Interesting read. It clarifies some of the confusion I've had over what exactly the deal is with her.
1: I'm sort of boggled that it was a deal at all.
Hipsters love their authenticity, I guess.
Those SNL performances are definitely pretty terrible, but that's hardly unprecedented. Remember Ashlee Simpson?
4: So bad that the King quit, right?
Man, I hate the term "hipster". It's been deployed, separately, as both a compliment and an epithet in my direction. Everyone should stop using the word for thirty years, so it can be cool again.
That will probably happen, because linguistics.
This "scandal" was dumb enough to surprise me at its dumbness. Who are these idiot children who don't understand that performance and persona are elements of popular music? What kind of hermetically sealed milkbath of fairytale truth must you soak your culture in for you to take offense that a pretty person telling stories has affected a degree of artifice?
Apparently this has been stuck in my craw for at least two and a half weeks.
Who are these idiot children who don't understand that performance and persona are elements of popular music?
Would this be a scandal if she could actually, you know, perform her music? Don't make me read the article, people.
The "scandal" actually seems to be pretty independent of the SNL performance and the question of how well she can perform live. And read the article; it's pretty short and a good summary of the story.
I was told there would be no reading.
I read there would be no telling.
Okay, article read. So some hipsters were scandalized before her SNL appearance. Would the bulk of people who are now scandalized care were it not for her shaky vocals? We need a control group, a manufactured indie hottie with chops.
Simply don't understand this argument. If Bob Dylan had been given a $10m grant from the Gulbenkian foundation to make Highway 61 Revisited and had made the record he actually did, it would have been better or worse how, exactly?
Haven't people always been interested in stories around stars, and don't stories rely on a feeling of reality? Just wondering.
I just recently heard* Duke Fakir talking about working with the Holland-Dozier-Holland 'recording team.' He talked about that team writing perfect songs for the four tops right after cranking out a perfectly crafted number one for some other motown group. But I bet audiences were loving the detroit authenticity of motown at the time.
*on wait wait don't tell me - I love that show and if my wife hasn't convinced me it's lame after all these years then none of you haters has a chance.
BTW, I had linked recording team to this wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland%E2%80%93Dozier%E2%80%93Holland
But I forgot to check the html in preview and I musta screwed something up.
Personally, I get annoyed when musicians can't come close to their studio sound. Or at least I used to. Now I expect they can't.
If Bob Dylan had been given a $10m grant from the Gulbenkian foundation to make Highway 61 Revisited and had made the record he actually did, it would have been better or worse how, exactly?
But at the time, a lot of people were *very* angry at Dylan for making the record that he did, because they had invested quite a lot in their image of him as an acoustic troubadour and whathaveyou. In the case of Dylan, I sympathise with him rather than his fans (largely because, well, Dylan). But if he had been on a different level of talent, and if someone had rather cynically promoted him as being a really folkfolkfolkie who was really definitely part of a particular culture when he actually wasn't, I can see how the fans might have been justified in getting angry that someone was making a living off their subculture while only pretending to be part of it.
Hey d^2, re your dating advice to flippanter, where the heck is your 'complete political economy vision' being shared lately? I don't see it on CT and your blog is still locked.
I don't think anyone looked to Motown for 'Detroit authenticity'. Perfect pop was their stock in trade, no? Not gritty authenticity.
re: Del Rey. I've seen her perform live on British TV twice. Once her voice was pretty much bang-on (when compared to the record), once a little flat and nervy. I'm shocked to discover that some musicians are inconsistent performers.
re: 22
Varies a lot, though, doesn't it? I don't really care if bands recreate their record if they are still good live. Where 'good' might mean presenting a slightly stripped down version of their recorded sound [without strings or some of the electronic effects, or whatever]. Ironically, as someone who grew up as a teenage metalhead and who had ingested the metal myth that 'metal bands are good live, unlike that indie/dance shite', the best live bands I've seen have all been indie or dance type bands, and the worst largely rock bands.
Ladyhawke was (is?) always pretty weird like that: really tight rock band live, floaty ethereal pop recorded. Decent live, from memory, and decent recorded, but.
re: 27
Yeah, although there's a bit of the FM radio rock sound on the record, too. I think she has a new album coming out, judging by the posters I've seen around.
Are there any performers that make/made a thing of NOT sounding like their records? It strikes me this would/could be a thing, if it isn't already.
^^^me being rude abt myself: overall I conclude that I need coffee.
re: 29
Jazzers? Particularly heavily free or improv focused groups? Although I suppose that's more 'never playing the same twice' than 'not like the record'.
A bit of Motown 'grit':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLOB6B6vMTY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlY8Hf4MAB0
Total sucker for that vocal style.
Jimi Hendrix made a point of not using the effects pedals which were featured on his studio albums while playing live, because they kept getting stolen.
Also, Jesus & Mary Chain albums usually last longer than ten minutes and feature songs rather than motionless hostile scowling and disorganised guiatar feedback, whereas their early live appearances didn't.
As for poor Lana del Rey, I think "the Internet hates attractive young woman" is a well-worn groove.
22 I don't know, isn't studio production considered a legitimate instrument nowadays? (A college boyfriend once said the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds marked the moment this happened and I was so taken with the idea that there was a moment of conversion like that that I have quoted it sometimes without ever having bothered to listen to the album.)
7 I remember checking a box categorizing me as "urban hipster" on planetout in 2001ish because I had zero associations with "hipster" and hey, I liked living in cities. Eleven years later I own a bunch of vintage furniture and love cocktail bars and have been to a Yo La Tengo show but I'm afraid/relieved to say nobody would ever call me a hipster, even so. You do realize objecting to the term means you are one though, right?
Yes, I wasn't meaning improvisation -- obviously that's never the same twice (hah! except when it is), and that's part of its USP. I doubt there's ANY free improvisers who go out with an intent to "play the record". I meant like arrangement and texture and layering and general sonics -- speculatively these performers would have one MO for studio and another entirely for shows. Because there are -- as people are noting -- studio sound-styles which just go to chaotic mush in many auditoriums. Plus think of the way that big-screen acting has to be tiny, where on-stage acting has to be much broader: actors used to both can deliver both. A lot of 80s music I loved on record -- electric Ornette Coleman, Ronald Shannon Jackson 84-86 -- was *really* ill-served by the kinds of sound-systems available on tour; this must have bothered them, given what they were working at. But they weren't really generating the audiences to pay for the technical developent, maybe.
(It's the sort of thing you could ask Lou Reed, if you wanted to die of boredom during the reply.)
It struck me as I was reading this that the taste for "Unplugged" as a performance style was actually more about making a record that could be tidily reproduced live than anything else.
OT: Ouch.
Calling W.E. a film gives Madonna and her collaborators too much credit. W.E. alternately recalls a perfume commercial that doesn't know when to end, an elaborate lingerie fashion show, and the longest, most pretentious, most historically minded Red Shoe Diaries episode ever filmed, with Cornish filling in for David Duchovny and his trusty dog as the filter through which viewers experience a hot-blooded, heavy-breathing, super-softcore love affair. It's a glorified cinematic romance novel with blindingly slick, expensive production values that never begin to mask the fundamental emptiness at its core.
I suppose "sounding like their album" isn't the right criterion. How about "not sounding like shit"?
If Lana del Ray's SNL problem was that she was nervous, poor girl.
Are there any performers that make/made a thing of NOT sounding like their records? It strikes me this would/could be a thing, if it isn't already.
There were a ton of people who recorded tightly arranged 2:30 minute singles for Chess, Stax, Atlantic, etc. who were much more relaxed and unstructured live. Not so much that they made a thing of not sounding like their records, but they didn't really think their records sounded like them.
Marshall Chess spent most of the 60s refusing to allow Buddy Guy to let rip on record; when he realised what was happening with Cream and Hendrix, he turned to Guy and said, "Just kick my ass."
The "confrontation" JaMC shows -- and there actually weren't that many -- were bascially attention-grabbing happenings to help promote their upcoming LPs full of pretty popsongs (which are kind of Depeche Mode with guitars). The only time I saw them -- with Dinosaur Jr, MBV and a fourth group who arguably falls into the territory this question opens up -- they "played their hits" like nice rockstars mostly want to.
Jimi is a more plausible answer, because he was very much working on solving the conundrum of two different play spaces with varying possibilities and constraints. But I actually mean an act that makes this difference part of their identity, not one that has to put up with a difference that the technology -- or the thieving sociology of their fans -- forces on them,.
re: 38
I'd guess - Tierce? -- the starting point of that was a fair bit earlier. Les Paul multi-tracking his own guitar and Mary Ford's voice, or lots of 'lounge' music, or the early(ish) pop/electronic stuff -- Raymond Scott, Jean-Jacques Perrey, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, or whatever.
But yeah, I suppose the early to mid 60s is the point where major pop acts started making records they clearly couldn't reproduce live, and were never intended to be reproduced live.
Isn't there someone around of the relevant age to go all "Sgt. Pepper's! Sgt. Pepper's! George Martin! Stu Sutcliffe! Brian Jones!" w/r/t early studio manipulation nostalgia?
Live play doesn't fit studio modalities is an old story: also a very important one (the discipline of economy that 78s brought to jazz and 45s to pop really suited some musicians, even if it stifled others...)
What I'm getting at is studio possibilities -- essentially of artificial dimensionality of sound and antiphonal rhythm play, maybe others to do with contrlled layering of overtones -- that just haven't been replicated out in a live space. So that those who like to work at this soundface opt to refuse to deliver a misleading low-quality version, and say so out loud.
One thing not to `do' live though, and another to do live different, if that makes sense. (The Beatles stop being a live band, etc. But that's not really what we want.)
re: 47
Yeah, I was never really into 80s Coleman or Ronald Shannon Jackson, but I do remember watching a live video of the Decoding Society -- which I wanted to see as my 80s self was into Vernon Reid's playing -- and it was just a chaotic jumble and not in a good way. I take it that's the sort of thing you have in mind, with controlled layering and rhythm play, and so on, being ill-served in live performance?
Les Paul was living a double life soundwise -- he's one of the soloists on the JATP shows Norman Granz put on (to raise money for people arrested or police-harassed during the zoot suit riots iirc); which as a whole could hardly be more "live" and unstructured, and he's playing alongside Illinois Jacquet, whose style is about as far from "How High the Moon" as it's possible to imagine. But Paul ever even try to play his studio confections live? The Radiophonics really didn't; it wasn't part of their remit or intention (though some of them moonlighted as serious electronic composers at avant-garde festivals on the continent: but this notoriously meant plonking a tape-recorder on-stage, and switching it on, so the audience might as well have been listening to a record... ). It was a point of contention among the Darmstadt generation, Stockhausen and such, what the role of performance actually was in the age of the tape composition: it's one of the reasons that composing by dice-throwing became fashionable (not the only reason, though).
46. I'm the right age but I'm not going to say it. The Beatles never played Sgt Pepper (or anything else after 1965) live, nor did the Stones play Satanic Majesties live or the Beach Boys Pet Sounds. After Let it Bleed Stones rapidly reverted to recording fairly stripped down rockpop that reflected their live act and never looked back.
What happened in the 70s was that technology came on stream which enabled live performances to emulate studio sounds, and the prog rock bands picked up the ball and ran with it. These days Brian Wilson can play Smile live, and I believe he does.
re: 50
Yeah, Jacquet basically invented that raw RnB sax sound - Flying Home, with Hampton, etc. Paul's own sound around that time is pretty raw, although not especially original. I don't think he tried to play his studio stuff live, although there's some fun things from his TV show with him and Mary Ford doing various harmony guitar tricks, and so on. Although some of that looks mimed.
Yes, the OC and RSJ records -- some of them -- were using the stereo separation to pick out and detail interplay that very easily gets flattened and lost. Not hard to imagine that the foldback sound made a lot more sense on-stage -- where they were in control of it -- than the in-hall sound, very likely being adjusted by someone who didn't really know what he was supposed to be doing.
Everybody's forgetting the early masters of not-reproducible-live studio vocal wizardry.
And I'm forgetting to close my tags, so I guess we're even.
enabled live performances to emulate studio sounds
I suspect this isn't entirely true, at least not very quickly: stage amplification technology developed a lot in a very short time in terms of volume, which meant that much larger audiences were possible, and a handful of bands were interested in more complex capabilities, but I really doubt they solved the basic problems of the acoustics of the spaces they were in, which are as much to do with the particular buildings as the amp-stacks travelling with them. The backlash against prog in the 70s may well have been that the big shows were muddy and boring even for fans, because they compared badly with the records.
Pink Floyd experiment with a kind of sound joystick which "moved" sound around the hall, but I bet it was rubbish. And you see those photos of the Dead in front of a vast wall of marshall amps -- how can that have been any good?
Heh. The first records I ever had were Pinky and Perky records. My grandmother worked in a little radio/tv shop, and they had a little selection of 7" for kids.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCFE4xOvk90
Of course, notoriously, with lots of bands those vast walls of Marshall amps only have a couple of the amps plugged in -- 50 or 100 watt valve heads into a pair of 4x12s are fucking LOUD -- or there's some tiny amp sitting behind them with a mic in front of it.
I suspect this isn't entirely true, at least not very quickly
Depends on your definition of quickly. The Dead may not have been among the earliest adopters, I've no idea. Yes and Floyd were touring with a mixer in the early 70s and the sound/balance quality may not have been what you'd expect today, but it was so different from anything anyone had heard before that anybody who could afford them got aboard with months rather than years. But we're talking about what was at that date expensive kit that regional and local bands couldn't afford; it wasn't that they didn't want to.
Yes, that makes more sense -- though with the Dead I half-wondered if there was some mystic mushroom technology of total feedback at work, since total feedback is surely what you can expect when you stand in front of your own amplification.
My own hearing is good -- considering what I've subjected it to -- but it does seem to be on an odd equalisation setting: I can *never* recognise songs I know when they come on the pub jukebox, when all around me happily start singing along. And on the whole I sit through most live music thinking "bah the levels are all wrong"
Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour strikes me as an example.
With the Dead, iirc it's something about the wavelength of the lowest note on Phil's bass.
re: 61
Possibly, yeah, re: feedback. Some bands make a big deal of having a real backline -- rather than a load of amps not plugged in -- as they want to 'feel the air move', or whatever. I've never played through more than a single stack at one time, but that was really quite loud enough, thanks.
