I don’t get it either. Why is MySpace better than just having a regular website? I also refuse to add myself as a “friend” of the musicians that have pages there just to get info – so they can e-mail me thier propaganda.
That Fun Home is a featured book is interesting to be because at least in my area, MySpace is firmly the domain of the giggly-teeny-bopper-under18 crowd….I’d like to hope that that set is branching out and reading interesting books that might enlighten them a bit….is that too optimistic???
myspace: not very different from what you have here—members of a community that seem to find each other—myspace does have a lot of “noise” on its pages and in terms of “design” it is atrocious, but it is definitely a place where people (yes, some older than 18) hang out.
I have a profile on myspace only because some of my younger colleagues set it up for me…..I don’t get the obsession, but then….how often do I check and post here?? Especially to see what Aunt Soozie will say next? š
On-line communities are really big in Sweden, especially in the LGBT-community which sort of has its own online-community/parallel universe called “Qruiser”. If you meet someone new the big question is going to come up eventually : “What’s your nickname on Qruiser?”
And then to read the review of FUN HOME one has to join MySpace. Uh…thanks, no.
Likely a favourable review, since FUN HOME is tipped for readers, and possibly interesting (what are those kids thinking anyway?), so perhaps the text could be cut-and-pasted into a spot on this blog.
A tangent: Has anyone, other than Ann Coulter perhaps, given FUN HOME an unfavourable review? Amazing for anything to resonate so uniformly well. Not an uncomprehending review, mind you, but an unfavourable one?
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
by Alison Bechdel
Memoir
Alison Bechdelās Fun Home is something rareāa quick read and an important work of literature. An autobiography in graphic-novel form, Fun Home centers on Bechdelās relationship with her father, a closeted gay man who never escaped his small town. The Bechdel patriarch ran the family funeral home (or āfun homeā as his children nicknamed it) and taught high school English, but his real passion was his meticulous restoration of the familyās ornate Victorian house. Beneath his fastidiousness, however, lurked chaosāas the story progresses, Bechdelās mother becomes increasingly depleted from the stress of living with him and his secrets threaten to become public when he is arrested for buying alcohol for a minor.
Comic strips, with their layers of images, dialog, and text, are particularly well suited to capturing the contradictions of family life. In Bechdelās hands, domesticity is simultaneously mundane, gothic, and fun. In one series of panels, she reproduces a diary entry about her fatherās court date: āWe might have to move!! Yikes! How horrid! We went to see Herbie Rides Again. It was okay.ā In the next panels pre-teen Bechdel and her father eat cereal and laugh at a cartoon of Roadrunner blithely escaping a falling anvil. The captions read: āHow horrid has a slightly facetious toneā¦ It appears to embrace the actual horrorāpuberty, public disgraceāthen at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.ā
Along with her diary entries, Bechdel copies old photographs, excerpts from her fatherās letters, and passages from his favorite books. With these artifacts of his thwarted desire, Bechdel both indicts artifice and redeems a man who excelled at it. For all his faults, Bechdelās father encouraged his daughter to live an honest life instead of an elaborate lie.
i can’t wait to buy my copy of Fun Home! I’m 40 year old ex-dyke and i have to have myspace because of my job. http://www.myspace.com/lesliemodified Ya’ll are right, there is a predilection for hairstyles and passing photos of fingernail polish, and boring teenage art, but underneath it all (which i can see for the uninitiated would be a pain to slog thru) there are focused individuals using it as a springboard to a better way of life. Bands, music promoters, bookers and they are all so young. i was never this diciplined when i was a kid.. (under 25)
kill me i never thought i’d wave the flag for rupert murdoch’s myspace. anyway been a huge fan of AB’s forever and her success thrills me to no end, if only because it feels like hope for the world.
I recently joined MySpace to keep up with a friend’s blog, but I won’t be blogging there myself. It looks terrible. And I like how LJ sends replies to your mailbox, rather than a message telling you you have a reply.
I just read how the Marine Corps has a MySpace presence, where you can watch promo videos and contact a recruiter. That makes me love it even less ..
I suppose I must concede that there are some good things at work on myspace…Helping people find like-minded individuals, local bands bands getting some publicity without having to sell their souls to corporate record companies, etc, but I agree with AJ that the obsession is baffling. I can’t even chalk it up to my age, since I’m only 24….
The Marine Corps info is really scary…..
You do keep odd company in your group recommended book lists. By the way, I’ve been following the Amazon sales rankings of your old Time mates: Roger Angell, Howell Raines, Edmund White, and Julia Child. Except for Julia, who stays below 100, the others have all drifted off into the thousands, while Fun Home has been staying in the low hundreds. I predict it will be recognised as a classic and stay in print. Wouldn’t that be nice?
I think a key aspect of myspace is that it allows young folks to have quick and easy webspaces without the hassle of setting up a whole site themselves, and it has an easy way to link to friends. For many kids, the blah design is part of it’s charm.
I’ve met the most awesome creative people at livejournal, where we can actually have a conversation. But due to myspace’s dominance, I use it to find old friends — most of them are on there somewhere, if just to post a link to their “real” site.
