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grandhotelabyss · 4 years ago

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Two points, though, are not raised in either the essay or the thread: what is the source of the ideas and the power of this new “universal middlebrow,” and what in the cultural landscape runs counter to it?

In answer to the first question: there is still a very much “funded” highbrow regime operating in the same institutions that operated the old highbrow regime. It is an academic discourse, dictating to and parasitic upon the middlebrow artistic fare discussed in the essay, whose job is to vet it for ideological conformity to a series of propositions borrowed from both liberal and radical traditions and now pressed into the service of the corporatist hegemony. The new highbrow regime generates the moral ideology informing the lowbrow/middlebrow artistic content. You can tell this ideology is highbrow because it’s enforced the way the old highbrow was: through an unspoken but brutally enforced knowledge of the comme il faut, which, if you lack it, outs you as an out-caste.

For example, when an organ as venerable as The Nation publishes something like this—something that bears very little resemblance to the published political utterances of, say, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Toni Morrison, or Cornel West—one is not, on pain of being thought a philistine or a rube or far worse, supposed to notice that it is a racialist hate discourse, which, in its resemblance to prior forms of corporatist-fascist ideology, is basically incompatible with the “structure of feeling” that used to prevail among American left-liberals as recently as a decade ago. (You won’t catch me noticing any such thing—I’ve been to college!)

Second, and in counterpoint, evident everywhere we see the quiet and creeping influence of a so-far not-quite-denominated emergent counterculture—let’s call them the post-liberals, a formation that ranges up and down cultural registers and from left to right in politics, but which converges on an essentially aesthetic hostility to the new highbrow regime and its middlebrow art-troupers described above. I wish some sociologist would visually map out this counterculture, but it’s not a spot on the political compass so much as a sensibility rhizomatically tangled under the whole field, with roots traversing the “dirtbags” on the left (the Chapo crew), the IDW and its fellow-travelers in the middle (Yang, Siegel, Greenwald, Chatterton Williams), and NRx (Land, Yarvin) and Catholic reaction (Deneen, Ahmari) on the right, as well the superficially apolitical avant-garde literature, art, and music worlds and the Thiellist dissident wing of Silicon Valley.

Some names, by no means exclusive, might include Anna-and-Dasha, Logo-and-Kantbot, Justin Murphy, Default Friend, Geoff Shullenberger, Alex Kaschuta, Adam Lehrer, Mónica Belevan, Aimee Terese, Malcom Kyeyune, TrueAnon, Gio Pennacchietti, Bronze Age Pervert, Barrett Avner, Deanna Havas, the Perfume Nationalist, Zero HP Lovecraft, Delicious Tacos, and more. (“But some of these individuals and cliques hate one another and fight one another all the time,” those in the know will object, which is true but not relevant to my point, since they fight within the emergent milieu I’m trying to define.)

One of this varied and contentious formation’s major traits is its appropriation of much of the last-but-one highbrow canon, the politically heterodox high theory displaced by the orthodox left-sociology canon of the new highbrow regime. So we see an interest, for example, in Bataille, Weil, Foucault, Deleuze, Girard, and Baudrillard, not to mention Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schmitt, Strauss, and Jünger, along with American mavericks from Lasch to Paglia to Illich to Mumford, and a handful of “based”-seeming Marxists like Lukács, Žižek, and Fisher. All of these thinkers are aggressively anti-middlebrow, most of them either operating at a level of abstraction that makes them hard to read for the philosophically unprepared or issuing astringent judgments and formulations impossible to reduce to any sort of moral uplift—or both. Most are openly illiberal, though one or two (Foucault and his nemesis Paglia, for example) deliberately translate their sub rosa liberalism into an alluringly illicit doctrine of monstrously absolute license.

For minimal entry to this counterculture one must emit a signal of some sort that one does not affiliate with the new highbrow regime and its moral priorities: the ideological litmus test can be passed with any form of nihilism, most forms of conservatism provided it’s not lowbrow American (except if relished as irony), or a form of line-them-up-against-the-wall leftism that has no truck with empathy-and-Arendt bromides. What used to be called postmodern irony is still alive here, after its millennial demotion by the plaster saint DFW that inaugurated the present epoch; it is really the affective core of the tendency: “It’s dark but just a game,” as one of the movement’s few approved mainstream pop figures recently crooned. Also preferred is some cognizance of the interests behind the new woke highbrow regime’s installation and what these interests have been up to in the past: mention the CIA, the foundations, the NGOs, the defense contractors, and who killed Kennedy.

