So yeah once again I’m not really coming up with a whole lot of content to talk about that wasn’t covered by one of my earlier meta-textual rants. I feel like I’m the long, rambling monologue equivalent of a Stand-Up that’s grabbed all the low hanging fruit and now has to either really dig down deep in order to find some fresh material buried somewhere inside or just like…become Dane Cook. So instead I’m going to quit.

Wait, no, that probably makes it sound like I’m quitting.

I’m actually just quitting trying to force this one specific issue See I like the long 1500 word posts because it lets OTP become an experimental dumping ground for me to try out some things I’d like to be doing but have no real impetus to do in another area of my life since nobody’s paying me to expound on what’s wrong with the critical reactions to a movie I haven’t actually seen yet.

(Side note: I have seen it now and I actually feel kinda bad for critics since I walked out aware the movie didn’t work but totally unable to articulate exactly why. Blaming a random actor or Luhrman not being as good at English Lit at me would have been tempting if I was on a 12 hour deadline to rate the whole damn thing. Huh…maybe I should write 1500 words on how I wish critics could just say “damned if I know” more often.)

Just like the coding/site design experiments I was doing last summer though once I figured out what I generally wanted to do with that class of object OTP stopped being the best place to keep making it and I fizzled out. I can already kinda feel that happening here as well where the urge to just find a new thing to that lets me talk about the unexamined meta-conversation going on every other day is starting to have diminishing returns. Instead of trying to dig out as much content as I can in the same vein I’m going to just have OTP go even weirder.

Off format experiments seemed to work fairly well so let’s see how off format we can get here. Prepare for me to screw around with video on here. Prepare for me to bring back a the coding experiments when I think they’re going to work. Prepare for me to send ACTUAL PICTURES in this e-mail like it’s the year 1998 or something. I’m not going to ask everybody to let me know what’s really working for them since I know people like to catch up all at once some times and sometimes they skip days but if this starts annoying you so much you’re thinking of unsubscribing please let me know that first so I can change things up.

So I don’t have a lot to say besides that I really like the new Vampire Weekend album. Turns out they only needed to turn down the world music reappropriation bullshit like 20% before I found Ezra Koenig a charming, clever lyricist. Somehow I don’t think going on about that for 1500 words is really going to interest you guys. That’s okay though because I’m sort of realizing me not having 1500 words in me two days a week is probably to be expected when I’m spending those days locked in an office trying to write fiction. I could abandon that plan or half ass it on Tuesday and Thursday every week but instead I think I’m going to scale back slightly and just have big old posts on a M/W/F schedule. Way way back in the dark ages when I was still entering peoples e-mail addresses into gMail for this like some sort of monkey that was the schedule. Then I found I needed the warmup 5 days a week so maybe it’ll drift back to that but for now OTP seems more like an exercise in organizing a bunch of disperate things that have been flying across my desk and my writing warm-ups have shifted to other things, things that actually pay me money on occasion. So what I’m saying is that you’re getting a short entry today but don’t worry because there’ll be a lot on Friday again and then we’ll hopefully settle into a nice groove next week.

Guys I’m super sorry again about yesterday’s post. I’ve been receiving my usual amount of feedback and all of it was negative today…in that nobody said a word about it to me and I really didn’t like that half-hearted post. Once again I regret writing it when I did because it turns out what I actually wanted to talk about with How I Met Your Mother is much better illustrated discussing what the show’s probably going to do with its 9th and final season than it is describing it as a class of sitcom with Community and then doing absolutely nothing to establish what that classification means and then getting bored and quitting halfway in…I’m really sorry about yesterday’s post.

Anyway, let’s dig deep into the aftermath of the season finale of How I Met Your Mother because everybody is super angry about it in a way that makes perfect sense if you think of the show as a hangout show and seems absolutely insane to me because that isn’t how I view the show at all. Needless to say if you really want to go into the 8th season finale of How I Met Your Mother “pure” then I’m about to spoil the shit out of it and you probably should just go watch it now because it’s just 22 minutes and it’s pretty good.

The big thing that changes the formulation of the entire show is that we’ve finally seen the mother in the last few moments of the finale after 184 episodes of delaying that reveal. From what I’ve heard she’s going to be a big part of the last season since they tested her chemistry with all the other characters before they cast her which pretty much rules out her just popping up here and in the series finale. This news thrilled everybody who felt the show’s been running in circles for seasons on end. But, while everybody was pretty thrilled on Monday evening on Tuesday morning CBS sent out a press release that explained the plan for season 9 and everybody pretty much went insane in the other direction.