I have myspace and LJ, they are both good and bad in different ways. I like myspace because I live basically in the middle of no where, so it is nice to be able to talk to friends who live 1/2 hour away or more. it is also nice because you can find people who think like you and like the same sort of stuff and are able to talk to them…or if you prefer you can also find people who don’t agree with you and argue. It is just something to do when you are bored.
my friends and i are definitely not teeny-boppers (and weren’t even when we were that age), but myspace works well for us for several reasons. personally, i’m educated about creating websites, but many of my friends are not. myspace makes it easy for a friend to upload pictures, blog, or generally entertain this internet dork in her own domain. as well, most of us (late 20’s) have recently abandoned our college towns and are having trouble keeping up with old friends. plus, it’s great for networking; my classmates are now easy contacts across the nation.
as for the obsession, it’s like anything else (television, sports, books, film) that entertains us for short amounts of time. it will fade. military recruiters and exploiters of young girls aside, it’s worked well for me as an easy way to keep up with a lot of folks.
fat femmes…that’s one of my main topics. i don’t want to use alison’s blog to go into my own stuff (esp. since we already talked about this, alison). go to http://www.myspace.com/ladyareola. if you want to read them, send me a message and i’ll add you.
I’m 26 and I find my space nausea inducing. But its the quintessential watering hole for those crazy kids these days and their customization fetish. Its all about being unique and standing out from the crowd by…going to the same places everyone else goes to and doing all the same things everyone else does but in a way that is somehow unique. Some kids manage to accomplish it. More don’t and you end up with aesthetically offensive pages that are a mishmash of music, corporate logos and formatting that defies readablity. If this is the state of their myspace page, i’d hate to see the state of their souls.
I’m an LJ devotee myself. More customizable and more language oriented. And on my LJ I have sung the praises of Fun Home to anyone who will listen (well, read). I even made a Fun Home vocab list.
27 Responses to “I don’t really get myspace.”
I hate looking at myspace pages. I’m a webpage formatting snob, I guess. Myspace pages are always a hot mess!
Or maybe I’ve finally slipped over from the up & coming generation to the curmudgeonly one….
I don’t get it either. Why is MySpace better than just having a regular website? I also refuse to add myself as a “friend” of the musicians that have pages there just to get info – so they can e-mail me thier propaganda.
I prefer Livejournal myself.
Now I’m wondering if LJ & Myspace are Betamax & VHS, or VHS & DVD…
That Fun Home is a featured book is interesting to be because at least in my area, MySpace is firmly the domain of the giggly-teeny-bopper-under18 crowd….I’d like to hope that that set is branching out and reading interesting books that might enlighten them a bit….is that too optimistic???
myspace: not very different from what you have here—members of a community that seem to find each other—myspace does have a lot of “noise” on its pages and in terms of “design” it is atrocious, but it is definitely a place where people (yes, some older than 18) hang out.
I’m 25-and myspace is beyond what my friends and I can comprehend. The concept I get, but the obsession with it is just insane.
I have a profile on myspace only because some of my younger colleagues set it up for me…..I don’t get the obsession, but then….how often do I check and post here?? Especially to see what Aunt Soozie will say next? š
On-line communities are really big in Sweden, especially in the LGBT-community which sort of has its own online-community/parallel universe called “Qruiser”. If you meet someone new the big question is going to come up eventually : “What’s your nickname on Qruiser?”
And then to read the review of FUN HOME one has to join MySpace. Uh…thanks, no.
Likely a favourable review, since FUN HOME is tipped for readers, and possibly interesting (what are those kids thinking anyway?), so perhaps the text could be cut-and-pasted into a spot on this blog.
A tangent: Has anyone, other than Ann Coulter perhaps, given FUN HOME an unfavourable review? Amazing for anything to resonate so uniformly well. Not an uncomprehending review, mind you, but an unfavourable one?
Here’s the myspace review:
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
by Alison Bechdel
Memoir
Alison Bechdelās Fun Home is something rareāa quick read and an important work of literature. An autobiography in graphic-novel form, Fun Home centers on Bechdelās relationship with her father, a closeted gay man who never escaped his small town. The Bechdel patriarch ran the family funeral home (or āfun homeā as his children nicknamed it) and taught high school English, but his real passion was his meticulous restoration of the familyās ornate Victorian house. Beneath his fastidiousness, however, lurked chaosāas the story progresses, Bechdelās mother becomes increasingly depleted from the stress of living with him and his secrets threaten to become public when he is arrested for buying alcohol for a minor.