My point in making this very rough sketch is to detail the consequences of the dilemma I wrote about here. If the new highbrow regime cannot survive the potential economic collapse of the institutions that materialize it—academe, journalism, etc.—we’re seeing what will replace it in successor institutions, not least because this emergent counterculture will fascinate the artists and thinkers to come with its irony and lack of ready answers. Ambiguity—not what the right-Trotskyists of the Bush era and the left-identitarians of our own time have extolled as “moral clarity”—is the engine of cultural survival. John Ashbery wrote, “The new conservatism is / Sitting down beside you”—and he, I think I read somewhere, voted for Nixon. New as it is, we’ve been here before, a century ago, to be precise, for better and for worse (the best art, the worst politics): they used to call it modernism.

#cultural politics #modernism #counterculture #the new conservatism

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thanksjro · 5 years ago

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Spotlight: Trailcutter - Trailcutter Threatens to Kill Several People For a Good Noodle Star

The Spotlight issues- the one-shots that focus on a single character in an effort to get readers interested in them (and sell toys, of course)- are a funny thing. The ones relating to MTMTE characters within the timeline of MTMTE’s events were written nearly a year after the events during which they are set.

The Spotlights as a whole don’t stick in my brain terribly well, and that’s probably because when I first read IDW’s run back in 2016, I went by publication dates instead of story chronology. I don’t think that really leaves itself for a properly cohesive reading experience, at least not in this particular case. It doesn’t help that a lot of the other ones weren’t super awesome reads, in my opinion. Spotlight: Cyclonus isn’t exactly my favorite thing, for example.

The Scavengers storyline gets interrupted anyway with the Annual, so I figure I might as well slot these in here as well. Really, I should have covered this between MTMTE #5 and #6. Well, technically, I don’t have to do anything in any order, but it’s what I would have preferred.

Anyway, let’s see what's up.

Looks like the Lost Light’s seen better days. It’s had a hole punched in the side of it, and Trailbreaker’s been asked to use his forcefields to keep the vacuum of space from doing its thing while all the Headmasters slap some duct tape on the rip.

No, they aren’t actually Headmasters in this continuity, but it’s not often Highbrow gets to exist in the story proper, so I figured I’d take advantage of that.

Rodimus, impressed by the quick response to the damage, decides he’s going to hold a little ceremony for the boys- not Trailbreaker though, because I guess nobody told Rodimus he’d pitched in too.

Soak it in, Highbrow, because this is the closest thing to main character status you’ll be getting this whole comic run. Be mindful up there now, because if Chromedome turns too fast he’ll take your head clean off with those massive shoulders.

Each of them receive a Rodimus Star, a medal with Rodimus’ face on it signifying that the owner has done something exemplary to earn it. It is in no way shaped like a star.

Trailbreaker, bummed out that he wasn’t recognized for the work he put in, decides to drown his sorrows at Swerve’s, which at this point is still technically not on the up and up and is running illegally. Unfortunately for Trailbreaker, the afterparty is also being hosted here, so he’s not actually escaped anything.

Off to the side, Chromedome and Brainstorm are chatting with Tailgate, who notes the theming of the award-winners’ names, and thinks it’s very funny. Chromedome explains that they’re actually nicknames, from when they all worked together.

Back at Trailbreaker’s table, he’s trying to keep himself entertained, when Whirl happens. Whirl, being Whirl, makes a rude comment about his face, claiming he has an expression he makes whenever he uses his forcefields. Trailbreaker denies this, but he totally does.

Whirl asks what’s eating at Trailbreaker, not that he really cares, and after a bit of hemming and hawing, finds out that Trailbreaker’s really bothered by the fact that he was the only one on the repair team that didn’t get a star. As it turns out, Rodimus has been passing these things out like hotcakes, because Whirl’s got one too. Pretty much everyone but Trailbreaker has a star at this point.

Whirl decides to cut out the middle man and yells at Rodimus to get his McDonald’s-looking butt over here and proceeds to cut to the heart of the matter.

Implying that Drift doesn’t already have twenty Rodimus stars for just existing.

C’mon Rodimus, just give him a star. You obviously ordered way too many if you’ve given one to Whirl by this point, and Trailbreaker’s obviously feeling low.

Whirl, not satisfied with this answer, decides to inflict his special brand of help on Trailbreaker, and decides that it’s time for a little self-improvement.

But y’know. Not like he really cares.