Total feedback can be fucking awesome. I saw an amazing feedback performance the other night.
Hipsters love their authenticity, I guess.
And what's wrong with that? Katie Perry, Madonna, etc., are about artifice, and that's why they don't get any shit for it. People who are about authenticity need to be either authentic, or good enough at artifice to appear authentic.
People have always admired musical performers for things other than their musical performances - that's true of Ms. Perry and Madonna, too. Their performances continue offstage.
(I don't know enough about Lana Del Rey to have an opinion on where she fits in here.)
Neil Young endorsed Ronald Reagan for president. I knew a huge Neil Young fan who stopped listening to him at that point. He and I used to debate this - with me taking the Stanley line - but my friend's choice didn't seem at all unreasonable to me.
Similarly, I think it's reasonable to not want to listen to Eric Clapton because he's a racist.
Something something Wagner mumble something.
re: 64
Yeah, but a lot of musicians who aren't explicitly about authenticity still get shit for not being authentic. Which brings me back to the usual rants about the pernicious after-effects of punk.
Chris at 59: yes, absolutely, but "very different from what had gone before" (which is true, the evolution for the groups successful enough to afford it was extraorinarily quick) is really not the same at all as "emulating studio sounds" -- which is the element I don't believe, and not just with hindsight via subsequent development. Of course emulation was the story everyone was telling themselves at the time, and it was what PF and Yes were keen on exploring. Unless I'm muddling this story, Yes got their kit cheap when Tomorrow broke up on tour in the north of England -- and Tomorrow and PF were regulars at places like the Round House, which had in-house "all-media" systems where the experiment could take into the account the permanent acoustic aspects of the building.
Quite apart from anything else (such as technology only working intermittently: early mellotron and moogs were notoriously capricious) live spaces have unavoidable bleed-throughs of sound that layered tape collage doesn't.
||
I' need some sophisticated NYC advice. I'll be at JFK for nearly 4 hours tomorrow afternoon (3-7). My niece, who lives in Nürnberg, is also in NYC (Manhattan) celebrating her 30th birthday. We'd like to meet briefly, at some place that makes sense, transit wise.
Ideas?
|>
66. Way to move the goalposts - "emulating studio sounds" != "perfectly replicating studio sounds". Nobody perfectly replicates studio sounds even now. Even if you're just singing along to a computer, the venue acoustics are going to affect the sound, as you point out. But any band who could afford it after about 1972 used the available technology to make their live sound as much like their recorded sound as possible, and many of them put a great deal of effort and ingenuity into it. Look, I was at the Round House, where were you?
I've lost track of what you're trying to prove here.
Someone said grit? Grit. Chess Records, obvs, though.
Yikes, I wasn't starting a fight! I think I was trying to "prove" (or less liverishly to "suggest") that if you're "using the available technology to make your live sound as much like your recorded sound as possible", but that "perfectly replicating studio sounds" is impossible, then different stages of adaptive response and reaction likely come into play. Which is to say this was all amazingly exciting and inspiring at first; but after a while (a few years, say) a lot of people got a bit bored and frustrated. I'm a few years younger than you and didn't start going to big shows till the end of the 70s -- Yes at the Stafford Bingley Hall, for example -- I was always underwhelmed; it always seemed muddy and confused. But as I say, I'm not sure my own ears are set correctly, so maybe everyone else is hearing the things I'm sadly hunting for in the sound, and my disappointment is always just mine.
What I was originally interested in upthread was the possiblity of a speculatively extreme version of the frustration -- where the gap between the studio sound and any possible live version would always be so great that the musicians upfront refused to attempt it, and performed distinctly and obviously different versions live as a consequence. Has anyone ever made this a thing? But people didn't quite seem to be understanding what I was getting at, so I was trying to refine the question and to explain why the examples they were offering weren't what I meant.
With the Dead, you have to contend with the reality that they were trying, in the studio, to recreate (in abbreviated form) their live experience. Sort of the opposite situation.
Sorry, CC: Dylan I suppose I'd file more under the "improvisation is always meant to be different" get-out clause, and I'm not sure I understand why Rolling Thunder was a refusal to replicate the studio sound because it couldn't be done, rather than because he decided he wouldn't -- but yes, Dylan in general has an unusually sceptical attitude towards idea that the recorded version is in any sense the canonic or "proper" version.
Just realised that John Martyn would probably fit Tierce's challenge (continued to do acoustic folkie versions of tracks that had gone synth heavy and ambient on record). Also the Specials post the second album (the live version of "Stereotype", for example is Yet Another Two-Tone Rave-Up, versus the version on the record, which is basically smooth jazz).
71.1. Yes, I think that's probably right. I started going to gigs in the late 60s, so my "ear" was adjusted to making the best out of the unbalanced and fuzzy noise produced by e.g. Jethro Tull at the Marquee. So Yes in 1972 sounded like limpid clarity by comparison, much closer to the recorded sound than to what I had become accustomed to as live sound generally. For a start, the band members could hear what each other were playing - we have progress here!
But to your original question, you've ruled out improvisors as not fitting your definition, and you've ruled out people at an earlier date who played differently live because they were constrained by the limitations of the studio (was Baby Dodds ever actually recorded playing drums rather than blocks?) We know that the people who were using cutting edge recording techniques in the 60s tended not to play that stuff live (because they couldn't), and that as soon as the idea was planted in their minds people started using technological fixes to try to emulate the studio sound, however imperfectly. So I think you have an answer, and the answer is no, nobody has ever (deliberately) done this.
ooh, yes, Jerry Dammers is an excellent call: and the third LP is called "The Specials aka: In the Studio", to stress the point -- though I think they'd actually broken up as a live band by the time it finally appeared, so we can't really put the theory to the test on that one.
Martyn I seem to remember using a whole armoury of echoplexes and such during live performances? Or anyway when I saw him playing "live" on the telly round the time of Solid Air itself.
re: 75
Yeah. FWIW, when I saw him in the late 80s, in a pub in Edinburgh, his set was split fairly evenly between folkie/acoustic and smooth/synth heavy stuff. The latter not, to my ears, very successful live. Then again, I didn't really like that stuff on record, either.
75. John Martyn is a good idea though. But not a common thing. I would contend that the Specials fall into the category of not having a canonical version, by and large.
I guess I was asking more in the present-day ultra-niche context of people performing live versions of Metal Machine Music and similarly fruitful endeavours.
(Along the same lines as 64) I'd say that finding out that the author of a piece of work is very unlike what you'd expected can reasonably affect how you read not just the author, but the work too.
If you find out that an author who you thought was a woman was really a man, you might reasonably wonder whether the feelings of the female characters were presented as insightfully as you'd imagined before. If it turned out that the book had actually been written by a computer program, you might wonder even more. Even if you still think the book's just as good as you did before, or for that matter come to think that it's better, you're going to respond to it in a different way than your earlier take on it.
So I don't agree with the guy quoted in the article in the OP - it should make a difference to your reception if you know that the songs on an album were written by committee or whatever, as opposed to their being the expression of a unitary consciousness. The New Critics are dead, guys. (This doesn't affect the truth of the point in 10 that it's dumb not to expect some level of image in the self-presentation of a pop singer.)
(Listening right now to the outtake version of Desolation Row that was released on No Direction Home. . . . boiled guts of birds)
I'm not sure that I can follow this debate, exactly, but it's worth remembering how relatively new in the history of pop music the dominance of the recording is. Prior to people like Les Paul, the idea was basically that you'd have recorded music as a cheap, not very good version of a live performance (often of a nonoriginal composition). The recording was an inferior version of the performance. It was really only (roughly) post-Beatles, post Motown, post Phil Spector that the idea that the recording was the key output of an artist's vision, and the live performance secondary. This is also tied into to valuing original artist composition as opposed to assuming that artist and songwriter were totally distinct.
I have a live version of Ghost Town that is a) awesome and b) very different from the record, which sounds a bit wet and insipid by contrast.
Oh, and the Lana Del Rey thing was just spectacularly stupid, along the lines suggested by K-sky.
I'd say it's pretty rare for bands to try to literally recreate their studio sound, and when they do it sounds terrible. I saw a Steely Dan concert where they played Asa straight through track by track, and came very close to exactly recreating the studio sound. It sucked.
The version of "Outside In" on Martyn's Live at Leeds is fantastic.
I just listened to the SNL performance. Get her some beta blockers.
84: you'd have recorded music as a cheap, not very good version of a live performance
This seems intuitive to me too, but I'm wondering if it is completely accurate. I expect the earliest record-buying public, who'd grown to adulthood without having the option of listening to recorded music (except for music boxes) probably felt this way almost universally, and of course there was the fidelity issue then too. But look at all that stuff on Document Records -- lots of regional or even local acts, that some people at least were listening to without even a chance of ever seeing the band live, which coincided, not coincidentally, with the rise of radio. Certainly, whatever cohort of audiophiles/musical gourmands of recordings existed then, it was probably pretty small. Then we have to consider the rise of sync sound in film as well -- some elements of live performance captured, but different ones than you got from a live radio program. I guess what I'm saying is that I doubt that there was one precise throughline for all of this "authenticity" stuff.
mumble mumble commercialization of "old timey" music, a la O Brother, Where Art Thou? mumble something mumble
Somebody should do a mash-up of Big Freedia's "Azz Everywhere" with the original Bulawayo Sweet Rhythm Band version of "Skokiaan".
Because everyone likes beer and sex.
The one time I saw GWAR the singer bragged about how they were really authentic, how they dressed this way when they were at home, etc. It was really funny.
Now that LDR's record has come out and it turns out her hideous treachery did not produce more than one or two great songs, and the world will not be conquered by her fraudulently acquired buzzzzzz, nobody cares anymore.
mumble mumble commercialization of "old timey" music, a la O Brother, Where Art Thou? mumble something mumble.
Something John Emerson has mentioned before, and which is also a personal bugbear of mine is that often that old-timey music is really pretty sophisticated stuff, which often got simplified and rendered more 'primitive' (and thus 'authentic') by/for urban/white audiences. A lot of the country blues players were quite capable of busting out jazz and ragtime; the 30s and 40s 'western' artists were playing music a lot closer to swing/jazz than their post-war successors; the changes a lot of the original electric blues artists were playing were often pretty 'hip', and so on.
John Cage, 4'11'' was created by the audience
I don't understand what representation, reproduction, the outside/in of an art-working is or means, but art is a different thing in the age of digital reproduction. When the "mass" (market) disappears, the individual disappears with it. That dichotomy was a historical artifact of the dialectic. "Authenticity" used to be a social construct, of course, but now makes no sense, because existence itself is performative. One used to be able to commoditize performativity, but the signs no longer signify. There is no outside in, no inside out.
Walmart is not a site of production, but a circulation of the reproduction of social relations. The Louvre is no longer about the art, but the tourists. Lady Gaga is a tool for the reproduction of her audience.
Oh, 90 is right, for sure, in that recorded music obviously dramatically increased the availability of music, even for people who never saw a live show. But it took at least 50 years -- not just artistically, but financially -- for the recording to supplant the performance as the cornerstone work of the pop artist, and, especially for the "band that writes its own songs and records an album that is the primary way people have heard those songs, and where the album earns money for the band and label and helps promote their live shows" model to come into place.
I have a tedious way to tie this all into the law and the need for copyright protection to preserve pop music, but even I know when to shut up.
There's a story in Guralnick's book on Robert Johnson that the people recording him -- for Peer? For ABC? Have to check... -- refused to set down any of his cover versions of Bing Crosby songs, because they wouldn't be the hardcore country blues the punters wanted. (It isn't just Bing, it's a variety of types of songs in all kinds of genres -- he made his living playing parties and dances so presumably had to do non-Hellhound requests all the time -- but Bing is the one that seems most incongruous.)
Plus think of the way that big-screen acting has to be tiny, where on-stage acting has to be much broader: actors used to both can deliver both.
By reputation Bruce Springsteen could do both.
I'd say it's pretty rare for bands to try to literally recreate their studio sound, and when they do it sounds terrible.
That's been my objection to many of the clips I've seen of Bowie performing live -- way, way too confined to be an interesting performance.
(sorry, Ralph Peer is a person, not a label: I wrote a lot about all this stuff 20 years ago, and it is coming out all topsy-turvy... )
But it took at least 50 years -- not just artistically, but financially -- for the recording to supplant the performance as the cornerstone work of the pop artist
I do think, "pop artist" is doing some work there. Random fact, according to wikipedia, "[Enrico] Caruso's 1904 recording of Vesti la giubba was the first sound recording to sell a million copies."
Clearly he was famous independent of and prior to his recordings, but the recordings sold to a large audience which had never seen him live. Also, it just amazes me that any recording sold a million copies in 1904.
I don't think it did sell a million copies *in 1904*: it sold a million copies (and more) eventually, and is the first record this is true of.
102: If I understand Halford correctly, I think his point is that Caruso would not have sold a million records without making his reputation first as a live act. That was sort of my point in referencing Bulawayo -- pretty much impossible for the average US citizen in 1947 to ever hear them live, but their song still had a huge impact, albeit mostly in cover versions.
I saw a Steely Dan concert where they played Asa straight through track by track, and came very close to exactly recreating the studio sound. It sucked.
In 2009 I saw them play The Royal Scam and miscellany. The arrangements were different from the album's, in part because - Donald Fagen's well-traveled voice having its limitations - they relied more on three back-up singers. But some of the guitar solos were almost note-for-note. I did not mind this.
I don't think it did sell a million copies *in 1904*: it sold a million copies (and more) eventually, and is the first record this is true of.
True, since it has been in print continuously since then. But I believe it was a massive hit at the time. I don't have that number available, but way more of a popular success than I would have guessed.
re: 99
Yeah. There seems to have been tons of crossover of that type. It went the other way, too. With Eddie Lang [Bing Crosby's guitar player] recording blues duets with Lonnie Johnson, but calling himself Blind Willie Dunn. Again, because of ideas of the sorts of music black and white musicians played.
Duets that are still pretty amazing sounding:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFHI4K-JlKc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WNL3RGxdFE
BB King sometimes talks in interviews about how crazy he was for the Texas Playboys as a young kid, and how much he wanted to play guitar like Leon McAulliffe.
