dansolomon.com

Paying my final respects. (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 27 May 2012 15:29:58 -0500

Paying my final respects. (Taken with instagram)

Austin City Limits Festival lineup talk

Fri, 25 May 2012 15:31:00 -0500

Austin City Limits Festival lineup talk:

KUT radio invited me to come on to talk about the lineup for the Austin City Limits Festival. We talk about a bunch of things, and I address the criticism that this is, like, “the whitest festival lineup ever.” Which, I mean,I get it— there are three rappers on the entire bill. (Four, if you count Die Antwoord, which I do not — I wouldn’t have counted Fred Durst if Limp Bizkit had been booked, either.)

At the same time, though, proclamations like that either dismiss the existence of Gary Clark Jr, The Weeknd (just added!), Esperanza Spalding, Brittany from Alabama Shakes, Michael Kiwanuka, Thundercat, Ruthie Foster, and all of the (numerous) other artists of color — or it re-assigns them as white just because they’re not doing hip-hop.

In either case, the use of “white” as an insult — as I’ve written about before — isn’t just an attack on the dominance of white people, it also actively erases people of color who don’t fit into the margins of what you mean by not-white.

Ultimately, what that implies is that if the festival had booked (say) Brother Ali, Atmosphere, Diplo, El-P, Action Bronson, Yelawolf, Paul Wall, Mac Miller, and Eminem, then it’d be a less white festival than the fact that it’s got all of the artists of color mentioned above.

I don’t think that’s a fair critique at all, and while I’m a little worried that it came out wrong on the radio (talking about race as it relates to Austin, music, and Austin music culture hasn’t always made me popular), it’s something I think is worth addressing. This is a bill that definitely dismissed hip hop, which is absurd and disappointing, but let’s not declare it too white.

I did my civic duty at Fiesta today. There are only a few...

Thu, 24 May 2012 16:09:00 -0500

I did my civic duty at Fiesta today. There are only a few candidates with challengers in Travis County, and most of them are for criminal justice-related offices. Here’s who I voted for, and why:

District Attorney:
Charlie Baird over Rosemary Lehmberg. Lehmberg has been an acceptable district attorney, but it is genuinely exciting to cast a vote for Charlie Baird, who was our best judge when he was on the bench, and he’ll be a very progressive DA. Also, while I’m not opposed to incumbency, I do question whether it’s healthy for an office that needs to be flexible to have at its head someone who’s been there for three decades. Austin does not have a terrific record when it comes to criminal justice issues — from a lack of charges in police shootings to the handling of the yogurt shop murders — and much of that is on Lehmberg’s watch. We were fortunate to have Baird on the bench, and it would be a terrific thing for criminal justice in Austin if he were to serve as DA.

Sheriff:
Greg Hamilton over John Sisson. John Sisson’s platform is built on “mandatory memos” regarding deportation, and the argument that, when ICE requests that a person be detained for possible deportation, it’s just that — a request, which the Sheriff can decline. It’s hardly clear if that’s true, though, and even if it is, it’s definitely the case that it will not be true by 2013 (that link comes from Sisson’s own website). That doesn’t leave a real reason to vote for John Sisson. Meanwhile, I like, and trust, Greg Hamilton. Some of y’all may be aware that my wife runs a small non-profit that she started as a volunteer at the Travis County Correctional Complex (where she still goes in every week). Not only has Sheriff Hamilton personally supported her work with the women in the jail — which he doesn’t have to do — but she’s told me about the support that the Sheriff has from those women, which is overwhelming. A Sheriff who operates with the support of the people he’s in charged of incarcerating is one whom I am happy to support.

District Judge, 167th District:
David Wahlberg over Efrain de la Fuente. To put it simply, if there’s a candidate for judge who comes from a criminal defense background running against a candidate for judge who comes from a prosecution background, I will vote for the defense attorney 9,999 times out of 10,000. (Might not cast a ballot for Levy from The Wire.) The fact is, there is already enough cooperation between the DA’s office and the bench just by virtue of both having the same employer; the perspective of a prosecutor while wearing the robe isn’t anywhere near as valuable as the perspective of a defender. David Wahlberg is a good defense attorney, by all accounts, and that makes him an important voice to have on the bench. There are countless former prosecutors who are now judges, and it does not often work out that well for the accused. I’ll always support a candidate who works to break that monopoly.