See, the season finale established that the “now” of the show’s universe was 56 hours out from the big wedding of Barney and Robin where Ted, after the ceremony while waiting for a train, will finally meet the mother. Apparently the backbone of season 9 will spend 24 episodes exploring those 56 hours. They’re going to stretch the 56 remaining hours before Ted meets the mother (we get a glimpse of her as the audience but Ted still doesn’t) and make that the entire season.

There was a time it would have driven me insane as well. I was a huge advocate of just introducing the mother already around season 5 or 6 because I thought a new character dynamic would do a lot to liven up some of the characters that had grown kinda stale. From the perspective of a hangout show this is basically the worst idea in the world. For any other sitcom it’d be an unquestionable disaster. You’re stranding all your characters in a situation that isolates them away from the familiar situations that the audience likes seeing them in and plotting-wise. You’re basically cornering them into a soap-opera dynamic where everybody has to have an absurd number of emotional revelations in the space of two and a half days.

Even worse from the perspective of some critics, instead of doing the proven formula of the last season victory lap that provides a nice coda for all the major characters, instead of directly exploring what makes this new character so important to Ted that he’d stop the eternal love triangle two-step with him, Barney and Robin the show’s been doing for half a decade at this point it’s going to spend the last season on more temporal shenanigans and structural fuckery.

The problem is that this entire show IS structural fuckery. The entire premise of the show is that all the action we’re watching is a flashback from the year 2030. This has let the show pull off bits with regularity that even relatively daring and experimental comedies would leave alone outside of an odd “off-formula” episode or two. Seinfeld pulled off one episode where the narrative progressed backward in time, How I Met Your Mother does this practically every week for at least part of the story. Most sitcoms experiment with an unreliable narrator on occasion or produce the customary Rashomon episode but I can’t think of another show that regularly lets its characters take over as narrator and break the reality of the story randomly within an episode.

See, what makes How I Met Your Mother a puzzlebox sitcom (and what made Community one back in the heights of its Dan Harmon fueled seasons) isn’t that it’s capable of doing bizarre punchline->setup constructions or could have a scene derailed by an unreliable narrator it’s that those tricks are actually how these shows communicate with the audience. How I Met Your Mother’s relationship with time (just like Community’s relationship with genre) actually ends up being the fundamental storytelling tool for Ted’s growth . Without doing all that jumping around in time to give a sense of perspective on his actions the show is just the story of an awful guy who makes tons of terrible relationship decisions refusing to get over a girl who’s repeatedly told him she can’t commit to their relationship. It’s not surprising that’s many people’s opinion of the later seasons verbatim because if you’re reading recaps of the show as a linear narrative THAT IS FACTUALLY THE STORY BEING TOLD.

So, here’s the thing that I find so bizarre about these complaints: the season everybody seems to want, the season where we learn all about the mother and watch Ted grow into a good husband and say goodbye to everybody and basically have a Mary Tyler Moore finale, this is how you get that on this show.

Everybody seems to assume that a show obsessed with jumping forward and backward in time is suddenly going to turn into 24 as overwrought comedy, slowly marching directly forward toward the inevitable ending at a snail’s pace, which is insane. In fact, by announcing the entire last season takes place at the wedding I think HIMYM has pretty much announced that the Mary Tyler Moore ending is EXACTLY what they’re going for and that wedding is our goodbye to these characters. If you assume that the show has already told you its ending (it has, we’re ending with the moment Ted meets the mother) this is the structural fuckery equivalent of basically promising you the entire final season is going to be a long series of goodbyes disguised as hellos before they even get started. Of course, the only way that’s going to work out satisfyingly for fans is with a whole ton of jumping around in time and it’s going to play out pretty much like this:

Ted in the future, already prone to digressions from the main narrative, goes full Tristram Shandy as he approaches what he considers to be the single most important moment of his life and realizes the story’s almost over (and he hasn’t even told the kids about ______!) we start jumping all around forward and backward in time closing off odd narrative digressions from earlier in the show (okay so it’s not FULL Tristram Shandy since there’s going to be some closure) and seeing how our favorite characters turn out in the future by reading the signs of all those future and past events from the weekend of Barney and Robin’s wedding. The core plots of the season will all take place during two days but those two days are going to spin out into Barney and Robin’s married life, Marshal’s professional life and the future of his marriage with Lily and of course Ted’s relationship with the mother after the wedding ends even as the season itself slowly tells the events of the actual wedding proper.