If I understand Halford correctly, . . .
I don't disagree.
99: Now I want the lost "Johnson Does Crosby" album.
Noys ed, Communization and Its Discontents available online, fucking rocks
These actions(1) only survive by continuously pushing their own outside in front of them, by opening up spaces of rupture, and continuously inviting and then transcending not only the repression of the police and the rule of property but also forms of settlement, stasis and compromise that can emerge from inside antagonism. Still, against the repressive countermovement of the police, just as important are the alternate forms of belonging or sociality that fill in the space left by the expanding outside....Jasper Bernes, "Strategies of Struggle"
(1) California University Protests
(1a) Substitute "OWS", "Artists", "Individuals" there
The site of production has disappeared in the hurricane of circulation, and the only resistance left is to attack circulation/social reproduction/expression itself, to be your own negation. OWS is, to the degree it works, a protest without content, protesting itself, its own negation...
...I think I ruptured myself.
102 -- maybe I'm not expressing myself well. I don't mean records didn't sell, but when they did they were seen primarily as capturing a live performance, generally of a song that wasn't original to the artist and that the artist didn't write. The recording is shadows on the cave from the real thing, which was the performance (and not the "song"); it took a long time for the live performance to become shadows on the cave from the real thing, which is the recording.
Ok, that's confusing too but I give up. Off to work!
110: So you've completed your transition to being an insurrectionary anarchist? Congratulations, I guess.
I didn't find it that surprising that Robert Johnson was able to "sing all kinds", as Elvis said about himself at his first recording session. In a world with limited recorded music, he would have been in demand as an all-purpose local performer, like the cover bands of the 60s and 70s and 80s and I guess today. And like him, the best of the cover bands also produce original material, in the style they are best suited to. There are also plenty of uninspired cover bands who are very popular aping other people but don't have any particular speciality or desire to do their own stuff.
111: I really don't disagree with you.
If anything I was reacting to something which you didn't say, which is that there's a general sense of sound recording, as an industry, which started out small and niche and gradually expanded as technology improved, and that isn't completely true. Sound recordings were quite popular from remarkably early (I'm remembering this from Repeated Takes -- great book, and I could look up the exact claims at some point).
I didn't make my point well, but that's what I was thinking about.
95: I'm not a huge music fan but there's just no way on earth that album is that bad. Obviously some great betrayal occurred though.
God, Nick, why do you have to be so contrarian? Can't you just meet Halford halfway on this? For the sake of the blog?
There never has been any reproduction in live or studio performance, and that has always been the point.
This could be more fun if we analyzed the reactions to lip-synching onstage. What is "inauthentic" about that?
I want a band that does totally different unrecognizable versions of their studio stuff onstage. That announces "Now we are going to do Day in the Life" and then does Desolation Row.
Haha, I *hated* the Chanan book and gave it an extremely bad review in The Wire. I was being a bit territorial, probably (this is my BIG TOPIC back then), but I thought his grasp of the actual history was really sketchy -- basically gussied up to fit the big-name theory he was plonking down on top of it all. Which he also didn't have a very critical grasp of.
Haha, I *hated* the Chanan book and gave it an extremely bad review in The Wire.
Awesome -- seriously.
One possible reasons for our different reactions -- I don't listen to a lot of classical music (which seemed to be his focus), so I could read it as a bunch of interesting thought without being too invested in the narratives.
I was reacting to something which you didn't say
New mouseover text?
Now I want to read the book, and Tierce's review thereof. Also, tangent, I want someone to explain why older Deutsche Grammophon recordings always sound like shit.
I still think it's a totally fascinating -- and entirely under-examined -- topic. The PhD funding I didn't get last year (bah!) would have helped me kick-start a related research project (I had to put the original work on hold for family reasons).
basically gussied up to fit the big-name theory he was plonking down on top of it all. Which he also didn't have a very critical grasp of.
I should add, for what it's worth, that I didn't read the book as attempting to be particularly theoretically ambitious -- despite his gestures in that direction. I read it as, "I've been taking notes on these ideas for twenty years, and now I'm trying to organize them into a book, and here are a couple of organizing ideas."
I think it's quirky and personal, rather than a grand statement, and that was part of what I enjoyed about it.
I want a band that does totally different unrecognizable versions of their studio stuff onstage. That announces "Now we are going to do Day in the Life" and then does Desolation Row.
That's Bob Dylan.
Tierce writes or wrote for the wire?? Is it too late for this? (Though now that I look again I was already pwnd with "fire music" even back then.)
Jimi played the combined English and American national anthem at Monterey. There's no Youtube of it. I blame Halford.
Halford redeemed! They cut off the intro, unaccountably, but the "anthem" itself is here.
EDITOR once I was, young neb: but that was long ago and I have no sway there these days, just another dim blur from their time of legend.
67: Charley, that's pretty brutal. Getting from JFK to anywhere sucks. BUT! It would be possible to take the A train to downtown Brooklyn in about an hour and meet her somewhere near Jay Street. If you walk down Jay until it turns into Smith, you'll hit Dean St., where there is a cute little bistro called Bar Tabac, or, at Bergen, there's a Hanco's, which is a really nice banh mi shop.
There's a story in Guralnick's book on Robert Johnson that the people recording him -- for Peer? For ABC? Have to check... -- refused to set down any of his cover versions of Bing Crosby songs, because they wouldn't be the hardcore country blues the punters wanted.
This is also one of the major points of Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta.
Even more convenient, Charley -- get off at Lafayette in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. There are a billion little cute coffee shops and burger places around there.
67: Ooh, I just saw this, and four hours at JFK is hard -- it's really in the depths of Queens. It's more than an hour by transit to Manhattan, and not a reliable hour. Ideally you'd meet at some restaurant right by an A-train stop in Queens or Brooklyn, but I don't have a good suggestion.
Oh, never mind -- AWB's got you covered.
And do take the A rather than a cab, which can be a total crapshoot depending on timing and cabbie mendacity. I had one who went from JFK to Park Slope by going all the way around Brighton Beach and Coney Island first. Fun drive, but not a fun credit card bill.
And yeah, really an hour is being pessimistic. To Fort Greene it shouldn't take 45 minutes.
You could get to the Queens County Courthouse really fast (not even the subway, just the same airport train you'd take to get to the subway), but I don't know where to eat around there; everyplace I've tried has been kind of lousy. And that's a long trip for her.
87.
and these days, Fagan apparently doesn't have the lungs to sing anymore, so all of his vocal lines are quickly stuffed into a breath or two at the start of the verse. that sucks in a different way.
||
Lawyers, tell me about life in house, and particularly what the career path is like if you need to change jobs at some point in the future.
I'm currently a reasonably happy midlevel associate at a big firm, but recently learned of an opportunity for a 3-year term limited position in the general counsel's office at a big prominent university where I went for undergrad, a mile from my house. Second interview is tomorrow.
If I do this (if they make me an offer, obvs), I think I will be closing the door to being a litigator again at any time in the future. I think that's okay. And I think this job would very likely be 3 happy years. But the certain knowledge that I'd be looking for work again in another 3 years is unappealing. How worried should I be about that? Would a person with a clerkship, then 3-4 years at a firm, then 3 years in a university GC's office be in a weird unemployable hole because he jumped off the path too early?
Did I mention that my commute would go from 45 minutes to |>
That was weird. I think I inadvertently opened some kind of tag there.
... from 45 minutes to less than 20 (on foot) or like 6 (if I got a bike? I may be unduly influenced by that prospect.
|>
I can't google for it at work, but I once saw an image of a goatse-themed iPod cover, exposing the clickwheel IYSWIM. You could call it the iAnal.
on 138, I dunno. I think NPH is in that industry. Three year limited contract would make me nervous, but is there a shot that you could job-hunt within the uni? At other nearby unis?
Maybe, and those are questions I'll be asking them tomorrow. Previous holders of this position have gotten permanent jobs at other universities in the city, but one doesn't like to count on that because those jobs are few and far between. Which is also why one doesn't want necessarily to pass up this opportunity, because they don't come along very often.
What I'm more curious about is to what extent the skills I might get at this job would be attractive to private companies looking for in-house help. Not because I definitely want to go to the private sector (although, $$), but just because it would broaden the field of possibilities.
138: No. 3-4 years at a firm has been the industry average for a couple of decades now, and may be towards the longer side of the spectrum. I'd jump on the opportunity.
As for the rest of the thread, I suppose it has been a while since I said that popular music is a medium of charisma rather than content, and that criticism (professional or amateur) of popular music divides into genres through its enactment of the confusion of the two. Anyway, this thread brought that thought to mind.
Thanks, you two.
OY, it's not immediately apparent, to me at least, that your litigation career would be over. Would you be overseeing outside counsel litigating tenure denials and the like? Would the uni be a client worth having at a firm you'd be willing to work at?
At my old firm, we had a run of representing a local uni in misc discrimination suits, and some others. I always enjoyed them. Never forget the deposition where the plaintiff/prof's wife, attending to give empathy and support, learned of his affair (the end of which was apparently quite devastating to him, not that he could vent about it to her).
What I'm more curious about is to what extent the skills I might get at this job would be attractive to private companies looking for in-house help. Not because I definitely want to go to the private sector (although, $$), but just because it would broaden the field of possibilities.
Perhaps less appealing to the private sector than to the broader public sector (universities, foundations, museums), but three years wouldn't, I think, make you an untouchable to corporations. If you planned to stay there 7-10 years, then I think you might have chosen your path pretty irrevocably.
I represented a university (as outside counsel) and my impression was that their in-house people did a lot of transactional work and a lot of IP work, in addition to general litigation. I would think that that experience would be pretty marketable.
Since it is popular to slag authenticity in music here, I want to say a few things in support of it.
1. Authenticity in art is a coherent concept, and sometimes artists are being authentic. I'm thinking mostly of people who produce autobiographical work that is basically true.
2. Feeling an emotional connection to an artist producing autobiographical work is a completely legitimate reason to like the artist and the work.
Kurt Cobain wrote Smells like Teen Spirit to express his alientation from highschool culture. I'm pretty sure he really did feel that way, and I like the song because I shared that feeling.
There's nothing wrong with any of this. This is one of many legitimate functions of art. Given that this is a legitimate function, it is not surprising that people who went to an artist expecting a certain kind of art get upset when they discover they are really looking at a different kind.
Would a person with a clerkship, then 3-4 years at a firm, then 3 years in a university GC's office be in a weird unemployable hole because he jumped off the path too early
I know someone who did almost exactly this and seemed to be totally fine. She was at [big prominent local firm] for exactly that long, then went to the GC's office of [big prominent local university] and then went to [other big prominent local firm] no problem. Definitely didn't seem to generate a weird unemployable hole for her, though I guess she went back to Firm No. 2 before 2008, so maybe everything's changed in the Great Recession.
Thanks, guys, this is all very encouraging. I'm getting opinions from as many different directions as I can and there's a surprising variety of views. Hearing about actual examples of people who've gone this route is really helpful.
Hipsters love their authenticity, I guess.
And what's wrong with that? Katie Perry, Madonna, etc., are about artifice, and that's why they don't get any shit for it. People who are about authenticity need to be either authentic, or good enough at artifice to appear authentic.
People have always admired musical performers for things other than their musical performances - that's true of Ms. Perry and Madonna, too. Their performances continue offstage.
(I don't know enough about Lana Del Rey to have an opinion on where she fits in here.)
Yeah, but a lot of musicians who aren't explicitly about authenticity still get shit for not being authentic. Which brings me back to the usual rants about the pernicious after-effects of punk.
I've also been thinking about this and basically I think (a) that authenticity may be a poor choice of words, but that there's a legitimate criticism to be made and useful information conveyed by those criticisms and (b) I'd pay money to listen to Ttam debate, "the pernicious after-effects of punk" with Simon Reynolds.
I really don't know much about Lana Del Rey or the deal with her but I pretty firmly believe that most pop music exists within a context and that you have to have some expectation of what to expect from the music before you can really decide what you make of it*.
Pop songs are really short. A book or movie or, to some extent, a pop album has a certain amount of room to signal it's intentions but a single can easily present a wide range of possible interpretations** (and Lana Del Rey has been mostly known for a couple of singles). Particularly considering that Del Rey's songs sound like pastiche it's natural to wonder, "should I take this seriously, should I take this ironically, or are the trappings just window dressing and should I ultimately ignore them."
That's a somewhat tricky thing to write about, which is why I'm willing to forgive people using a word like "authenticity" which isn't very precise, but I think it's an important part of one's reaction to pop music.
*The exception would be either great songs which satisfy their ambitious so perfectly as to leave no doubt about their goals, or unambitious songs which are happy to invite the simplest possible interpretation.
** Consider, as a classic example, "Okie From Muskogie" Much ink has been spilled about whether the song is intended seriously, and with good reason.
Smart people judge music by the music. You know, pop acts for decades and lots of rock acts haven't written their own songs, so are they good or not? It doesn't mean anything. It just doesn't.
of course it means something. it means, at best, you give a band credit for a good performance and for good songwriting skills, or you give them credit for a good performance and for having good taste in music.
songwriting and having good taste in music are two totally different things. smart people would want to give appropriate credit.
The blockquotes were actually two different comments -- the last paragraph was Ttam. I was experimenting with a different formatting considering that I was quoting three different comments.
Authenticity in art is a coherent concept
I'd say it gestures at something true, but doesn't actually qualify as a coherent concept in and of itself. More importantly, I'm not willing to accept this as a flat statement without justification.
I thought I did offer a justification. Someone producing straightforwardly autobiographical material who is truthful about their own experience is being authentic in some basic sense of the word.
It doesn't have to be anything complicated. If Carly Simon really did write "You're So Vain" after breaking up with someone who is self-absorbed, then the song is in some basic sense authentic.
There's a terrific essay by Frank Kogan in Real Punks Don't Wear Black, 'Roger Williams in America/The What Thing': it pushes a long way beyond the usual impasse/tangle that people get into writing about reality and fakeness in pop. I should try and summarise it instead of just saying "it's terrific" but it's dense and wide-ranging, and it's late and I'm sleepy and watching The Good Wife. (Why am I watching The Good Wife?)
