Help me out here, commenters and co-guest-bloggers. I am a bit puzzled.

Via Ann Friedman’s Lady Journos! tumblr (which come to think of it is also how I found my way to Molly Lambert), I just read Sady Doyle’s Birth of the Uncool.

Sady argues that Tori Amos was mocked for the powerful feminine qualities of her music. I get the argument. I love the Helene Cixous shout-out: “The gender binary also tended to perpetuate itself in other divisions, such as ‘Head/Heart,’ ‘Intelligible/Palpable,’ and ‘Logos/Pathos.’ The music of Tori Amos asks its fans to stand on the wrong side, the female side, of all those dichotomies.” Makes perfect sense to me.

Here’s the thing, though — I don’t remember ever feeling uncool for liking Tori Amos. I played the hell out of Little Earthquakes at my all-male school, to no resistance. I can still get through most of “Leather” on the piano. I loved her take on “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (it was before everybody did that). I never saw her play live and I didn’t stick around for the rest of her career, but she was in heavy rotation when I was a young man.

“But it’s hard to underestimate the role that homophobia and gender policing have played in the assessment of her fans.” Really? I get why that might have happened. I just never noticed it. Tori took me from senior year of high school into college, and I never noticed any policing around here. And it’s not as if I didn’t pass under the gaze of music snobs. Trust me, I knew better than to admit how deep a groove I wore into my CD of “Pocketful of Kryptonite.”

Maybe it’s because my time with Tori was at the dawn of the Internet, before correct positions could be circulated with vicious speed. But I really didn’t sense that the invisible hand of masculine cosmopolitanism had consigned Tori to the yonic kitschyard. Did you?

x-posted at Joshua Malbin

I am falling bloghead over blogheels in love with Molly Lambert and her website (blog? magazine?) This Recording. She’s sly and epigrammatic and has a mix of irony and sympathy that feels contemporary but elevated. The stuff that is rough at Gawker and refined in The Awl gets even better as you go towards her.

Her tribute to Latina Rap has an assertion which is extremely contemporary:

There are no more “I listen to everything but rap and country” people left, because the mp3 economy and widely free access to all kinds of music has rendered that stance and all similar genre-excluding stances irrelevant.

This is true in the manner that “God is dead” (speaking of epigrams) is true. It’s an emerging subject position with an impressive cultural influence, but tell it to Osama Bin Laden. (That incorrigible rockist.)

Scratch an eclecticist, find an “I listen to everything but rap and country” person. My MP3 collection includes songs by each of the Highwaymen, and an eclectic-appropriate smattering of last year’s and 90′s hip-hop, but its bones are pretty easy to identify.

I enjoy leading pronouncements and the-future-is-here declarations. But I also want to know how everyone else is receiving the now now. (It’s one of the things I find Alyssa’s writing attuned to.)

x-posted at Joshua Malbin

The io9 editors are very upset about the delayed Bioshock film.  But why do we feel the need to make video games into movies?  Review the previous VG2Ms.  Then tell me that one of those was any good, other than Max Payne, which was beautifully shot but pretty tragically acted.  Also, Uwe Boll.

The connection between a gamer and hir player-character in a deep game is almost always more intimate than any connection between a viewer and an actor on a screen.  We feel so strongly and have such vivid memories about living in the PC’s world that we want to see it writ large on the big screen, but a movie, due to formal limitations, could never live up to those memories and breadth of experience.  Thus, dozens of attempted VG2Ms and an equal number of failures.

Until a Great director comes along who really Gets a certain video game and makes it into a Film, I think we’ll be stuck in the same pattern–fan excitement drives massive disappointment and adequate ticket sales to ensure more video-game movies.

Thanks for your patience, guys. I’ll be ramping back up to a full schedule this week.

For the first time in months, I tuned in to an episode of Glee last night. The episode was reasonably cute—I thought the actors who played the kids did a nice job of embodying teenage drunken silliness, and some of the numbers were good, though I’m a bit concerned with where the turn to original music is going to lead. But I think the episode illustrated Glee‘s largest problem:

The show doesn’t seem to have any idea what it thinks about anything. Does bisexuality exist? Or is it a fraud? Can drinking be reasonable fun in moderation? Or does it always lead to disaster? Can exes be friends? Or will they necessarily be sloppily involved? Is an involved dad a homophobe because he doesn’t want his son sleeping over with a boy he’s clearly interested in? Or is his son creepy for wanting sex tips from his father? Ambiguity’s often a good thing because it forces an audience to do moral work. But being perspectiveless is just irritating.