lils ([info]gleemie) wrote,
@ 2007-11-12 21:48:00
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Gunther gunter new video - SUNTRIP

This guy is so delicately walking the line between irony and earnestness. It totally reminds me of euro songs like Barbie Girl and happy hardcore bands like Dune.

NSFW if your work is scary

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[info]lpetrazickis
2007-11-13 02:50 pm UTC (link)
Ola ola!

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[info]stiill
2007-11-13 05:09 pm UTC (link)
Awesome. Left this looping on my second screen for about an hour while I played World of Warcraft.

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[info]hetchjay
2007-11-14 07:27 am UTC (link)
That's the most internet thing I've heard all day (and it's 11:27 PM)

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Irony?
(Anonymous)
2007-11-14 08:46 am UTC (link)
Okay, as you might know, I'm investigating the idea of irony in one of my seminars. After careful thought, I've decided that this video can't possibly be ironic. I don't want to really get into all this (as we'd have to talk about bricolage, and the early 20th-c defintion of kitsch), but there are no dual registers of meaning here. This is almost post-ironic, I think. Irony has worked itself through to completion, thus destroying itself. The video means precisely what it means.

-Terry

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Re: Irony?
[info]gleemie
2007-11-14 09:05 am UTC (link)
No, I did not know you were studying irony. When I first watched the video, I actually thought it was totally serious. The self-consciousness didn't become clear to me until the cumshot and the following viewings.

Don't kill me but I just skimmed the wikipedia entry on irony. And I'm realizing that the irony I learned about (not deeply) in academia has a very tenuous relationship with the way I hear people always throwing ironic around among the hipsters. All those little threadless or urban outfitters ironic tees can be argued to make no bones about actually being an old, out of time t-shirt that would be understood at that previous face value. But that's the sense in which I was using ironic -- self-consciously absurd referencing themes and tropes that were earnest and familiar in another time.

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Re: Irony?
(Anonymous)
2007-11-15 03:52 am UTC (link)
Hey, I hope I didn't sound snarky in my reply. I wasn't lambasting you for calling this ironic, because that's pretty much the standard reaction to this sort of things nowadays.

Irony has a really interesting history. As far as I know, it originates in Greek comedy, with the stock characters Alazon and Eiron (the derivation for the word). Both represented a deficiency to meet the ideal of knowledge: Alazon boasted of things beyond his reach, and Eiron cuts down Alazon's boasts, but misrepresents his own knowledge by selling himself short. This form was taken up by Plato in nearly all his dialogues, with Socrates playing the role of Eiron. Thus, the origin of irony is this dialectic tool through which truth can be apprehended through some sort of method. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. In Socratic terms, this leads to a progression toward the Form of Goodness (sort of like...the essence of goodness in itself, if you haven't read the Republic). At this point, irony is interesting, but not necessarily anything more special than most figures of speech.

Then the Jena Romantics come along and complicate everything. It's hard to explain this without getting into Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Wilhelm, Schlegel, and Schiller, but, um, it has a lot to do with free will and the possibility of human creativity in the face of determinism. It takes on a sense of "permanent parabasis" (constant admission of self-awareness). A concern for irony has, more or less, dominated Western literature since, and I have a suspicion that postmodernism can be explained mostly through irony.

Anyway, what I was getting at in my comment is that I don't believe there is any play among multiple registers of meaning here. I think it shows the Kitsch (Adorno...basically lazy art) of kitsch (Warhol 40 years later). The "problem" of kitsch is that its parasitic. Now, that kitsch has seemingly become a dominant mode of expression, it is Kitsch (i.e., the opposite of Avante-Garde).

This is really confusing, and I'm probably not explaining it right. I might even be comletely wrong, and just fed up with Urban Outfitters. I think I'm gonna work on my actual Romantic Irony stuff for class now.

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Karaoke
(Anonymous)
2008-08-19 07:40 am UTC (link)
Hi
http://mp3minusovka.ru/ - karaoke archiv
G'night

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(Anonymous)
2008-08-23 03:06 am UTC (link)
Hi.

Bye.

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(Anonymous)
2008-08-29 12:40 pm UTC (link)
Hello.
The Good resource. Much what interesting for itself has found.

See you.

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Проверка
(Anonymous)
2008-09-12 08:06 am UTC (link)
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Smoke
(Anonymous)
2008-09-25 06:31 pm UTC (link)
It just seems like it all just for fun and I hope it stays that way.

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Subject1
(Anonymous)
2008-10-09 02:37 am UTC (link)
Hi all!


Bye

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