After the manner of B‑Links, I decided to assemble my notes from Instapaper. [continue with: “Notes” →]

Pet Shop Boys (really just Neil Tennant), in a 1987 interview I remembered well and was happy to find on YouTubé (emphasis added):

Pop music is superficially more frivolous. It sets out to entertain – if it’s pop dance, to make you dance. It’s more of a song, probably. Most rock groups don’t really write songs. Pop people sing a structured song which has got a strong melody, normally, if it’s any good. And so I suppose it sets out to do something different.

Pop music isn’t “meaningless,” though, you know. I tend to think most of the songs that survive tend to be pop songs. I mean, you could probably count on one hand, or two hands anyway, the rock songs that survived from the 1970s. I mean, kind of “Name ten great rock songs of the 1970s.” You know, you’d get pretty stuck after sort of like “Layla” or something, wouldn’t you, you know? But if you wanted to name a hundred great pop songs of the 1970s, you wouldn’t really have very much problem, I don’t think….

There’s a slightly patronizing thing that people kind of set out to make pure pop, without really — I’m forever reading papers about “jangly” guitar groups that are making pure pop. When I listen to their records it’s not even pop music at all, I don’t think. I mean, sort of people kind of think about it too much in a way…. I mean, the Human League thought about it incredibly and it worked with them. But some people always do think about or theorize about it, and it can’t be fresh when you do that.

Ironically I think pop music is the music that tends to survive. It’s always a mistake to make pop or rock music, I think, with the aim that you’re making an important statement that will last forever. I think you should just set out to do something truthful, and to write something that’s for the moment, that satisfies you, that works musically, you know, and hope that it’s going to entertain, that people will dance, and not worry about the future….

A typical rock group is U2, which to me is pompous, and supposedly meaningful in a very unspecific way. That it’s stadium music, it’s music that sets out to be important but probably isn’t. On the good side of it, it’s meant to be music that brings people together by its strength or pomp or whatever. And I think music is best when it’s striving for something new and forging ahead rather than looking back.

Happy Magic Fun Time has caused (t)his posting (of 2011.02.07) to disappear. It remains of value. [continue with: “Making Friends” →]

Being anonymous and populated mostly by eldergays, more postings at DataLounge are actually honest than one might expect.

• “Genocide”:

  A veteran gay ACT UP activist told me today that the trans cult is the Establishment’s second attempt at genocide against gays. The first attempt was AIDS, but that didn’t succeed because the gay community rallied itself and responded to the crisis with ACT UP and saved ourselves. Now the trans cult is the second attempt to wipe out gay children[,] and we need another ACT UP movement to say NO! before it’s too late.

• “Tranny is a Y short of tyranny”

• “Race realist”/ostensible hetero (thus two counts of “What the hell is he doing here?”):

  I came for the Hollywood gossip and velvet-mafia conspiracy stuff, and stayed for the joy of trolling totalitarian cultural Marxists.

  I’d rather get my Hollywood gossip and “feminine view” of the world here than on some chick Web site, probably because I have women issues. But I also understand that gays have exceptional influence on the world, through their disproportionately important careers and their chatty social lives.

  I’m a former Bernie Bro type, but all the Obama riots and anti-white racism woke me the fuck up to race realism.

  Let’s make March “White History Month” and compare it to February’s “education” about American history.

  Whites are the most gay-friendly ethnic group in the U.S. and the world, and I’ve seen people here admit and lament that gays were better off when everybody stayed in the closet, because at least then gays had families and children, and didn’t die alone and without a sense of purpose. And gays could still get dick on the side while married.

  So as the Western world claps back against anti-white racism and jealousy, there’s probably a nice seat at the table for civilized gays who can think beyond their own lifetimes and consider what is good for America and its white majority.

  So in promoting common sense, science, race realism, culture, and tradition, there’s also the major side benefit of trolling the cultural Marxists who just want to see the white world burn and then bow down to Allah later.

  We all know these toxic, self-destructive narcissist gays will die of AIDS long before future American gays are being tossed from buildings.

  Defying the odds, he consistently wrote white without a majuscule.

• FTMs refusing to “date” each other (cf. MTFs and Gaysians likewise refusing):

  FTMs don’t want other FTMs because they don’t see them as real men and are therefore not attracted to them. However, we are required to do what they are unwilling to do and pretend that an FTM is equivalent to a biological man and fuck them. We are required to pretend that a FTM is not just a diesel dyke on steroids but an actual man.

  We have to suppress our own desires and sexual attractions just to make them feel better. FTMs won’t date each other because they don’t see each other as real men. But we biological men aren’t allowed to see them the way they see each other – a cosmetically altered woman on steroids. That’s the world we live in now.

(Q.v.)

1. Seriously competent strength coaches with good client bases and reasonable cashflow need to recognize that some of their lifters, or even many of them, are struggling with mental health. Each of those lifters may be strong as an ox, but that isn’t the only measurement of overall health.

2. Strength coaches are not shrinks, doctors, or counsellors. Providing therapy or counselling isn’t their business, literally or figuratively. But recognizing that this population exists, and meeting its needs, is a strength coach’s business.

3. A strength coach with some headroom in his budget should set up a Mental Fitness Workout, where lifters with psych issues can work out in a confident, as opposed to safe, environment. That means lifters can confidently lift even if they’re having a bad day psychologically or emotionally. [continue with: Mental Fitness Workout →]

• Conservatives cannot design. Except when they can, as in the case of certain late-epoch Trump graphics, assembled by a team led by… Brad Parscale, just named the campaign head for Trump 2020.

  [Note that the incumbent news media insists on pronouncing Parscale’s surname to rhyme with “kale” (which I doubt he eats) or “shale” (which I assume he considers a perfectly valid long-term source of natural gas).]

• Next! The conservative/Republican illustrator/designer whose existence, by dint of the former, the ruling caste will never acknowledge has zapped the Oscars. Of course I refer to Sabo, who, despite being short, packs intersectionality points, as if in a holster, by also being Hispanic. (His dad: Their people were “descended from kings!”)

  Kooky fun contradiction! Sabo (a) took direct political action against pedophiles and sexual predators in Hollywood (b) using only text on a solid background.

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  Rather like what (a) ACT UP and (b) Babs Kruger have done since time immemorial, at least in form. It is only the ruling caste, alert to every visual detail, that will act wilfully blind and pretend Sabo’s agitprop is in some respect “right-wing.” Then again, only right-wingers consistently denounce pedophiles.

Superloving chiding of Michael Bierut

I dearly love Mr. MICHAEL BIERUT [(q.v.), whose name the New Yorker misspelled] of caste-governing design colossus Pentagram. Michael posted a link to my treatise on conservative design, but there’s no link to that link because mighty Design Observer still cannot figure out basic HTML (nor ever could).

But that’s all Michael is willing to do. His Design Observer runs the gamut of observations from A to B. Michael even waited several months until – again – the New Yorker conferred its imprimatur on Sean Tejaratchi (q.v.) before mentioning the latter on the (Design) Observatory podcast, cohosted with a Sontag manquée for whom “insufferable,” “enraging,” and “unlistenable” are preposterously inadequate sobriquets.

This is graphic design. We’re all on the same team, and there’s only ever been one.

(Via; q.v.)