Instances where you can't separate the art from the artist. vs. instances where you can.

"altrenately" is an alternate spelling kind of like color vs colour y'know.

we liberals are poor typists =(

xpost to beato/youtubers you dig:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnivNajzZ1E
fd signifier - "when you can't separate the art from the artist" (video essay, 2024)

(fd doesn't exclusively do music topics, but is excruciatingly otm when he does)

#onethread

sry that opening phrase should have been a link to here.

Knowing nothing about this until yesterday, can someone summarise the evidence for Steve Albini’s involvement in with child abuse imagery? Lots of references to it on Twitter today but reluctant to click on links or delve into it myself

aiui, he wrote some really gross things in an old tour diary referencing European p0rn that he was looking at that allegedly had such imagery.

all i know is i clicked on a link for some interview on the albini r.i.p. thread and when i got to "my friend peter sotos..." i bailed. but whatever. i don't know about any abuse imagery though. he did hang out with whitehouse, right? and lots of japanoise people probably. they like that kind of stuff. on CD covers anyway.

Produced Whitehouse I believe?

did feel like he was making a very conscious effort to rehab his image toward the end there especially after the tyler the creator thing. probably didn't want to have *legendary asshole, racist, misogynist, and nirvana producer dead in electrical mishap* at the top of his obit. who would? better to have *ageing white male working on issues before electrical fire* at the top. but man that picture at the top of the NYT obit was not flattering. even iconoclastic dickheads don't deserve that kind of treatment.

there's *a lot* that could be said honestly but it feels too soon at least for me

i read the MEL magazine story (at https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/steve-albini-counsel-culture-interview ). it's interesting to hear him talk about it. i was an internet edgelord when i was younger myself. like albini, i'm white, but unlike him, i'm not a cisgender man. i _acted_ like one when i was younger, though. the thing was, the "edgelord" shit at the time was fucking weaksauce. i was reading about donna lee parsons, about how she lived, and that was way more fucking punk than anything albini ever did, anything i ever did when i was younger. a lot of that shit i didn't talk about even at the time, because i wasn't proud of it. it was fucked up, and i did it because i was fucked up. that doesn't excuse it. it's just that i'm not proud of it, is all. whereas the "edgelord" shit i've done since transitioning, the kind of shit they used to put in "faces of death" videos, that is stuff i'm proud of. i think getting my dick cut off was pretty fucking hardcore. just because i was doing it to, like, make my life better, just because my deciding to do so was a _good, healthy decision_, that doesn't make it not hardcore. other people might disagree and hey they got the right to believe what they believe.

what stuck out to me was this thing albini said in his idk "accountability" twitter thread:

A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them. It's nobody's obligation to overlook that, and I do feel an obligation to redeem myself…

see, i don't feel that way, i don't feel like he needs "redeeming". he's dead and people get to judge him however they want. guy who was friends with a pedo creep, guy who spent every christmas helping out families who couldn't give their kids anything for christmas. guy who was there to help create tons of great music and didn't claim more credit or reward than he thought was fair, guy who shat on most of the entire history of black music. one doesn't redeem or negative the other, they're just things that happened.

idk, before i transitioned, and for a while after i transitioned, it really bothered me that when i was gone, there might be people in this world, good people, who hated me and thought i was awful forever. i don't feel that way now. i don't expect to be widely remembered when i'm gone, but if there are people i leave behind who will never forgive me for what i've done, i think that's as much part of my legacy as people i leave behind who love me dearly and will miss me. hell, there'll probably be people who belong to both groups at once. i didn't know albini. i don't think anything can "redeem" some of the shit he said and did. i wouldn't forgive him for it even if it was my place, which i don't think it is. i don't hate him. i just think certain things he did are irredeemable.

