A Brooklyn Culture Mafia

[catalog]

No idea but there's some good tunes on there. Leonard Cohen, some decent mtv base era hip hop, some jazz guy I can't remember who

 

[catalog]

This one from Julia fox also really good

 

[IdleRich]

Oh it's not Visotsky as she goes on to explain (but she does say that it sounds like him).

 

[version]

above all i object to this kind of maniacal interest in this set of pseudo-celebs because i think they're less interesting than the people I actually know. it's me that they should be interested in, not the other way around. the great chain of being has come undone somewhere. not acceptable.

I dunno that anyone's interesting really. There's a sweet spot between being aware of someone, but not actually knowing them that can make them seem interesting though. The James Joyce Grapejuice talks about's much more interesting than actually meeting him would probably be. Watching James Joyce cook an egg, read the paper. It's what @borzoi and I were discussing in the OPN thread about the mystique of the old records compared with each new album now being "Dan Lopatin and these other recognisable people explore this concept".

Interest's replaced by other things as you become more familiar with someone.

 

[sus]

The real dynamic is "how interesting is the public performance," how interesting is your mask. There's "behind the scenes" (cooking an egg, reading the paper) and there's killing it whenever you're in public. (Which includes now—our board is marked by asymmetric gaze too.)

 

[sus]

Which I don't think Beiser would disagree with, he says a similar thing early in the thread, but I think that makes up part of the problem

There's a hard tradeoff between developing interestingness and performing it.

Which I think is in a similar genre as e.g. writing. Plenty of scientists have a way better understanding of X or Y, but at a certain point, it needs to be written well, and that's a whole separate set of skills, and developing one necessarily comes at the cost of the other.

There's just pareto frontiers all the way across the (pure research)-->(pure presentation) spectrum of every single field, and there's no way out of them

 

[version]

The real dynamic is "how interesting is the public performance," how interesting is your mask. There's "behind the scenes" (cooking an egg, reading the paper) and there's killing it whenever you're in public. (Which includes now—our board is marked by asymmetric gaze too.)

Yeah,

like meeting a pop star, the horror comes with the realization that you cannot fuck the image, because the image does not exist. perhaps you can fuck the person, but the person is not an image, and if either the image breaks or it becomes so twisted around the edges that it does itself in. the truth of any fantasy must be sordid, or else it wouldn't need to be fantasy.

 

[linebaugh]

Perfect Blue is about this. The stalker wants to kill the pop idol because the person performing the pop idol gets in the way of the image

 

[version]

I was thinking about the 70s rock mythos earlier and how squalid the reality would be. A bunch of people on drugs in a hotel room is still just a bunch of people on drugs in a hotel room, even if they're famous musicians.

 

[sus]

Maybe. In another sense you're at the top of the world—you're hanging out with your friends, who are also all famous or about to be, and you're getting served champagne, your agency is virtually unlimited relative to how you came, there are beautiful women constantly trying to sleep with you. It's not a perfect existence, but if you're high on cocaine—it probably feels pretty good in that hotel room about then.

 

[linebaugh]

I dunno that anyone's interesting really. There's a sweet spot between being aware of someone, but not actually knowing them that can make them seem interesting though.

makes me think of friendships heavy on mutual ribbing or putdown humor- social games that enter healthy destabilization into the equation to wade off the boring.

 

[constant escape]

@suspendedreason would you say this thread is in the interest of understanding current cultural trends, or do you think some of these people actually have the wherewithal, cognitive and material, to actually command an influence, and that it could be more than just a trend?

 

[version]

Maybe. In another sense you're at the top of the world—you're hanging out with your friends, who are also all famous or about to be, and you're getting served champagne, your agency is virtually unlimited relative to how you came, there are beautiful women constantly trying to sleep with you. It's not a perfect existence, but if you're high on cocaine—it probably feels pretty good in that hotel room about then.

That isn't interest though. That's something else. You're also talking from the perspective of the people in the hotel room and not someone observing them.

 

[IdleRich]

I was thinking about the 70s rock mythos earlier and how squalid the reality would be. A bunch of people on drugs in a hotel room is still just a bunch of people on drugs in a hotel room, even if they're famous musicians.

Can be good though... even if they're not famous musicians.

 

[sus]

@suspendedreason would you say this thread is in the interest of understanding current cultural trends, or do you think some of these people actually have the wherewithal, cognitive and material, to actually command an influence, and that it could be more than just a trend?

Clearly they have the werewithal to command an influence

Whether they stick around longer probably is more to do with the culture and their own flexibility than it does "are they interesting right now"—to which the answer, empirically, is yes.

 

[constant escape]

That isn't interest though. That's something else.

I mean, its interesting from a perspective of hedonism, which I suppose varies across psyches. To the more maximal of hedonists, I'd imagine that level of indulgence is quite interesting.

 

[version]

Can be good though... even if they're not famous musicians.

Oh yeah. I'm not saying it wouldn't be fun or good, I'm saying the glamorous musician can still be the annoying person with bad breath or the person who tries to knick your coke or throws up in the sink, but these aspects aren't necessarily accounted for in the myth/fantasy.

 

[IdleRich]

I think it would be a far more interesting event without the famous person everyone tries to suck up to distorting the dynamic.

 

[version]

I mean, its interesting from a perspective of hedonism, which I suppose varies across psyches. To the more maximal of hedonists, I'd imagine that level of indulgence is quite interesting.

Maximal hedonism obliterates interest, imo. Interest strikes me as more of an intellectual thing.

 

[constant escape]

I see, so maybe hedonism is more of a compulsion then.