talking about), because it’s got so much attention, it’s no longer “some dude’s blog,” it’s well, a media event. I don’t understand all these people you follow . . . I think of a blog as what me and my buddies have, and they don’t write news or compete with “old journalism,” we mostly just pass around links or say what we want to say, assuming our friends and occasional friends-of-friends will be the only ones interested in reading. It may compete with the editorials & letters-to-the-editor of old media, but no one I know takes themselves so seriously as to feel they have a duty to provide content.Galley Slaves seems to be an entity unto itself, because it is so focused on being more or less like the Standard. The Galley Slaves is really the arbitrary duration of time “Standard” with only three writers instead of a full staff, and a comments area (which I seem to be using more than my fair share of.. . If it bugs you, I can probably stop)These other blogs… they’re kidding themselves by calling it a blog. A blog is about a person, and what that person is about. What a lot of these people have is just “a politics website” with only one author. It makes no sense, in this context (which has been applied to it by people before me, clearly), to write about your personal life in that level of detail. That’s just exhibitionism, and I imagine that’s the motivation for most of the content there.
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Sounds like a very bad poetry slam. (Uh oh, I may have just made it sound like there has ever existed such a thing as a non-bad poetry slam. Whoa.)
Anonymous October 29, 2004 at 8:56 pm
On the bright side, it doesn’t seem that the insufferable blogger Jonah Goldberg and his ridiculous canine will be attending. It does seem like this Yglesias kid is channeling his extreme self-importance.”Galley Slaves” is a little like Law & Order. You get the story, a bit of personality, but mostly substance. You never see the inside of Briscoe and Greene’s apartments. You never have to watch them groom their pets. They don’t talk about their children’s incomprehensible burblings are a sure sign they too will grow up to be Important Because One Of My Parents Is. You don’t even know if they have children.