How Does It Feel?

Wed, 23 May 2012 15:35:00 -0500

How Does It Feel?:

Over on ThinkProgress, Alyssa Rosenberg reacts to the (excellent) GQ feature on D’Angelo by Amy Wallace. Specifically, the following section:

But as D began to fall apart, the video would be the only thing many fans remembered. “The video was the line of demarcation,” says Harris. “It sent him spinning out of control.”…The trouble began right away, at the start of the Voodoo tour in L.A. “It was a week of warm-up gigs at House of Blues just to kick off the tour, draw some attention, break in the band,” says Alan Leeds, D’s tour manager then and now. “And from the beginning, it’s ‘Take it off!’ “…
D’Angelo felt tortured, Questlove says, by the pressure to give the audience what it wanted. Worried that he didn’t look as cut as he did in the video, he’d delay shows to do stomach crunches. He’d often give in, peeling off his shirt, but he resented being reduced to that. Wasn’t he an artist? Couldn’t the audience hear the power of his music and value him for that?

To which Rosenberg adds:

when a man experiences, gets driven crazy by it, it’s not really “some Kate Moss shit” anymore, and it’s not complementary. So much of pop culture is like this. When a man experiences objectification, or stays at home with his kids, suddenly, this arena that women have been playing in for decades is a revelation. How does it feel, indeed?

She’s right, of course, and D’Angelo is hardly the only example of a dude freaking out when he finds himself hyper-sexualized in that way. He looks trim and fit in the GQ photos, but do you remember what he looked like when he was arrested a few years back? The Internet loved to make fun of him for getting fat.

A similar thing happened to Elvis, of course, and to Brando. Jim Morrison, too. Two other dudes who were sexualized the way that we, as a society, sexualize women. Or, if they don’t put on a lot of weight, they do other things to mess with the way they look. They take on roles that reward them for looking unattractive, maybe, or they grow stupid beards, like Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp, if they’re able to let these things roll off their backs a bit. But it happens a lot, in any case, to men who are treated the way that women are — as objects, whose sexuality and appearance are public property.

Which is fascinating, in a way. Because so much of the rhetoric from dudes who talk about the way women are objectified is that they’d love it if they were sexualized in the same way. And it sounds like a dumb hypothetical, something that has no real connection to reality, because there’s no real equivalence between the way society does (or even can) treat men and the way it treats women.

Except, kinda, there is — and the way the men who do get treated that way tend to do whatever it takes to get out from under it. That’s probably worth considering, fellas, the next time you try to make that argument.

"Adult Swim: When you met him did you think, “This guy should be a talk show host”? Hannibal Buress:..."

Wed, 23 May 2012 11:46:19 -0500

“

Adult Swim: When you met him did you think, “This guy should be a talk show host”?

Hannibal Buress: Naaaaaaaah. Naaaaaah, I didn’t think that at all. I said, “This guy is going to do comedy and make $20,000 a year forever.”

”

- Adult Swim had me interview Hannibal Buress about The Eric Andre Show, and he was every bit as much like your idea of Hannibal Buress as one could possibly hope.

"Perhaps the blogger feels empowered because she’s taken on the 'masculine' trait of building muscle?"

Wed, 23 May 2012 10:37:03 -0500

"Perhaps the blogger feels empowered because she’s taken on the 'masculine' trait of building muscle?":

“Does it seem outlandish that perhaps the blogger feels empowered because she’s taken on the “masculine” trait of building muscle? That interpretation of events probably doesn’t apply, but there needs to be some degree of critical analysis beyond bandwagon back-patting.”