Totally.

The first step in the Whirl Self-Help program is to throw away your old identity while insulting/infatuating over Ultra Magnus.

Now the Spotlight subtitle makes a lot more sense. Trailbreaker/Trailcutter is one of the many characters within the Transformers franchise who suffers from trademark issues, which is why he’s got more than one name. We’ll see him flipflop between the two in MTMTE- or rather, other characters flipflop between them- OR RATHER Roberts flipflop between them.

As is, Whirl takes to the change immediately, probably because he himself has gone through the process in the past.

So, talking yourself up is the next step, but Trailcutter doesn’t really want to reinvent himself, per se; he just wants to be a little more than the guy who does forcefields. He wants people to see him for him, y’know?

Whirl thinks the answer to this conundrum is to get Trailcutter a gun.

They go find Brainstorm, who’s currently busy trying to figure out just what exactly the ship hit to punch such a big hole in it. They’ve brought in the big metal something, and he, Perceptor and a couple other nerds are giving it a good once-over.

As Whirl gushes over Brainstorm’s many inventions- lot of love coming from Whirl this issue- Brainstorm questions Trailcutter’s desire to get into traditional weaponry, seeing as he’s got some sweet stuff going on already, namely the forcefield thing and the magnawheels, which we’ll get to see in action later.

Trailcutter leaves to go take a depression nap.

When he gets to his room, he finds his roommate, Hoist, to be absent. Hoist is off on his own adventure, which is covered in his very own Spotlight. Of course, because Trailcutter is playing the buttmonkey today, he still doesn’t get left alone, as he receives a call from Swerve, who’s probably super jazzed that he’s not the most beat-down character on the ship for once.

Swerve’s supposed to be doing a sponsored silence in exchange for a Rodimus star, but he’s find it very difficult, thanks to the whole “cannot shut the hell up” thing. Swerve, much like everyone with teeth in this issue, looks like he’s got a retainer in, showing that little bit of artistic license off as he asks Trailcutter for a favor.

And on that note, let’s take a brief look at the artist for this issue, Matt Frank.

Frank’s only worked on a couple other things within Transformers, one of which being the second half of the Animated comic “First (and Second) in Flight.” His style is very different from our regular artist, Alex Milne. While Milne seems to prioritize the more technical aspects of the Transformers designs, even in the relatively streamlined looks for MTMTE, Frank’s art is much more simplified, almost soft-looking. Characters look as if their faces would squish if you grabbed them by the cheeks. There’s a lot of expression, almost to the point of looking straight-up cartoonish. While I’m not sure that this style would have worked with the more serious storylines of this series, I think it’s a shame that this was the only entry from Frank that we got to see. It’s a little funky in spot, but I like how emotionally open it feels, if that makes sense.

Getting back to the story, Trailcutter hangs up on Swerve and plugs in for beddy-bye, wishing that he were a normal dude and that everyone would just shut up about his forcefields.

See, I told you- depression nap.

Trailcutter, feeling that something’s up- both with the ship and himself- heads out to find a friend. What he finds instead is profoundly disturbing.

Clearly there is a dark evil at work, if Huffer’s smiling. He shouldn’t be able to DO that.

Trailcutter wanders around the ship, finding more of the same strangeness going on: everyone is frozen in place, even Rodimus as he yells at Rewind over those snuff films Red Alert found, firmly setting this issue for having happened right before issue #6.

Trailcutter heads back to his room, and is about to answer a call from Hoist- who is still on that mission from before naptime- when a laser blast explodes his monitor.

Zounds! Some Decepticons have snuck aboard the Lost Light, and they’re looking for trouble. Thinking quickly, Trailcutter pops out of his hiding spot to forcefield the pair… except he doesn’t, because something’s wrong. His forcefields aren’t working.

The art’s a little hard to follow here, but it looks like Trailcutter just ripped Whirl’s tit-guns off and used them to shoot that guy. Radical.

With the enemy fully distracted, Trailcutter jumps over a chair and bolts for the exit, using his magnawheels and showing us exactly why they’re called that.

They’re wheels that act as magnets. That’s why.

He hacks the door to the medibay and uses it to kill a man, crushing his head, then gets the other guy with a pair of resuscitation pads. Day’s saved! Good job, Trailcutter!

Just kidding, we still have another half of this issue to get through.

The guy Trailcutter just knocked out with medical equipment gets a call. Good thing Trailcutter’s good at impressions.