Will they be able to pull that off? I have absolutely no clue. That’s a pretty ambitious final season structurally even for a show that managed to pull off using the first half of a running joke as a season ending cliffhanger. It’s easily possible that they simply don’t have enough ideas for the two days until the wedding and every moment spent NOT jumping forward or backward through time is a horrible slog of melodrama that moves forward by just a few paces. They could also screw stuff up on a smaller scale by botching a character arc in the last season or something.

It is however the only final season that lets the show even attempt to do what the audience wants though while still remaining recognizably How I Met Your Mother. I understand the desire for the show to dispense with meeting the damn mom and then spend the back half of the season with Ted blissfully happy with his new destined wife but that’s How I Met Your Mother fan-fiction not a final season of television for a show that’s always been more about the telling of the story than the story itself.

Man I…kinda wish I’d waited to do the Daft Punk thing AFTER they started streaming the whole damn thing but I guess that’s really just an excuse for me to try and do something else…again drunk, at 11:10 at night…guys I’ve made some bad decisions. I guess since I spent most of the evening watching How I Met Your Mother now’s the best time I can come up with to discuss the concept of puzzle box comedies.

I’ve been holding off because I’ve desperately wanted a really strictly accurate third example for this concept but I…don’t really have time to do that at this point so we’re doing this with just the two major examples. The idea behind puzzle box comedies is that you’re already structurally familiar with the sitcom and so what makes the comedy funny is the dialogue it’s having with the traditional sitcom.

How I Met Your Mother and Community are the two examples that really exemplify the form. What makes both shows work is that both of them see like they are hangout shows in the vein of Friends or late-season Cheers but when they try and be a hangout show in that vein they fall flat on their face which is maybe best exemplified by season 4 of both shows. I’m not sure why these aren’t hangout shows but I am sure what they are instead.

The fact that Suzan gets an awesome new job and the new Daft Punk album and gets to actually meet the mother with the season finale all at the same time should qualify today as a pretty amazingly awesome day.

…okay it’s now 11:40 and I’m nowhere near done with this so I guess I have to really boil this down to the bare essentials which is that these shows are built around playing with the form in a way that’s worth watching even when I find the character dynamics (and Jeff Winger and Barney Stinson have some similar problematic things as breakout characters) what keeps me coming back to bother shows even when they’re in a slump is that they love to screw around with the kind of Sitcom story to…guys this entry is a failure and I’m super sorry. I promise I’m going to extend this one out to be an actual entry tomorrowy…maybe I’ll throw in what I meant by temporal empathy just to be generous.

Well that’ll teach me on the new OTP format. I’ve been waiting for inspiration to strike and it’s now 10:47 on Sunday night and I’m drunk and I frankly don’t have a better idea of what I’m going to talk about than I did on Friday. So here’s the best I can do: let’s talk Daft Punk because right now we’re in a place where they’re emblematic of something that interests me intensely about music. At the moment we’ve got a radio edit of one song and really terrible rips of some small portion of two more but we’ve got a complete track by track review of the album from about 18 different sources.

On some level that’s actually as old school as the album itself, it used to be that you could actually have an album that existed for an elite few WITHOUT having it leak to everybody else and that’s now something you can only do when you have the absurd combination of clout and money that Daft Punk currently possess, but that’s not what makes their current position interesting to me.

What’s interesting to me is how bizarre it seems to try and impose your own narrative on top of that. Sure other people have had albums that got reviewed before they got leaked but nobody’s so thoroughly defined the story of what that album will be before anybody’s heard significant portion of it. Daft Punk is bringing Disco back. You can accept that or get out of the way but it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen because they have the mindshare and the narrative around the album is so on lock that it almost doesn’t matter what the album actually sounds like.

Just look at the reaction to Get Lucky. In any other year the race for the year’s summer jam would be a reliable traffic earner for anybody that judges music. Who gets to be the OFFICIAL summer jam is such a ridiculous question that I came up with 10 different options myself and I don’t have an editorial group I’m navigating. This year though, the articles are still happening but there’s no suspense. NY Mag published their version and even though the headline was “what will be the summer jam of 2013″ the content of the article was “it’s Get Lucy. Here are some other songs though.”

