just stop reading it, girl

ok, so i read another of that foul wench's entries. i am so on crack. why am i punishing myself? she is such a horrid, clueless dog. man, i'd like to kick her. why such sudden angst? aaagh. the pgrad cultural studies grapevine bore fruit this afternoon and i heard Gossip (which shall not be repeated in print, only polished in private). got me thinking about her. so i read her blog.
end verdict?
she sucks.

not only for her own stupid brain, but also because she writes more frequently than i can be bothered to.
here is an excerpt to illustrate her stupidity...
i am not going to reference her properly. google some of this and you'll find her. but don't you dare go re-visiting her site.... damn. conflicted - should i publicise this rot or drown it? hmmm. no, go look, mock, deride and depart.

oh, the title of this post was 'What makes me uneasy about independent media?'.
she's going straight to hell for doubting independent media (or minority media, or community media or whichever term you prefer).
i goddamn LOVE this shit. i am all about indepedent media. and socialists.

here's the quote:

Anyway, so I left early. And I was flicking through the actual magazine when I was in bed, and I started to feel uneasy, in that nagging, non-specific way that I do whenever I come up against any of those things like Indymedia, zines, The Paper, This Is Not Art, and student newspapers in the days when they didn't look like government-issued 'yoof' pamphlets. Like, I admire what Spinach7 is trying to do, which I interpret as creating a space for subjects that don't get coverage elsewhere, while still making it sexy, self-sustaining, and, dare I say it, 'cutting edge'. Unlike, say, Vice, which people seem to love and I don't know why, because it's so smarmy and written from the perspective of being better than everyone else.

But my feeling of unease just wouldn't go away. I realised that one of the editorial team was this prick who was flaming me on the Contemporary Cultural Studies discussion list in 2000, when I first vaunted the idea of studying bogans. And I recognised a number of other names, like Eve Vincent and Jacob "The Human Shield" Nowakowski. And some of the articles really gave me the shits, like this nasty, contemptuous, sarcastic rant from Philip Brophy about how far ahead he is of the rest of Australian society.

It bothers me that all these people seem to know each other from Express Media or doing Creative Arts or from festivals and zine fairs and 'workshops'. It's all about grassroots art and media, and DIY fashion, and carefully ritualised forms of subversion and culture jamming, and meeting like-minded people with tropes like "I thought I was the only one who liked [insert bottom-up form of cultural production here]." I don't know what makes me more uneasy: the fact that I also like doing these things but think and go about them in a completely different way that only draws people's ire; or the fact that despite the rhetoric of accessibility, it's all so clubby and everyone seems to know each other.

Perhaps it's because these people make me feel that because I'm not constantly trying to counter global injustice with grassroots protest and cultural production, there's some part of me 'missing' and I'm a bad person. I once tried to provoke The Boy by telling him that I had no politics. His face didn't change and he didn't take the bait, so I never found out what he thought. It wasn't strictly true, though - I constantly wrestle with why I believe what I do, and agonise over the discursive constitution of those beliefs. Perhaps another reason why independent media make me uneasy is that I wish I could find some of my own ambivalence reflected in their pages, rather than the ideological certainties I find instead.

and don't you go comparing my writing style to hers. i'm not having any of that. i'm Right On, and she's duh.

needless to say, she sucks.

specifically:
why she won't Get this guy she's keen on.
so she's trying to provoke the object of her erstwhile affections (called 'the boy') with declarations of her dummy-ness? yeah. you go girl.

why she's stupid, in general terms.
these sorts of comments are extra-worrying when you actually take into account her area of research. read around on her blog to find out what it is. cringe at her stupidity. her public stupidity. sure, i'm probably digging my own little hole with such a scathing attack/criticism, but heck. i'm a seat-of-my-pants type of girl. and it's not like i've not already burnt some bridges over at unimelb (oh, don't study there - the only people who like it are ex-unimelb undergrads).

why she hates indypress people:
they won't let her be in their 'clubs' because she's the annoying dumb kid who can't figure out when to shut up.

at the end of the day, though
when all my anger has worn away, i just feel sorry for her. i don't like the angriness of this post of mine, but heck, i was provoked (ahahahah). and i do feel sorry for her. if she was just a little less desperate, tried a little less harder to be liked, she'd actually have a chance at being likeable.

...

or perhaps not. that 'no politics thing' gets right up my crack. is she completely stupid? can she not see how that might be a bit of a silly thing to announce when once is a cultural studies researcher?

kick her arse, i say. and kick it good.

Posted by Dogpossum on April 30, 2004 02:27 AM