Turns out, there’s a LOT of Decepticons on the Lost Light at present, and they’re after something in the shuttle bay. Looks like Trailcutter’s got some work to do. Might as well set yourself up for success, huh pal?

Gee, Brainstorm, wonder how much of all this nonsense is your fault. I’m going to guess at least all of it.

Trailcutter stocks up on the heroic necessities, and heads over to shuttle bay 3.

Lockdown’s here, and he’s brought a third of the villain lineup from Transformers Animated with him. Trailcutter brings on the bravado, dumping the two Decepticons he took out earlier on the floor and asking just what the hell these guys think they’re doing on his ship.

Lockdown isn’t terribly impressed.

Trailcutter, what the actual, genuine fuck is that even supposed to mean?

Stealing Whirl’s little talking-up speech, Trailcutter frames himself as friggin’ death incarnate, again not impressing Lockdown very much. Honestly, Lockdown just wants to grab that big ol’ something the Lost Light ran into yesterday and go.

That big ol’ something, you see, is a Titan thumb, and Lockdown and his crew are in the business of Titan hunting. Trailcutter makes it pretty clear that he’s not going to let them take the thing, seeing as Lockdown and his goonies are probably going to use it for nefarious purposes, and so seals himself in the role of the hero for the evening. He informs the Decepticons of his claim to fame, even though his forcefields still aren’t working, then pulls a little magic trick by turning off the artificial gravity for the room, claiming it to be the work of his highly-specialized skills. He lets them go up… then lets them come back down, hard.

Then Trailcutter ramps up the psychological manipulation significantly, using his anime eyes to convince Lockdown that he’s planted a tiny forcefield within his spark, and that he’s fully capable of letting it expand until it rips said spark asunder.

Lockdown and company get the fuck away from Trailcutter as fast as they possibly can, completely terrified and also maybe just the slightest bit flustered by our forcefield specialist. Once they’re out of sight, Trailcutter allows himself a moment to reflect on a job well done.

ARE YOU FUCKING-

Roberts, please, we can’t keep doing this. The sad, proud smiles, I can’t take them.

Trailcutter plops down in the captain’s chair to take a load off, only to get spooked by the hand of Rodimus clapping down on his shoulder.

Later on, Hoist’s returned from his mission to their room, and Trailcutter regales him with his tale of derring-do. Turns out that everyone being frozen was absolutely Brainstorm’s fault, and the only reason Trailcutter wasn’t affected was because he was sleep-forcefielding.

Of course, we can’t just let the guy be happy, now can we?

Okay. I looked it up, and it turns out, the British use “snap” when they’re in a situation where they’ve got the same X as another person, i.e. two people show up wearing the same outfit to an event, or some such. It comes from a matching card game. In America, we say “snap” as an exclamation, like “wow!” or “Jesus Christ!” or “dangit!” Snap is a very versatile word in the States. So there’s your little culture lesson for the day.

Trailcutter, sinking back into his sour mood from earlier, decides to go get plastered, because he has a drinking problem, but not before he goes to make a threat on Rodimus’ life over a goddamn sticker. Thus ends dear Trailcutter’s Spotlight.

#transformers #jro #mtmte #spotlight #maccadam #Hannzreads #text post #long post #incoming analysis #comic script writing

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quetzalpapalotl · 4 years ago

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Eugenesis Chromedome, Brainstorm and Highbrow all worker at the Institute of Higher Programming, just like in Mtmte!!!

Except not, because the Institute of Higher Programming is a school here and also in IDW, Orion Pax was a student there!

The Institute Chromedome and co. worked in Mtmte was, well, The Institute

#quetzal faces mechpreg

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zephyrrhiesfyrian · 1 month ago

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a wip for that sparkeater fic i mentioned: Perceptor and Highbrow bond over noms (the noms may or may not be a former crewmate, it's unclear)

what is Getaway looking at

i do not remember why i drew this tiny hoist

Protectobot snuggles!