For a while now I’ve wanted to do a review site for music but I’ve been describing it wrong. When I’ve said I want a music site that doesn’t pretend to be an impartial judge that’s objectively evaluating music people have rightly asked if I’m saying I want to be Lester Bangs but what I’m actually suggesting is the exact opposite. Instead of somebody who admits their biases up front and who just runs with them as hard as they can, I want a music review site that is actually grappling with the biases more than the music itself. I want to care about the story around the music that has informed everybody’s review MORE than I want to care about the album. In fact, I kind of want to only review albums nobody’s heard.

I touched upon this a little when I was talking about Kitty and Grimes on Wednesday but it isn’t limited to them by any means. Instead, it seems to be a vital part of the calculus of every band and we’re just pretending it doesn’t exist because it’s “all about the music, dude.” The fact that it hasn’t been all about the music since…ever doesn’t seem to bother anybody. Instead, it seems to make them all the more obsessed with the prospect of being the one reviewer that’s able to shake off the illusions of whatever story the band is telling about itself so that they can tell you what’s REALLY going on.

I’m not ready to say that review of an album is impossible but I am ready to say I’m not particularly interested in that review even if you could make it. Nobody listens to an album without some sense of the story around it. Nobody’s sitting down to listen to Random Access Memories with no conception of what Daft Punk is trying to do here, they’ve made damn sure of that.

Of course, none of this is limited to music. If that medium is unique in any way it’s that music reviewers have somehow managed to keep their belief in creativity ex-nihilo, but I’m not entirely sure that argument is even valid. All art criticism has an odd tendency to pretend like all we’re judging is the piece of art in front of us when anybody with any sense knows that isn’t true.

If any through-line to the new version of Other Ten Percent ever appears that’ll make me stick with this instead of freaking out that I’ve run out of things to say and reverting to the old format it’ll be that not enough people care about what a thing wants to be. I’m not trying to excuse crap art’s failure to execute on their ideas (and I do worry that in my haste to edit things down to the most pertinent links I sometimes gloss over that there’s a LOT of crap out there) but most everybody’s stopped judging things as a failure to create what it wants because they’re satisfied to attack it as a failure to be what they want.

Oh, right, the Daft Punk album. I mean on some level they’ve set themselves up to fail here. You can’t announce that you’re a wake up call to electronic music and actually BE a wake up call to electronic music. You can’t say you’re the wake-up call for anything and have that work. The best you can hope for is that everybody doing the thing you hate ignores you because you smacked them around too completely for them to try and directly respond to you (Sup, Cabin in the Woods).

On another level though it’s almost impossible for them to fail. It’s Daft Punk and they’ve clearly laid out the criteria on which you can judge them. They’re making a disco throwback record and they hired fucking Nile Rodgers for the gig. Good luck questioning those credentials.

…Yeah here’s what I’ve got to come up with to make these OTP entries work: I need a better moral than the fact that I’ve read 10,000 words on a topic and have no idea what I think about it.

So Time has published another insufferable “millennials are all narcissistic little shits and if we call them that on the cover maybe they’ll bother to actually buy a paper magazine to tell us how wrong we are” issue. I haven’t actually read the articles since Time’s trapped them behind a paywall but from what I can tell the article is split into two parts: a baby boomer explaining how all kids these days are lazy, narcissistic assholes that lack the industry to do any real work and then a glowing article about how one day we WILL have that industry and we’ll fix the world with our amazing new types of work (it’s amazing how we’re both lazy and multi-talented polymaths that can do five jobs at once. Guess that’s just the paradoxical skillset you get living in mom’s basement) along with our naturally sunny dispositions.

Once again though my real rage isn’t at the baby boomers who seem to be utterly convinced they’ve ruined their kids by telling them they can succeed in the world so often the little idiots actually believed it. Those arguments always sound like a parent explaining everything they did wrong in raising their kids for so long it becomes clear they aren’t apologizing so much as looking for someone to give them absolution and I end up feeling nothing except vague pity. Instead it’s the Gen X douchebags commenting on Time’s article that actually enrage me.

