the emperor’s new clothes

luka

Well-known member
you can find yourself in a conversation, here say, where suddenly you realise you need to pull your face into focus, and the language into line with that because someone clever has just turned up and is using language in a more careful precise way to express more subtle and precise thoughts. you can feel the skin around your eyes tighten.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
yes, of course, you pick up every tone from somewhere. some from books some from television some from your peers
Currently on a rewatch of Friends, of all things (don't judge! it's really tightly written! young Lisa Kudrow is astoundingly beautiful!), and reminded of how it taught an entire generation how to be "funny" like, especially, Chandler. Yuh-huh! Talk to the hand! An entire vocabulary of snark and banter, from verbal intonation to physical gesture, just landed in a single package, like a gift from the gods. Before that - you younger people may not believe me, but it's true - the only way anybody had to be funny was to recite Monty Python skits at each other. And that was a totally different style of being funny, centred on silly voices and absurd scenarios with a latent dimension of class resentment.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
you can find yourself in a conversation, here say, where suddenly you realise you need to pull your face into focus, and the language into line with that because someone clever has just turned up and is using language in a more careful precise way to express more subtle and precise thoughts. you can feel the skin around your eyes tighten.
This is true, I see people doing this around me all the time
 

luka

Well-known member
This is true, I see people doing this around me all the time
im sure this is true. another thing that happens is that people will put pressure on each other, will use tone, diction, accent etc as part of a way to impose or agree a set or ratio of values. this much seriousness, this much cynicism, etc. so youre always moderating and making interventions etc https://www.dissensus.com/index.php?threads/15834/
 

sufi

lala
Currently on a rewatch of Friends, of all things (don't judge! it's really tightly written! young Lisa Kudrow is astoundingly beautiful!), and reminded of how it taught an entire generation how to be "funny" like, especially, Chandler. Yuh-huh! Talk to the hand! An entire vocabulary of snark and banter, from verbal intonation to physical gesture, just landed in a single package, like a gift from the gods. Before that - you younger people may not believe me, but it's true - the only way anybody had to be funny was to recite Monty Python skits at each other. And that was a totally different style of being funny, centred on silly voices and absurd scenarios with a latent dimension of class resentment.
this is so true, it was like a whole new vocabulary for articulating all these twenty something urban neurotic relationship memes arrived with "friends", and so inevitably that must have affected how people built relationships and lived their lives, especially as the telly was our main window on the world previous to facebook and this place - both started the year friends finished
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I watched the Friends reunion show, and then not long afterwards the episode in the first season where Phoebe gets a shrink boyfriend, whose immediate observation on meeting Chandler is "oh, hey, you're a funny guy!...wouldn't want to be around when the laughter stops though", which bit just that little bit deeper after hearing Matthew Perry, visibly changed by years of drug misuse, talking about how desperate he was to nail the laugh and how empty he felt if a line went flat.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I mean this is a chaos magic thing, isn't it. Be careful what you manifest, even if you think you're only playing at it. Even a throwaway quip can become prophetic. When you put on the Friends comedic-repertoire, to do bants with your IRL friends, you also enter into its psychic universe. There's a shadow that slips in, unnoticed.
 

sufi

lala
I mean this is a chaos magic thing, isn't it. Be careful what you manifest, even if you think you're only playing at it. Even a throwaway quip can become prophetic. When you put on the Friends comedic-repertoire, to do bants with your IRL friends, you also enter into its psychic universe. There's a shadow that slips in, unnoticed.
yeah there was a lot of resistance to being like friends, a lot of disparaging, but the influence was powerful and insidious,
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
The other thing, while I'm taking over this thread to talk about Friends, is that after years of not being able to watch it because it all seemed so played out, and I had learned to hate the characters, it is now actually funny again; at least the first season is. There is sufficient distance that the nagging homophobia and anorexia-inducing weight-loss contests between lead actresses now seem like historical quirks rather than active toxins. I'm so old that it no longer seems like it's meant to be a reflection of, or an attempt to reshape through the power of mimesis, my own life. Perhaps the reunion show performed a purgative or distancing function. The players take off their masks. They, too, are older. They reassure us that they enjoyed making the thing, had human feelings (David Schwimmer really had a thing for Jennifer Aniston, OMG!) at the time, have in one way or another integrated those past roles into their sense of themselves. A bit like the bit at the end of a really hectic BSDM porn video where the performers talk about how it was all really consensual and fulfilling and they'd totally do it again, especially the bit with the foreskin clamps, my god, so hot.
 
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poetix

we murder to dissect
Like visiting a museum full of relics of a now-defunct empire. How terrible it must have been to live under its sway. But now people roleplay conqueror and conquered. The vulture insignia look cool, we use a stylised version for our MMORPG raiding party. Everyone knows the "what have the Romans ever done for us" routine.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Coincidentally I actually was listening to autechre the other day. Didn't really get it, though. Not convinced there's anything there, to be honest.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I mean I like abstract bleeps and bloops as much as the next person, but I have no insight at all into the thought process that goes "after precisely this bleep, let's have precisely that bloop, and then a sort of swooshy, smushy sound made by mixing the spectral signatures of the two sounds together, only just for a twentieth of a second before we introduce the next blorp". I can't distinguish it from randomness. I made a short piece a week or so ago which actually was entirely random, and found it pleasing, but it also felt like I was cheating somehow.

 

catalog

Well-known member
which autechre were you listening to? cos you might like the earlier stuff, incunabula and garbage. i don't really like the new stuff as much as that old stuff.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
It was Sign, from 2020. I know only bits and bobs of the older stuff, like Rae which I really like. Perhaps you have to walk the whole path with them to make any sense of where they're currently at.
 

catalog

Well-known member
i've not listened to that yet. not really interested at the moment. the last newer stuff i listened to from them sounded alright but is not something i ever felt the need to return to.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
A bit like the bit at the end of a really hectic BSDM porn video where the performers talk about how it was all really consensual and fulfilling and they'd totally do it again, especially the bit with the foreskin clamps, my god, so hot.
I love the way you always explain things using examples we can all easily relate to.
 
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