Now, I am very much interested in conversations about valuing the traditionally masculine at the cost of the traditionally feminine. I’m constantly trying to root out my own internalized misogyny and femme-phobia, because I recognize that disdaining things that are traditionally coded as “feminine” puts me on the same continuum of woman-hating as the preacher who says parents should beat the gay out of their sons or the social trends that lead trans women to be murdered at a disproportionate rate than pretty much everyone else. So yes, let’s talk about femme-phobia and internalized misogyny and let’s talk about ways to defeat this, because internalized misogyny has a body count that continues to rise with each trans woman who is murdered and each gay kid who is bullied into committing suicide.

But what I completely reject is this idea that “building muscle” – aka developing physical strength – is inherently a masculine thing, and that I take pride in my physical strength because I have adopted masculine traits. This idea is at the core of a deeply damaging idea about gender roles, which posits physical strength and muscle as the provenance of men and physical weakness the domain of women. One of the biggest ongoing themes in my writing is that physical strength is not a masculine trait or a feminine trait – it is a human trait.

Okay, we all had a lot of fun with the Is This Feminist Tumblr last week, which makes sense, because it was fucking funny. And while I don’t want to take a good joke way too seriously, there was an important and genuine critique at the heart of it, right? And it was roughly what the author of Fit And Feminist gets at here: namely, that it’s somehow “feminist” to call out a woman who is into building muscle, because she’s serving as another tool of the patriarchy or something by chasing a masculine ideal — instead of challenging one’s own notion that equates strength with masculine.

Which is a real thing: Not just that specific notion (obviously), but the co-opting of the language of social justice to justify repression. That was a big part of what made Is This Feminist funny — because it demonstrated that you can use that language to attack women for doing anything, which is easier (and thus more satisfying, because you get the immediate prize of self-righteousness) than questioning or challenging the underlying systems. It’s common, and depressing, to slap a#PROBLEMATIC on the end of a shallow critique that’s rooted in the same bullshit that holds people back, and justify it with verbal acrobatics.

Because, really — the idea that a woman is a bad feminist because she’s into weightlifting? How stupid is that? How can you possibly make that argument with a straight face? Except that the language to do so already exists, and it’s really easy to find anything #PROBLEMATIC if you just run it through this Madlibs framework. It’s a unique way to attack anybody for anything, and to do so under the banner of empowerment.

The difference between Parks & Recreation and Community.

Mon, 21 May 2012 13:17:00 -0500

I love Parks & Recreation so much, I can’t really imagine anyone else not liking it.

I love Community so much, I can’t really understand how anyone else does like it.

That’s the thing about Dan Harmon leaving the show that’s such a bummer.

Parks & Rec is a sitcom that tells stories about people; they’re people you love, and it tells its stories with a heart that’s both genuine and rare, but it’s a show that’s easy to relate to. It’s a nearly-perfect example of how to make a sitcom, and its ambitions are ambitious in fairly conventional ways — having ten (10!) main characters who are consistent and well-developed in each episode, giving you reason to believe that people as disparate in belief, disposition, and attitude as Leslie Knope and Ron Swanson genuinely admire and care about one another. Its characters grow and develop in ways that are surprising (look at April and Chris from their introductions to now) but which never feel phony. It’s easily one of the most likable shows on television. But if Michael Schur were to leave Parks & Rec tomorrow, as long as the new showrunner understood where the show’s heart is and what makes these characters work, there’s every reason to believe it would still be a good show.

Community is a sitcom that tells stories about ideas. It’s not the better show, necessarily — but it’s ambitious in ways that often make little sense. Consider the penultimate episode of the past season, where the Dean is locked in a dungeon and the gang is dressed in various disguises to prevent Chang’s security forces of pre-adolescents from identifying them as they prepare a counter-insurgency, and then remember that this is ostensibly a show about a group of unlikely friends who meet at community college. Every character spends at least half of any given episode as a self-obsessed jerk, and their motivations are usually consistent with their selfishness; if you identify with Abed or Jeff, it’s usually not a great part of you that’s making that connection. But the show is amazing, because we rarely get to see stories like this told on television, and it’s utterly committed to telling them with consistency and honesty.