So far the most insufferable is an article at Wonkette where a bunch of 30 somethings lecture millennials endlessly about how entitled we are before kindly offering to join in with us on a friendly round of “uselessly yell at the man.” Like everything at Wonkette it’s so over the top I can’t be sure which comments they’re actually taking seriously and I can’t even be that mad at those. Don’t worry though, I’m sure some 34 year old white dude who runs a gadget blog or has his own youtube channel will be along shortly to pick up the slack.

See, at some point every blogger in their mid thirties figured out that the two sides of this argument are the Baby Boomers yelling that kids today are too lazy to fix the economy and all the 20 somethings screaming at their parents for fucking up the entire economy in the first place. And, since Gen X isn’t a part of either group, they quickly hit upon the brilliant idea that it’s BOTH groups fault because then they get to shit on twice the amount of people while still not taking any blame themselves.

But here’s a provocative thesis: Everything that’s wrong right now is Gen X’s fault and they need to get off their entitled faux-anti-establishment asses and do something about it.

Sure, it’s absolutely true that the Baby Boomer generation went off the reservation and utterly trashed the economy at the start of the millennium, but it’s not like they were the only people alive at the time. See the little fact Gen X keeps trying to ignore is that the global economy crashed on the baby boomer’s watch but you guys were supposed to be watching the baby boomers! They kept their WWII vet parents from completely wrecking the global economy when they all went insane in the late 60s but when it was your turn to mind the store you were all way too busy telling mom she just didn’t understand grunge to bother to fucking vote and now look what happened! Your complete disengagement with society as a form of protest didn’t do jack shit but let old assholes run the show. That might be slightly less infuriating if it seemed like any of you noticed. Instead you all wander around like you’re God’s gift to counter-culture because the Clinton years produced some good bands none of you were in and which don’t exist anymore anyway.

Meanwhile, in start-up culture, the only place you guys did manage to engage with the rest of the world, you broke everything so hard you turned breaking everything into a cardinal virtue. Now you’ve got the nerve to turn around and yell at us for not disrupting as hard as you did? The only things left to disrupt are your startups, which you seem to prefer we keep our hands off of, (good luck with that by the way) and the global financial system, which, it may shock you to learn, turns out to be slightly harder to disrupt than Capitol Records.

Listen, I get it, I’ve got to hustle if I’m going to make any money and you did too. This isn’t the first generation that’s had to work in four different industries simultaneously to do anything worth doing. But, you might look up from your desk every once in a while to notice that your 4 part time gigs in 2003 have somehow transitioned into an actual ass job and there don’t seem to be all that many of those to go around these day. Constantly shifting industries isn’t a transitional state anymore it IS the career path. Why the fuck do you think we all don’t respect our boss? They’re going to be our boss for like 18 months if we’re lucky and it’s even odds if we’re going to get fired before the whole company goes down in flames pretty much no matter what happens.

I’m sure that anybody in their thirties is going to say that this portrayal of their generation is unfair and congratulations, that’s probably accurate but also pretty much the whole point. The truth is that the economic clusterfuck we’re currently embroiled in is a combination of at least three different generations being totally unable to communicate with each other and the very idea of a generational grouping based on identical behavior is sort of ridiculous since the monoculture broke down (for instance I scored a 77% on this “how millennial are you” Pew Research quiz and somebody in their forties who I’ve worked with scored 92% sooooooo maybe not entirely accurate). I bring up the Gen X thing because somehow, 20 years after they utterly failed to rebel in any way that actually hindered him they still seem utterly convinced that they’re a singular generation removed from the rest of society and given how totally screwed we seem to be right now we could use all the help we can get.

So I’ve never been the hugest fan of The Great Gatsby as a book, but when I first read Kathryn Schulz’s long article on how the book is secretly awful I thought it was pretty stupid. I mean the critical consensus on something can certainly be wrong but you usually want to try and engage with that consensus and counter that narrative directly. Schulz’s article seemed to just be a list of complaints about a book that wasn’t her stylistic cup of tea and that didn’t seem like it would actually get anybody to agree that Gatsby wasn’t a very good novel.

