Every Man Is An Anachronism By Tomorrow's Standards

In her brilliant, insightful, terrifying, loathsome piece on the "Say Everything" generation, Emily Nussbaum explores the means and ends of the kids' penchant for internet self-exposure. She argues that my peers and I see LiveJournal, MySpace, etc, etc, as skin-thickeneing, interactive archives of our adolescence.

I bandied about vaguely similar arguments in my response to the Facebook Feed a few months ago (though, because I did so on a blog and as a registered facebook user, my invectives were gleefully hypocritical). Nussbaum shouldn't fret; she joins a long and distinguished list of scientists, philosophers, poets and critics who have blatantly plagiarized my work. Here is just a small sampling of the political and social trends and phenomena about which I was ahead of the curve:

-The Wire
-Scientology
-The fact that Dane Cook sucks
-Poker
-The fact that Dane Cook sucks at Poker
-Enthusiasm over Barack Obama
-Dissapointment over Barack Obama's
-The dire consequences of living the life designed for you by your handlers, sans even the most primitive self-awareness.
-To wit: Britney Spears
-Globalization
-Puggles
-Thai food
-Parker Lewis Can't Lose
-blogs
-lists
-the backlash against string theory
-the second, third, and eighth backlashes against Family Guy
-anal is the new vaginal
-Pixies reunion
-Colbert outdoing Stewart
-Meth
-the death of irony
-the death of work
-the death of privacy
-the death of Anna Nicole Smith
-the four-minute mile
-facebook girls who are obviously fine with you masturbating to their pictures
-bourbon is the new scotch
-the concept of a "Wiki"
-the concept of a "Wookiee"
-the concept of a Wookiee via the concept of a Wiki
-using the Snoop Dogg "izzle" patois in casual conversation
-this halloween costume (seriously)
-The coming apocalypse

Dr. Foster's Dictionary, September 8, 2006

Today's entry in Dr. Foster's Dictionary comes from the section on slang usage, under "R".

ran-dom [ran-duhm]
adj.

1. occurring without definite aim, reason, or pattern.

"Since they still rely on fixed inputs for their algorithms, computers remain unable to generate truly random numbers.

2. [slang] irrelevent, disconnected, lost, apropos of nothing:

"Most of the Phi Kappa Alpha guys love Seth MacFarlane's random humor."

3. [slang] distasteful, tacky, or otherwise unaesthetic:

"Jane noted on her MySpace profile that her taste in music was 'really random'. She liked everything from Panic! At the Disco to Ashlee Simpson."

4. [slang] signifying choices made for the wrong reasons (usually because of inebriation and/or low self-esteem):

"Tori was not really looking for a relationship because of her recent success with random hookups."

5. [slang] as a beat, or placeholder, in the hipster patois.

"I was at some random bodega in this random part of Park Slope with these random people trying to find directions to this random gallery opening at random in random."

Rants on a Blog

This is likely the last Snakes on a Plane blog post you'll ever read, but it won't be the last X on a Y post. That's because, like this guy's tattoo, the novelty of SoaP took about a week to wear off but its effects will be felt for quite some time. This much Chuck Klosterman notes, along with just about everything else there is to say about why this movie is bad for your soul, in his Esquire piece.

Among my generation, irony is a language, hyperirony a currency, and hyperirony-for-its-own-sake a narcotic. In other words, to get by a healthy amount of the first is essential, a bit of the second is useful, and too much of the last is dangerous. Call me old-fashioned, but I usually look for films, TV, music and other bits of culture that I enjoy. In any other century that last sentence would be unambiguous, but allow me to clarify: to 'enjoy' something in my sense is to enjoy it intrinsically, and not as an irony delivery mechanism or as fodder for the sneering, self-satisfied, sarcastic nuggets of your fellow hirsute hipsters.

Life is too short to continuously blast Raffi's "Banana Phone" or The B-52's "Rock Lobster" just for grins like my ex-roommate did (unless, of course, you actually like Raffi or the B-52s, in which case God bless). That's why when my buddies sent me a canned voicemail of Samuel L. Jackson demanding that I get off my ass and see Snakes on a Plane, I politely informed them that I'd just as soon be on a trans-Pacific flight stocked with a surfeit of venomous serpents.

Oh, and as for the supposed brilliance of the film's title, file it under Ecclesiastes' dictum: There is NOTHING new under the sun. For one thing, nearly every sitcom ever aired followed the same formula of the using the title to spell out the concept, we just never got excited about it because the concepts themselves were usually less absurd (mental exercise: figure out why it is that That 80's Show is a title conceptually closer to Snakes on a Plane than either is to That 70's Show). Then of course there is that other bastion of the upfront title: porn. Now, I know what you're thinking, porn titles at least go so far as to give us some assonance or a second-rate pun (e.g. Butt Fuck Sluts Go Nuts, and Weapons of Ass Destruction, respectively). But lowest-common-denominator literalism gets even lower and more literal than that. To wit: I am apartment-sitting for my buddy and his girlfriend in Jersey City, and one day I took a ganders through their DVD collection in search of amusement. To my delight I found the 1999 gem Hookers in a Haunted House, which was Snakes on a Plane 8 years before Snakes on a Plane was Snakes on a Plane.

And it's got tits.