I feel like there was a high point, maybe in the mid-80s, of rock bands, like two guitars, bass and drums, getting songs written for them. Not writing their own songs, not doing covers of their favorites, but straightforwardly getting songwriters to write their songs. Whether it was "everyone is using drum machines and synths so who knows anymore", or the commercial nadir of country music leaving songwriters available to write rock songs, or the first instances of post-40-year-old rock dinosaurs who stayed popular as their creativity vanished ... I think that was a period when more major rock bands were getting songs written for them than ever before or since. You had bands like Cheap Trick and the Bangles, that weren't even clearly over the hill, coming out with records where the people in the band wrote maybe one and a half of the songs.
I thought I did offer a justification. Someone producing straightforwardly autobiographical material who is truthful about their own experience is being authentic in some basic sense of the word.
That's an example, not a justification.
I feel like there was a high point, maybe in the mid-80s . . .
I've mentioned this before, but the collection of Elvis Presley's top 10 hits has 38 songs on it and Presley has (shared) songwriting credit on 4 of those songs.
I'm surprised by that. I thought he had never written anything, like literally never anything.
Also, he's not a rock band. Irrelevant!
I'd just like to note for the record that my use of "authenticity" (and, for that matter, "hipsters") in 3 was deliberately tendentious and I was expecting pushback and discussion along these lines to emerge much sooner. As it turns out the thread took a different, more interesting direction instead.
All four look like "executive producer" credits to me. Though the rationale for these goes back to Halford's point about copyright -- without a writing credit, your share of the royalties is likely much slimmer, even if it's your performance that made the song a money-spinner.
IIRC, Madonna got plenty of crap.
Speaking of work by professional songwriters, when's the last time you folks listened to Mavis Staples singing Hard Time Come Around No More?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ixbah9u234
I don't want to jump on the Internet hates pretty young women bandwagon, but really, I'm willing to wait to have any discussion of this young woman until she's got a little more of a body of work going. (Ok, you didn't have to wait with Mavis Staples, but that's from the context of her early career.)
Watched the movie Hud last night, and was struck by a line from Homer Bannon: Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire. You're just going to have to make up your own mind one day about what's right and wrong. Not really something to apply to LDR, but the point applies to all sorts of flavor on the month things, including Newt and his moon colonies.
re: 151
My problem isn't with the music that came after punk [or with the music _of_ punk]. I love the vast majority of the music Simon Reynolds writes about in Rip it Up. I yield to no-one [Aragorn voice] in my love of a lot of the music of that period.
My problem is with a certain current in music criticism that's ubiquitous in much UK writing about popular music. Where punk [definitely not post-punk] or 'punkness' is seen as the sine qua non of music. The problem I have with that strain of criticism is much the same sort of thing that gets labeled as 'rockism'. Sweaty blokes yelling about misery or fucking is music. Everything else is for little kids, girls, and the terminally square. If it's not 'raw' it's not good.
Well, bollocks to that. I remember the nadir of that being a certain strain of grunge triumphalism, but it's been ubiquitous since at least the 70s.
FWIW, Reynolds, in his neophilia and celebration of the experimental in pop -- and celebration of pop and dance music, not just rock -- is pretty much the antithesis of the sort of stuff I dislike [in criticism].
Looking for a good contemporary version of I'll Take You There, I see that Mavis told an interviewer that Dylan had asked Pops Staples for her hand in marriage.
Turn it up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l64Bte5ygvM
FWIW, Reynolds, in his neophilia and celebration of the experimental in pop -- and celebration of pop and dance music, not just rock -- is pretty much the antithesis of the sort of stuff I dislike [in criticism].
Fair enough, that was just a joke anyway, but I certainly won't challenge your love of post-punk.
For myself I really like his writing but have much less overlap with his musical tastes. I definitely remember thinking that reading Rip It Up was way more entertaining for me than listening to all of that music would have been.
I'm just not much of a punk.
Yeah. The 'yield to no-one' was also a joke. I don't really listen to that much of that stuff at the moment, although I did a lot at one time. Gang of Four's 'Entertainment!' would still be on my desert island list of albums, though.
OT: I have shortly to dress for this evening's event, reprobates. Should I wear a tie? Twenty to thirty years ago, it would have gone without saying, but who the hell knows anymore? More important, would wearing a tie at this point scare off an age-appropriate woman not in the financial-legal sector?
I've lost track: what is the event?
I fear to divulge, but it is related to the arts. Not a book party.
Which tie? I have laid out a navy suit and solid black tie, for evening, but I could get more colorful if the distaff side thinks that would have more woman-appeal.
What manner of shirt are you wearing?
(I assume Sir will be wearing a shirt.)
You can imagine, Flip, that 'the arts' is pretty broad for the question at hand. I never wear a tie unless someone is paying for it. This age appropriate woman, though, needs to see the real Flip. And the real Flip wears ties to evening arts events. Right? If it scares her off, you're scaring her off, and it's a good thing too.
BE YOURSELF, YOU HAPLESS OAF
A solid black tie is about the only tie I would absolutely not recommend with a navy suit.
Twenty years ago was the era of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", so no tie. Or shirt.
The texture contrast is important.
As to the actual tie, that depends on the art. Nothing wrong with being the most conservatively dressed man in the room, but you want it to be a close call.
Red, blue, green, pink, gray, purple, yellow, orange? All fine. Not black.
I believe that this tie at its widest is 3.25". Middle of the road.
Actually, Andy seems to be of two minds about the issue.
I am not going to wear orange or yellow, ever. My grey ties are too light for evening. My reds are too boldly patterned. The blue ones seem a little too conference room-esque.
Other than grandma, only men have risen to the fly. I'm going to drop out, and drink some whiskey I keep here in the office. See you guys later.
I could get more colorful if the distaff side thinks that would have more woman-appeal
Sexist.
Just wear whatever you'll feel comfortable in, dude.
Before reading the link in 186, I hadn't considered a knit tie. That might work well.
(10 year old single malt Irish. Will there be any at the art event? Could make the tie debate -- as if there was ever any answer but blue -- moot.)
re: 191
Particularly the velour adult onesie.
(If your concern is, as it seems to be, that a suit+tie might be too formal, well, aren't you, as CCarp observes, the sort who enjoys playing dress-up? Couldn't you carry yourself confidently even in a room full of shabbily dressed boho slobs? Certainly: you won't seem out of place at the event, because you will feel inwardly in place in your outfit.)
I'll see whether my solid navy satin tie still makes an acceptable knot. I thought I had a nice navy knit tie but it seems to have disappeared.
Particularly the velour adult onesie.
If that's how Flip chooses to garb himself, I will not put him down.
Whatever. I'm sure the black will look fine.
193 just made me really excited to get some work done, go home, drink whiskey, and watch something long from my Netflix queue. I love the power of suggested.
195: The question is whether the formality of a tie would scare the woman off by implying either an off-putting aggressiveness (i.e., being the sort of dipshit who goes all "We're in a relationship! I own you!" after one date; lots of terrifying horror stories about those guys in the ether) or an awkward formality.
195 is a good point. I am the sort of person who would enjoy being a little overdressed, but I didn't used to be. It's good to think ahead. In general, I say go with your skinniest non-clashing tie.
(I wish I had more occasion to dress up, so that I could justify spending money on a new suit -- I feel as though all of my suits are boringly loose-styled, beyond a tailor's reach. I did just have a couple of old blousy shirts tailored to fit me, $17/pop, worth doing.)
199: It is evening. I'm not wearing a dinner jacket but, you know, come on.
a tie would scare the woman off by implying either an off-putting aggressiveness (i.e., being the sort of dipshit who goes all "We're in a relationship! I own you!" after one date
I'm having difficulty imagining circumstances in which a tie could imply that, unless the tie actually says on it: "We're in a relationship! I own you!" If that's what it says, definitely don't wear that particular tie. In fact, throw it away.
What about an adorable formality? I've never been put off by a man who seems to have put a little too much effort into looking nice. It's flattering.
As a last resort you could call (or text!) her and ask how formal an event it is, like should you wear an evening gown or is a cocktail dress ok.
204, 205: One would prefer both to look one's best and to look as though one's best has been achieved effortlessly, naturally, relaxedly.
206: That's what I have you people for.
As if touched by the spirit of Cary Grant/Fred Astaire/The-Duke-of-Windsor-without-all-that-closet-Nazism.
Do you normally, when wearing a tie, behave stiffly and awkwardly (or more so than on other occasions)? Surely not. It is to you as water is to a fish; it is your medium. Will it, then, convey awkward formality? How could it? Do you expect her to show up in a t-shirt and ripped jeans? Even then, what problem? You might make an odd-looking pair (I admit it), but this fact need not create awkwardness between you. You are too easy-going, effortless, natural, relaxed for that.
209: Spot on.
Maybe a little less daring in combining patterns than HRH.
Flip, don't you have a thing for slightly inappropriate socks? That could convey an air of not-too-seriousness.
Do you have any regimental, school, club ties associated with regiments, schools, or clubs to which you do not belong? Wear one of them as a test of her perspicacity.
212: I'm a little shy of scaring her off. Maybe next time.
213: Certainly not, sir!
You have a tear-away suit, right? (For after.)
Who exactly would be scared off by socks?
I'm a little shy of scaring her off. Maybe next time.
But don't you want to be able to say that you once had a date go wrong because of the insouciance of your socks?
You have to be kidding.
Ties are most certainly the symbol without equal of Eurocentric imperalist patriarchal aggression. Saudis, Indians, Japanese, all cultures have had to put on the tie. It probably means "we own you" to favored men, but it does mean "I own you" to everybody else.
Definitely a tie. How else to express sexy, sexy hegemony?
Also -- pocket square?
White linen pocket square, I think.
re: 220.last
Of course. How else to communicate via the Imperialism hanky-code?
White for annexing a country.
Off-white for annexing a country via the mechanism of a fixed plebiscite.
Purple or lilac for extracting tribute and installing a suzerainty, but not actually occupying.
Yellow for forcing them to export their raw materials to you, which you'll sell back to them at inflated prices as consumer goods.
And so on.
I don't want Fop! I'm a Dapper Dan man!
Completely accepted and taken for granted, as if you had never given Attaturk or Meiji a moment's thought.
It is exactly what I said it was, and since a King or CEO or tv reporter is more likely to wear a tie than not, it is a symbol of hegemony, not submission.
Attaturk and Meiji wanted to be hegemons. They put on the tie.
Wow, just completely internalized.
Don't forget the imperialist trouser.
You're my soul, and my Meiji Restoration, you're all I've got, to get me by.
Bob surely wears a kilt.
But seriously, McManus is right. Instead of that horrific symbol of genocide and domination, the Western business suit and tie, you should dress in a close approximation of the traditional costume of the Native American tribe indigenous to your locale. Not the fancy dress kind that the dancers wear to pow-wows, either. You want some brain-tanned buckskin, with porcupine-quill decorations, and plenty of bear grease and woodsmoke rubbed into the leather. Let your hair flow freely, unrestrained by the brutal dictates of Euro-American cultural domination. If possible, bring some stone or copper tools, and perhaps some small trade goods that have made their way up from Meso-America through a long and convoluted series of interlocking trade routes, to express your appreciation for the diversity and sophistication of pre-Columbian societies.
I vote for fun socks unless this truly is the kind of art where whimsy of any sort is frowned upon. It sends the message that there's more to you than meets the eye, plus when she comments you know she's been checking you out.
Did Native Americans not tie their hair back, or braid it? Have Westerns lied to me?
I vote for fun socks unless this truly is the kind of art where whimsy of any sort is frowned upon.
IME/O it usually sends the message "Look at me! Despite the fact that I'm wearing the same uniform as all the other guys, I'm really wacky and fun! No really!"
It's entirely possible that I just hate fun.
233: True, and I don't want him to have some cliched "I may wear a suit but I'm not A Suit" thing going on. I just figured that if his socks impress people here, they're particularly awesome socks. But you're on his side about how she might judge them negatively, so I defer to you and admit that knitting probably makes me differently sock-aware (and differently distaff-y, though not in a spinning way) than most on the distaff side would be.
230: That the buckskin is tearaway goes without saying.
Wear a suit and tie, but if anyone else is wearing a suit and tie, go up to him and say, "Excuse me. It's a culture, not a costume."
More communization. Maybe I'm liveblogging it.
any opposition between form and content becomes increasingly incoherent. As such, man is time's carcass in that living labor power is valued only in accordance with its form: it is that form, fully developed into the general equivalence of value, alone which is of worth.Man, the original source of that form, is a husk dominated by an abstraction with no single inventor. Form fully reenters and occupies the content as if it were dead matter, incapable of generating further adequate forms. And when it is productive to do so, time makes those bones dance.
This is your cue, y'all. You know what to say.
Brrrraaaiiinnnsss
I wore a tie to me dad's funeral, early 80s I think.
If there's a piano, you should go over to it in your buckskin suit (which will be glazed with fruit), sit, sway, and say, "Hey everyone, watch me play!"
156 Why am I watching The Good Wife?
Why would you not be watching The Good Wife?
I feel like I'm being a television evangelist. A televangelist, if you will.
I know a guy who makes brain tanned buckskin clothes. He can start a fire with a wet stick and half a growler of stale beer.
What will your response be when she asks "um, why are you wearing a suit"?
Instead of that horrific symbol of genocide and domination, the Western business suit and tie, you should dress in a close approximation of the traditional costume of the Native American tribe indigenous to your locale.
In Flip's case the relevant tribe would be the Munsee Lenape; this article has some relevant details and a picture. The section on clothing says:
From colonial times until recent years when the Lenape took up modern clothing, the dress of the men consisted of a shirt of calico or deerskin, a robe, usually of strouding or broadcloth, a breechcloth of the same material, leggings of deerskin or cloth, and deerskin moccasins, made in one piece and puckered to a single seam down the instep - a familiar type in the central, eastern, and southern portions of the Eastern Woodland area (fig. 41). Many shaved their heads, leaving a short bristling crest, or roach, of hair running from a point just back of the forehead to the nape of the neck. At the crown, a part of this hair, allowed to grow long, was braided into a slender queue or scalplock, upon which an eaglefeather or two was tied. Others let their hair grow and hang loose. Sometimes head-bands of fur were worn, or caps decorated with bunches of loosely attached feathers, resembling somewhat the Iroquois style. Facial painting was universal, and tattooing was frequently practised.