Apparently I was wrong though because I’ve been spending the day reading articles by people that apparently despise the book. It’s just kinda hard to notice their problems with Fitzgerald’s original because it usually comes right after they praise it as the greatest American novel and start complaining that Baz Luhrmann ruined it. So far I’ve read reviews that savage the movie and the actors in it for making Daisy a passive character with little or no personal identity and reviews that hate that Gatsby seems to be nothing more than a charlatan who’s obsessed with remaking his past and fails. Obviously a novel whose title character was simply a status-obsessed liar could never command the respect Gatsby does. I swear to God I’m half expecting somebody to lambast Lehrmann’s clunky reliance on visuals to tell his story as best exemplified by this stupid fucking green light he keeps harping on.

I should probably make it clear right now that I haven’t seen the new Gatsby so I’m not trying to make an argument that the largely negative reviews its been getting are actually wrong about the quality of the film. My problem is that I’ve probably read 10,000 words of negative reviews on this movie by now and I have no clue what makes this movie awful. Because by and large the negative reviews fall into two camps: rants about how Lurhmann’s ruined a classic novel by people who’ve seemingly never read the damn thing far enough to understand the basic character dynamics (hint: if you think that The Great Gatsby is a tale of star crossed lovers whose tragic love can never be…stop talking) and people who keep saying things that are actually awesome that they think will get me to hate the movie.

That latter category is best exemplified by the Time Out New York review that has this gem: “The anachronistic pop-music cues, digitally augmented tracking shots and disco-globe–glittery production design don’t re-create the headiness of early-20th-century New York so much as invent a billowy fantasy otherworld in the gauzy vein of Twilight.” Replace the word Twilight with basically any other movie that creates a Fantasy Otherworld and that sounds like my ideal Gatsby movie.

Neither type of review however actually tells me what the movie is besides “not the novel.” Is it the kind of Lehrmann film that uses its visual excess to support the story or does all the glitter gets in the way? Oh sure people will argue its the second in their review but their evidence seems less based in the film’s cinematography and more based in its failure to line up with their reading of the novel which, as we’ve established, can get pretty fucking suspect depending on the reviewer.

The reviews seem absolutely obsessed with establishing their literary bona fides but in a weird way what I want for a review of the movie is somebody that knows absolutely nothing about the book (the prospect that such a person might be in the audience this weekend and that they might like the movie seems like absolute proof that taste is dead to most critics) because my interest is less if Luhrmann adapted Gatsby correctly to the screen and more if Lurmann adapted his own visual style competently to the source material.

I’m not convinced the movie ISN’T a disaster. In fact, given Lurhmann’s track record I was pretty on the fence about seeing the film. Now that I’ve read a dozen negative reviews of the thing though I feel a strange sense of obligation to see it because the reasoning for why its awful is so strange. It shouldn’t be a hard sell to tell me that Luhrmann directing Gatsby is a disaster but the mystery of what the hell the film is actually like has been haunting me all day and apparently describing the film they just saw is no longer the job of film critics. Instead they’re all far too busy describing a book we all ready in our 9th grade English class…badly.

Yeah okay, not feeling today’s links that much at 4 in the afternoon and I’ve still got the tab open to do the other thing I was thinking of doing yesterday which, coincidentally, kinda plays into why I haven’t been feeling it that much in OTP lately in general. Don’t worry, this isn’t me declaring that I’m shutting down. It’s the other thing where I ramble endlessly about a specific topic and almost make an interesting point without ever actually having the thing coalesce into an actual honest to God essay. That’s right guys, buckle the fuck up because it’s time for 1500 words on meta-textuality, boringly repetitive online narratives and the rapper Kitty Pride who is apparently just going by Kitty now according to a new interview on Stereogum and Wikipedia.

Coming on the heels of Iron Man 3 that interview actually crystalized something that’s been creeping up on me for the last couple of months about the way I’ve been enjoying pretty much every form of entertainment. Lately I find myself liking the meta-text more than the text of basically everything I enjoy. That’s always been true to some degree but traditionally it’s just been things where I liked it on both levels but found the meta-text made me sound smarter. Lately I’ve just been tossing away the actual text when I find it boring though and just engaging with the parts around it that I actually care to engage with because honestly the text is all starting to seem pretty interchangeable.

Iron Man 3 is the perfect example. As an actual movie Iron Man 3 has enough structural problems that I really can’t recommend it to anybody I know. As a movie about Iron Man 3 though it’s one of the most interesting movies in years. Tony Stark has long conversations with an empty Iron Man suit and argues with people about what value he actually possesses outside of empty spectacle. At one point a small child literally asks him “when are we going to talk about The Avengers?” and Tony Stark literally has a panic attack in response. I’ve never seen a movie that’s so obsessed with its own precarious status as a summer blockbuster that can’t possibly be the biggest summer blockbuster. So it’s really disappointing when it turns around and tries anyway.

