The (Ab)used

Music: This Mortal Coil: Blood Much goodness going on, but I regret not having the time to post about it. Briefly: (1) the last party I am hosting in Baton Rouge is an April Fools' Party; (2) co-author and I have come up with a pretty smashing critique of the write-up on "rhetorical agency" in the last Rhetoric Society Quarterly--and I'm really looking forward to seeing it in print (I'll post parts of it later); (3) I have my teaching assignments for next year at the University of Texas: one section of "Rhetoric and Popular Music" in the fall, and then a small undergraduate "Rhetoric of Religion" class in the spring, and a graduate seminar in "Psychoanalysis and Rhetoric"; (4) I'm uncertain if I should be thrilled or dismayed by the very recent appropriation of goth chic by glossy, commercialized boi-punk.

Regarding the latter: last week I saw two videos, one by The Used and the other by My Chemical Romance. The music is certainly catchy, and the gothic boys are certainly cute, but (as with Marilyn Mason before he grew into the intellectual stead of goth) there's little attempt to pay the appropriate subcultural dues.

What are those dues? Well, for one, there are the wrinkles us first and second generation grufties are now dealing with. But there's also the, uh, sense of isolation and abject lostness . . . . these kids are way too happy.