...
After considerable trouble I succeeded in gaining some information from Indian sources as to the kind of clothing worn before the arrival of the whites. ... In those days leggings were made of deerskin instead of cloth, and fancy embroidery in porcupine-quills and moosehair, dyed in different colors, took the place of the ribbon appliqué and beadwork seen today.
So there you go.
It's not LA, Rob. People are civilized.
No, it's perfectly adequate as a response, although it's not clear why he would be calling her "Rob."
Perhaps that's her name.
Rob Lunchy.
Good point. Of course, I'm wearing a suit right now. In LA.
What's weird is that Flip has apparently never been to an arts-related event of the kind he's presumably attending even as we speak. I mean, how do people usually dress for these things? No idea? Hm, that does make a person queasy.
I've told before, quite a while ago, the tale of the time I attended a hippie wedding on a small artsy island and wow, I was the most conservatively dressed person there ... which was quite a surprise. No one held it against me.
I wore a tie to a Godspeed You! Black Emperor concert once.
What's weird is that Flip has apparently never been to an arts-related event of the kind he's presumably attending even as we speak.
Why is that weird? I presume most people have never been to any given type of arts-related event.
It's totally a burning man regional.
Maybe not any given type, but there are certainly many types of art events that I'm quite sure few people ever attend in their lives.
I've been to a few art shows in a bathroom. No tie.
Using the quote from 236 is my new social-event goal.
254: I had taken Flip for a man of the world, that's all.
Who would probably know that he could wear a suit to a burning man regional if he wanted to, but not for, like, a date.
Then again, the guy I was seeing on the small artsy island whereon there was that wedding wore a three-piece suit for it, I believe in a costumey frame of mind, and he was mostly hot and uncomfortable the whole time, but really no one cared one way or the other.
260: 259 was mostly a joke about how people dress for burning man (regionals): they're not the kind of thing you'd go to on a date, for one thing.
I've definitely worn a tie at burning man.
I've definitely worn a tie on a date.
There you go, then! Wear whatever you want. I assume sweatpants are okay pretty much all of the time.
Don't wear sweatpants on a date. Yoga pants are fine if Flip has the ass for it.
The site of production has disappeared in the hurricane of circulation, and the only resistance left is to attack circulation/social reproduction/expression itself, to be your own negation.
Thanks, Bob--this will be my new elevator speech for what I'm doing with my life.
Don't wear sweatpants on a date.
Wait, why not?
What if Flip has the ass for sweatpants? No sense hemming that glory in.
Wait, why not?
Because one will come off as a sloven.
One might be a lots of things one wishes to display only after dating for a longer period of time.
There's no need to cast aspersions, neb. We've already read words about what might be thought about those who strangle their necks with ties.
I've just remembered that you (neb) wore a suit to UnfoggeDCon2, and I think to 1 as well: dear sir, you are fine.
This is all in a teasing spirit. Obviously I would not wear sweatpants on a date. Most of us, I tend to think, have generic outfits that we consider suitable for this or that type of occasion.
I didn't wear a suit to either of those! I wore a tie to the second one, though.
I wear khaki pants and blue shirts to nearly everything.
Wait neb if what you wore to unfoggidycon 2 wasn't a suit, what was it?
I wore a corduroy jacket of one color and denim pants of another color, how is that remotely a suit?
I hope neb will answer 279. Maybe it will be some kind of technical matter to do with what constitutes a "suit".
Generally speaking, it is desirable for the components of a suit to be cut from the same cloth, and to be intended to go together.
278: Can you get me a deal on a flat screen?
You were wearing jeans?? No way. At Unfoggedycon 2?
Hrmph. This is a silly argument.
Speaking of menswear definitions: when I purchased a waistcoat at H&M a month ago, I was shocked to see it labeled a "blazer" on the tag. What the hell? Very cursory googling backs me up on this: a blazer is a jacket that isn't part of a suit. A vest/waistcoat is something else entirely.
Clearly, the world is going to hell.
I vaguely remember that neb was wearing something like a corduroy jacket, because I fingered the fabric, which made him uncomfortable -- I do remember that. So okay, but I can't speak for the pants.
I think they may have been yoga pants -- far, far too awkward.
207: One would prefer both to look one's best and to look as though one's best has been achieved effortlessly, naturally, relaxedly.
As I mentioned in the other thread, one word: sprezzatura. Your next assignment for this relationship is to read up on your Castiglione.
290: You are Lee Siegel and I claim my five pounds.
I was just going to mention Siegel. That association is probably going to make it impossible for me to ever read Castiglione.
285: I thought it went:
Jacket that goes with a matching pair of pants: suit jacket
Jacket without a matching pair of pants: sport jacket
Sport jacket with brass buttons: blazer
||
God this made me laugh.
Smuggling ring accused of using black drivers to avoid detection
"It's absolutely true that most of the people involved in transporting human smuggling networks are Hispanics, by virtue of the fact that most customers are Hispanics," said Special Agent Claude Arnold of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in Los Angeles. "This organization thought, 'What if we recruited those who attract less attention from law enforcement?'
Oh man, what kind of criminal plan in this country involves using black guys to avoid getting pulled over? Is this a Chappelle prank or something?
|>
One is of course familiar with the literature of sprezzatura.
Returned from the event now, having spent roughly 2-3 hours in light conversation with this woman, discussed lunch next week after learning that she had prior commitments for this weekend and gotten another friendly hug on parting, one is oddly uncertain where one stands with this woman.
296: Well, she can't know how things stands until she discusses the evening with her imaginary internet friends in the group blog she frequents. You didn't think you were the only one with cabal of hyper-intelligent advisors furthering your interests, did you?
She had some friends there. One of them told me I was very well-dressed and asked what I did.
"Nothing, if I can help it." (A little glib, but it went over OK.)
I certainly hope I made enough of an impression to be under discussion with her coterie of Internet or in-person lunatics. (Kid because love!) I took a leaf from the book of doing the opposite of the ugly things that people have mentioned about dating and told her that I would like to see her again. I guess we'll see what happens.
Huh. Yeah, I dunno. That's the sort of situation that I always found intensely frustrating about dating.
She is intriguingly difficult to read, without being aloof or standoffish. Maybe she's just cautious.
"Nothing, if I can help it."
s/b
"As little as possible."
Have some respect for the classics, people.
So wait, whose suggestion was lunch next week?
And was the entirety of the evening spent at this one event, or did you two go off by yourselves later? I'd actually take it as a good sign that she invited you to something with her friends, and if they were there the entire time it's not entirely surprising she didn't send you off with more than a hug.
Mine, I think, but we were sort of in the midst of describing our next week's schedules to one another.
And you suggested *lunch*? Oh dear oh dear oh dear.
About half the time she was involved, the other half we were sitting together. The just-a-hug thing didn't bother me, but she seemed a degree or two less open than yesterday -- as you say, that could well have been due to the site/presence of her friends and colleagues.
306: I'm doing my best! She's really busy! Apparently.
She is intriguingly difficult to read, without being aloof or standoffish. Maybe she's just cautious.
"Maybe you're fed up. Maybe you want to be by yourself. Who knows? You look down and see a tortoise, Leon de Lunchy."
Could you people be just a bit more reassuring?
Eh, it's probably fine, given how interested she seemed before. It's just hard to say what's going on with this sort of thing.
this sort of thing
You mean women? Because that's sexist.
I mean dating. Do you want your reassurance or not?
Could you people be just a bit more reassuring?
Dude. She invited you to a thing with both her friends and her colleagues? I won't say you're golden, but you're doing pretty damn well. Just make sure you make your intentions clear, and everything'll be fine.
What Josh said. You were interesting enough to warrant a further vetting. Not a guarantee of happily ever after but encouraging.
Well, I don't think they were her closest friends. More like work friends.
Dont just stand there, bust a move.
She could just be wary of people she met on the internet in the abstract, rather than any wariness related to you in particular. Meeting in public for lunch, bringing friends, etc. are the kind of advice you hear about how to make sure you don't meet some crazy person through the internet.
Huzzah, Flip. Everything's going great. Now: just chill out and be cool. For next 24 hours, act like you're Steve McQueen.
George W. Bush, on the other hand, got elected and re-elected, despite his enormous, substantive shortcomings, because ordinary people found it easy to relate to him at a personal level. They felt he wasn't trying to be someone different from who he was.
As my daddy always told me, once you can fake that you've got it made.
For next 24 hours, act like you're Steve McQueen.
Or anyone else famous for repeated desperate attempts to escape, really.
I am really surprised that a plain black tie is a normal thing to wear. Here that's what the close family wear at funerals. The undertaker also.
Ok, Flip, time to kiss her. Can we stage this as a group?
Just make sure you make your intentions clear, and everything'll be fine.
I wasn't aware that Flip was clear about his own intention as yet. To judge from the stuff he's been posting.
Also, what Emir says about black ties. If you're wearing a navy suit you should wear a colourful tie with it, within reason. Slightly loose, so she has an excuse to adjust it.
Josh and Biohazard are so right. Seriously, even if they're work friends, taking you out in public with them seems huge and definitely a sign that she's going to want to see more of you. It sounds like this week's lunch was pleasant and so it's a good sign that she wants more of the same.
It really is a sign that she wants us to stage her seduction. Also, Valentine's day is coming up.
So you'll want a Macy's Day balloon in the shape of your penis.
324, 326: I wasn't going to say anything, because I'm bad at menswear. But I was thinking it. Maybe things have changed here and black ties are ordinary now.
The next time you talk, I'd schedule an evening date if at all possible. Nothing wrong with a couple of lunch dates, but at some point it starts looking like you're lunch buddies rather than dating.
Also much easier to move to teh sexxing part of the process if you are having an evening date. Not to the lower the tone, or anything.
I was trying not to be all vulgar about it (yeah, out of character, I know) but that was my thought.
Also much easier to move to teh sexxing part of the process if you are having an evening date.
One speculates that we are at least a few dates from that the agenda committee taking up that proposal for consideration by the full body.
Lunch dates scare me because the local free weekly used to run huge ads for "It's Just Lunch." This was a dating service for busy professionals run by women who were clearly trying their best to look like they'd never murdered anyone who didn't call them back after a lunch date.
Hey, she just wrote back thanking me for coming and asking if I've ever been to a particular restaurant.
Play it cool, old boy.
33: I may be out of step with the kids these days, but you've been out three times already, with plans for a lunch next week before any possible evening date, making such an evening date the fifth? While a gentleman is never pushy, I think at least some meaningful hand-holding might be appropriate in the near future.
asking if I've ever been to a particular restaurant
If NYC requires those health inspector signs in the window, you can go by that.
335: one assumes that you haven't, but have heard good things about it, and would love to try it, perhaps on (day), if she's free in the evening.
337: wait, is that what Flip does for a living? Tough date.
"That restaurant? Yeah, I remember! B-rated! Terrific food, but don't have anything with salad. And try and sit towards the front, away from the air vent, there were... things."
338: I have been on dates before, neb.
Back in the Pleistocene.
My apartment would currently not pass a health inspection. The building used to be seething with mice until around seven years ago, and then we got a new porter who solved the problem for a long time. Now they're back: the last couple of months our apartment has been full of tiny little scampering feet. We tried a humane mousetrap, and they laughed at, so we've been putting out glue traps, which completely suck, because you have to kill the damn mouse rather than letting it die of thirst. Thank heavens for cast-iron frying pans.
341: Assuming the reporting is accurate, there is literally no problem whatsoever. I don't think I've ever heard a series of early dates described that went this smoothly. Flip merely enjoys the abuse. (I suppose at some point you'll need to share that with her, come to think.)
If you put the glue trap in an out of the way place, you can let it die of thirst. I don't even notice them until they stink. Of course, I'm talking garage and basement.
I killed a resident mouse once, with poison. I still feel bad about it. Poor little fellow.
Yes, that's good, Flip, show your sensitive side.
I caught a mouse once in a spring trap. It didn't die because I only caught the foot. I threw the mouse and trap in the dumpster without killing the mouse. I still feel bad about it.
343: I do not enjoy the abuse, but the comedy you reprobates find in my awkward, stumbling attempts to connect with another human being relieves some of the stress involved in departing from my accustomed solitary ways.
Buck isn't fond of having cats in the house. And DogBreath, who's very old these days, would probably be terminally sad about having a cat hassling her.
The maddening thing is that I actually kind of like mice: they're cute and appealing. If they'd just stay off the countertops, or remain continent somehow, we could work something out. But if they're going to befoul my kitchen, I have no choice.
or remain continent somehow
Maybe this thing comes in a smaller size.
Ok, Flip, time to kiss her. Can we stage this as a group?
Isnt this the 4th date?
On her blog, they are asking her why they arent having sex yet.
350: It's a sad fact that Miss Bianca and Bernard are fictional.
352: Christ, if she has a blog ... well, I don't know, but I hope she doesn't.
Have you not kissed yet?
You are in dangerous territory if you havent. Any further dates without kissing are a bad sign.
Not trying to stress you. Quite the opposite.
Do it. It is expected.
It could simplify things. If you put her staff of advisors in touch with Unfogged, the two groups of representatives could hash out what each of the two of you wants out of life, decide whether it was a good idea to go forward with it, and inform the both of you of our determination. Much lower stress than trying to run your own life.
We have barely grazed, much less held, hands, will. Any sane woman would be cautious about some crazed loner reserved and diffident gentleman of scholarly mien, no matter how well dressed, she met on the Internet. At least, that's what I plan to keep telling myself.
355.1: Right. This shouldn't be stressful at all. If this is starting to make you nervous, that's a very bad sign. Remain relaxed at all costs.
If they'd just stay off the countertops, or remain continent somehow, we could work something out
"a long grey rustling blur emitting a fine spray of urine like a peripatetic lawn sprinkler."
http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/mouse.html
Cautious is good. That is why you cannot deviate from the norm of kissing her immediately.
LB's idea is excellent. Have her people contact us.
I suggest that we keep dsquared and Alamedia off the committee. Maybe Apo too.
