7.17.2006
What Do You Knows?
It's been awhile since I've seen something so brilliant it makes me cry laughing, but here is one such item. These are the final contestants from Ze Frank's "I Knows Me Some Ugly Myspace" contest. On Friday's show, in response to something from the comments, Ze actually discussed some of his top secret motives behind having a contest promoting the aesthetics of anti-aesthetics. He largely discussed Myspace's appeal in terms of a response to the antiquated pre-internet publishing industry: "the small number of people who had access to these tools and resources created rules about what was good taste or bad taste... Over the last twenty years, however, the cost of tools related to the authorship of media has plummeted... Suddenly consumers are learning the langauge of these authorship tools." I guess a person is entitled to their opinion....
Hey Jason, thanks for the sweat goth link. I didn't dare take the test, because my eyes were bleeding by that point. That guy definitely can't be an angel for me if he doesn't know proper punctuation.
For all the obvious hideousness, though, I also think there's something subtly interesting going on with the people who really take pride in their Myspace sites. Ze Frank's point about the new consumer-driven publishing aesthetic is good, but I feel like there's something much less conscious in the movement he's describing (though he dodgily denies the fact that he's simply mocking myspace for his own pleasure in "the show" link I posted).
It's alomst like the massive interaction between people on sites like Myspace is trying to give birth to a new grammar of the visual, and this is the messy, crowning part of the process. There's something kind of exciting about it, but as with any new subculture or trend, there's always also the risk of the whole thing developing into yet another way to justify self-serving elitism. I think "lots of fun" would make an interesting paradigm for a change.
Anyway, those thoughts are more scattered than I'd like them to be, but wasn't I just talking about messy birthing?
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