jobey-wan-kenobi

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

punk black history month post. I give you the legendary Don Letts.

Don Letts In the late 1970s he was the link between the burgeoning punk and reggae scenes. He single-handedly brought reggae music to the punk world essentially starting ska, playing heavy dub records to members of bands such as The Clash, The Sex Pistols and The Slits. Later he went on to become a renowned documentary filmmaker, not to mention part of the Grammy-winning group Big Audio Dynamite

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

did i ever mention how much i fucking love the aesthetic of the orginial production of 'Elisabeth'? No bc look at this,,,the dead were wearing fucking veils in the beginning. like,,,damn

and the whole androgyn death style??? hit me the fuck up.

Y'all need to go and watch the 1992 version. I think there is one up with subtitles ??? I am not sure rn PLEASE give yourself the pleasure. It's so pleasing to the eye

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

i had a 4 hour drive today so i put on the revenge of the sith audiobook and the part where palpatine tells anakin to kill dooku came on right around the time that i saw a cybertruck and for a brief and beautiful moment when he said "do it" i had the urge to ram my honda full on into that shitty ass car

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

i'm pregnant... with the next great American novel! [looks directly at you, suddenly serious] and I'm getting an abortion

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

The Grammys suck, but...

... but, 2024 was the first and last? time I ever made it a point to keep up with all the new mainstream music. So, I was invested.

And now I have opinions but no one to discuss em with.

Cowboy Carter is way more polarizing an album than it should be. It has a very good concept and some really good writing, but the execution was just not where it needed to be to produce something "great" instead of "interesting." It deserved Country Album of the Year because the other albums (though there were a few individual tracks scattered among 'em that I bopped to more than anything on CC) just didn't have anything interesting to say. But CC didn't deserve Album of the Year IMO, not even on the artistic merits because I think it can put up a respectable fight against the other noms on that front, but because so far as the zeitgeist stuff goes it wasn't THAAT big. I favored Brat myself because it defined the year but I wouldn't have been mad about some of the others. Ofc New Blue Sun was the actual best of the lot but again, I do think it's fair to factor in pop culture impact into this equation and, well, yknow.

I don't like "Not Like Us" winning Song of the Year AND Record of the Year. Now, I would have been more mad if it had won neither lol, I think it definitely deserved SOTY, but competition for the singles was tight this year and it really doesn't seem right for NLU to take both — spread the love. I also don't love NLU sweeping all its noms. And I say this AS a Kdot diehard. 😅 But I don't think the Grammys should be glazing any artist I love harder than I am. It makes me feel dirty. Almost as dirty as I felt to see Dre and Lucian fuckin' Grange huggin and kissin to celebrate... Disgusting. Yep, I'm ready to exit the "Not Like Us" era. It was a great run! But, next please!! (I say, knowing full well that we still have the Superbowl and that I WILL make it a point to watch. But, yknow. After THAT.)

Chappell Roan as Best New Artist ✅ no notes.

"Von Dutch" and "Espresso" deserved their flowers ✅✅

Happy for "3:AM" and "Saturn" to be recognized! Two of my favorite tracks this year! 🥳🥳

Not mad about St. Vincent getting best Alternative Music Album. There were other good ones but no one was snubbed.

Billie Eilish deserved some recognition for her work this year but it was a crowded field and she's been lauded in Grammys past so it's understandable I guess.

Everyone in the Rock category, however, got screwed lol. "Now and Then" deserved some sort of minor honor because it WAS a Music Moment™️ but Best Rock Song is absurd. It's not even rock! C'monnn! (Saying this as a Beatle girl! But this IS insulting the other nominees.)

Rolling Stones' win is a biiiit more defensible because Hackney Diamonds was genuinely a good album. But. Elephant was better. Elephant rocked, actually. And even if Elephant had been merely as good, yeah, I think ties should go to the band that is actually a current force. The dinosaurs deserved their nomination for real but I think they should really have to drop a masterpiece for the younger artists to be snubbed like that. I'm not much of a current rock fan but if I were I'd be fuming.