356: "Madame, I demand would like satisfaction. My seconds will call on your seconds."
363:
Seconds would be a bad term to use.
Ok, Flip, time to kiss her. Can we stage this as a group?
I'm willing to take one for the team and kiss her. How about the rest of the group?
364: There is a form to be observed, sir.
Internet "first dates" are not really dates, they're more like when you meet someone at a party and talk and then you ask for their phone number at the end. It's at the pre-dating stage. So really this will only be your third date. But definitely you're at the point where you want to make sure things are going in a romantic direction rather than a friend direction. Which means a kiss, or making it clear that however much you enjoy lunch you'd like to take her out on a "real date."
I felt compelled to watch that entire video. For Flippanter.
Glamour: How Do I Know If It's a Real Date?
b) He will keep all physical contact to an appropriate minimum. Should She find John physically irresistible and green-light him for further physical contact, She should know that John doesn't really have sex on the first date, though he makes exceptions for oral, and that this is no reflection on Girl's attractiveness, what she ordered for dinner or the cleanliness of her living space.
Moby:
You should hold out for benefits.
Internet "first dates" are not really dates, they're more like when you meet someone at a party and talk and then you ask for their phone number at the end. It's at the pre-dating stage.
A stage generally only reached by pre-dators.
370: John sounds like a douche and a half.
374: Referring to a woman's genitalia as "her living space" is pretty questionable, it's true.
Flip, do you have a bridge, a lamp and some drizzling rain? And a trenchcoat?
An apple turnover? I like apple turnovers.
You can get all those things from SkyMall.
Flip, do you have a bridge, a lamp and some drizzling rain? And a trench coat?
I know where to find those things, but I think it's a bit early for "Hey, let's go to Paris for the weekend."
And a note that says "Wanna finger-bang on the bridge?" with boxes for checking yes or no?
Or some Bachman-Turner Overdrive? No woman can resist a man who's Takin' Care of Business.
Flippanter's soundtrack to the scene in 377:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OKQdp6iGUk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNmbDg5UV_c
Finger-guns are the finger-banging equivalent of wagging your tongue between your V-spread fingers.
I've been listening to those two lately. That, Coleman Hawking, and Chet Baker.
I thought protocol was casual contact early, small of the back or an arm or something, and peck on the cheek to take the temperature. Mumbling and looking at your feet can be kind of sweet, but reaching out even awkwardly is better than not doing so.
Flip, can you arrange to walk somewhere, and then take her hand? Hand-holding is good.
Holding hands is good. Tickle her palm with your index finger and then confusedly act like she did it to you. Maybe accuse her, but keep it friendly at first.
Way back in the archives is a thread where Bitch Phd. gave instructions on how to make a move in a smoove manner. Most of it sounded like good advice, although she did advise the "Sitting close together on a couch, stretch, and then leave an arm inconspicuously on the back of the couch, sort of kind of around the target," which would I think in practice look as if you were in middle school.
391: Then move on to genuine hostility. Begin to weep. Flee.
It's a little difficult to tell whether some of these suggestions are serious. Mostly because some of the things people do when they're flirting are objectively ridiculous.
390 is very un-British. Holding hands comes after sex not before, in the chronological sequence.
Anyway, the kissing thing is eye contact and distance. You should know if kissing would be welcome. Surely?
395: Traditionally in the UK, initial sexual encounters are performed no-hands. It's kind of like bobbing for apples.
("Ah, 'ducking for apples'. There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life." Mrs. Parker)
re: 398
Damn right.
Anyway, I've not been single for 11 years. I wouldn't know wtf to do anymore.
399: Same here. Not that I knew what to do back in the day, either. I only managed to get laid dating Buck by simply sitting on his couch and refusing to go home until he finally broke down and kissed me. I'm sure there was a more direct way to go about it, but nothing occurred to me at the time.
The robot is doing better than the humans. See 390 and go for a walk. Hold hands. Squeeze gently while pointing out something interesting, like the artwork a homeless person did in vomit on the sidewalk.
re: 400
As per previous conversations about dating, I wasn't any good at 'picking people up' in some conventional way, and would have no idea how to make myself attractive to someone. But I was good at working out when women/girls found me attractive already, and when was the appropriate point to kiss/whatever. I had a reputation at my workplace, when I was in my mid 20s, which wasn't really earned, but as I worked in an IT place I was a bit like the tallest pygmy.
I expect Flippanter will do better ignoring the Unfogged greek chorus, but where is the fun in that?
...and would have no idea how to make myself attractive to someone.
Wear more velour.
Flip, you're doing great (and unlike all you people who have been partnered for ages, I can speak from lots of relatively recent experience). 367 is exactly right; the first meeting isn't a date yet. You're on date three, not four. I love that you told her you would like to see her again.
You don't have to rush kissing, unless you'd like to, but there are intimacies that will let her know that your intentions aren't platonic. Hand in the small of the back as she goes through a door ahead of you. Holding the hug to brush cheeks. Hand holding. Those will all get amplified when she talks about this on her blog.
Finally, as to her intentions? I can speak very firmly to those. Is she a reasonably social person who does stuff with her co-workers and has friends? Then SHE HAS FUCKING FRIENDS. She has lots of friends. She is not interviewing for friends. If she wanted friends, she would call her own damn friends. She is not a nice person who just doesn't realize that she's stringing along some new guy on dates while she is only looking to add to her friends collection. If she is giving you time, it is to figure out whether you will be her honey. That may be mutually unresolved, but she is not, like, just a friendly clueless person who doesn't realize she is on dates when she is only making a new friend.
403: It's not like we're actually trying to help, here. See 343.
404: Moleskin also good for a more subtly fuzzy fabric. Having to explain that it's not made from real moles can make an interesting topic of conversation.
She is not interviewing for friends.
Right. She's looking for a romantic partner or a victim. If she invites you to her basement, you've got to decide how optimistic you are.
406.2: Sounds too much like a notebook.
406 > 403: I've been assuming the Flipster is more than intelligent enough to sort the nuts from the shells. If not, then this gem of a woman doesn't deserve being afflicted by him.
Having to explain that it's not made from real moles can make an interesting topic of conversation.
It's not? You'll tell me that violin strings aren't made from real cats next!
Two cats walk by a tennis court. One cat says to the other, "Hey, my dad's in that racket!"
Try the veal. I'll be here all week.
I expect Flippanter will do better ignoring the Unfogged greek chorus, but where is the fun in that?
As LB points out, 343 indicates that Flip has exactly the right attitude toward all this. Well done, sir.
When is this next date?
When should we expect an update?
If Lunchy can bring her friends, Flip can too. Who's available to tag along on the next date?
unlike all you people who have been partnered for ages, I can speak from lots of relatively recent experience
Hey!
415: Hey, I already volunteered to come and bring Smearcase if he's available. We could heckle from the next table.
Maybe we could just make it a large Unfogged meetup. Then, he looks like the normal one who isnt walking around saying "Who wants to sex Mutumbo?"
||
(138, cont.) Second interview seemed to go well, though I now fret that I appeared insufficiently excited about the job. Thank-you email to interviewers emphasized that point, but still. It is difficult to focus on work, even interesting, otherwise congenial work, while pining away for another job.
|>
For Flip, let me reiterate my advice from the other day. When confirming whatever your next plans together are, you simply say "If I go to this thing, we're definitely going to do it, right?" Surely that would resolve all this needless ambiguity.
Or, you know, something like this.
Second interview seemed to go well, though I now fret that I appeared insufficiently excited about the job.
Try to hold the interviewer's hand. Or stretch your arm out behind them and move a little closer.
390 is very un-British. Holding hands comes after sex not before, in the chronological sequence.
The lyrics to "I Want to Hold your Hand" just got way more suggestive.
419: ugh, I could have written this, word for word, except for the part about the thank-you email to the interviewers, which I'd like to write but I don't have their email addresses. I really wish I'd tried harder to keep my cock in my pants for the interview.
Holding hands comes after sex not before, in the chronological sequence.
The lyrics to "I Want to Hold your Hand" just got way more suggestive.
The lyrics to "I Want to Hold your Hand" are a few months shy of half a century old. The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
Attempting to reconcile the first and second sentences of 423 leads to a very sad mental image.
But paper thank-you notes are still good form, right? Particularly where it's the only kind you can send?
Well, I was. Or, I did. I'm not at the moment. I didn't not get the job. But I didn't get it either. IYKWIM.
I think my attitude of "I'm still trying hard to figure out whether I really want this lousy job" shone through loud and clear in the interview, and I don't think that's exactly the quality they were looking for. But, it turns out I did! really! want! the job! Especially as I learned more about it during the interview itself. It was a better match than I'd thought. So, blech. We'll see what happens.
Who's peekin' out at a dyspeptic Yankee
Fixating on a checked pocket square
Who's set a lunch date on OpenTable?
Everyone knows it's Lunchy
Who's tripping down the streets of the city
Smilin' at everybody she sees
Who's 4th date is ambiguous hugging?
Everyone knows it's Lunchy
OK, I give up.
429: Call them back, tell them you'd like to see them again, and make a dinner date for next. Do not under any circumstances make a lunch date.
This whole Lunchy saga will eventually get to Flip doing this number, right? Only with a gramophone?
I can't wait.
425.2: Except when you do what I did and send a thank-you note to the person who was supposed to interview you but had to cancel at the last minute, instead of the person who actually did interview you...
But I got the job anyway, so maybe that was the way to go. It certainly made an impression.
Lunchy is willing to organize and has liked Flip's affect so far. Perhaps he should keep quivering with gentlemanly repressed ardor and let her peel him out of his suit and accoutrements. I used to enjoy that, when dating.
(I used to arrange and/or pay for the first date partly to weed out excessively controlling patriarchal assholes, too. Guys who got hinky about having been 'paid for' didn't get a second try, on the grounds that I didn't want to be rented either.)
The guy from the new job just called my cell phone while I was on my work phone talking about some nonsense billing crap I couldn't possibly care about, and left a voicemail saying only that I should call him back. Phone tag ensues. Sigh.
Thank you, Megan. That's very comforting advice. As we've only had "real" "dates" for lunch and last night's event, during the latter of which she was at least partially distracted from my I am on fire and you are the waterfall gaze louche lack of affect by professional obligations, I have thought on both occasions that no proper opportunity presented itself for handholding* or whatnot, so the friendly hugs are all I have to go on.
* The other day I passed the former site of the little cafe near Columbia where the Ex and I first held hands. Quick, someone distract me from maudlin reminiscence! Moby! Dance like a happy prospector!
435: Oops. At lunch yesterday when the bill arrived she moved in the direction of her purse and I said something like "Don't be ridiculous." But lightly, lightly, I hope.
433-4: The subtext being: I'm reliable. I show up when I say I will. You won't see me sending in substitutes for my part of interviews.
438: Obviously women don't have money.
440: That's why they can't be president, right?
That's why you had to order for her.
Thundersnow teases me for how long it took me to get around to kissing her for the first time. I saw it as a gentlemanly courting process. She apparently speculated that maybe I was (a) gay but for some reason dating girls via OKCupes and/or (b) just not that into her, and she even went ahead and scheduled another date with some dude. Lucky for me, it turns out the other dude spent the date telling her all about how his fiancée broke off the engagement due to his addiction to WoW, and shortly thereafter I got over myself.
Postscript: that WoW dude runs sound fairly regularly all over town, so every time we cross paths I have to to restrain myself from gossiping wildly with my bandmates, because that would be untoward.
If it wasn't clear, I should like to emphasize that I'm pretty sure I'm not looking at this woman like (i) I'm gay or (ii) I want to be pals.
Yoga pants and a well-timed erection will make sure she knows.
Also, get you plenty of room on the bus.
Stop imagining me in yoga pants. Aren't you supposed to be dancing like a prospector who enjoys a high level of professional fulfillment?
419.3 (at least somewhat NSFW, yes, sorry about the failure to warn) to 445. Who needs pants?
444: Seriously, I can't see how you could be in better shape at this point. You've seen each other often enough that smooching wouldn't be premature, you've got circumstantial reasons why you haven't made a move yet (that none of your dates have been at a smooching-appropriate time and place) so there's no reason for her to be impatient with you; reported communications make it sound as if she likes you fine (I wouldn't worry about brushing off her attempt to pay for lunch, she's still in contact, so she's not writing you off on that basis. Obviously, if she makes the attempt again, at some point the gracious thing to do is to let her pay without making a fuss, but you would have figured that out on your own.)
You should be off somewhere basking in your good luck; again, I can't think of when I've heard an internet dating story that went this smoothly. Are you sure she's not actually a humanoid viper wearing a rubber mask?
444. If she starts whistling A Fine Affair, you know what to do, right?
Otherwise, chill. You know this person. Nobody else here does.
Are you sure she's not actually a humanoid viper wearing a rubber mask?
Is that a deal breaker these days?
Are you sure she's not actually a humanoid viper wearing a rubber mask?
I like a challenge, but literally cold blood may be a bit much.
438: What LB said. Also, she's not me. Also, the Dwarf Lord and I had a ridiculous number of dates before kissing -- including camping with one tent -- which worked as extremely extended foreplay. Dayum.
I'm pretty much a humanoid viper wearing a rubber mask, though.
Yeah, I think we should probably step away from proffering patently unnecessary advice, and move straight to speculating how such a promising beginning could go horribly wrong. My first guess is the humanoid viper thing -- anyone else?
456: Flip eventually finds that each day of forty years of happy coexistence only struck the roots of loss deeper into his soul.
She e-mailed me again. With one of those wink-and-smile emoticon things.
456: Either Flip or Lunchy turns out to be a spy, using the other as cover for a top-secret black-ops assignment, which ends in the other learning deeply disturbing things about his/her own government and way of life such that even though they've built a real personal connection, the relationship is forever associated with memories too painful to allow it to continue.
I express no opinion as to which.
It turns out they're both into heavy S/M but on the same side of the slash?
With one of those wink-and-smile emoticon things.
So she's not perfect. You're still onto a good thing. Don't reply with oIo.
With one of those wink-and-smile emoticon things.
Oh, damn. And things were looking so promising. Have you let her know you'll have to cancel your plans together?
Oh come on, that's totally forgivable.
Listen to me, not urple. She may just be a little nervous...