But I don’t really know why or even how Community works. It doesn’t have a formula the way that Parks & Recreation does (even if that formula is just “write characters consistently, treat them with integrity, be funny, and let them play off one another”), and so I honestly can’t imagine that in new hands, it’ll be anything like the same show. It will probably be good: the new guys who’ve been hired are supposed to be smart, talented creators. But I think you just have to assume that season four of Community is going to be a new show starring the cast of the original Community, set in a community college, with some similarities to the one that got canceled this weekend when Harmon was fired.

There are worse things in the world than getting a new show featuring a cast with great chemistry who you love. But that show isn’t going to be Community.

zdarsky: And that’s that.

Sun, 20 May 2012 10:19:40 -0500

zdarsky:

And that’s that.

"They all decided they needed to start working out, so that if anyone messed with Gabel they’d..."

Fri, 18 May 2012 16:37:39 -0500

“They all decided they needed to start working out, so that if anyone messed with Gabel they’d be able to throw down. “We gotta take care of Tom!” Kleeman said. “We gotta protect him!””

- The Rolling Stone article by Josh Eells about Tom Gabel’s transition to Laura Jane Grace is full of endearing moments, and this one — taking place in the car among the stunned, stoned other members of Against Me! after Gabel told them that it would be Laura going forward — is probably my favorite, because it’s both really sweet and incredibly doofy. (“The more I think about it, I don’t know that that’s really necessary,” Kleeman — the band’s manager — informed Eels when he was sober.)

When I was younger and punk rock-er, it was cool to make fun of...

Fri, 18 May 2012 16:28:30 -0500

When I was younger and punk rock-er, it was cool to make fun of how totally outdated and out-of-touchRolling Stoneis (and, sure, the bands above the logo are Aerosmith, Linkin Park, and John Mayer). But, you know, check out the stories on the cover of this issue, which is not a “special” issue of the magazine or anything:

Cover photo of an actor with dwarfism whose defining role casts him as a sex symbol, not a joke
A seven-page feature thoughtfully describing the coming out of a transgender woman
A feature about an openly gay rock singer
And as a bonus, a smart investigative piece about financial policy by one of the brighter writers covering the industry in the U.S.

I’m not saying that, like, Rolling Stoneis the best magazine ever (or even the most progressive and diverse — lots of white people there, still), but the fact that our culture is at a point where you can put all of these people on the cover of any major magazine and it’s not even a thing is pretty cool.

We spend a lot of time lamenting how shitty the world can be to folks who aren’t straight, white, male, gender-conforming, rich people with conventional body types, so let’s give ourselves some credit — this is the culture we’ve helped create, too.

A new one: don’t believe I’ve been published...

Thu, 17 May 2012 17:47:00 -0500

A new one: don’t believe I’ve been published internationally before. Definitely don’t recall being translated into Spanish, in any case, until now. Tell all your Colombian friends! (Taken with instagram)

Also, if you ever find yourself in this situation and want to make yourself dizzy, I heartily recommend reading your own article translated back into English choppily by Google Translate.

All that really needs to be said about Joe Ricketts...

Thu, 17 May 2012 15:39:31 -0500

…is that anyone who signs Carlos Marmol and Kerry Wood’s paychecks is probably not someone who we should spend too much time listening to about who we should hire to run the whole country.

boom-swagger: lisamonster: ribee1986: i may be in my 20s but...

