Other than the secret blog (and the other secret blog)…
…I generally try to keep my Andy Rooney internet griping to a minimum because you know rantings, ramblings, musings.
But sometimes I simply cannot contain the righteous indignation and now is one of those times. Here are some things I could do without. The first two are related.
1. Usage of fonts that look like how people wrote on denim binders in the 1980’s.
2. The current commercial ubiquity of the musical equivalent of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Why? Why would I care? Why on earth would anyone care? Twee-ification, that’s why, Buddy. It’s just so g-d twee out there lately and sometimes it just makes me want to chew tobacco.
Also when you are clearly the target market for something, but the marketers don’t get you, you can feel it. There is a palpable disingenuousness to it, the manipulating hand is pushing a little too hard.
But it’s not just forced tweeness that is bugging me. On the opposite end of the spectrum:
3. Kneejerk vulgarity lauded as style. I first started really noticing this when I saw Anthony Bourdain last summer. Now don’t get me wrong, I like Bourdain and I like food people, but the way the audience tittered everytime he said a swear! made me wonder if they’d been locked in an isolation tank with only NPR piped in the rest of the time.
Anyway, after the Bourdain show, yada yada yada Baader-Meinhof, I’m seeing this more and more. ”Fuck” as an ipso facto punchline. (And not just where one expects it, i.e., lowest common denominator culture, where, actually, sometimes it DOES work as an actual ipso facto punchline in that context. No, I am referring specifically to people who should care about words falling prey to the same troglodytic syndrome.)
And while tweeness annoys me, nothing drives me to an immediate homicidal rage like self-satisfied laziness in writing, and nothing drives me to an immediate multiple-homicidal rage like laziness in writing being rewarded. It’s rather Salieri of me, I realize, but I promise it annoys me even when I see it in a writer who has less of a following than I do.