But, they got it right with the rap albums! DOECHII THE DON, DOECHII THE DEAN, DOECHIII SUPREMEEEEEE 🐊

Now there are some fair critiques to be made of this project (like the fact that it's a mixtape, and it feels less weighty than some of the albums it was up against) but there was nothing actually nominated that was better than it. Some people don't seem to understand that Ab-Soul, Tyler, and Kendrick's albums qualify for next year, not this year (and damn, next year's Rap AOTY is already shaping up to be a battle of titans! We've barely got underway for the year, and we already have awesome albums that are too hard to choose from!!) And the actual best Rap Album of the Year shoulda been Blue Lips but for whatever reason (I don't know how that works?) it wasn't nominated (laaaaame!) So, of the actual noms, Alligator Bites is soooo correct that I'm actually shocked the Grammys made that call lmao. The music sounds dope. The rap is fiery and hungry. One of the most fresh and fun projects put out by anyone this year. The only competitor I can see an argument for is We Don't Trust You, which sounds more mature and assured and was more popular from the jump — but it also had a lot of bloat. Doechii's project is admittedly lean but every single minute of it is sick. I can actually agree that these two projects are on a same tier, they'd just be on that tier for two different reasons. All the other nominations can all go suck it, though. Laughing my ass off at people saying Cole or Em was snubbed, fuck offfff. Or Common. Common! 😆 And I love Common, but let's be so for real about how much impact Absolution had. C'mon.

Anyway, my 2024 pop music challenge made for an interesting experience. I found some new-to-me artists that I'm definitely gonna keep following. But I don't plan on pushing myself to keep up with new releases across the board this year... Too much like work!

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.

The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.

It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.

And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.

Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.

A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.

Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.

At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.

And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! Student loans just started back up!

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

Babe that last essay gave me a raging thinker I'm gonna have to go muse off right now

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

Today in phrases I expect to retain: “rotten architecture but wonderful gargoyles” (George Orwell criticizing Dickens’ overarching plots while praising his scene-by-scene writing and eye for detail).

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

One of my favourite things when reading fanfiction is when you click with an author's style so much that you adore the fanfiction you're reading, and once it's over you need more. So you go to their page and hope that there's more for any fandom you might know- only there isn't any. They've written for other fandoms you aren't familiar with and never would've thought about before.

But you're down so bad for their style and talent that they got you wading in like:

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

the tom cruise salon article you posted was revolutionary to me... thank you for your service

Everyone should read possibly my favorite piece on Tom Cruise. I think it's kind of vital for understanding him and hollywood and sexuality and how they all intersect and it’s just so fascinating that it was written in the lead up to the release of Eyes Wide Shut. I would love to know what the writer thinks about the last 25 years of Cruise.

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

you're dead fucking wrong. hope your final breath is spent bemoaning your own close mindedness

this was sent to me six months ago so all context is lost but i just like the cadence of it

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

Please don’t pay for his music.

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

chatgpt is the coward's way out. if you have a paper due in 40 minutes you should be chugging six energy drinks, blasting frantic circus music so loud you shatter an eardrum, and typing the most dogshit essay mankind has ever seen with your own carpel tunnel laden hands

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

*raises hand*

i'm not sure it's my 'favorite,' but it is the first beatles cd i ever bought (like, after moving out, for my own collection - so i was already intimately familiar with all their studio albums! this was an informed purchase!) and it does sort of 'scratch an itch for me that the others don't'

first of all, i like the cover songs. so i don't mind that there are as many here as on PPM. their cover material makes the 'baby beatles hamburg/cavern' nerd in me happy.

this one also has an interesting advantage over PPM, they have more studio experience so their arrangements are getting more complex and george martin seems to be really trying to push himself out of his comfort zone to get the 'pub songs' to sound more pub-song-like. it's pretty much a failure? 'Mr. Moonlight,' for instance? 💀 but it's an interesting failure.

similarly, tired though they were from their huge year, they weren't phoning it all in. some of these (esp. John's stuff) has their most ambitious lyric-writing yet. so it's more inconsistent than AHDN, i would never say it's objectively better than ADHN, but i just... i appreciate this more. i dig getting to listen to their struggle and their growth. ADHN is actually my least favorite early beatle album, obviously it's gorgeous, immaculate, but it's just... ADHN is almost too easy for them. they're already just about too good to write that mindless pop. so i just get a lot more enjoyment listening to their growing pains. you can hear their creative exhaustion, but they're not giving up. ringo's back there pushing himself. john's up there pushing himself. paul's not pushing himself, but i get to be spared the lyrical run he's about to embark on where he is constantly lecturing his girlfriend so i'm actually into him not saying much rn 👍 (sorry buddy, come back when you're mature enough to give us 'eleanor rigby')