Thu, 17 May 2012 14:35:46 -0500

boom-swagger:

lisamonster:

ribee1986:

i may be in my 20s but seeing this still play on my TV in the mornings, still makes feel like a kid

Can we just discuss for a moment how despite the lovely nostalgia of Saved by the Bell (yes, it’s nostalgic for me, too), what an awful awful misogynist program it is? Yes, it was twenty years ago, and reminds us twenty-somethings of our childhoods, but can we please stop glorifying assholes like Zach Morris and not feed this shit to another generation? MTV2 is showing two hour blocks of Saved by the Bell every weekday. Sure, this is probably thrilling for everyone who grew up with the program to be able to watch it again, but admit it, you were watching MTV at age 10 or younger, just like me, and you know nothing has changed. They’re basically all horrible characters, but Zach just takes the cake. He fucks Kelly and all of his friends over every episode and still gets what he wants in the end. Also infuriating is Jessie’s “feminism” being played for laughs because of how absurd it is that a woman would want to be treated as anything other than an object to compete for. Can we please just acknowledge that?

what lisa said. i never really liked the show, and think these reasons are why. not that they were thought out or anything when i was younger, but it just never sat right with me.

Okay, I have almost zero interest in arguing the merits of Saved By The Bell, especially as it relates to gender politics, but I do think this is relevant: the fact that the show even had a feminist character and allowed the girls and boys who watched the show the opportunity to realize that there were other ways for girls to relate to boys than just wanting one to like her doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me.

There aren’t a lot of ways — at least for boys, at least that I knew/know of — to get that sort of idea through the TV we watch/stories we read/games we play/etc, and any of them seem like they’re to our benefit. I mean, yeah, who cares, fuck Saved By The Bell for whatever reasons, but I suspect it helped me learn a little bit about the fact that women and girls could have different ways of relating to people when I was a kid.

Today in well-timed corresponding Tumblr posts.

Thu, 17 May 2012 11:45:01 -0500

Today in well-timed corresponding Tumblr posts.

"The Truth About Fleshlight"

Thu, 17 May 2012 11:39:00 -0500

"The Truth About Fleshlight":

Steve Shubin, the owner/founder of Fleshlight, wrote a letter to the editor at the Austin Chronicle in response to the cover story I wrote about him and his company for the paper last week. He wasn’t, as it turns out, especially thrilled with it.

I kind of expected that might be the case as I was working on it. I don’t think I wrote anything unfair or unkind, but Shubin struck me very much as a man who has a definite idea of himself, and I suspected strongly that the story I was telling would not correspond with the vision of who Steve Shubin is that he himself holds.

After reading the story, I thought, “This sounds like a pissed-off ex-cop that missed choking people out, had a lot of money, a lot of fancy cars, was misunderstood, mistreated by bankers, rejected by organizations that needed donations, whose neighbors would not wave to him. What an idiot!”

That is probably not the way that Steve Shubin sees himself, no. I spent a little over two hours with Shubin, though, and these were the things that were hammered home to me. In his letter, he laments the fact that the charity work that he does didn’t make it into the article — and he did talk about that a bit, but here’s the thing: telling a reporter about the charity work your company does rarely registers, because that very often plays like spin. Saying “we built a martial arts school in Kenya” is nice, but the way it’s rattled off at the end of an interview, in a list of charitable contributions a person made, doesn’t lead me to believe that this is a great passion, and I’m not interested in documenting someone’s tax deductions.

The fact that he was willing to tell me about the “hundreds of people” he’s “choked to unconsciousness,” unsolicited (I never asked him for those details), knowing that I was recording it? That revealed something unexpected about his character.

It’s a tricky business, profiling someone for print. Because I have no interest in being cruel, or painting someone in a negative light (though to be clear, I don’t think the story actually portrays Shubin in a negative light at all, except that it doesn’t correspond to his own vision of himself). But I’m also interested in exploring the truth of a person, and not writing a hagiography. I left out details that would both raise your opinion of Shubin (like the charity work) and probably lower it (nothing serious, mostly just stuff he describes as “locker room talk”), because none of that seemed to get at the truth of this guy’s struggle surrounding this company he’d built, the wealth he’d accumulated, and the resentment he clearly felt toward the people who didn’t treat him the way he felt he should be treated.

I didn’t pull his quotes about his bank, or his neighbors, or the people in his office park out of nowhere, you know? He kept coming back to those themes, over and over, in a two hour interview. That let me know that this stuff was important to him, even if it was mostly just in brief asides. You can learn a lot more about a person by the things that eat at them than you can by the things they profess to be proud of.