Which is why I find Kitty deeply interesting as a media personality that writes in Vice and does interviews with Stereogum even as I haven’t really bothered to listen to anything she’s done since “Okay Cupid.” Cupid was such a bizarre cultural artifact when it came out that I was just totally unable to parse the multiple levels of battling irony and twee sincerity long enough to figure out what the hell was going on. I’ve read interviews with her though because I was trying to figure out if she actually meant the bit or not and the more people turned against her and let her know she was ruining rap by being a small white girl who wasn’t a very good rapper the more interesting I found her.

I mean, the position of being famous and not very good is actually shockingly common in the modern musical landscape, the pressure to find new artists to hype means that you’re constantly plucking people out of obscurity who have performed publicly like a dozen times and when you’ve only done something a dozen time you’re pretty much guaranteed to be awful at it when 500 people are staring at you and ranking you against every other human being who’s done that thing. What made Kitty interesting was how she handled the narrative of not being a very good rapper.

Usually, when somebody gets to the “emperor has no clothes” stage of their hype cycle they decide to double down because what the hell else are you going to do? When somebody says you suck you go “No I’m awesome!” and hope you’ve got enough fans that don’t notice and stick around that you’ve still got a career. In that interview up there though Kitty does the EXACT OPPOSITE THING, she confesses that she sucks but says Danny Brown thinks she has potential and lets everybody know that she’s trying to get better and you’re free to watch that process.

I think what makes me vaguely obsessed with that interview is that the pitch seems to be working for her. She’s making some friends in music scene high places (in addition to Danny Brown she’s got GRIMES working on her new album???) and touring and getting more press than a lot of rappers that seems pretty sympathetic to her. Which, it shouldn’t be working right? I kinda feel like every time I try to engage with the meta-narrative and ask everybody to ignore the content I find myself surrounded by people who suddenly fell asleep.

I tend not to share stuff like this with you guys because I feel like for anybody that ISN’T looking at so much media that small variations in the formula end up being more interested than execution it’s all incredibly boring. Who wants to watch a random rapper who isn’t all that great get better? Who wants to watch a movie that’s okay but not that great have a nervous breakdown about the possibility that it’s okay but not that great?

Pretty much nobody.

Except, I do. In fact I kind of want to watch that stuff more than I’d like to watch the actual content being delivered to me these days. And I’m hoping maybe I’ve bombarded you guys with enough stuff that I can make you feel the same way by osmosis or something? There’s only so many meditations on the aesthetics of drone photography a guy can look at before they’re just photos taken by a fucking flying robot and if that’s true you can imagine how quickly the funny web videos nitpicking the artistic integrity of action blockbusters, the indie bands trying to bring “____” back and the shows about anti-heroes and daddy issues start to blend together these days. It’s not that any of those things suck (The stupid nitpicking videos about summer blockbusters I’m getting real sick of though) it’s that I’m starting to feel like we’ve all graduated from the 101 class here, right?

We’re in a very different position on the web than we were when I started this thing. RSS is pretty much dying with Google Reader because ambiently collecting all the updates you care about has gone from a specialized task for the web elite to the way basically everybody engages with the web and, in general, people prefer to get those updates tailored to them by social connection rather than news outlet. As a result the service I used to provide here of letting you know about 10 things you might not have known about before OTP seems to be more double checking you’re following the right people on Twitter.

I guess what I’m asking is, does anybody feel like they really need me to tell them what’s interesting that they might have missed anymore? Because honestly I’m not really finding that task that interesting the more I’ve automated it the more it’s become obvious that a robot can and does do this better than I do. When people tell me they’re behind on OTP I tell them they’re not missing much. Instead, I want to talk about the stuff I’m absolutely certain that nobody finds interesting but me and try to explain why the hell I give a crap about it.

So this is both a textual and meta-textual appeal that says this can work. It can work because there’s a teenage girl rapper that’s trying to get people to engage with her journey more than her content and that seems to be working and it can work because I just did it and at least two of you are still awake. Let’s see if I can do it again.

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