northwessed

llydian-mode:

OffBeat premiered my single The Future off of the forthcoming Interiors (coming atcha June 25th)

Some thoughts on this:

1) I’m inclined to agree with my friend who shared this on Facebook that the attainment of extreme wealth is not a guarantee of greater wisdom or perception regarding the future of humankind. Where it all goes wrong is the ridiculously disproportionate societal power this extreme wealth gives to a small number of people whose very wealth is supposed to be taken as a proxy for their fitness to wield it wisely.

2) What extreme wealth does seem to guarantee is an almost pathological disregard for investing in those things that bring benefits to the commons regardless of their ability to pay for it. There’s never a point where they’ve made “enough” that they can even stomach the idea of providing something to the rest of humankind that isn’t predicated on someone else’s ability to pay for it, and therefore, turn a profit for them. What compulsive insecurity keeps you from being able to contribute to the world in a manner not tied to a profit-based model?

3) Honestly, I suspect it comes down to something like what happens to the psyches of residents in the Seattle neighborhood of Magnolia - despite all evidence to the contrary, they imagine that their majority-white well-to-do neighborhood is a crime-infested hellhole, and they need to take measures like hiring private security for the entire neighborhood to keep themselves safe. It’s as if they subconsciously recognize that their good fortunes are largely a product of luck, heredity, and past injustices rather than any special merit, and so they channel that insecurity into a fear that the angry mobs will come and take it away from them.

4) In the same way, the hyper-rich have basically won Western capitalism’s lottery, and fearing/knowing deep down on some level that they don’t possess any magical birthright to it, they paranoically try to figure out ways to keep themselves and their wealth safe against the reckoning they suspect they deserve. Thus, all this wealth becomes hoarded by a shrinking number of ever more fearful oligarchs, thereby increasing the chances of the very societal collapse they plan countermeasures against. What a terrific waste of human potential.

everydaylouie:

musical words 🎶

(via doubleflopflat)

Does anyone else have FUN HOME on their phone, and every time they connect their phone to their car, it plays your music in alpha order, so it starts with “A Flair for the Dramatic” with Beth Malone shouting “Caption!”?

musictheoryaugmented:

musictheoryaugmented:

(via )

liftedbrow:

I was sitting in a trendy Surry Hills eatery, just trying to eat some fried chicken and deconstruct my existential loneliness with a friend, when I was distracted by this image:

 

Why was this image here? The obvious answers weren’t satisfactory somehow. This place was young, innovative and painfully hip – shouldn’t they know better? The fried chicken was more than a physical censor; it was being used as a proxy, a deep fried piece of irony that justified the presence of a sexualised picture of a young woman in a public space. How dare they exploit fried chicken to exploit the female body! The aesthetic was so Terry Richardson; gratuitous and ironic, as if the latter ever negates the former.

This experience fitted neatly into a category of experiences I’d been mentally cataloguing under the heading: My Confusing Run-ins with ‘Ironic Sexism’. Other experiences included: a self-identifying feminist ally turning an intellectual conversation about sleep paralysis into a fictionalised sexual encounter between me and Kevin James (a.k.a. Paul Blart: Mall Cop), which he narrated in the first person, as me, paying close to attention my “gyrating pelvis” on Kev’s “shitty body” but of course as a joke, which was kind of funny, but it was also like “please stop, I barely know you!” There was the time I noticed that the tip jar at my favourite bar had a photo of an eighties bikini babe on it, with a post-it note saying “just the tip.” It was the handsome beta male with the beard and flannel offering to buy me a drink with the wry, magnanimous promise of “don’t worry, you don’t have to sleep with me or anything.” It’s the Instagram picture of three female friends in the kitchen, as dudes compete underneath for the pithiest, most sardonic version of “make me a sandwich, babe.” It’s even the well-intentioned, sarcastic jokes that try to suggest how stupid sexism was, unwittingly leaving little space to talk about how stupid sexism still is, because despite being so desperate to appear ‘above’ it, ironic sexism actually has little interest in your experiences within it. It’s about its own image, not your reality. It exploits its awareness for attention, not solidarity. Its eyes glaze over if you start to talk about your experiences, of which there are probably many.

Keep reading

I once stayed in a hipster hotel in LA that exemplified this aesthetic/problem. Also, apologies for the trigger-y images in the article, but it does drive home the point.

musikit:

is the MOST AMAZING COMIC I HAVE EVER READ.

Like seriously, as an Asian American, it covers basically everything I have ever dreamed of in a comic. 

Silk loves karaoke

There are cosplayers

They talk about representation.

And blatant racial stereotyping.

And microagressions.

And parental expectations of you.

And they fight over the dinner bill. Literally.

(via gregpak)