All that said, this is something I’m going to think about a lot going forward, as I develop as a journalist and a person who tells other people’s stories. Because let’s not dance around this: mine is a business that rewards shocking details, that offers plenty of opportunities to be cruel, and which gives people like me the power to frame how people are perceived. That’s a serious responsibility.

For the most part, this hasn’t been something that the people I’ve written about in other stories have been upset by. And while I wouldn’t do anything differently knowing that the story I wrote was going to bother Shubin, things like this are still a good way to remind yourself of your responsibilities.

Writing about the weird-ass R. Kelly show in Austin this weekend...

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:27:42 -0500

Writing about the weird-ass R. Kelly show in Austin this weekend got me listening to R. Kelly a lot yesterday, because come on. That, in turn, reminded me of this webcomic from 2006-2007 that starred R. Kelly as a manga hero with a talking pig sidekick. Sadly, the strips appear to have been taken down at this point, but I found this one on archive.org. It’s too bad — the manga version of “Trapped In The Closet” was glorious.

thisfan: Oh, for fun! Do it. Sure, let’s try this.

Mon, 14 May 2012 23:07:28 -0500

thisfan:

Oh, for fun! Do it.

Sure, let’s try this.

garlandgrey: theheritagefoundation: JPMorgan Chase’s $2...

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:45:21 -0500

garlandgrey:

theheritagefoundation:

JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion trading loss is top news nationwide. But over at the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), such losses are business as usual. USPS reported a typical (for it) $3.2 billion loss for the most recent quarter. Try that comparison on for size.

More.

I don’t necessarily disagree with everything the Heritage Foundation says. I remember several times in the past month saying “My, my, that Heritage Tumblr has a good point.”

But you either don’t KNOW that the USPS is required to fully fund the pensions of employees that haven’t even been BORN yet, or you you do know, and you’re being disingenuous.

So let’s keep that “LOL silly liberals don’t understand the world” on a case-by-case and I’ll extend the same courtesy, much as it contorts my innards.

At this point, I really probably ought to just go ahead and quit all of my jobs and go mow Charlie Pierce’s lawn or something, but he’s got a fantastic piece at Esquire right now about this very thing.

Pierce writes about the history of the Post Office as a cultural institution; the notion of government as an entity that’s able to take a letter from one person’s house in New York to another person’s house in California in a few days’ time for an exceptionally reasonable price; the fact that, but for new laws passed requiring the Post Office to fully fund every pension it will have to pay out in the next 75 years in advance, the USPS would have run at a profit of $2.5 billion in 2011 (note: Pierce doesn’t provide a link to the report he cites; here’s one to a report for the first quarter of 2012 that puts the profit, absent the pre-funding burden, at $200 million); and, crucially, the way that anti-government ideology provides the impetus for trying to destroy the Post Office.

It’s an important read.

"Call me cynical, but I didn’t think his views on marriage could get any gayer."

Sat, 12 May 2012 13:05:07 -0500

““Call me cynical, but I didn’t think his views on marriage could get any gayer.””

- — Rand Paul, on Obama, yesterday.

I am gonna feel really sad for the Ron Paul fans when they realize that all of their enthusiasm, passion, and devoted organizing was just part of a long-con game to position this integrity-free judas goat slightly more prominently in a party that stands in direct opposition to so many of the things that they’ve talked about believing in.

Community renewed for fourth season

Thu, 10 May 2012 19:33:14 -0500

Community renewed for fourth season:

I’ll stop posting about my precious Thursday night NBC shows shortly, but I figured it’s worth noting that none of the reports about the fact thatCommunitywas renewed say anything about this being the last season.

That’s always a possibility, of course, but it’ll probably depend on what happens during its 13-episode run next year, and not on a pre-determined basis like 30 Rock. So, good news, everybody.

(I’ll be returning to using Tumblr for self-promotion tomorrow, don’t worry.)