Comic strips, with their layers of images, dialog, and text, are particularly well suited to capturing the contradictions of family life. In Bechdelās hands, domesticity is simultaneously mundane, gothic, and fun. In one series of panels, she reproduces a diary entry about her fatherās court date: āWe might have to move!! Yikes! How horrid! We went to see Herbie Rides Again. It was okay.ā In the next panels pre-teen Bechdel and her father eat cereal and laugh at a cartoon of Roadrunner blithely escaping a falling anvil. The captions read: āHow horrid has a slightly facetious toneā¦ It appears to embrace the actual horrorāpuberty, public disgraceāthen at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.ā
Along with her diary entries, Bechdel copies old photographs, excerpts from her fatherās letters, and passages from his favorite books. With these artifacts of his thwarted desire, Bechdel both indicts artifice and redeems a man who excelled at it. For all his faults, Bechdelās father encouraged his daughter to live an honest life instead of an elaborate lie.
Visit “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic’s” profile
i can’t wait to buy my copy of Fun Home! I’m 40 year old ex-dyke and i have to have myspace because of my job. http://www.myspace.com/lesliemodified Ya’ll are right, there is a predilection for hairstyles and passing photos of fingernail polish, and boring teenage art, but underneath it all (which i can see for the uninitiated would be a pain to slog thru) there are focused individuals using it as a springboard to a better way of life. Bands, music promoters, bookers and they are all so young. i was never this diciplined when i was a kid.. (under 25)
kill me i never thought i’d wave the flag for rupert murdoch’s myspace. anyway been a huge fan of AB’s forever and her success thrills me to no end, if only because it feels like hope for the world.
I recently joined MySpace to keep up with a friend’s blog, but I won’t be blogging there myself. It looks terrible. And I like how LJ sends replies to your mailbox, rather than a message telling you you have a reply.
I just read how the Marine Corps has a MySpace presence, where you can watch promo videos and contact a recruiter. That makes me love it even less ..
I suppose I must concede that there are some good things at work on myspace…Helping people find like-minded individuals, local bands bands getting some publicity without having to sell their souls to corporate record companies, etc, but I agree with AJ that the obsession is baffling. I can’t even chalk it up to my age, since I’m only 24….
The Marine Corps info is really scary…..
You do keep odd company in your group recommended book lists. By the way, I’ve been following the Amazon sales rankings of your old Time mates: Roger Angell, Howell Raines, Edmund White, and Julia Child. Except for Julia, who stays below 100, the others have all drifted off into the thousands, while Fun Home has been staying in the low hundreds. I predict it will be recognised as a classic and stay in print. Wouldn’t that be nice?
I think a key aspect of myspace is that it allows young folks to have quick and easy webspaces without the hassle of setting up a whole site themselves, and it has an easy way to link to friends. For many kids, the blah design is part of it’s charm.
good point, steph. I hadn’t thought of that…
I’ve met the most awesome creative people at livejournal, where we can actually have a conversation. But due to myspace’s dominance, I use it to find old friends — most of them are on there somewhere, if just to post a link to their “real” site.
i don’t love it, but i do use the blogspace to talk about fat femmes, queers, gender politics, and whatnot.
i don’t know how to make my own webpage so that’s where i go.
I have myspace and LJ, they are both good and bad in different ways. I like myspace because I live basically in the middle of no where, so it is nice to be able to talk to friends who live 1/2 hour away or more. it is also nice because you can find people who think like you and like the same sort of stuff and are able to talk to them…or if you prefer you can also find people who don’t agree with you and argue. It is just something to do when you are bored.
Fat femmes?
my friends and i are definitely not teeny-boppers (and weren’t even when we were that age), but myspace works well for us for several reasons. personally, i’m educated about creating websites, but many of my friends are not. myspace makes it easy for a friend to upload pictures, blog, or generally entertain this internet dork in her own domain. as well, most of us (late 20’s) have recently abandoned our college towns and are having trouble keeping up with old friends. plus, it’s great for networking; my classmates are now easy contacts across the nation.
as for the obsession, it’s like anything else (television, sports, books, film) that entertains us for short amounts of time. it will fade. military recruiters and exploiters of young girls aside, it’s worked well for me as an easy way to keep up with a lot of folks.
fat femmes…that’s one of my main topics. i don’t want to use alison’s blog to go into my own stuff (esp. since we already talked about this, alison). go to http://www.myspace.com/ladyareola. if you want to read them, send me a message and i’ll add you.
Tried finding you on myspace and no luck. Also the myspace link goes to “page cannot be found”. :/
Maybe I can find this if you visit me? Here is my addy for it. http://www.myspace.com/sassygirl1951
I’m 26 and I find my space nausea inducing. But its the quintessential watering hole for those crazy kids these days and their customization fetish. Its all about being unique and standing out from the crowd by…going to the same places everyone else goes to and doing all the same things everyone else does but in a way that is somehow unique. Some kids manage to accomplish it. More don’t and you end up with aesthetically offensive pages that are a mishmash of music, corporate logos and formatting that defies readablity. If this is the state of their myspace page, i’d hate to see the state of their souls.
I’m an LJ devotee myself. More customizable and more language oriented. And on my LJ I have sung the praises of Fun Home to anyone who will listen (well, read). I even made a Fun Home vocab list.
You don’t like myspace
How sad.
We’ll have to find you a retirement community.
You, me and nearly everyone else with a brain š
enter text? test, sorry
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