BLADES, DOWN, DOWN BOY--

Senator Shockwave has a crisis

#transformers #transformers idw #transformers mtmte #transformers art #transformers perceptor #transformers highbrow #transformers getaway #transformers hoist #transformers protectobots #transformers blades #transformers shockwave #sparkeater au #so many scribbles #sparkeater brainrot sparkeater brainrot

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4ce160 · 3 years ago

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This turned from a serious character design study into doodles and I'm happy with that-

#hello it's been ages since I've drawn anything transformers related-#maccadam #transformers #transformers headmasters #highbrow #i hear about the hm series and I die inside as I think about the wasted character potential show pls-#there's like #one drawing of his Idw(ish) version there but it's mostly just headmasters related lmao #side note but I love drawing him emoting with his visor like that #I know it doesn't make sense but it's fun

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outlier-roddy · 5 years ago

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in general I think abt Hardhead more than a lot of ppl probably. like he just spent his time in idw playing second fiddle muscle to someone more charismatic, from nightbeat to hot rod to optimus. also as a sidenote gotta love how he, chromedome, and brainstorm were main characters, leaving highbrow to claim the title of most forgotten g1 Autobot headmaster

LMAOOO you’re so valid tho dude

(also how the hell did i not realize before now that all those guys’ names had something to do with heads? that's uhhhh g1 subtlety for u i guess?)

#we stan a second fiddle hot boy #and with that u have officially converted me to the roddy/hardhead ship lmaoo #rosesscythes #asks!

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sternerstufftoys · 5 years ago

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One night in Bangkok makes the Hardhead humble

It is the year 1987... ...the UK is hit by an actual hurricane, unless you were watching Michael Fish, then it didn't. ...Ronald Reagan asks Mikhail Gorbechev to tear down a wall. Gorbachev, ever the workshy layabout, gets a bunch of Germans to do it for him two years later. ...and the Transformers are starting to use their heads...

Hardhead is one of those characters that never quite got their due over the years. Despite a long list of appearances in the IDW series in particular, he never really stood out other than being a bit of extra firepower for the Autobots to use. While most of the characters brought on board in the early -ation miniserieses were classic 1984-types, Hardhead was conspicuous by his inclusion. Of course, being introduced in Escalation was fitting, as the facade of using alt modes as disguises began to be dropped, and having a massive artillery gun became a more useful trait. As for why Hardhead was chosen rather than Warpath, I can only assume that Writer Simon Furman didn't particularly want to fill the dialogue with lots of "Pow!"s and "Ka-ZOOM!"s. A grateful world thanks you, Mr Furman.

Thing is though, while Hardhead stuck around for a long time, he never really got to do very much. He hung around with Nightbeat for a bit, with Optimus Prime and Wheelie for a bit, shot people a lot, and eventually died. He was a perennial backup character, always there to lend a helpful rat-a-tat-boom but never really getting to live. Aw, that's actually really sad. At least when Sideswipe copped it people felt sorry for him.

It's especially a shame because Hardhead was the odd one out in the original Headmasters. Brainstorm was the smart one, Chromedome was the smart one, Highbrow was the smart one and Hardhead was the not-smart one. Clearly the original pitch for the quartet was to lean into the fact that the heads were the important thing about them, so for the most part they clearly needed to be good thinkers. But to mix things up a bit, Hardhead didn't have brains, he had... an armour-plated noggin. Well, it's certainly different.

As one of the initial wave of Titans Return Hardhead made it abundantly clear where the line was going. No wild reinventions, but instead the old toys looking like you remember them rather than they actually were. The robot mode and the transformation are near-identical, though with the sorry loss of the tech spec panel into a mere painted-on detail. But overall it's a genuinely pleasing upgrade. It helps that Hardhead was always something of a looker, and the original design lends itself to modern mechanics quite well. Yeah, it's the classic H-tank transformation, with four sets of treads becoming four limbs. Well, Hardhead always did it pretty well, compared to some of the later adopters of the look.

In alt mode the treads hug tightly to the main hull of the tank, so they don't look quite as conspicuous as limbs. There is one notable change from the G1 design here, in that the cockpit is on one side due to the smaller scale of the vehicle, rather than in the middle. I can live with it. Happily the tanks main gun can now lift up, rotate left and right in addition to the traditional up-and-down motion, and especially fun is the ability to plonk a second titan master into it to act as a gunner. We croon about the G1 accuracy of the TR line these days, but to me the real joy will forever be in the toys that have added interaction with multiple titan masters. Kup has it, Hardhead has it. The more the better.

Perhaps I'm not as enthused as I could be though. Hardhead is pretty much perfect but not exactly exciting. I keep looking back at the utterly bonkers energy of the Thrilling 30 era and wish that a little bit of that spice could have made it through to Titans Return. It's a tradeoff, certainly. You can have imperfect but inventive, or perfect and safe. I'm lucky enough to have a collection that includes both. Hardhead, you're fine.

#transformers #maccadam #toy review #hardhead #best bots of 1987 #titans return

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