Death Disco 2012

[koganbot]

Embedding this just because I think it's brilliantly great, and to see if it gets a rise out of arbitrary_greay. Also, the Dead Lester thread is getting close to where LiveJournal does that horrible thing of collapsing subthreads on us, so if you have any more responses to what's on that thread, I suggest you do so on this one.

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

(Responding in this thread because I know you and Frank both can see it this way, standard disclaimer re: awfulness of conversing on Tumblr etc.)

I think the problem is the assumption that if you don't have the time/resources, you must not be "getting enough out of the intellectual conversation" (joy in discovery, etc.) to prioritize it over your current use of time/resources, and thus you can't really be taking it seriously. Which, yes, can come across as pretty condescending. I don't think it's what Dave means, although it's a standard way academics and un-/under-employed deep thinkers can condescend to the employed. :P

Personally, I make no bones about it: I'm very scattered in my interests and have a remunerative and time-sucking day job. Nine times out of ten, I do deprioritize intellectual conversation because relatively speaking, there's less in it for me than something else I could be doing. But I barely play a critic on the Internet, let alone am one - I've merely reached the point where I want to measure my non-fiction writing against pro standards rather than amateur ones. The only thing I feel bad about is leaving the other person(s) in the conversation hanging, not whether I'm taken seriously.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

'Course I said the opposite of that -- that lots and lots and lots of people in my orbit consistently take music criticism seriously, but that there are other issues about what to do with all of those people taking things seriously without any sense of going somewhere with it. (I still feel comfortable blaming context and lack of time/resources, though. It's been the thing that's pushed me out of conversations, when I'm pushed out of them.)