-

anyway it does have me reflecting on my own edgelord shit. i don't think it was, like, _qualitatively_ different from a lot of the edgelord shit albini did. i did act like an entitled cis white male asshole a lot of the time. it's hard for me to own up to that because i worried for a while that it meant that i was "really" a cis white male asshole, that someone who wasn't Really A Man wouldn't act like that. that's not what i believe now. patriarchy isn't about individuals, men, women, cis, trans, whatever. it's systemic. i wasn't a man when i did that shit. i was acting like a man. it doesn't matter that i know now that i was never really a man. it doesn't matter that back then, most everyone bought into the act, including me. i hold myself accountable for that behavior to the same extent, in the same way, that i'd hold a cis white man responsible. i don't _regret_ them necessarily because a lot of that shit was... you know, i didn't have all the choice i'd like to have had, in some things. i don't think i need to be "redeemed" for that shit either. i did shit, and other people got the right to make their own judgements about me based on the shit i did.

i guess maybe that's sort of perpendicular to the idea of "separating the artist from the art". not really sure though.

Found this summary

https://medium.com/@MoonMetropolis/now-that-steve-albini-is-dead-lets-reflect-on-his-admitted-love-and-promotion-of-child-fadf5072288e

Found this summary

written by...

(not that it changes anything about the content of the article)

as a good gen Xer i did have to know a little about serial killers. and i did always like horror movies. and, god help me, i did buy copies of Answer Me! magazine back in the 90s. they were definitely gross. and even had Sotos excerpts. i mostly liked it for Debbie Goad. i thought she was a genuinely funny writer. i saw some issues years later and, yeah, they were bad. but just as bad were the copies of the national lampoon that i looked at in the 21st century. holy shit, they sold those in every convenience store in the country. they are just filled with the most toxic, noxious shit imaginable. i basically bought them for the cartoons. i loved gahan wilson. but, man, i was like 11 years old when i was reading them! my parents should have been thrown in jail. they were so racist. and that's the kind of stuff that albini grew up with too. i always hated the sex torture aspect of some noise/industrial. i liked bleak but why did bleak have to be so hateful? i mean i'm a death metal fan, so, i guess i do ignore a lot of stuff but with metal it seems more cartoon-y. like a horror movie. there is a school shooter vibe to some of that 80s black & white noise music. proto-incel. that whole quasi-nazi vibe. completely inhospitable to people of color. women. just gross. and some people never grow out of it. they just go deeper into it. albini's rants have that quality sometimes. the smart nerd in the back of the class drawing murder porn in his notebook. reading about hitler. i'll give him the benefit of the doubt. he saw how fucked up it all was. i dunno. he WAS a smart guy. ride or die for peter sotos though...ugh.

yeesh, now THAT is a wikipedia page. holy shit. and that picture...gah, i'm getting out of here.

One thing Albini seemed very much in favor of is seeing art as entirely and most paramount an expressive act of the artist, even to the exclusion of the actual sounds or artifacts of it, so in a way it is a tribute of sorts to embrace or dismiss his output on that basis.

as a good gen Xer i did have to know a little about serial killers. and i did always like horror movies. and, god help me, i did buy copies of Answer Me! magazine back in the 90s. they were definitely gross. and even had Sotos excerpts. i mostly liked it for Debbie Goad. i thought she was a genuinely funny writer. i saw some issues years later and, yeah, they were bad.

― scott seward

i mean i was the same way, i had copies of "answer me!", like to me there wasn't a difference between that and neil gaiman's "sandman", it was all like, "oh this is cool underground stuff", and today it's easy to see the difference, but it was, you know. _alternative_, right? it didn't matter if it was good or bad, it was just different, you know, fuck society, fuck all of these norms, all of these rules, they were all bullshit. that was how it was for me back then. that's not to say, again, that i'm not _accountable_ for the edgelord bullshit. it's just a lot more obvious to me in retrospect. and it's not like i was wrong about the norms back then being bullshit. they were absolutely bullshit, and i'm still appalled that anybody took that shit seriously.

