What’s Next…

Busy, busy, busy.

What does it all mean?

Mark Elliot Cullen

Spring Break, Site News

As you may have noticed, the site hasn’t been updated very frequently as of late. Several of our writers have been, or are now, on Spring Break, so updates will be touch and go for a week or two. But there’s good news.

First of all, there’s a new layout coming that will solve some of the navigational issues that some readers have mentioned. Posts can be organized by author, more precise tags and less precise tags, and categories. Also, we’re going for a wider layout, since most monitors aren’t square these days.

But most importantly we’ll soon be opening the floodgates of submissions.

As you may have guessed by our spoatic updates, the staff’s main focus isn’t on writing for the blog. The blog is something to keep people interested and a way for us to express our seemingly endless opinions on lewd youtube videos, trendy music and bizarre politics. Ideally the main focus of the site will be on the “magazine” section we’re currenly crafting.

In about two weeks we’re going to be accepting submissions of poetry, short fiction, short nonfiction, scholarly essays, art, photos, music and other recordings. These will then be carved down by our staff into the source material we’re going to use to create our magazine. We’re hoping to creatue a unique multimedia presentation of the work of young artists and writers. This will take a month or so once we close submissions, which should occur when we feel we have enough material to present.

Thanks for your patience, we look forward to reading your work.

Mark Elliot Cullen 1 Comment

Br’er Hillary and the Briar Patch of Identity

Recently the blogosphere EXPLODED over Hillary Clinton’s supposedly “fake” black southern accent. Here are some articles to read that discuss the incident in which Hillary went to a southern town to woo Black voters at the same time Obama visited. While that move was pretty phony, as Hillary wouldn’t have been likely to visit the town had Obama not decided to go there, I believe her (attempt at) adaptation of a southern accent has been unfairly criticized.

Here is the sound clip that some internet news thing called a “blog” posted recently:

The Southern Clip is interesting mainly because there’s a long history of adapting accents in politics. Politicians have been doing it for years, and now it is finally being scrutinized. I remember Kerry doing it, Gore doing it, and George W. Bush has affected a regional accent for years and years. Kucinich recently did something similar, though his example was overshadowed by his singing. Hell, even the elections in the 19th century created “rural” back-stories, Zachary Taylor and Andrew Jackson especially. Under this light the phrase “mayer Paaahmer frum Trentin” seems less strange, but the clip still turns my stomach.

I think the stomach turning is the result of a failure to adapt. Most people adapt their linguistic features for different peer groups, so it isn’t that surprising that Hillary would do the same thing when trying to get support from southern Black voters. You wouldn’t talk to your boss the same way you’d talk to your best friend, and even if they were the same person, you’d use a particular set of linguistic features depending on the situation you’re speaking in. Typically these changes aren’t conscious, but subconscious as the language features and grammar rules change from situation to situation and it would be nearly impossible to systematically try to remember the features of a language and adapt your speech line by line. That’s why Hillary’s speech sounds so robotic and unnatural– she doesn’t have the capacity to easily slip into a southern dialect.

Does this make Hillary less “authentic?” Perhaps, but only in the context that that isn’t a speech pattern she’s used to using so she just ends up sounding phony and almost minstrelesque. By the end of an election cycle, most of the candidates get flattened into two dimensional caricatures anyway, usually at the will of their opponents campaign or their own (see Dukakis and “card carrying member of the ACLU” and Pres. Bush’s Press Brush Clearing Oppurtunities). It’s only in instances like this where the characterization is done poorly when a larger audience notices.

It might be that Hillary’s discontect with the image she’s trying to harness is so far separated from the “real” Hillary that she ends up coming across as disingenuous. Instead of shying away from her intellectual strong woman persona, Hillary should be embracing what makes her different, as Obama does with his Story (TM). If she hopes to succeed (at least in the blogosphere, whatever that’s worth) Hillary needs to get her act together and decide who she wants to be seen as, before her opponents do it for her.

Mark Elliot Cullen 2 Comments

New White Stripes Album: Icky Thump

According to NME the world’s number one source for Pete Doherty rehab updates and angry Gallagher Brothers’ rants, the White Stripes have finished recording and mastering their newest album which goes by the name of:

ICKY BUMP

According to The White Stripes, some song titles include:

Catch Hell Blues
Little Cream Soda
Monkeys Have It Easy (discarded)
Rag And Bone
Clicky Bump (retitled into something pleasant)
Blue Orchid (relocated to previous album)
You Don’t Know What Love is (You Just Do As You’re Told)

Which makes sense, since the single Blue Orchid didn’t really match the sentiment of the last album, even though I loved both the single and the album. The White Stripes apparently spent nearly 3 weeks in the studio, making this their longest effort to date! Also, note I said studio and not Jack White’s living room, which was recently sold. Now their a Nashville band instead of a Detroit band, which should be a good thing for Us and Them a like. Word on the street is, Jack White has been using some new studio tricks.

More about Them: If you visit Their site, the extremely well designed whitestripes.com, you can read Their fake press release by Kitayna Ireyna Tatanya Kerenska Alisof from the MOSCOW BUGLE (known in some circles as Three Quid), and watch Jack record vocals on a new song while a skeleton dances behind him and 80s keyboard plays to prevent “song poaching”, though I wouldn’t take that for granted having been a White Stripes fan for a while, you start to get a sense of… their sense… of humor. Having spent several hours attempting to play White Stripes songs at home, I’m pretty stoked. Here’s a video from Ustube. It’s my favorite White Stripes video.

Mark Elliot Cullen