'No Reply' is a cool track and so is the 'Words of Love' cover, and they're both cool in a way that i don't think i hear on any other beatle track ever. the country-and-western stuff is not so cool to me but if one does like it, you don't really get it anywhere but here and Help!, and I think it's less offensive on this album, feels like it sticks out less

finally i just really enjoy these classic Lennon-McCartney power vocals and the John double-tracking leads. they ain't saying much but they sound so good. there are barely three braincells to be found in these songs but it's a great album to sing aloud in a car.

does anyone have beatles for sale as their favorite early beatles album? /genuine question

personally, its hard for me to imagine it being a standout album to anyone- esp considering that such other early beatles albums have such strong presences… PPM, AHDN, Help!; like, those are hard to shrug off! it’d certainly be interesting to know if BFS scratches someone’s itch in a way that the other albums can’t

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

idk something doesn’t quite sit right with me with the common headcanon that finnick and mags overplayed annie’s condition to help protect her and discourage the capitol from focusing on her. i’m not trying to start any sort of arguments or debate rn just thinking out loud bc like. what if it isn’t being overplayed. can’t we have a very visibly mentally ill woman. annie dissociates and cries in public and laughs at strange moments and physically reacts to her flashbacks by closing her eyes and covering her ears, all in public, all even in front of people she doesn’t know personally, and i think that should just. be ok with the fandom. while it’s a sweet mentality and i can see why people believe it, there shouldn’t have to be some ulterior motive behind any of her actions or how she portrays herself.

also. we as readers learn more about the victors at the same time as katniss, essentially providing us with how victors are seen in the eyes of the audience vs how they really are without the cameras. and in that earlier perspective, there are victors who are visibly affected by their trauma: haymitch and chaff drink, and the victors from d6 use morphling, and annie is “insane.” we learn later that they’re all broken, both bc katniss gets closer to them but also bc they go through even more trauma: finnick is barely holding on in d13 before annie’s rescue, and johanna is angry not just bc that’s her personality but also bc she’s in so much pain, and she eventually turns to morphling.

and just. idk. everyone else is able to keep up a facade that the capitol is willing to put up with if not outright use, and those who can’t keep that facade up become addicted to something that keeps them docile: the morphlings may not be outright usable, but at least they’re too out of it to do anything, and chaff seems to generally be a positive presence (at least in the eyes of the capitol), with or without alcohol. and johanna, while not abusing any substances until d13, (eventually) constructed a coping mechanism that was deemed palatable: with her family gone, she became angrier and more aggressive, both bc she had nothing to lose but also as a reaction to her trauma, and in the audience’s eyes anything she says or does can be brushed off as “oh that’s just angry johanna, she used to be such a crybaby but she sure fooled us, she’s so tough and feisty!” it’s all just a part of her shtick to them.

and even wiress, who has her peculiarities and is later broken further by the blood rain, is “useful” and invents in her spare time. hell, even haymitch manages it: sure, he tends to be very aggressive and grumpy, but that’s not what the audience sees. to them, he’s comedic. he’s the bumbling fool who arrives late to the reaping, yells some drunken stuff about how he likes the new tribute, messes with the escort, then falls off the stage. caesar even brings it up during katniss’s interview, and when the cameras pan to haymitch he goodnaturedly waves it away then turns the attention back to katniss

the only one we know of who can’t manage to reign in their symptoms in a way that the capitol can use to their advantage is annie. she’s also the only one aside from maybe wiress who we see really display the mental impacts in a way that is commonly thought of as “insane.” and i don’t think that has to be a problem, at least to fans.

[jobey-wan-kenobi]

reasons i haven’t replied back:

- i’m socially exhausted - i don’t have the time right now - i don’t know how to reply - i have a bad memory and got distracted - i’m having a depressive episode and don’t have the energy to socialise

not reasons i haven’t replied back:

- i’m ignoring you just because - i hate you - i’m fed up with you - i don’t want to be your friend anymore