Let her know? Someone who'd use a smileyface in an email doesn't deserve further contact. Cut her off completely. Actually, you should probably move.
I can overlook an awful lot in a woman as otherwise smart and pretty as she is.
I know this is heresy, but actually there's nothing wrong with using emoticons in the right circumstances. And anyway, it's the flirting thought that counts here. I say it's a good sign, at the risk of getting myself excommunicated.
By the way, the third date is the deadline for pictures to go in the flickr pool.
BTW, given the Urban Dictionary definitions, can we find a new pseud for this lady.
re: 468
I'll totally cut him slack for at least a couple of more dates. He needs time to get hold of the klieg lights and the plate camera.
Things may be taking a turn. She just speculated, via e-mail, that I am a Meyers-Briggs INFJ. Is that bad?
If she's mentioned what she thinks she is, you can go look up whether the two of you are soulmates or natural enemies: MB websites have lists of interactions between types. It's like asking what your sign is.
Immature No-Feelings Jerk. Isn't it a bit early to be so judgmental?
475: When you're right, you're right.
475: Some churchy types take that stuff seriously. The husband of my Mom's best friend self publishes these terrible books. He's a retired UU minister and did one called something like the Archetype of the Spirit which was all about Myers-Briggs and spirituality.
again, I can't think of when I've heard an internet dating story that went this smoothly
It's like you don't even remember the Health Inspector! *sob*
(It's really just selection bias. I've had almost exclusively positive experiences like Flip's, but posting about them just seems boring.)
INFJs are gentle, caring, complex and highly intuitive individuals. Artistic and creative, they live in a world of hidden meanings and possibilities. Only one percent of the population has an INFJ Personality Type, making it the most rare of all the types.
Could be worse.
I don't think she's churchy, but, hell, ain't nobody gonna out-church Churchy Churchins, right, Sarge? Sarge? When we get back to the world?
Sorry. Flashback.
I think we all resemble this remark.
http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-849/
She just speculated, via e-mail, that I am a Meyers-Briggs INFJ. Is that bad?
Is she correct?
Not for me to say, never having taken the test. Too much like work.
Well, you could take it now. There are websites all over the place with versions of the test.
Now that you have an incentive, that is.
OT but to the title of the OP: Choral rifts lead to choral sects.
Thundersnow teases me for how long it took me to get around to kissing her for the first time.
Yeah, as much fun as it to give Flip shit about this, it's nothing to worry about. My last serious relationship also didn't involve any kissing till quite a few dates in; you're making it clear you're interested, and that's what matters. Everyone understands that public displays of affection can be kind of awkward.
Thundersnow teases me for how long it took me to get around to kissing her for the first time.
Yeah, as much fun as it to give Flip shit about this, it's nothing to worry about. My last serious relationship also didn't involve any kissing till quite a few dates in; you're making it clear you're interested, and that's what matters. Everyone understands that public displays of affection can be kind of awkward.
Oh FFS. Time to get off the internet, I guess.
480: Oh, you don't have to be churchy. It's just surprisingly popular among church types. It's not quite the same thing as asking someone about their horoscope, but it's not real psychology either.
Oh for crying out loud, assumptions about what will happen based on who's kissed whom when are going to be about as effective as Myers-Briggs typing at predicting the future. I kissed Lee in the middle of a straight bar on our first pre-date and it's just part of the story, not a sign that I liked her more than Stanley liked Thundersnow or whatever.
That said, Flip, let's keep neing generous. She's thinking about what sort of a person you are. That's a good sign. Smiley!
Being. Fuck. I'm not even going to look back at what other mistakes I made.
Seriously, the fact that she's continuing to e-mail is much more significant than any of this other stuff.
491: Please tell me it didn't end with a guy handing you a t-shirt and a release form.
494: No, not that straight. I have told the story of the really drunk soldier several months later who insisted on buying us shots because he had "jumped out of airplanes into foreign lands so we'd have the freedom to get married" and so we just drank them and didn't let him know that we couldn't actually get married here. We never got any complaints from anyone there, plus our dog was welcome to come in and liked eating peanut shells off the floor. The gay bar with free pool most nights was a better fit in general, though.
eating peanut shells off the floor
Every place I've ever been where you could chuck your peanut shells on the floor has been pretty damned straight.
Every place I've ever been where you
could chuck your peanut shells on the
floor has been pretty damned straight.
The first such place I visited was called "Dirty Dicks". I mean, it *seemed* straight, but...
I almost just wrote "It's a culture, not a costume" on someone's facebook post, but they wouldn't have gotten it.
Why do you worry if other people get it?
I didn't add the part about how we had a lot of arguments about the propriety of dogs in bars becaust that's not very romantic. This bar wasn't super straight, had a gay co-owner and a gay regular besides us occasionally. It was truly a neighborhood bar, and on weekends the happy hour crew would leave around 8, when they were replaced by their children and their children's friends. The first time Lee and I went (mentioned above, after we'd been eyeing each other for months while I was with my knitting group) I knew the bartender from grade school and later his little sister bartended there too. So that kind of a place, more than one where peanuts are a schtick.
I walk by a knitting store when I go to my neighborhood bar. There used to be a different store but everyone called her the yarn Nazi and switched stores.
502: It is entirely a coincidence that I moved in with Lee when she lived down the street from the yarn store and then we moved to the town it had moved to, again within easy walking distance. I might actually know which store you're talking about, though I've never shopped for yarn in your city.
I don't follow new music too closely but don't Beirut, LdR and that other band . . . Vampire Weekend all have kind of the same "dissipated wasp on vacation in a hazy home movie shot at the pool" kind of vibe.
Just as I feel maternal toward the Strokes because Franco Moretti's son is in the band, I feel maternal toward Vampire Weekend because Najmieh Batmanglij's son is in the band. I have no opinion about the music.
Flip, I'm just catching up, but just take her to dinner, and then, as you're walking out, tell her you'd like to kiss her. See what happens. (If you have said something like "Don't be ridiculous" about paying again, ask, don't tell.)
The bassist for Weezer used to live next door from my parents. One Christmas I got him and his mother to autograph Pinkerton.
507: Neutralize the awkwardness by acknowledging and foregrounding it? That's a little forthright for me and seems a bit out of her affect's comfort zone as well, but I'll see what the temperature is when next we meet.
OT: I don't particularly like the Eagles, but I confess shamefacedly that I quite like "Take It to the Limit." That seems an odd Eagles song to like.
510: Neutralize the awkwardness by acknowledging and foregrounding it?
Yup. If there's no awkwardness at all, then probably no one wants to kiss anyone. Awkwardness of the end-of-date variety that doesn't cause one to say, "Well, got to get up early!" is the good kind. So you have to get into the kind of situation in which the good kind of awkwardness might arise; i.e., not lunch or a thing where all her friends are.
tell her you'd like to kiss her. ... ask, don't tell.
In other words, say "would I like to kiss you?"
I once turned down a post-lunch-date offer of a kiss on principle. Dude. It was lunch.
Dude. It was lunch.
See? Vindication for 306!
I feel that the success of the acknowledge-and-neutralize strategy depends on the personalities involved. Certainly I have known people, the teeth of one of whom I brush a couple of times a day, who might collapse into embarrassed, smoldering ashes if asked "May I kiss you?"
516: Paraphrasing the late Ted Williams, one can't get a pitch to hit if one isn't at the plate, Josh, so one takes one's at-bats something baseball something pastoral mumble superego-as-umpire something.
embarrassed, smoldering ashes
This is a bad thing?
the teeth of one of whom I brush a couple of times a day
Also, what? Oh wait, you mean you. I thought maybe you had an armless child slave or something. Nevermind.
I thought maybe you had an armless child slave or something.
If I had an armless child slave, would I look to him for romantic advice?
Very possibly.
Speaking of armless child slaves, now who wants to sex Mutombo?
511: I know I've put it on one mix or another here, but please enjoy Jesus's old classmate Sarah Dougher's cover of Take It To The Limit."
No judgments here, neb. Safe space.
525: He didn't say much during lunch except that he was intimidated, as a Scotsman, to find me in the restaurant reading Hume. I can't say it was an auspicious beginning.
That's different from a principled refusal based on the lunchness of lunch.
AWB speaks truth regarding acknowledge-and-neutralize.
529: I mean to insult neither AWB's nor anyone else's romantic or sexual preferences, but if I were to compose, say, a list of qualities that I would enjoy in an intimate personal relationship, high on that list would be something like "a sincerity devoid of, and indeed repudiating by the purity and intensity of the subjective and intersubjective experience, self-reflexivity, cynical Generation X 'ironic' distance and parody display of one's faults and insecurities as some sort of grotesquerie."
I carry little water for the late David Foster Wallace and his bag of footnoted tricks, but he at least recognized that crawling up our own asses to keep from looking one another in the eye was a poor choice aesthetically, morally and emotionally.
It's too bad the stuff within the quotation marks in 530 is totally incomprehensible.
Also, I don't see how being forthright about incipient awkwardness is a method of avoiding looking one another in the eye.
Wait, what you're looking for in a relationship is something other than overanalyzed ironic distance? You may not be looking for feedback on the right blog.
Wait, I'm not getting what's ironic about asking for a kiss. What I'm talking about is that you presumably want to, and want to find out if she wants to, so you ask her.
531: It's comprehensible to me.
To that end, maybe I'll give that girl a call for some viva voce in place of the e-mails we've been trading.
"repudiating by"?
Wait, what you're looking for in a relationship is something other than overanalyzed ironic distance? You may not be looking for feedback on the right blog.
Hey, I'm no friend of ``ironic'' ``distance'', lady.
Jesus fuck, I was just on the phone with a friend and we were lamenting that people think our intense sincerity is fraudulent just because they feel like frauds and can't imagine someone who doesn't think everything is some kind of joke.
535: It's perfectly comprehensible (and admirable) to me too. Take that as good or bad as you wish.
The sense of 530 escapes me completely. See 534. I don't see how putting things on the table, however briefly and perhaps even humorously, constitutes "crawling up our own asses to keep from looking one another in the eye ". Quite the opposite, in fact. I must just be missing something.
530 is, um, what's the word I'm looking for? I'm sure it'll come to me shortly.
I think the kind of thing referred to in 530 would be more like walking out of the restaurant and saying, "Hey, to be perfectly honest, what I'd really like to do is kiss you right now, but I think I'm going to preëmpt that possibility at this moment by telling you in this creepy way that I'd like to kiss you and thereby relieving us both of the horrible possibility that you might, in fact, actually attempt to fulfill my request, probably out of a deep need to perform any action requested by a man, particularly one in a tie, and so now I'll be taking my leave. Don't worry, I won't call again."
What I said was, if it feels awkward, maybe it's because you both want a kiss. So ask for one.
"I'd really like to kiss you right now, but I fear that the onset of diaeresis is going to preëmpt that."
I always ask "what would James Bond do?" (I'm aware James Bond would never ask that question). And James Bond would never ask for a kiss.
He didn't say much during lunch except that he was intimidated, as a Scotsman, to find me in the restaurant reading Hume.
I presume your response began with "No true Scotsman..."
Email exchanges involving emoticons on one end and diaereses on the other would be a struggle, I must say.
I haven't gotten used to the consensus developing over the last year or two, that in all blogs and other media intended for hip young adults, the word "woman" is to be replaced by "lady". It still remings me of this horrible poem.
and then, as you're walking out, tell her you'd like to kiss her
Then she laughs in your face and jokes about it with all of her friends, and you never kiss anyone ever again. There's nothing ironic about that.
Not to trumpet my good fortune in the face of Flippanter's struggle, but my gf and I are classmates who reconnected at a reunion last summer, went for a walk one night, and more or less spontaneously kissed about 15 minutes into it. Then we walked some more and found a place to make out. (Then she dumped me the next day, requiring over a month of furious, shameless pursuit on my part, but that's another story.)
Huh. I was not familiar with that poem.
I had not been aware of the "lady" trend, except in the ironic/sleazy/wink-wink laydeez way that people around here use it. So this is a thing? What was wrong with "woman"?
550.1 is a scene from an anxiety-dream sequence in an after-school special, right?
552: For some people, irrational anxiety is eternal. "After school" describes a timeline stretching into infinity.
It's not really reasonable to cite a personal anxiety fantasy as evidence of how people actually behave. Fear of women usually manifests itself as a misogynistic refusal to talk to them as if they're human.
Sometimes it's just pathological fear of rejection, which is a different thing, but still a thing. Try imagining the same fear (and acknowledge the obvious exaggeration) with the sexes reversed, if that helps.
I'm pretty sure that anxiety about making a first move, and not doing so even if you want to and think there's a reasonable chance it would be welcomed, is not limited to men.
557: No, it isn't. A woman I've known for about 55 years just (two days ago) told me she had a major thing for me back then but was afraid to send any signals. It's a little late now though.
No no no, I thought Poke was trying to say that women actually behave like psychopaths who ruin your life when you communicate with them.
It doesn't seem non-misogynistic to repeat this fantasy as if it's something that actually happens to human beings over the age of 8.
I think AWB is objecting to the nature of the non-story story in 550.1.
By the way, I see that Flip announced his intention to actually speak on the phone with the woman. I applaud! That is a good idea! here's hoping it went well.
I think AWB is objecting to the nature of the non-story story in 550.1
See 556: (and acknowledge the obvious exaggeration)
Is flip on the phone now? Has he been trading "No, you hang up first!"'s for the past 30 minutes?
I don't know what it's like for other people. I get rejected all the time, and have since I was little. I'm used to it? All I can say is it hasn't yet ruined my life that I know of. I certainly would not get anything done at all if rejection were a paralyzing fear. Nowadays, it's much more scary to be accepted and then treated like shit afterward.
Nowadays, it's much more scary to be accepted and then treated like shit afterward.
This is another possibly irrational fear that seems all too real to plenty of people, based on their experience. Hasn't it been proposed that the only solution is to avoid relationships altogether? Why has no one warned Flippanter?
Don't wring your hands, AWB.
It's just not workable not to put your thoughts plainly forward at some point or another. The best case scenario is that you've chosen well enough that if it doesn't work out when you do that, it will be disappointing, but not debilitating.
570: Hi, L, from the geriatric ward.