Epatering la bourgeoisie seems to most often be a dead end that leads to monstrous trash (usually not as horrible as that Sotos zine) and Albini's review + his statement on the porn he found (I also find true crime/serial killer media that isn't trading purely on shock value distasteful tbh). Part of the growing older and wiser is that he (and similarly, Henry Rollins - so many chunks of Get In The Van are just wtf) appeared to have realized it to some extent.

Epatering la bourgeoisie seems to most often be a dead end that leads to monstrous trash (usually not as horrible as that Sotos zine)

― papal hotwife (milo z)

mmm, i'd call it more a dramatic crossroads

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/046/344/598.jpg

I didn't know about the CP thing I was just going on the general edgelord racism, misogyny etc as reflected in 2/3 of his band names but in light of that I withdraw my too soon

hopefully his late in life conversion wasn't totally cynical but it doesn't erase any of that shit

tbh I have felt weird in certain online trans spaces where the assumption seems to be "didn't we all have an alt-right phase?" since I probably fought a lot of those people during my own edgelord phase (which I thought was more justified because it was for social justice but a lot of the tactics were the same) and I still find it hard to forgive people who were involved in gamergate or whatever

I don't want to deny anyone's capacity to change but I also don't want to deny the harm that was done before and in albini's case it was substantial and has had lasting effects

fwiw i never had an alt-right phase but i had a liberal phase, which i'm even more ashamed of lol

well not really _ashamed_, to me it's like, i don't know anybody who gets through unscathed. you get the trauma of transition or you get the trauma of repressing, either way, one winds up taking damage

nothing i think i can really do but accept responsibility for the consequences of my words and actions, whatever those consequences are

I regret spending the 90s in love with Clintonian centrism

but did it ruin your appreciation for his sax chops?

like... ok i'm sorry it took me this long to remember this, the serial killer thing wasn't just random edgelording in my case. when i looked for people like me in movies, what i saw was, like, dressed to kill and sleepaway camp and the silence of the lambs. it seemed more likely to me that i was a serial killer than that i was, like, a woman. i guess there are a lot of people who saw those movies and still kind of believe that about me, which is kinda frustrating given that i'm not actually a serial killer, but at the same time i can't say i have no idea where that belief came from.

hollywood was really like if we show serial killers as the enforcers of cisheteropatriarchal white supremacy that they are it might make us look bad for doing the same kind of thing through media so let's keep doing the same thing by putting them in a dress instead

:(

1970s pop culture totally tried to make me terrified of men dressed as women or men being women or trans people in general. they were either a murderer or it was horrible comedy where the male comic was basically drooling and leering in the worst way possible. i'm looking at you, benny hill! i blame milton berle. flip wilson was okay. the kids in the hall probably did it best later. and i did find monty python funny and somehow not intimidating/scary because they often played older women who had really funny voices. but i blame these depictions for my conflicted feelings about drag in general when i was young. i TOTALLY blame them for that. when i was younger i would definitely be turned off by drag because of those residual memories. i basically had to meet and know drag performers and cross-dressers and live with gay men when i was young in philly to realize how brainwashed i had been by fucking starsky & hutch or whatever.
remember putting on ace ventura pet detective for one of my kids thinking funny jim carrey what could go wrong! either i had never seen it or blocked it out of memory but holy fucking shit what a transphobic nightmare! funny animal movie! hahaha!....fucking hell...

also, in every cop show ever, every drag queen was a prostitute. and when i was a kid the idea of prostitution scared me. so, there you go. thanks, america. thanks, christianity. i'm looking at you, jesus.
how many cop shows just have the ubiquitous drag queen sitting in a chair twiddling their thumbs waiting to be put in jail? even now. its like having a coffee machine in the scene.

Just be glad you never grew up with pantomime.

well, we did have Shields & Yarnell. and Mummenschanz. they scarred me in different ways. they were all over the streets in the 70s. NYC was lousy with them.

