I closed yesterday by saying I’d draw on some personal experience to try to flesh out the complexities of the Figes “fake reviews” scandal: his “praising his own work and rubbishing that of his rivals,” in the memorable words of The Guardian. I am, by training, a scholar of British & Irish literary modernism, and [...]
Not that I give a rip about such crass metrics, of course, but fakechineserubberplant.com hit the 20,000-views mark today. Huzzah for us all! — K Tweet This Post
This, in my experience, is that very rare thing: a video that explicitly tries to be weird and is, in fact, weird! As viewers of “Fish Heads,” ours is not a “camp” experience: we’re not wiser than the video, seeing in it all kinds of weirdness that its producers didn’t intend. No, they intended it, [...]
You gotta hand it to Lil Wayne: He’s not a man to let a little thing like Rikers Island cramp his flow. Apparently during a blitzkrieg Super Bowl weekend before his internment began, he recorded all kinds of video footage for possible “purposing” into all manner of music video, both his and others’, that might [...]
With the spring semester now but a fond memory, I’m finally catching up on some of my homework. I think I’ve mentioned here that I taught a senior seminar called “Irony in the Public Sphere”; we were interested, mainly, in the sometimes spectacular ways that very compelling and intelligent ironic projects can misfire when they [...]
I’m just back from a week on the road: Yeah, all those fcrp posts over the past week about the homoerotics of the power ballad, and about Jimi Hendrix—as well as Emily Dalton’s piece on bump ‘n’ grinding second graders—werr pre-loaded, scheduled for release as I traveled! The shape-shifting miracle of the Internet. At any [...]
I know, I know: I’ve already written, and raved, about Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” video (March 19-20). I’ve also written on fake chinese rubber plant, if briefly, about cover recordings (March 4, 6–7, 10): about how the best of them crack a song wide open, and make available readings of the original previously unimagined. Let me begin [...]
Beloved readers: a milestone, if a silly one. 10,000 clicks on the lil’ clicker thing in the right margin. And we’ve been at this together for something under three months. I know, I know: it really means nothing, I’ve been told. But it means a lot to me, and I’m grateful for your support. I’ll [...]
Nobody wants to read a long post on a Saturday morning, right? Here’s a quick read; you can decide for yourself how long you’d like to spend in replying. Today’s topic: the most annoying grammatical mistakes in rock. I’m not talking here about those grammatical mistakes employed as dialect, local color: “Ain’t too proud to [...]
[Starting today and continuing for the next two, I'm republishing an essay that first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education last September, assuming that most readers of fake chinese rubber plant aren't also subscribers to the Chronicle. Hope you enjoy! --KD] At my high school—Taft High, Woodland Hills, Calif., also the alma mater of Jane [...]