570: Then why are you talking to us? I mean, sounds promising!
OK, we just hung up. That went OK. We talked for a decently long while. A good decision to break the e-mail chain in favor of the live thing.
She was in a sorority. This may take some getting used to.
575: it turns out that matters less the further you get from college.
Which is to say, make sure to ask if she still has a fracket.
You should definitely let that fact weigh heavily in your thoughts, much more heavily than your experiences with her over the past week or whatever.
Oh fantastic.
I have no idea why anyone was ever averse to the phone thing. Progress is made. Kissing perhaps imminent. Perhaps not. Either way, live voice! I'm so pleased. :)
Because something has to distract you from that fatal emoticon.
I have no idea why anyone was ever averse to the phone thing.
Because talking on the phone fucking sucks and is for old people.
She seemed to be under the impression that I wear suits all the time. She asked if I owned jeans.
581: Being married is for the young, hip and striving?
582: And you told her about your wingsuit, right?
How is that Flip doesn't have a blog called "Wingsuits and Wingtips"?
575: Less important than if she'd been in a fraternity.
Alternative response:
You can't use that word! That is our word!
I have no idea why anyone was ever averse to the phone thing. Progress is made. Kissing perhaps imminent.
Kissing over the phone doesn't sound any more plausible than kissing via e-mail, frankly.
She seemed to be under the impression that I wear suits all the time. She asked if I owned jeans.
This is sort of hilarious. Good thing you talked on the phone then, in order to straighten a few things out.
What is a fracket?
Is a fracket one of those Greek-letter pin things they wear?
Anyway, glad to hear the phone thing worked out, even though it does seem to indicate that Flip's emotional world is vastly different from mine.
Wow, HBO's Luck is full of the Michael Mann Repertory Players.
I don't own jeans and I wear a suit less than once a year. As a slacker, I wear slacks.
Note that Flip has not yet specified whether he does in fact own jeans.
I do. I'm wondering whether I can wear my usual ragged pair to see her the next time.
I think at this point you clearly have no other option.
Later, wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled.
598: On the same principle that leads Thompson's gazelles to pronk?
Flip has recounted one or another story here of wearing jeans to the [past] law office, and to hear him tell it, he was practically barefoot as well. The suits were giving the wrong, or a one-sided, impression, I'd say.
600: The ragged claws are for even later.
If you abandon the suits after one bit of teasing it can only cause her to wonder what else in these dates has been artifice.
605: Good point. For the next date he should wear two suits.
That's why Our Lord created the navy blazer.
what else in these dates has been artifice
Whatever made the monkey die, one assumes.
On the same principle that leads Thompson's gazelles to pronk?
I've never heard of Thompson's gazelles. Do they sound like the Cardiacs?
I'm still worried about this fracket thing, but I'll put it to one side. She wasn't a cheerleader, was she? Does she even own a grungy sweater?
I'm not going to ask about her politics, because we're interfering enough in Flippanter's business.
because we're interfering enough in Flippanter's business
You're going to let him crash and burn, totally unaware of all the things he's doing wrong? That's cold. Really cold.
He phoned her, and that's great. My work here is done. I just can't get all caught up in this sorority thing, which is probably meaningless for practical purposes. Lots of people are in things like that. Apparently.
I'm still worried about this fracket thing
It's like a slanket, but Scotchgarded for vomit-proofing.
606: Do you mean simultaneously, or that he should periodically excuse himself to the bathroom and do a quick change?
613: I thought it was like a froky, something that comes back to life when talked about.
Ooh, even more impressive: Flip, do you have a tear away suit?
606: I was thinking simultaneously, but sequentially would work too.
Flip should be a man who wears a suit pretending to be a man who wears jeans pretending to be a man who wears a suit. Just in case he makes it through the evening, suitable underwear should be worn underneath the two suits and the jeans-based outfit.
Scotchgard a less-important suit so that you can wear it hither and yon to parties with no fear of bodily fluids. Call it a "fruit".
619.last: Suitable underwear.
Not necessarily SFW.
Not necessarily SFW.
Not really any less so that than LMFAO video that was linked in another thread.
that than
Heh. I am not necessarily entirely sober.
622: I suggest bringing that to the attention of the person that linked the video.
624: Noted. Hey, Stanley! Your video is NSFW!
Flip should be a man who wears a suit pretending to be a man who wears jeans pretending to be a man who wears a suit.
"I know who I am! I'm a dude playin' a dude disguised as another dude!"
She was not a cheerleader. She pointed out this morning that we spent almost 3 hrs. on the phone last night. I said I hoped I hadn't bored her.
She pointed out this morning that we spent almost 3 hrs. on the phone last night.
Just get a room, you two.
I think having been in a sorority, like having been a cheerleader, although it may well be a dealbreaker at 20, as a grownup should just be treated as kinda hot in an ever so slightly transgressive sort of way.
should just be treated as kinda hot in an ever so slightly transgressive sort of way
Like dressing up as Nazi, but one of the not-directly-genocidal ones like Guderian.
having been a cheerleader, although it may well be a dealbreaker
This is making very little sense to me.
I once worked with a couple of former sorority girls and they taught me their songs. The DG songs were all totally serious, extolling the virtues of their tribe, but the Tri-Delt songs were mean and made fun of the other sororities ("Kappa's the color of the tampon box, dark blue, light blue. Kappa's the color of the tampon box. You can use them, too.")
626: Flippanter seems to be having it too easy here.
Therefore, to add a note of impending doom to the process, may I note that Valentines Day is next Tuesday? You're going to need a plan. Or at least a plan for finding out whether you're going to need a plan, or whether you can mutually agree that no plan is necessary.
Oh man. Valentine's day with somebody you've only just started internet dating. Play it too mellow and she'll think you don't care, take it too far and she'll be repulsed. You should buy her a boat.
Boat is clearly correct. Once you're in the 'boat' area, though, you've still got a lot of questions. Sail or motor? Wood or fiberglass? If sail, how many masts? Go outside the box with a Zodiac?
Nothing says "luv" like a swan-shaped pedal boat.
But what shade of yellow? Daffodil? Butter? Something in a muted ochre?
MAYBE NO OATMEAL SUBMARINE, BUT POSSIBLY SOAP RADIO?
Nothing says love quite like a gondola on the East River in February.
A gondola works better than a pedal boat. I mean, where would LB and Smearcase sit?
Smearcase probably knows some arias -- he could sing while I poled.
I think that, as a symbol of his affection, Flip should donate an ox to a village in Namibia. Then he can invite her to visit the ox.
645: Is this a general offer, or only for Filppanter?
Well, I am fond of small boats. I don't actually have a gondola at the moment, though.
Can one ever really have a gondola? You know?
646: At this point in the relationship, donating a castrated animal probably sends the wrong message. You think there's a third-world country in need of untamed stallions? Perhaps something in a majestic ram?
You know the old saying. "If it floats or sing "O Sole Mio," rent it.
Buy a gross of biodegradable rubber duckies and spend an afternoon writing messages on them in favor of world peace and such. Then toss them into the sea on an outgoing tide and watch them vanish in the distance as the sun sets.
Valentines Day is next Tuesday? You're going to need a plan.
Step One: Cut a hole in a box...
You could go canoeing on the Gowanus, "Brooklyn's Coolest Superfund Site."
Let's grab a kayak to Quincy or Nyack
Once you are in the boat, you should shout out "Im the man in the boat!" Bc that will impress her.
Yes. I am 16 years old.
Three hours on the phone?!!? How did your cell phone battery last that long?
Ooh, boat-related but also to demonstrate his hipster cred, Flip should invite the lady to a game of BattleShots!™, THE strategic drinking game of 2012.
650: I think Flippanter's line should be "Any village I'm in doesn't need another ram. Laydeez."
Surely, if Flynnpanter still professes anxiety, that is, at this stage, only for our benefit.
I would endorse 660 unreservedly, except that I am disgusted by the typoes therein.
What kind of flowers has he sent her? (He has sent her flowers by now, right??????)
There was only one typo in 660 and it is now fixed.
This may assist in selecting a bouquet. I would suggest starting with Mimosa and working from there.
I need to be careful about giving basil plants at house warmings.
665: The clear winner on that list:
Leaves, Dead
Sadness
What happens when the message you want to send in flowers doesn't make for an attractive bouquet? Also, who sends mushrooms? (Delicious, delicious mushrooms...)
Also, I don't know what Asphodel is, but anybody who sends it is likely to be a serial killer with a morbid delusions.
Unless you're supposed to send Asphodel to the funeral of someone who is already dead. That would make more sense.
Liquorice, Wild
I declare against you!!
Burgundy is apparently the appropriate flower to give someone you've just roofied.
Or someone who has had too much Burgundy.
667: Now I'm imagining Flippanter sitting there, in his silk upholstered chair.
I guess this explains all the wolfsbane.
Laurel, Mountain
Ambition
Not exactly what I associate the mountain laurel with.
What Fassbinder is it?
The one-armed man walks into a flower shop and says:
What flower expresses days go by and they just keep going by endlessly
pulling you into the future.
Days go by endlessly
Endlessly pulling you into the future.
and the florist says:
White Lily.
Red Columbine (anxious and trembling) might be a bit too evocative.
Asphodel was the main vegetation in the low rent districts of the Greek underworld. I would not appreciate a bouquet of it.
There are 14 different geraniums, varying in meaning from "stupidity" to "melancholy" to "esteem" to "may I have this next dance?"
Unless these things come with Latin name tags, we're all so screwed.
678: Maybe some Red Columbine with a bowl of hot grits?
680: I actually wonder about reproducibility from one list to the next. The only ones of these I know offhand are the ones Ophelia mentions -- are different 'language of flowers' references reliably assigning the same meanings to the same flowers?
I like lettuce and mushrooms: pleasant salad, or nasty message?
I always think "stella" when I hear "asphodel", because it is contorted in my mind's ear into "astrophel".
There are 14 different geraniums
Geranium, Apple-Scented
Present preference
"You'll do for now" really is a lovely sentiment.
Accompanied with bacon, it means "That'll do, pig."
What does the hairy alpine rose signify?
And does the scarlet geranium have two alternative meanings, or is the meaning a two word phrase. If the latter, I may start wearing one at all times.
686: The comment text replacement trick.
682: I'm imaging them being used to communicate ship-to-ship like semaphores, or something every gentleman has at his disposal, carried in ornamental cases by his manservant. "I'm afraid it will be the Colchicum from here on out, Hargreaves."
681: I'm not sure what questionable joke you are making. My questionable joke was referring to the evocation of a specific referent for "Columbine". If yours is related to mine, I need a hint of some kind.
Mine was a misremembered garbling of this; somehow, I recalled 'petrified' as 'trembling'.
A beautiful bouquet for neb's mother: Currant, Moss, and Tuberose.
I can't quite see the context in which Gourd would be a necessary thing to communicate.
At first I was afraid I was trembling /
Thinking I could never live without you by my... fling
693: You are not appreciating the general purpose nature of the language. Your old college roommate wants to store their ski boat in your garage for the winter and you respond with a gourd with a note attached simply saying "No."
A gourd with yellow carnations stuck in it, surely.
When is the next installment of this tale due?
696: Right-- much more efficient. Jackmormon's a veritable Dodecatheon of the Language of Flowers.
Or perhaps if one were trying to gently indicate to a loved one that they had put on weight.
I thought people did that by "forgetting" the Swedish Fish when they go shopping.
Vernal Grass is what some HR consultant will come up with as a way of delivering layoff notices.
702.--To which the fired employee should respond with some Jacob's Ladder.
This is actually a market niche, don't you think? Linguistic Florist: you give them a message, they translate it into a bouquet, identifying the flowers for you and the meaning of each. It could be a business.
Not, admittedly, a lucrative business. Or a sane business. But a business.
Not, admittedly, a lucrative business. Or a sane business. But a business.
Clearly this should be the basis for a sit-com.
As God is my witness, I had no idea what a Tussie-Mussie was. The Kate Greenaway illustrated version.
And from LB's link:
Criteria for determining accurate, authentic flower sentiments:
1) Identify the primary sentiment for each flower and often a flower color through at least three resources,
using classic period references in combination with the best modern references and
2) Add a second or third sentiment only if it enhances the primary sentiment.
The concept explored in a recent novel.
I'm really glad I decided to wade into this exorbitant thread. The mating habits of awkward Unfoggedtarians really are the life's blood of this place.
If you have cable, Sexting in Suburbia is on Lifetime. Probably similar.
The mating habits of awkward Unfoggedtarians....
I'm doing my best, JRoth.
Didn't I hazard the escalation to real-time voice communication? Could have kept e-mailing, but this American said "That's not what the Founders would have wanted. I'm going to call her. Using a telephone. Let's roll."*
* Dramatic interpretation.
Of course they did; how else would they have talked to Jesus?
Poetic license. I think they had a couple of tin cans and some catgut.
Didn't I hazard the escalation to real-time voice communication? Could have kept e-mailing, but this American said "That's not what the Founders would have wanted. I'm going to call her. Using a telephone.
You didn't speak to her at all during the dates? All miming? And she has gone on three of them already in the span of a week and is asking to see you again? I'm taking notes.
Bass-playing lifeguard-improvising publicist?
It's like Marcel Marceau meant nothing to you guys.
Just goes to show that mime doesn't pay.
720: It's true. His work just doesn't speak to me.
721, 722: I just feel like I'm walking against the wind here.
723: You don't know how disappointed I am that clip didn't involve him talking with Col. North while dressed in jungle combat gear.
724: We are all trapped in invisible boxes of our own construction.
Oh, and no one cares about the OP anymore, but FWIW:
Authenticity is more or less bunk, but there's a difference between "inauthentic" and dishonest. Folkie Dylan fudged his upbringing to seem more authentically hardscrabble, but he truly loved Woody Guthrie's music and those old songs meant a lot to him. If it had all been an act - if he was really a Sinatra man, but saw the folk revival as the best way to launch his career - then he'd actually have been lying to people, putting one over. I don't think people are wrong to react negatively to fraud.
None of which is to say that claims of fraud aren't often specious, covers for other kinds of nastiness (since pretty much all artists fudge something, you can always make a colorable case for fraud). I've no personal opinion on LDR's case.