I think the most memorable ones from the media I grew up with were in movies about Berlin/Weimar when the Nazis rose to power… To Be or Not To Be … so I associated transwomen / drag with sympathetic tragic figures who were oppressed by fascism

I also watched some of the same cop shows as Scott, and I didn’t think of them as scary… they tended to have the best wisecracks

I rewatched Ace Ventura a few years ago and had completely forgotten how transphobic that movie was…I think I was 9 when I first saw it and didn’t really remember the plot. That shit must’ve done a number on the brains of a lot of kids.

my first explicitly trans media exposure was boys don't cry and I guess it could have been worse but

was watching the mask the other night with my roommate and recounting all the ways in which ace ventura is one of the most evil movies ever made and watched his eyes bug out as he realized the degree to which all of that was in there all along

There was also a movie I vaguely remember partly set in a gay bathhouse in SF with Rita Moreno and there was a running “joke” where she would be mistaken for being trans

xps as far as films that hinge on a hate crime go I guess it's better for it to be framed as a tragedy than a punchline? I guess

i'm not sure the degree to which ace ventura shaped my thoughts on trans ppl bc i honestly remember the vibe being bad and weird the first time i watched it with my folks not long after the sequel (almost certainly very racist but i saw it in theaters and LOVED it bc i was eight) came out. the scene where carrey is shuddering naked in a bathtub bc a trans woman touched him or whatever (i refuse to refresh my memory about this so maybe i've got it all wrong), i guess someone thought that was funny but to me it was super unfunny and fucked up *at the time*

It’s strange that Peter Sotos’ extremeness was leapfrogged by mainstream culture, e.g., “Soft White Underbelly” has 5.36 million subscribes on YouTube and is frequently more extreme than “Buyer’s Market.” I suppose one difference is that Sotos’ frequently inserted himself into that work where today’s copypasta content creators claim they have journalistic distance (including Joshua Ryne Goldberg).

s/subscribes/subscribers

the mask is very trans positive though, wholesome message of "wear something weird and become a completely different person aka a living looney tune who robs banks"

Yeah … it’s different now. It’s not just that I have gotten older that I have less interest in edgy culture… times have changed. The elements of resistance to dominant ideology that were part of it at the time aren’t there anymore.

I haven’t seen the Jim Carrey remake of Fun With Dick and Jane - who has! - but the original contains one transphobic scene that is p much a hate crime now.

I mean, the Ace Ventura shower scene was also an explicit reference to an R-rated film that came out one year earlier, I can't speak to the makers of Ace Ventura Pet Detective on whether they knew or cared that it would sort of live as a kids movie

*two years earlier

This makes me glad I am a middle aged genx who managed to avoid this shitty movie

i didn't see sleepaway camp until i was in college but the way the ending was framed to me ("it's so fucked up, the killer is actually a MAN") was deeply transphobic, but i don't find the movie itself to be transphobic bc so many of its sympathies lie with angela. this is hammered home in the first sequel as well. this could also be a consequence of years and years of doing feminist readings of slasher films made by gross men but what else do i have to do with my time than to see the killer as an embodiment of the feminine unconscious, and sleepaway camp is like that times a billion

anyway i love perverse transgressive art from the '80s and '90s much as i'm conscious that the ppl behind it could be so so awful, sorry this is so beside the point of albini's associations

I mean, the Ace Ventura shower scene was also an explicit reference to an R-rated film that came out one year earlier, I can't speak to the makers of Ace Ventura Pet Detective on whether they knew or cared that it would sort of live as a kids movie

― The SoyBoy West Coast (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, May 10, 2024 1:36 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ha, i've never seen the crying game, might be tough for me but maybe one day

Oh … other stuff from my childhood depicting trans/drag … Bosom Buddies and Twisted Sister music videos

ivy, per your interests, I can confirm nothing transphobic happens in this 88-second clip of Ace Ventura where Cannibal Corpse plays "Hammer Smashed Face"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dM_TN7I5m8

oh i mean that scene is a classic